The MeCUE questionnaire (2.0): Meeting five basic requirements for lean and standardized UX assessment

Abstract

Five requirements can be considered as basic for a standardized and lean measurement of user experience (UX): Comprehensiveness of the assessment, efficiency of execution, intelligibility of items and scales, psychometric quality as well as adaptability to different research contexts and types of applications. meCUE is a questionnaire in German and English that was developed to meet these requirements. It is theoretically based on the CUE model (Components of User Experience) and consists of 34 items which cover the components of the model and their sub-constructs: product perceptions (usefulness, usability, visual aesthetics, status, commitment), user emotions (positive, negative), consequences of use (intention to use, product loyalty), and overall evaluation. Items are grouped into four modules which correspond to these components. The modules were separately validated in a series of studies and meCUE has been used in several surveys to assess UX. Insights from this practical use pointed out that items for instrumental product qualities (usefulness, usability) and those for non-instrumental qualities (visual aesthetics, status, commitment) should not be grouped together into the same module. The new version meCUE 2.0 fulfills this demand by splitting up the module for product perceptions into two sub-modules, one for instrumental and one for non-instrumental product qualities. To ensure that this structural change does not impair the psychometric quality of the questionnaire, two data sets were re-analyzed that had formerly been used to validate the German and English version. The results of the analyses confirm that the psychometric quality of both versions remains intact. Due to the modified structure of meCUE 2.0, investigators are no longer obliged to incorporate items for both, instrumental and non-instrumental product qualities into their studies. Hence, the new version of the questionnaire significantly increases efficiency and adaptability and offers more degrees of freedom for combining its modules.