Extending Usability Heuristics for Blockchain Applications: A Domain-Specific Framework for Enhanced Evaluation

Abstract

Blockchain technology is a modern day decentralized databases which presents unique usability changes like “transaction irreversibility, decentralized trust models, and cryptographic key management” which places excessive responsibilities on users that can lead to financial loss and hinders its adoption. Failing to address these usability changes, the current heuristic evaluation models like Nielsen's ten principles need to be revised. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate whether new heuristics are needed to evaluate blockchain applications effectively. During the investigation a critical gap was identified in establishing usability evaluation methods, demonstrating that Nielsen's widely adopted heuristics failed to address 40% of common blockchain-specific usability problems (e.g., users sending funds to incorrect addresses due to poor reversibility awareness). 33 empirical studies were analyzed using systematic review and metaanalysis, mainly focused on blockchain wallets, DeFi (Decentralized Finance) platforms, NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) marketplaces and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). A set of core usability issues were extracted and thematic analysis was conducted to develop four new blockchain-specific heuristic principles:(1) Transaction Finality Awareness (explicit warnings for irreversible actions), (2) Cryptographic Self-Custody Affordance (intuitive key/seed phrase management), (3) Fee Transparency & Control (realtime gas fee estimation), and (4) Decentralized Value Proposition Clarity. This paper proposes a validation methodology via heuristic evaluation of three blockchain applications by five experts would show a significant increase in detected usability flaws when using the extended heuristics versus Nielsen's original set, projected at approximately 31% based on our gap analysis. Reducing the risk of user errors will require a tailored criteria that will provide experts domain specific heuristics to create a user-friendly Dapp. Thus, this paper not only aims to create a novel domain specific heuristic evaluation for blockchain experts to use as a pre- deployment evaluation tool but also to create safer UX (user experience) for dApps.