Developing an Emoji-Based User Experience Questionnaire: UEQ-Emoji

Emojis are increasingly used in tools to evaluate user opinions, typically through happy-to-sad rating scales. We extended this concept by developing an emoji-based User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ), a well-established UX evaluation tool. Our design process involved selecting emojis corresponding to UEQ adjectives and creating bipolar emoji scales. The final tool covered 11 scales but could not represent the novelty subscale due to limitations of the emoji language. A comparative user study showed statistically similar results for 7 out of 11 scales between the emoji-based and word-based UEQs. Although the word-based version was preferred, our findings suggest that emoji-based scales can be a viable alternative for UX evaluation. Our work provides new insights into the potential and limitations of using emojis in UX research. Supplementary materials include a ready-to-use UEQ-Emoji form and an analysis tool.