Evaluating user experience of cross-platform web services with a heuristic evaluation method

Appealing user experience (UX), including its pragmatic and hedonic aspects, has become a central design target for interactive products and services. Even though several generic UX frameworks have been developed, the specific characteristics affecting UX of web services and their implications to service design have not been studied systematically. Web services need to be developed iteratively, with UX as a central evaluation criterion. To this end, low-cost methods for UX evaluation are needed. In this paper, we present the results of our service UX study in which three web services were evaluated by UX experts in their contexts of use, using a set of service UX evaluation heuristics. The evaluation results point out main themes of service UX, including usability, social presence and cross-platform interaction. We discuss the applicability of the developed heuristic evaluation method for web service UX evaluation.