XGoalTest: Evaluating your design against experience goals

Experience goals have been introduced to guide experience-driven design, but there are few tools to test whether those goals are met. This research introduces an evaluation technique that addresses the practical evaluation needs of experience-driven design projects in organizations. The XGoalTest technique was developed through thirteen design students’ experience-driven design course projects in two countries over twelve years. This article reports a literature review and analysis of ten selected course projects. A literature review on UX goal evaluation revealed a research gap in evaluation methods targeted for testing if the design outcomes match the UX goals. The student projects revealed seven important requirements for such an evaluation technique. After two decades of research on how to determine what experience to aim for and to design something that is expected to evoke that experience, this article proposes an instrument to evaluate whether that experience is actually realized. While numerous methods exist for evaluating user experience, the XGoalTest technique offers a novel, structured approach to assess whether design outcomes meet a specific experiential goal.