Understanding and Measuring User Experience in Conversational Interfaces

© 2019 The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com. Although various methods have been developed to evaluate conversational interfaces, there has been a lack of methods specifically focusing on evaluating user experience. This paper reviews the understandings of user experience (UX) in conversational interfaces literature and examines the six questionnaires commonly used for evaluating conversational systems in order to assess the potential suitability of these questionnaires to measure different UX dimensions in that context. The method to examine the questionnaires involved developing an assessment framework for main UX dimensions with relevant attributes and coding the items in the questionnaires according to the framework. The results show that (i) the understandings of UX notably differed in literature; (ii) four questionnaires included assessment items, in varying extents, to measure hedonic, aesthetic and pragmatic dimensions of UX; (iii) while the dimension of affect was covered by two questionnaires, playfulness, motivation, and frustration dimensions were covered by one questionnaire only. The largest coverage of UX dimensions has been provided by the Subjective Assessment of Speech System Interfaces (SASSI). We recommend using multiple questionnaires to obtain a more complete measurement of user experience or improve the assessment of a particular UX dimension. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Varying understandings of UX in conversational interfaces literature. A UX assessment framework with UX dimensions and their relevant attributes. Descriptions of the six main questionnaires for evaluating conversational interfaces. A comparison of the six questionnaires based on their coverage of UX dimensions