Fun in the home : Guidelines for evaluating interactive entertainment on the web

In recent years, we have witnessed a dramatic change in how ICT (Information- and Communication Technologies) is used, and examples of usage of ICT are allocation of leisure time, learning, man-to-man communication, e-shopping and much more (Bradley, 2001). Today, the computer has moved to the kitchen, the living room, and even the garage, to support the activities going on there – food recipes are browsed from the kitchen and in the living room a TV-show is displaying supporting web sites for chatting, presentation of further information, voting, etc. Children have PC’s, on which they communicate with others, play games, search the web and so on. Because of this change in usage of ICT, the focus of design concerns has expanded from predominantly functional aspects of ICT systems to overall user experience. The trend towards experience has direct implications for usability evaluation. Since experience is considered an important aspect of the quality of various products, it should be evaluated. One possible, if not universally accepted, approach is to consider evaluation of experience as a case of usability evaluation. However, the existing methods cannot be employed. When the focus is on experiences rather than on more functional aspects of systems, a revision of usability methods is required. This paper presents a novel approach in how to conduct Heuristic Evaluations (Nielsen, 1993) on ICT mediating interactive entertainment. New heuristics, so called funology heuristics, were developed and empirically tested on, what is called, entertainment web sites. These funology heuristics were also combined with novel methodological approaches in order to fulfill the requirements when evaluating fun on the web.