Applying the heuristic evaluation method in the evaluation of social aspects of an exercise community
Sanna K. Malinen, Jarno Ojala · 2011
Social interaction plays an important role in the use of modern websites. Because the practical ways to improve social interaction through community design often remain unknown, this study aims to provide guidelines for designing and developing social features for websites. In this paper, we introduce the results of a three-week-long qualitative field study with an internet service prototype intended for people who exercise. We aim to provide knowledge of factors that improve the social design of websites by introducing a set of heuristics for evaluating sociability. In order to validate the heuristics, the findings from heuristic expert evaluations were compared with data collected from ten test users of the internet service prototype. We suggest that the Heuristic Evaluation Method with sociability heuristics helps to identify the most fundamental problems concerning sociability and thus serves as a practical tool, particularly in the early stages of the design process of social internet sites.