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

Software und Usability Engineering und User Experience in kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen

Die Forschung zu Software Engineering, ebenso wie zum Usability Engineering und UX hat traditionell – wenn es sich nicht ohnehin um Grundlagenforschung handelt – eher auf große Unternehmen fokussiert. Dies ist sicherlich auch der Geschichte der Informationstechnologie und der Informatik geschuldet, die maßgeblich von großen Unternehmen wie IBM, Microsoft oder Apple vorangetrieben wurde. Die besonderen Herausforderungen, vor denen kleine und mittlere Unternehmen (KMU) stehen, wenn sie selbst Software entwickeln oder entwickeln lassen, haben bisher in der Forschung einen weniger deutlichen Niederschlag gefunden. Vor dem Hintergrund einer zunehmenden Digitalisierung und Vernetzung aller Wirtschaftsbereiche scheint eine Auseinandersetzung mit den Auswirkungen auf KMU besonders wichtig

On the Importance of UX Quality Aspects for Different Product Categories

User experience (UX) is a holistic concept. We conceptualize UX as a set of semantically distinct quality aspects. These quality aspects relate subjectively perceived properties of the user interaction with a product to the psychological needs of users. Not all possible UX quality aspects are equally important for all products. The main use case of a product can determine the relative importance of UX aspects for the overall impression of the UX. In this paper, the authors present several studies that investigate this dependency between the product category and the importance of several well-known UX aspects. A method to measure the importance of such UX aspects is presented. In addition, the authors show that the observed importance ratings are stable, i.e., reproducible, and hardly influenced by demographic factors or cultural background. Thus, the ratings reported in our studies can be reused by UX professionals to find out which aspects of UX they should concentrate on in product design and evaluation

Do Women and Men Perceive User Experience Differently?

We study three web sites to see whether there are systematic differences between women and men in their rating of the user experience of the sites. One of the sites addresses especially the target group of women, another the target group of men, whereas the third site is neutral in this respect. The selection of the sites was safeguarded with gender screening. The participants in the study rated the three chosen websites with the questionnaires UEQ and VISAWI-S. The results indicate that there are no substantial differences in the perception of the UX between men and women. Personal attitudes and preferences seem to have a substantially greater influence than sex

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

Measuring Mental Effort for Creating Mobile Data Collection Applications

To deal with drawbacks of paper-based data collection procedures, the QuestionSys approach empowers researchers with none or little programming knowledge to flexibly configure mobile data collection applications on demand. The mobile application approach of QuestionSys mainly pursues the goal to mitigate existing drawbacks of paper-based collection procedures in mHealth scenarios. Importantly, researchers shall be enabled to gather data in an efficient way. To evaluate the applicability of QuestionSys, several studies have been carried out to measure the efforts when using the framework in practice. In this work, the results of a study that investigated psychological insights on the required mental effort to configure the mobile applications are presented. Specifically, the mental effort for creating data collection instruments is validated in a study with N=80 participants across two sessions. Thereby, participants were categorized into novices and experts based on prior knowledge on process modeling, which is a fundamental pillar of the developed approach. Each participant modeled 10 instruments during the course of the study, while concurrently several performance measures are assessed (e.g., time needed or errors). The results of these measures are then compared to the self-reported mental effort with respect to the tasks that had to be modeled. On one hand, the obtained results reveal a strong correlation between mental effort and performance measures. On the other, the self-reported mental effort decreased significantly over the course of the study, and therefore had a positive impact on measured performance metrics. Altogether, this study indicates that novices with no prior knowledge gain enough experience over the short amount of time to successfully model data collection instruments on their own. Therefore, QuestionSys is a helpful instrument to properly deal with large-scale data collection scenarios like clinical trials

Health Information Systems in the Digital Health Ecosystem—Problems and Solutions for Ethics, Trust and Privacy

Digital health information systems (DHIS) are increasingly members of ecosystems, collecting, using and sharing a huge amount of personal health information (PHI), frequently without control and authorization through the data subject. From the data subject's perspective, there is frequently no guarantee and therefore no trust that PHI is processed ethically in Digital Health Ecosystems. This results in new ethical, privacy and trust challenges to be solved. The authors' objective is to find a combination of ethical principles, privacy and trust models, together enabling design, implementation of DHIS acting ethically, being trustworthy, and supporting the user's privacy needs. Research published in journals, conference proceedings, and standards documents is analyzed from the viewpoint of ethics, privacy and trust. In that context, systems theory and systems engineering approaches together with heuristic analysis are deployed. The ethical model proposed is a combination of consequentialism, professional medical ethics and utilitarianism. Privacy enforcement can be facilitated by defining it as health information specific contextual intellectual property right, where a service user can express their own privacy needs using computer-understandable policies. Thereby, privacy as a dynamic, indeterminate concept, and computational trust, deploys linguistic values and fuzzy mathematics. The proposed solution, combining ethical principles, privacy as intellectual property and computational trust models, shows a new way to achieve ethically acceptable, trustworthy and privacy-enabling DHIS and Digital Health Ecosystems

GCS: A Quick and Dirty Guideline Compliance Scale

Expert-based usability evaluation methods offer valuable alternatives to traditional user testing in Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) development. While general measures of usability for user-based empirical studies are well-known throughout the community of researchers, expert-based approaches often lack such general measures of usability. This research introduces the Guideline Compliance Scale (GCS), a measure that can be applied during guideline reviews to assess the overall level of usability. Several guidelines relevant for the system being evaluated are rated by the evaluators according to their compliance. In the case study for our research, an automotive user interface was empirically evaluated in a user study as well as a guideline review with experts. The usability problem lists, which form part of the output, were made comparable by classification using the Usability Problem Classifier (UPC). An in-depth analysis revealed differences and similarities in the problem identification of both applied methods. Comparing the results of the GCS from the guideline review with the results of the System Usability Scale (SUS) from the user study, regarding the overall level of usability, showed similar results for both scales

A Model-Driven Framework for Enabling Flexible and Robust Mobile Data Collection Applications

In the light of the ubiquitous digital transformation, smart mobile technology has become a salient factor for enabling large-scale data collection scenarios. Structured instruments (e.g., questionnaires) are frequently used to collect data in various application domains, like healthcare, psychology, and social sciences. In current practice, instruments are usually distributed and filled out in a paper-based fashion (e.g., paper-and-pencil questionnaires). The widespread use of smart mobile devices, like smartphones or tablets, offers promising perspectives for the controlled collection of accurate data in high quality. The design, implementation and deployment of mobile data collection applications, however, is a challenging endeavor. First, various mobile operating systems need to be properly supported, taking their short release cycles into account. Second, domain-specific peculiarities need to be flexibly aligned with mobile application development. Third, domain-specific usability guidelines need to be obeyed. Altogether, these challenges turn both programming and maintaining of mobile data collection applications into a costly, time-consuming, and error-prone endeavor. The Ph.D. thesis at hand presents an advanced framework that shall enable domain experts to transform paper-based instruments to mobile data collection applications. The latter, in turn, can then be deployed to and executed on heterogeneous smart mobile devices. In particular, the framework shall empower domain experts (i.e., end-users) to flexibly design and create robust mobile data collection applications on their own; i.e., without need to involve IT experts or mobile application developers. As major benefit, the framework enables the development of sophisticated mobile data collection applications by orders of magnitude faster compared to current approaches, and relieves domain experts from manual tasks like, for example, digitizing and analyzing the collected data

Identifying and prioritising unanswered research questions for people with hyperacusis: James Lind Alliance Hyperacusis Priority Setting Partnership

Objective To determine research priorities in hyperacusis that key stakeholders agree are the most important. Design/setting A priority setting partnership using two international surveys, and a UK prioritisation workshop, adhering to the six-staged methodology outlined by the James Lind Alliance. Participants People with lived experience of hyperacusis, parents/carers, family and friends, educational professionals and healthcare professionals who support and/or treat adults and children who experience hyperacusis, including but not limited to surgeons, audiologists, psychologists and hearing therapists. Methods The priority setting partnership was conducted from August 2017 to July 2018. An international identification survey asked respondents to submit any questions/uncertainties about hyperacusis. Uncertainties were categorised, refined and rephrased into representative indicative questions using thematic analysis techniques. These questions were verified as ‘unanswered’ through searches of current evidence. A second international survey asked respondents to vote for their top 10 priority questions. A shortlist of questions that represented votes from all stakeholder groups was prioritised into a top 10 at the final prioritisation workshop (UK). Results In the identification survey, 312 respondents submitted 2730 uncertainties. Of those uncertainties, 593 were removed as out of scope, and the remaining were refined into 85 indicative questions. None of the indicative questions had already been answered in research. The second survey collected votes from 327 respondents, which resulted in a shortlist of 28 representative questions for the final workshop. Consensus was reached on the top 10 priorities for future research, including identifying causes and underlying mechanisms, effective management and training for healthcare professionals. Conclusions These priorities were identified and shaped by people with lived experience, parents/carers and healthcare professionals, and as such are an essential resource for directing future research in hyperacusis. Researchers and funders should focus on addressing these priorities.Additional co-authors: Tracey Pollard, Helen Henshaw, Toto A Gronlund, Derek J Hoar