Focusing Requirements Elicitation by Using a UX Measurement Method

Many User Experience (UX) activities are carried out during requirements engineering phases, e.g. understanding and assessing the UX of existing systems, and eliciting functional and non-functional requirements that improve UX. These activities are typically performed by requirements engineers who are non-UX experts. It is necessary to provide a good UX in order to ensure long-term motivation of users, especially in business applications. UX has various characteristics of differing importance; it can be difficult for RE engineers to grasp all characteristics of UX and to judge which characteristics are important and which need to be improved. We propose a two-step approach to solve these difficulties. The first step is the definition of a UX quality model and corresponding metrics. We propose an approach to calculate the UX score of a business application using the value of these metrics. The second step is a process to identify insufficient characteristics within the calculated UX score. In this paper we present the aforementioned approach to collect and calculate the UX score of a product, show how to identify serious UX-related problems as part of requirements engineering activities, and present the results obtained from an initial validation of our quality model and related questionnaire. With our approach, we enable RE experts who are non-UX experts to find the necessary requirements to improve UX.

I. Introduction & Motivation

User experience (UX) is defined in ISO/IEC 9241-210:2010[1] as “a person's perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service”. UX is also important for software applications; if an application provides a good UX to users, the application will have many happy users. Moreover, a great deal of user-support labor is decreased by a good UX.