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

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

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