How Relevant is an Expert Evaluation of User Experience based on a Psychological Needs-Driven Approach?

Many methods and tools have been proposed to assess the User Experience (UX) of interactive systems. However, while researchers have empirically studied the relevance and validity of several UX evaluation methods, few studies only have explored expert-based evaluation methods for the assessment of UX. If experts are able to assess something as complex and inherently subjective as UX, how they conduct such an evaluation and what criteria they rely on, thus remain open questions. In the present paper we report on 33 UX experts performing a UX evaluation on 4 interactive systems. We provided the experts with UX Cards, a tool based on a psychological-needs driven approach, developed to support UX Design and Evaluation. Results are encouraging and show that UX experts encountered no major issues to conduct a UX evaluation. However, significant differences exist between individual elements that experts have reported on and the overall assessment they made of the systems.