Development of Proposed Heuristics for Evaluating Multilingual Website Usability

Abstract

The number of multilingual websites and interfaces grows as the world becomes more globalized. However, there is a lack of heuristics available to easily evaluate these websites and interfaces. While well-known usability heuristics like Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics have served as an industry basis for heuristic evaluations, they fall short of providing full considerations for multilingual systems. This paper proposes multilingual usability heuristics that can be used with existing usability heuristic sets to conduct heuristic evaluations on multilingual websites. We used U.S. Internal Revenue Service applications accessed in Korean and English to test the proposed Multilingual Usability Heuristics. We updated the Multilingual Usability Heuristics based on the results these evaluations. Our final set contains 6 heuristics that can be used in tandem with other heuristic sets, like Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics. Though they are not yet empirically validated, these heuristics are useful in evaluating multilingual website and graphical user interfaces.