Obstacles to Option Setting: Initial Results with a Heuristic Walkthrough Method

This short paper is the first step in a line of research that aims to deepen understanding of the difficulties that users often have with option setting interfaces: those parts of a system that allow the user to set parameters that influence the system’s behavior and appearance. On the basis of a theoretical distinction of three things that users may fail to understand about a given option, we introduce a simple variant of the heuristic walkthrough method that helps evaluators to uncover likely obstacles. We give a quantitative and qualitative overview of the obstacles found through the application of this heuristic walkthrough to parts of four popular applications.