Self-Reported Metrics - Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics - page 154

• Nonduplication of respondents. Most of these services provide a mechanism

for noting (typically via a browser cookie or IP address) when the survey
has already been offered to someone. As long as the user doesn't clear
their cookies and is using the same computer, the survey won't be pre-
sented to them again for a specified time period. This prevents duplicate
responses from an individual and also prevents annoying those users
who don't want to respond.

6.7 OTHER TYPES OF SELF-REPORTED METRICS
Many of the self-report techniques described so far have sought to assess users'
reactions to products or websites as a whole or to tasks performed using them. But
depending on the objectives of a usability study, you might want to assess users'
reactions to specific attributes of the product overall or specific parts of the product.

6.7.1 Assessing Specific Attributes
Here are some of the attributes of a product or website that you might be inter-
ested in assessing:

• Visualappeal

• Perceivedefficiency

• Confidence

• Usefulness

• Enjoyment

• Credibility

• Appropriatenessofterminology

• Easeofnavigation

• Responsiveness

Covering in detail the ways you might assess all the specific attributes you
are interested in is beyond the scope of this topic. Instead, we describe a few
examples of usability studies that have focused on assessing specific attributes.

Gitte Lindgaard and associates at Carleton University were interested in
learning how quickly users form an impression of the visual appeal of a web
page (Lindgaard et al., 2006). They flashed images of web pages for either 50 or
500 msec to participants in their study. Each web page was rated on an overall
scale of visual appeal and on the following bipolar scales: Interesting/Boring,
Good Design/Bad Design, Good Color/Bad Color, Good Layout/Bad Layout,
and Imaginative/Unimaginative. They found that the ratings on all five of these
scales correlated very strongly with visual appeal ( r 2 = 0.86 to 0.92). They also
found that the results were consistent across the participants at both the 50- and
the 500-msec exposure levels, indicating that even at 50 msec (or 1/20th of a
second), users can form a consistent impression about the visual appeal of a
web page.

Bill Albert and associates at Bentley University (Albert, Gribbons, & Almadas,
2009) extended this research to see if users could form an opinion quickly about