Towards a List of Heuristics to Evaluate Smartphone Apps Targeted at Older Adults: A Study with Apps that Aim at Promoting Health and Well-being

This paper presents a list of heuristics to evaluate smartphone apps for older adults. It further verifies the usefulness of the proposed list through a study performed with two groups of five expert evaluators, who inspected two popular health and fitness smartphone apps - Nike+ and Runkeeper - through heuristic evaluation. Additionally, the evaluators completed a post-evaluation survey to provide feedback to the researchers about the usefulness, strengths and gaps of the heuristics list. The results of the heuristic evaluations and post-questionnaires demonstrate both a comprehensive application of the heuristics as well as an overall positive assessment of their quality and potential to identify usability issues of smartphone apps targeted at older adults.