Design and Evaluation of a Short Version of the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ-S)

The user experience questionnaire (UEQ) is a widely used questionnaire to measure the subjective impression of users towards the user experience of products. The UEQ is a semantic differential with 26 items. Filling out the UEQ takes approximately 3-5 minutes, i.e. the UEQ is already reasonably efficient concerning the time required to answer all items. However, there exist several valid application scenarios, where filling out the entire UEQ appears impractical. This paper deals with the creation of an 8 item short version of the UEQ, which is optimized for these specific application scenarios. First validations of this short version are also described

Design and Validation of a Framework for the Creation of User Experience Questionnaires

Existing user experience questionnaires have a fixed number of scales. Each of these scales measures a distinct aspect of user experience. These questionnaires can be used with little effort and provide a number of useful support materials that make the application of such a questionnaire quite easy. However, in practical evaluation scenarios it can happen that none of the existing questionnaires contains all scales necessary to answer the research question. It is of course possible to combine several UX questionnaires in such cases, but due to the variations of item formats this is also not an optimal solution. In this paper, we describe the development and first validation studies of a modular framework that allows the creation of user experience questionnaires that fit perfectly to a given research question. The framework contains several scales that measure different UX aspects. These scales can be combined to cover the relevant research questions

A Benchmark for the UEQ+ Framework: Construction of a Simple Tool to Quickly Interpret UEQ+ KPIs

Questionnaires are a highly efficient method to compare the user experience (UX) of different interactive products or versions of a single product. Concretely, they allow us to evaluate the UX easily and to compare different products with a numeric UX score. However, often only one UX score from a single evaluated product is available. Without a comparison to other measurements, it is difficult to interpret an individual score, e.g. to decide whether a product’s UX is good enough to compete in the market. Many questionnaires offer benchmarks to support researchers in these cases. A benchmark is the result of a larger set of product evaluations performed with the same questionnaire. The score obtained from a single product evaluation can be compared to the scores from this benchmark data set to quickly interpret the results. In this paper, the first benchmark for the UEQ+ (User Experience Questionnaire +) is presented, which was created using 3.290 UEQ+ responses for 26 successful software products. The UEQ+ is a modular framework that contains a high number of validated user experience scales that can be combined to form a UX questionnaire. Currently, no benchmark is available for this framework, making the benchmark constructed in this paper a valuable interpretation tool for UEQ+ questionnaires

Gamifying a Map-based Feedback Service to Support Youth Participation in City Improvement

In recent years, youth has been recognized as an indispensable stakeholder of city environment. On the one hand, young citizens who have intentions to contribute their community should be given an opportunity to express ideas. On the other hand, it is necessary for city agencies to listen to the needs from young generation to create a more livable and friendly city environment. Since location is considered as an essential attribute of human activities, local knowledge of residents always has a direct relation with spatial data. Thus, utilizing Geography Information System (GIS) has been developed to help public to participant in improving city environment, that is, Public Participation Geography Information System (PPGIS). However, younger people are thought to be less attracted by traditional political engagement, and annoyed with authoritative and tough tone. Thus, gamification as an innovative and increase popular trend has been implemented in a variety of youth-related applications and projects. Gamification is proposed to fulfill the desires of young people in the aspects of achievement, social, and immersion. The effects of gamification individuals with different player types and preferences of games to some degree. The research in thesis is conducted in connection with All-Youth project based in Finland, which is a multidisciplinary research project to enhance the connection with young people and their communities. This thesis focuses on applying gamification into digital public feedback service to motivate and sustain youth participation. Firstly, the discussion of related work includes status of youth participation in city planning, digital map technology used in public participation, and definition, content, and benefits of gamification. Secondly, three map-based tools for different purpose of public participation are studied to evaluate their usability and aesthetic quality. Thirdly, a gamified feedback service is prototyped based on initial user research and analysis. Finally, the effects of the gamified prototype are evaluated in user testing with the comparison to a control prototype without gamification. The results suggest that gamification can have positive effects on attractiveness and hedonic system qualities, while it may also influence on pragmatic quality. Overall, the research of this thesis can be considered as a successful attempt to gamify the public map-based platform which could have influence on youth engagement

What Causes the Dependency between Perceived Aesthetics and Perceived Usability?

Several studies reported a dependency between perceived beauty and perceived usability of a user interface. But it is still not fully clear which psychological mechanism is responsible for this dependency. We suggest a new explanation based on the concept of visual clarity. This concept describes the perception of order, alignment and visual complexity. A high visual clarity supports a fast orientation on an interface and creates an impression of simplicity. Thus, visual clarity will impact usability dimensions, like efficiency and learnability. Visual clarity is also related to classical aesthetics and the fluency effect, thus an impact on the perception of aesthetics is plausible. We present two large studies that show a strong mediator effect of visual clarity on the dependency between perceived aesthetics and perceived usability. These results support the proposed explanation. In addition, we show how visual clarity of a user interface can be evaluated by a new scale embedded in the UEQ+ framework. Construction and first evaluation results of this new scale are described