Which UX Aspects Are Important for a Software Product?: Importance Ratings of UX Aspects for Software Products for Measurement with the UEQ+

Abstract

Questionnaires are a popular method to measure User Experience (UX). These UX questionnaires cover different UX aspects with their scales. However, UX includes a huge number of semantically different aspects of a user’s interaction with a product. It is therefore practically impossible to cover all these aspects in a single evaluation study. A researcher must select those UX aspects that are most important to the users of the product under investigation. Some papers examined which UX aspects are important for specific product categories. Participants in these studies rated the importance of UX aspects for different product categories. These categories were described by a category name and several examples for products in this category. In principle, the results of these studies can be used to indicate which UX aspects should be measured for a particular product in the corresponding product category. This is especially useful for modular frameworks, e.g., the UEQ+, that allow to create a questionnaire by selecting the relevant scales from a catalog of predefined scales. In this paper, it is investigated how accurate the UX aspect suggestions derived from category-level studies are for individual products. The results show that the predicted importance of a UX aspect from the category is fairly precise.