The Influence of in-VR Questionnaire Design on the User Experience

Researchers study the user experience in Virtual Reality (VR) typically by collecting either sensory data or using questionnaires. While traditional questionnaire formats present it through web-based survey tools (out-VR), recent studies investigate the effects of presenting questionnaires directly in the virtual environment (in-VR). The in-VR questionnaire can be defined as an implemented user-interface object that allows interaction with questionnaires in VR that do not break the immersion. Integrating questionnaires directly into the virtual environment, however, also challenges design decisions. While most previous research presents in-VR questionnaires in the form of 2D panels in the virtual environment, we want to investigate the difference from such traditional formats to a presentation of a questionnaire format in the form of an interactive object as part of the environment. Accordingly, we evaluate and compare two different in-VR questionnaire designs and a traditional web-based form (out-VR) to assess user experience, the effect on presence, duration of completing the questionnaires, and users’ preferences. As the means for achieving this goal, we developed an immersive questionnaire toolkit that provides a general solution for implementing in-VR questionnaires and exchanging data with popular survey services. This toolkit enables us to run our study both on-site and remotely. As a first small study, 16 users, either on-site or remotely, attended by completing the System Usability Scale, NASA TLX, and the iGroup Presence Questionnaire after a playful activity. The first results indicate that there is no significant difference in the case of usability and presence between different design layouts. Furthermore, we could not find a significant difference also for the task load except between 2D and web-based layout for mental demand and frustration as well as the duration of completing the questionnaire. The results also indicate that users generally prefer in-VR questionnaire designs to the traditional ones. The study can be expanded to include more participants in user studies as a means of gaining more concrete results. Furthermore, additional questionnaire design alternatives can also help to provide us with a more usable and accurate questionnaire design in VR.