Open Access

Andreas Hinderks, Martin Schrepp, Maria Rauschenberger, Jörg Thomaschewski

• As digital technologies advance, user experience (UX) has become crucial for software and services success. The User Experience Questionnaire Plus (UEQ+) is a flexible tool used to evaluate UX through questionnaires tailored to specific problems, yet a critical factor often overlooked is Trust. Trust, understood as a user’s belief in a software’s ability to function consistently, securely, and with respect for user data privacy, is especially pivotal in areas like financial services, health informatics, and e-commerce platforms. This paper focuses on the construction and validation of Trust as a new factor in the UEQ+. During the construction phase, an initial collection of potential items was assembled for the trust factor. A subsequent study involving 405 participants facilitated the reduction of these items to four, a task accomplished via factor analysis. The proceeding stages involved two additional validation phases, enlisting a total of 897 participants, wherein the selected items were subject to validation. The culmination of this process resulted in a newly validated factor, Trust, which is constituted by the following items: insecure-secure, untrustworthy-trustworthy, unreliable-reliable, and non-transparent-transparent.