Investigating the Usefulness of Methods for Evaluating User Experience of Social Media Applications

Amela Karahasanovic, Marianna Obrist
2010 International Workshop on the Interplay between Usability Evaluation and Software Development  
The usage and importance of social media or Web2.0 applications such as Youtube, Flickr, Facebook is rapidly increasing over the last years. They all build up on user communities, provide networking opportunities for their members, and are strongly related to audio-visual usergenerated content (UGC). Providing the user a good experience is a central success factor for such applications. Apart from standard usability principles the much broader concept of user experience (UX), including aspects
more » ... uch as fun, enjoyment, emotion, sociability and other factors have become relevant in the design of interactive systems. However little has been known on the usefulness of different evaluation methods for UX in the context of social media applications. We need to understand what new requirements for applying UX evaluation methods on these applications evolve and how to choose which of the existing methods are suitable for capturing different aspects of UX. This paper reports results and lessons learned on the usefulness of seven UX evaluation methods that were applied for evaluating ten different applications supporting non-professional users in sharing and co-creating usergenerated content. The results might be useful for practitioners and researchers developing social media applications when planning UX evaluation studies.
dblp:conf/iused/KarahasanovicO10 fatcat:isq5hq2bx5crrlgi64dhgm3dvi