Exploring Usability as a Formative Construct through UMUX: A Multi-Language Approach for Turkish Adaptation

Within the last decade, the Usability Metric for User Experience is translated into many languages. This study aimed to create an adapted version of UMUX into Turkish, based on item translations made from Arabic, Chinese, English, Italian and Slovene versions, which vary for the content of the items as well as their differences in how they are processed by machine translation systems and understood by human translators. Based on different translations, 45 UMUX variants in Turkish language are assessed psychometrically as a formative construct, regarding the criteria based on PLS measurement models for formative constructs and Rasch analysis. The results are benchmarked with the data collected via UMUX, SUS and CSUQ in Arabic and English or Turkish and English concurrently. Results show that all 45 Turkish variants of UMUX reveal strong psychometric qualities as a formative construct, as well as UMUX and Arabic UMUX. While there is evidence that usability can be measured as a formative construct, differences between item sets suggest that UMUX may not be a complete measure that includes all aspects of usability regarding ISO 9241-11. Our results also suggest that UMUX scores are sensitive to the native language of participants since the mean scores were significantly different between the native and English UMUX versions which were responded concurrently to assess the same software.