Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Data for Measuring User Experience of an Educational Game

Measuring the user experience (UX) with interactive systems is a complex task, because it is influenced not only by the characteristics of the designed system, but also by the user’s internal state and the context within which the interaction occurs. Human-Computer Interaction researchers always try to obtain numerical values for providing useful, valid and meaningful assessments. Until now, there is no consensus among researchers as to which specific techniques should be used for evaluating UX. We present here our approach that combines different techniques able to measure all the UX different aspects, some resulting in quantitative data, others providing qualitative data. The approach has been adopted in the evaluation of Explore!, an m-learning system implementing a game to be played by middle school students during a visit to an archaeological park. The outcomes of this study also show that, thanks to some problems that emerged by analysing qualitative findings, we were able to understand some unexpected results obtained by quantitative data.