Impact of Item Polarity on the Scales of the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ)

Martin Schrepp, Jessica Kollmorgen, Jörg Thomaschewski

2023

Abstract

Measuring user experience is vital for long-term success of interactive products. Questionnaires like the modular extension of the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ+) are an established instrument for this purpose. Different item formats are available for these questionnaires, such as the number of response options (most frequent 5- or 7- point Likert scales). But the item format of an UX questionnaire can of course influence the measured results. We investigate in this paper if the change to a one-sided polarity of semantic differential items influences the effort of the participants required to answer these items and on the measured scale scores. Therefore, we conducted 6 studies with 438 collected responses for the well-known products Microsoft PowerPoint, WhatsApp and Google Maps. Each product was evaluated by a sample of participants with the original UEQ and a modified version of the UEQ with one-sided polarity. In the modified version, the positive term of the semantic differential was always placed in the right position, while it is placed in half of the items in the positive and the other half in the left position in the original UEQ version. The results showed that the effort to complete the questionnaire (completion time and number of required corrections) was lower for the version with one-sided polarity, but the differences were so small that they are not practically relevant. But the results also showed that the change to a one-sided polarity introduced an answer tendency, which impact the scale scores. Therefore, the results obtained with the two versions of the UEQ cannot directly be compared. Based on this, we can conclude that it is not possible to directly compare the scores of the original UEQ scales with the corresponding scores of UEQ+ scales.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Schrepp M., Kollmorgen J. and Thomaschewski J. (2023). Impact of Item Polarity on the Scales of the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ). In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST; ISBN 978-989-758-672-9, SciTePress, pages 15-25. DOI: 10.5220/0012159900003584

in Bibtex Style

@conference{webist23,
author={Martin Schrepp and Jessica Kollmorgen and Jörg Thomaschewski},
title={Impact of Item Polarity on the Scales of the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ)},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST},
year={2023},
pages={15-25},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0012159900003584},
isbn={978-989-758-672-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST
TI - Impact of Item Polarity on the Scales of the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ)
SN - 978-989-758-672-9
AU - Schrepp M.
AU - Kollmorgen J.
AU - Thomaschewski J.
PY - 2023
SP - 15
EP - 25
DO - 10.5220/0012159900003584
PB - SciTePress