Dec 08 2017
Affective Heuristic Evaluation
To use Affective Heuristic Evaluation, here is what you do:
- We review the heuristics, explore, and then reflect on the software
- We then write comments about the environment filling in a table with respect to the different heuristics
- For heuristic severity we can adapt Nielsen’s severity ratings for usability problems (1995),
changing their emphasis to reflect emotional educational impact
The Affective Heuristics (Version 3)
| H1: Design elements and modalities should support the affective learning strategy |
| H2: Ensure help and documentation is provided where needed but does not distract from affective learning strategy |
| H3: Maintain visibility of progress, affirming challenges already overcome, and those remaining |
| H4: Allow the user freedom to explore but also to return to the previous step |
| H5: Avoid or prevent actions with neither feedback to help overcome, nor affirmation when success |
| H6: Visualize options clearly to encourage exploration |
| H7: Tailor actions to be encouraging at first and efficient later, while learners are attempting to overcome challenges |
| H8: Challenge learners and provide constructive feedback if they fail, and affirming success when they succeed |
| H9: Match the learners world view in affective strategy and multimodal support |
| H10: Maintain interface cohesion to support affective strategy |
- The affective heuristic evaluation is based on Nielsen and Molich (1990), and adapted with affect supported by Norman (2004) and Kort et al.’s emotional cycle of learning model (2001) as well as multimodal design based on Sankey (2007)
- To review your software and compare it against accepted principles
- The analysis results in a list of potential issues
- It explicitly emphasized the learning objective and the modality that was employed
- It helps to identify emotional educational aspects in the system
Examples:
Evaluating Code.org’s Minecraft Hour of Code that was created to encourage and support people initial learning of computer programming. In this study, we applied the evaluation method as discussed earlier (pdf).