EVALUATION AND REDESIGN OF AUGMENTED REALITY APPLICATION BASED ON USABILITY TESTING

Abstract

Any application designed for promotional purposes should be evaluated in terms of its usability for its users. Thus, the present study focused on assessing the usability of the e-Bahari Augmented Reality Application developed to promote underwater tourism objects in Bali in 3D augmented reality. Heuristic Evaluation (HE) was applied to evaluate the application by involving three users as evaluators to comment and give suggestions on its usability in three respective levels of specifications and how to improve it. These comments and suggestions were then categorized using heuristic principles based on ISO 9241-11 and adjusted Nielsen Heuristics criteria. The evaluation revealed that the E-Bahari AR had successfully represented underwater tourism objects in 3D, such as underwater lighting effects, anemones, fish, and turtles. However, the 3D augmented reality for virtual things of real life still needed improvement as it had not reached naturality and lacked interaction between users and applications. Moreover, the evaluation also revealed that the lower the application specifications, the lower the quality of the augmented reality. Thus, the application with the highest specification worked without apparent problems.