An empirical evaluation of the User Engagement Scale (UES) in online news environments

In this paper, we look at a specific questionnaire, the User Engagement Scale (UES), for its robustness as a measure. We describe three empirical studies conducted in the online news domain and investigate the reliability and validity of the UES. Our results demonstrate good reliability of the UES sub-scales; however, we argue that a four-factor structure may be more appropriate than the original six-factor structure proposed in earlier work. In addition, we found evidence to suggest that the UES can differentiate between systems (in this case, online news sources) and experimental conditions (i.e., the type of media used to present online content).