BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Augmented Reality
The Validation of a Heuristic Toolkit for Augmented Reality: The Derby Dozen
Provisionally accepted
- Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, United States
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Augmented Reality (AR) technologies hold tremendous potential across various domains, yet their inconsistent design and lack of standardized user experience (UX) pose significant challenges. This inconsistency hinders user acceptance and adoption and impacts application design efficiency. This study describes the development of a validated UX heuristic checklist for evaluating AR applications and devices. Building upon previous work by Derby and Chaparro (2022), this research expands upon this checklist through expert feedback, validation with heuristic evaluations, and user tests with five diverse AR applications and devices. The checklist was refined to 12 heuristics and 109 items and integrated into a single auto-scored Excel spreadsheet toolkit. This validated toolkit, named the Derby Dozen, empowers practitioners to evaluate AR experiences, quantify results, and ultimately inform better design practices, promoting greater usability and user satisfaction.
Keywords: AR devices, augmented reality, Heuristic evaluation, Heuristics, Mixed reality, usability
Received: 07 Sep 2025; Accepted: 28 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Derby, Aros and Chaparro. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Jessyca Derby
Michelle Aros
Barbara Chaparro
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.