Evaluating User Experience in a Public Sector Digital System Through Nielsen’s Heuristic Approach

The digital transformation in public administration has encouraged the Indonesian National Police (Polri) to adopt a digital government application for managing official documents electronically. Despite its functional benefits, users have reported several usability issues such as non-intuitive navigation, inconsistent interface design, inadequate system feedback, and insufficient documentation. To systematically address these problems, this study combines Jakob Nielsen’s Heuristic Evaluation (HE) with Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), offering a hybrid methodological approach that is rarely applied in public sector UX evaluation. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire distributed to 156 active users of the application. The instrument measured ten heuristic principles and user experience dimensions using a four-point Likert scale. The results reveal that all heuristic dimensions scored within the “good” range with mean values between 3.19 and 3.38, classified as cosmetic issues under Nielsen’s severity scale. More importantly, the analysis shows that only three heuristics—Match Between System and the Real World, Help Users Recognize Diagnose and Recover from Errors, and Help and Documentation—have a significant positive impact on user experience perceptions. Together, these heuristics explain 90.9 per cent of the variance in user experience, highlighting their critical role in shaping user-centered digital government systems. This study advances existing evaluation models by demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating heuristic evaluation with quantitative SEM-based analysis, bridging diagnostic insights with statistical rigor. The findings provide a prioritized roadmap for improving the application’s interface and emphasize the importance of user-centered design for enhancing the adoption and effectiveness of public sector digital systems.