HEUXIVA: A Set of Heuristics for Evaluating User eXperience with Voice Assistants

Voice assistants have become increasingly common in everyday devices such as smartphones and smart speakers. Improving their user experience (UX) is crucial to ensuring usability, acceptance, and long-term effectiveness. Heuristic evaluation is a widely used method for UX evaluation due to its efficiency in detecting problems quickly and at low cost. Nonetheless, existing usability/UX heuristics were not designed to address the specific challenges of voice-based interaction, which relies on spoken dialog and auditory feedback. To overcome this limitation, we developed HEUXIVA, a set of 13 heuristics specifically developed for evaluating UX with voice assistants. The proposal was created through a structured methodology and refined in two iterations. We validated HEUXIVA through heuristic evaluations, expert judgment, and user testing. The results offer preliminary but consistent evidence supporting the effectiveness of HEUXIVA in identifying UX issues specific to the voice assistant “Google Nest Mini”. Experts described the heuristics as clear, practical, and easy to use. They also highlighted their usefulness in evaluating interaction features and supporting the overall UX evaluation process. HEUXIVA therefore provides designers, researchers, and practitioners with a specialized tool to improve the quality of voice assistant interfaces and improve user satisfaction.