The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the majority of school activities being carried out through e-learning platforms. This has not been a gradual process but a sudden one, because of the imposed sanitary restrictions. Thus, many of the existing e-Learning applications have had to respond to the educational needs of a large number of teachers and students and to adapt their functions so that no major usability problems would arise. One of the e-Learning platforms through which a large number of students carried out their educational activities during the pandemic, is Google Classroom. This study aims to present the results of testing with students, the usability of the Google Classroom platform during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this regard, a heuristic evaluation with four teams of students was performed. Another objective was to familiarize students participating in the study with the method of heuristic evaluation of e-Learning platforms under the guidance of four expert evaluators. The results of the evaluation highlighted several usability problems of the platform, ranked on three levels of severity: major, moderate and minor. Regarding the usability heuristics, most of the problems were related to user control and feedback followed by the information architecture, prompting and minimal actions.

Usability evaluation; Google Classroom; Heuristic evaluation; COVID-19.