A Questionnaire for Assessing Immersive Websites

Abstract

Web-immersion – i.e., a deep sense of cognitive and perceptual absorption engendered by the content and interactive features of a website - plays an important role in our modern, digital world. Yet, this topic has received little attention from design and HCI scholars. The lack of tools to assess and measure immersion in the Web may severely limit our ability to understand the nature of such experience, thereby constraining future research in the area. To address this issue, we designed a questionnaire for assessing immersive websites and conducted a preliminary evaluation on it. In this article, we outline the questionnaire design and report on findings from a preliminary study conducted to analyse its reliability and validity. Moreover, we present results from Factor Analysis performed to investigate the dimensionality of the instrument. Finally, we conclude by discussing the implications of our findings, along with limitations of the study and future work.