The state of user experience evaluation practice

Despite the growing importance for practice, user experience is often a blurry and doubtful concept both for newcomers and for the industry. Such ambiguity stems from a emergent community of practitioners with diverse backgrounds, to whom user experience encompasses countless interpretations. This paper reports on an online survey deployed to grasp the state of user experience evaluation practice. We learned that evaluations are mainly conducted by HCIs, software engineers or designers and are perceived to strongly impact the user interface, as well as the business logic level. Additionally, informal, low cost methods are widely used and, although most methods rely on paper prototypes, a single artifact is used per evaluation and working prototypes are favored. Moreover, evaluations happen at multiple project phases and various methods are used. Finally, results shows that evaluations are constrained by evaluators' background or occupation. This compels the community to pursue an end-to-end methodology to prevent it.