  Usability is used to assess the effectiveness of a software product from the
user point of view. Hence, proper methodologies and techniques to perform this
assessment are very relevant. Heuristic evaluation is probably the most
commonly used method for usability assessment. Developed by Nielsen and Molich
in the '90s, traditional heuristic evaluations rely on Nielsen's 10 usability
heuristics. However, recent evidence suggests that such heuristics are not
sufficiently complete for dealing with new domains such as interactive
television, virtual worlds, and many others. In addition to the lack of
suitability of traditional heuristics, in the past years the lack of a robust
methodology or process to effectively develop and validate these new
domain-specific heuristics has been documented. In this paper we summarize
current evidence on the lack of suitability of traditional heuristics, as well
as the need to develop new domain-specific heuristics. After identifying and
acknowledging existing gaps in heuristics for state-of-the-art technology, we
present PROMETHEUS, a PROcedural METhodology for developing HEuristics of
USability. PROMETHEUS refines the methodology of Rusu et. al. (2011), and is
composed of 8 stages. PROMETHEUS clearly defines the artifacts that are
required and produced by each stage, and also presents a set of quality
indicators in order to assess the need for further refinement in the
development of new heuristics. As an initial validation of PROMETHEUS, we apply
a questionnaire to several researchers that have used the methodology of Rusu
et. al., and we have also performed a small retrospective study, computing the
quality indicators of several previous studies. Our results suggest that
PROMETHEUS is a very promising methodology, and that the metrics and indicators
are indeed pertinent with respect to the conclusions of previous studies.
