Heuristics-based Responsiveness Evaluation of a Telemedicine Computational Web System

Computational technologies are increasingly included in our lives, presenting themselves as indispensable tools in most human activities and benefiting different areas of knowledge, such as the medical one. In this way, it is essential that the computational systems are prepared to function well in various devices, such as notebooks, tablets, and smartphones. Such an example of a tool is the Integrated Telemedicine and Data Management System, developed by our research group, which allows medical procedures to be transmitted and watched remotely in real time. Its initial development was focused on personal computers, but due to the need of providing better experiences with different devices, important changes were made in the main features. The idea was to implement responsive design concepts in the system and allow users to access it in mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones. This article aims to evaluate the system responsiveness by applying a usability script for three devices: notebook, tablet, and smartphone. In particular, ten collaborators completed a questionnaire composed of twelve affirmative heuristics related to the system usability to evaluate their level of satisfaction for each valued aspect. The statistical evaluation revealed no significant differences among the devices considering the heuristics individually. However, when the heuristics were taken all together, the tests showed that the smartphone performed better, despite the fact that the notebook evaluation showed fewer usability problems. The results show that the changes performed in the system are functional.