Beyond “Usability and User Experience”, Towards an Integrative Heuristic Inspection: From Accessibility to Persuasiveness in the UX Evaluation

Abstract

Heuristic inspections are often carried out in a rather restrictive manner in the sense that they often address one or two of User Experience aspects. These two generally being: usability and "user experience". This fails to consider UX as it should be [considered]: through a holistic approach. Thus, we suggest to go beyond that by opting for what we have called an Integrative Heuristic Inspection that takes into account issues of: accessibility, usability, emotions & motivation and persuasion, and that aims to simplify the overflow of recommendations UX professionals are faced with nowadays. We illustrate our proposal by a case study carried out on an insurance prospecting tablet application. We analyzed the results of the inspection separately for each dimension as well as combined across dimensions. Implications for a reflection on the structuring of the criteria for a general criteria-based approach in UX are discussed.After a brief review of the emergence of the four currently recognized main criteria sets [in HCI/UX] and the contributing factors having led to it, this paper aims to argue in favor of a cohesive, integrative revised taxonomy of the existing criteria sets and a derived corresponding model: "the experience-based criteria". We illustrate our argumentation with a case study based off the results from the heuristic inspection of an insurance prospecting tablet application. Theoretical BackgroundThroughout the past 60-70 years, technological developments as well as evolving customer needs/requirements and the transformation of economic models have determined the evolution of the HCI models and dictated the focus of researchers in HCI/UX. This has allowed for new theories, concepts, methodologies, frameworks and different interventional practices to be proposed and adopted in the study of Ergonomics/UX at given times. Indeed, after starting at issues concerning technological accessibility, moving on to ease-of-use and switching to affective factors especially during the rise of video games in the 80's, the past decade has seen the spotlight be put on technological persuasiveness (see Brangier & Bastien [2] for a detailed historical review).

Understanding UX Better: A New Technique to Go beyond Emotion Assessment

“…We decided to present the studies separately, as they consider different perspectives (academy and industry) and different categories of users. For the first (Section 4), we compared UX-Tips to another technique named Integrative Heuristic Inspection (IHI) [13] using both of them in a UX evaluation. For the second (Section 5), we tested UX-Tips in an industrial setting to verify its viability in a real development context by evaluating a mobile application under development.…”