A Set of Usability and User eXperience Heuristics for Social Networks

Social networks have existed in all stages of the human history. Digital systems only helped to globalize their use. Usability refers to the efficacy, efficiency, and satisfaction in achieving user's goals through a product, system or service. User eXperience (UX) extends the usability concept to the whole range of user's perception when using (or even intend to use) a product, system or service. Heuristic evaluation is one of the most popular usability evaluation methods. Generic or specific heuristics may be used. Generic heuristics are familiar to evaluators and therefore easy to apply, but they can miss specific usability issues. Specific heuristics can detect relevant domain related usability issues. Evaluating social networks usability and UX is challenging. General usability heuristics, as Nielsen's, cannot detect specific, domain-related, usability problem. There are relatively few sets of specific usability heuristics for social networks. Moreover, heuristics rarely focus on UX aspects, other than usability. For this work we used the methodology proposed by Quinones et al. [7], which includes 8 stages, and can be applied iteratively. Finally, we developed a set of 11 heuristics oriented to UX in social networks, applicable for both mobile devices and websites versions. Heuristics were refined based on experts' feedback, and validation's results. As future work we pretend to further validate (and possible improve) the set of 11 heuristics based on new case studies.