Developing and validating an English version of the meCUE questionnaire for measuring user experience

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.Based on the Component model of User Experience (CUE), a standardized questionnaire (meCUE) was developed measuring key aspects of user experience (UX) for interactive products. The questionnaire consists of 34 items and covers four components: product perceptions (usefulness, usability, visual aesthetics, status, commitment), user emotions (positive, negative), consequences of usage (intention to use, product loyalty), and overall judgment. The modules were separately validated in a series of studies. Therefore, meCUE can be easily adapted to specific research goals by simply choosing those modules which are required. The original German questionnaire was translated into an English version that was validated in an online study. Fifty-eight native English speakers assessed a wide variety of interactive products, such as cell phones, digital cameras, PCs, laptops, tablets, software and mobile applications. Results show that the English version reliably assesses the key components of UX and that the internal consistency of its scales is high.DFG, GRK 1013, Prospektive Gestaltung von Mensch-Technik-Interaktion (prometei

Using SMS Text Messaging to Assess Moderators of Smoking Reduction: Validating a New Tool for Ecological Measurement of Health Behaviors

Objective: Understanding the psychological processes that contribute to smoking reduction will yield population health benefits. Negative mood may moderate smoking lapse during cessation, but this relationship has been difficult to measure in ongoing daily experience. We used a novel form of ecological momentary assessment to test a self-control model of negative mood and craving leading to smoking lapse. Design: We validated short message service (SMS) text as a user-friendly and low-cost option for ecologically measuring real-time health behaviors. We sent text messages to cigarette smokers attempting to quit eight times daily for the first 21 days of cessation (N-obs = 3,811). Main outcome measures: Approximately every two hours, we assessed cigarette count, mood, and cravings, and examined between- and within-day patterns and time-lagged relationships among these variables. Exhaled carbon monoxide was assessed pre- and posttreatment. Results: Negative mood and craving predicted smoking two hours later, but craving mediated the mood–smoking relationship. Also, this mediation relationship predicted smoking over the next two, but not four, hours. Conclusion: Results clarify conflicting previous findings on the relation between affect and smoking, validate a new low-cost and user-friendly method for collecting fine-grained health behavior assessments, and emphasize the importance of rapid, real-time measurement of smoking moderators

Negative brand beliefs and brand usage

This research focuses on consumer brand usage segments and the responses they give to negative attributes in brand image studies. Analysis was conducted across three markets and four approaches for measuring brand beliefs with respondents who were current users, past users or had never tried a brand. The major finding of this study was that past users of a brand consistently have the highest tendency to elicit negative beliefs about brands. Further, those who have never used a brand typically have a lower propensity than current brand users to elicit negative brand beliefs. These results suggest that negative beliefs about a brand are developed as a result of purchase behaviour, rather than as mechanisms to reject a brand prior to purchase. These findings have implications for the role of negative beliefs in consideration of set formation and the trial of a new brand. They also provide insight into the patterns that may be expected when measuring and interpreting negative brand beliefs across different usage groups

Actual and Imagined Movement in BCI Gaming

Most research on Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) focuses\ud on developing ways of expression for disabled people who are\ud not able to communicate through other means. Recently it has been\ud shown that BCI can also be used in games to give users a richer experience\ud and new ways to interact with a computer or game console.\ud This paper describes research conducted to find out what the differences\ud are between using actual and imagined movement as modalities\ud in a BCI game. Results show that there are significant differences\ud in user experience and that actual movement is a more robust way of\ud communicating through a BCI

Resonating Experiences of Self and Others enabled by a Tangible Somaesthetic Design

Digitalization is penetrating every aspect of everyday life including a human's heart beating, which can easily be sensed by wearable sensors and displayed for others to see, feel, and potentially "bodily resonate" with. Previous work in studying human interactions and interaction designs with physiological data, such as a heart's pulse rate, have argued that feeding it back to the users may, for example support users' mindfulness and self-awareness during various everyday activities and ultimately support their wellbeing. Inspired by Somaesthetics as a discipline, which focuses on an appreciation of the living body's role in all our experiences, we designed and explored mobile tangible heart beat displays, which enable rich forms of bodily experiencing oneself and others in social proximity. In this paper, we first report on the design process of tangible heart displays and then present results of a field study with 30 pairs of participants. Participants were asked to use the tangible heart displays during watching movies together and report their experience in three different heart display conditions (i.e., displaying their own heart beat, their partner's heart beat, and watching a movie without a heart display). We found, for example that participants reported significant effects in experiencing sensory immersion when they felt their own heart beats compared to the condition without any heart beat display, and that feeling their partner's heart beats resulted in significant effects on social experience. We refer to resonance theory to discuss the results, highlighting the potential of how ubiquitous technology could utilize physiological data to provide resonance in a modern society facing social acceleration.Comment: 18 page

Media Presence and Inner Presence: The Sense of Presence in Virtual Reality Technologies

Abstract. Presence is widely accepted as the key concept to be considered in any research involving human interaction with Virtual Reality (VR). Since its original description, the concept of presence has developed over the past decade to be considered by many researchers as the essence of any experience in a virtual environment. The VR generating systems comprise two main parts: a technological component and a psychological experience. The different relevance given to them produced two different but coexisting visions of presence: the rationalist and the psychological/ecological points of view. The rationalist point of view considers a VR system as a collection of specific machines with the necessity of the inclusion \ud of the concept of presence. The researchers agreeing with this approach describe the sense of presence as a function of the experience of a given medium (Media Presence). The main result of this approach is the definition of presence as the perceptual illusion of non-mediation produced by means of the disappearance of the medium from the conscious attention of the subject. At the other extreme, there \ud is the psychological or ecological perspective (Inner Presence). Specifically, this perspective considers presence as a neuropsychological phenomenon, evolved from the interplay of our biological and cultural inheritance, whose goal is the control of the human activity. \ud Given its key role and the rate at which new approaches to understanding and examining presence are appearing, this chapter draws together current research on presence to provide an up to date overview of the most widely accepted approaches to its understanding and measurement

Measuring the impact of game controllers on player experience in FPS games

An increasing amount of games is released on multiple platforms, and game designers face the challenge of integrating different interaction paradigms for console and PC users while keeping the core mechanics of a game. However, little research has addressed the influence of game controls on player experience. In this paper, we examine the impact of mouse and keyboard versus gamepad control in first-person shooters using the PC and PlayStation 3 versions of Battlefield: Bad Company 2. We conducted a study with 45 participants to compare player experience and game usability issues of participants who had previously played similar games on one of the respective gaming systems, while also exploring the effects of players being forced to switch to an unfamiliar platform. The results show that players switching to a new platform experience more usability issues and consider themselves more challenged, but report an equally positive overall experience as players on their comfort platform. © 2011 ACM

The sweet smell of success: Enhancing multimedia applications with olfaction

This is the Post-Print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 ACMOlfaction, or smell, is one of the last challenges which multimedia applications have to conquer. As far as computerized smell is concerned, there are several difficulties to overcome, particularly those associated with the ambient nature of smell. In this article, we present results from an empirical study exploring users' perception of olfaction-enhanced multimedia displays. Findings show that olfaction significantly adds to the user multimedia experience. Moreover, use of olfaction leads to an increased sense of reality and relevance. Our results also show that users are tolerant of the interference and distortion effects caused by olfactory effect in multimedia