Sentence completion for understanding users and evaluating user experience

Projective techniques are used in psychology and consumer research to provide
information about individuals' motivations, thoughts, and feelings. This paper reviews the use of projective techniques in marketing research and user experience research and discusses their potential role in understanding users, their needs and values, and evaluating user experience in practical product development contexts. A projective technique called sentence completion is evaluated through three case studies. Sentence completion produces
qualitative data about users’ views in a structured form. The results are less time-consuming to analyze than interview results. Compared to quantitative methods such as AttrakDiff, the results are more time consuming to analyze, but more information is retrieved on negative feelings. The results show that sentence completion is useful in understanding users’ perceptions and that the technique can be used to complement other methods. Sentence completion can also be used online to reach wider user groups.