Digital storytelling platforms have proven to be a great way of bringing cultural heritage closer to people. What lacks is a deeper understanding of the user experience of such systems, especially in multi-platform digital storytelling. For the last three years, we have been developing a project called Spotlight Heritage Timisoara, which is at its core a digital storytelling platform for the city of Timisoara (Romania), soon to be European Capital of Culture in 2023. The project consists of a website, mobile applications, and interactive museographic and street exhibitions. This paper presents a multi-platform usability evaluation study which employed semi-structured interviews, observations, think-aloud protocol, SUS questionnaire, Net Promoter Score and Product Reaction Cards to gather insights from 105 participants and reveal usability problems in the Spotlight Heritage context. We found out that the four platforms, i.e., interactive touchscreen table, desktop/laptop, mobile and Augmented Reality, have very good usability scores, are considered accessible and useful, work seamlessly together, and create user satisfaction and loyalty, across demographic groups, having the potential to bring people closer to cultural heritage.

Eye-tracking technologies have matured significantly in recent years and have become more affordable and easier to use. We investigated how eye-tracking technology can be applied to evaluate the usability of mobile augmented reality applications with historical images for urban cultural heritage. The experiment involved a series of complex user evaluation sessions, combining semi-structured interviews, observations, think-aloud protocol, SUS questionnaire, and product reaction cards, complemented by eye tracking, to gather insights on the Spotlight Timisoara AR mobile application, part of a digital storytelling multiplatform for the city of Timisoara (Romania), soon to be European Capital of Culture in 2023. The results indicate strong and weak aspects of the application, both as expressed by the participants and as derived from analyzing the eye-tracking data. The paper also lists the main challenges we identified in using eye-tracking equipment to evaluate the usability of such mobile augmented reality applications for urban outdoor heritage.

Requirements Engineering and Management (REM) tools play a significant role in ensuring project compliance and efficiency. Automotive engineering must comply with regulatory standards, requiring detailed documentation, rigorous testing, and solid traceability. Despite their importance, REM tools are underexplored from the usability and user experience perspective (UX), even though poor usability can hinder development workflows across stakeholder teams. This study presents a case study of heuristic usability evaluation of IBM DOORS Next Generation, conducted with expert evaluators, using Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics as an evaluation framework. The identified issues were analyzed in terms of impacted heuristics and severity ratings. Additionally, we underwent a Large Language Model (LLM)-based heuristic evaluation, using ChatGPT-5, prompted with the same heuristic set and static screenshots. The LLM detected several issues overlapping with human findings (32%), as well as new ones (23%); therefore, 55% of its outputs are considered valid and 45% are unconfirmed. This highlights both the potential and limitations of AI-driven usability assessment. Overall, the findings underscore the usability challenges of REM tools and suggest that LLMs may serve as complementary evaluators, accelerating early-stage heuristic inspections in safety-critical engineering environments.