User Experience (UX) Heuristics for the Digital Humanities

Although engaging with both academic and general audiences is a key objective of the digital humanities, the extent to which this value influences the full development of a project is less certain. User Experience (UX) has an especially uneven status within DH practice, despite its critical role in producing the best and most accessible versions of highly conceptual, scholarly, and discipline-heavy projects. The disparity results from uncertainties about terminology, methodology, and the transferability of industry practices to humanities research. In response, this article advocates for a reinvention of UX for DH, thus enabling it to serve effectively as a bridge for interdisciplinary teams and help ensure audience comprehension and engagement. As one tangible example of this reinvention, we propose ten user experience heuristics against which digital projects, tools, and platforms can be developed, evaluated, and refined. These flexible guidelines are both practical and theoretical in that they address common impediments that users encounter in content-rich projects of DH and collectively represent the cognitive shift that occurs when translating humanistic inquiry into computational methods and environments.