10 Heuristics for an Optimal User Experience - alt.chi 2013

happen in a more joyous and satisfying way. After a lot
of discussion on competing frameworks and
terminology, the term user experience has emerged for
this direction of research.
We argue that there is only little consensus on what
user experience is or should be, and an abundance of
possible definitions that while stimulating make it
difficult to come up with a working one. As a
consequence, practitioners are left without guidelines
on what constitutes a good user experience and how
they can design for it.
In an effort to build an understanding of enjoyment in
games, Sweetser and Wyeth [20] develop the
GameFlow model. They do so by mapping elements
from game literature to flow theory. The result is a list
of 8 criteria that can be used to evaluate how enjoyable
a particular game is.
In this paper, we follow a similar approach by deriving
general user experience heuristics from flow theory. In
doing so, we pursue two goals. From a theory
perspective, we aim at informing, expanding, and
contributing to the ongoing discussion on what good
user experience is or should be. For practitioners, we
provide a list of heuristics that can be used in the
design and evaluation of interactive devices and
applications.
The notion of heuristics is not undisputed in humancomputer
interaction research. Under the user-centered
design paradigm that demands involvement of users as
early and often as possible in the development process,
the idea of relying on experts inspecting a system
based on a number of heuristics has come under heavy
criticism.
Our motivation for proposing user experience heuristics
here comes from our background. Both authors have
worked in small design companies and often witnessed
how the requirement of involving users was neglected,
justified with a number of reasons such as time or
money constraints. In consequence we believe there is
still a lot of merit to the discount usability claim that
while it may not be the best usability methodology to
use, it is better than using none. Our list of heuristics is
intended as a resource-friendly way to ensure good
user experience of a product when time and money are
scarce.
Flow Theory
Flow is a well-established and validated psychological
theory developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that
describes what an optimal experience is.
Csikszentmihalyi [5] defines flow as a mental state of
deep enjoyment and intense engagement in a certain
activity, where most of a person’s attentional resources
are devoted to accomplish that activity. An optimal
experience is what a person experiences when being in
a state of flow and it is characterized by universal
conditions: 1) clear goals; 2) feedback; 3) focused
concentration; 4) loss of self-consciousness;
5) merging of action and awareness; 6) challenging
activity that requires adequate skills; 7) sense of
control; 8) a distorted sense of time; 9) autotelic
activity (motivations).
These 9 major components (in [5], 8 components are
given, but we split “clear goals and feedback” for
convenience) are the most often mentioned
accompanying factors of an optimal experience
regardless of the activity performed and of one’s
sociocultural characteristics. As stated by the author
there is no need to meet all these conditions to
experience flow.