AUX and UX Evaluation of User Tools in Social Networks

Online social networks provide technological support for making up virtual groups of any size, whose members share common interests and interact through the Internet. A person joins a social network not only owing to its popularity and the quality of its contents, but also thanks to the User Experience (UX) that the platform offers. A crucial factor in the growth and survival of any virtual social group is participation, which should be facilitated by suitable user tools supplied by the platform. However, this is not always the case. Anticipated User eXperience (AUX) allows knowing the idealisations, hopes, and desires of the users in a very early stage of any development. In this paper, we propose an AUX and UX evaluation method for user tools of social networks, whose goal is to improve their design, and through it, the participation of people. We tested our method by an experimental design that included the construction of paper prototypes and execution of tasks in actual platforms. The AUX and UX of the participants were measured with AttrakDiff. As shown by our results, based on their previous experience, participants have fixed ideas on the behaviour of user tools, having a visible impact when their expectations are not met.