When designing usability questionnaires, does it hurt to be positive?

By Jeff Sauro, James R. Lewis. International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2011

387 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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Usability: Lessons Learned … and Yet to Be Learned (2014, neutral): “It is also possible that mixed tone could contribute to three types of errors in practice (Sauro & Lewis, 2011), speciﬁcally the following: (cid:129) Misinterpretation : Users might respond to items forced into a negative tone in a way that is not the simple negative of the positive version of the…”
The Development and Validation of the Game User Experience Satisfaction Scale (GUESS) (2016, methodology): “Past studies tended to employ reversed-scoring method in an attempt to minimize acquies-cence bias and extreme response bias (Sauro & Lewis, 2011).”
The System Usability Scale: Past, Present, and Future (2018, background): “Sauro and Lewis (2011) administered a retrospective survey using the standard and positive versions of the SUS ( n = 213) across seven websites.”
UMUX-LITE: when there's no time for the SUS (2013, background): “Despite the common wisdom that attitudinal questionnaires should contain a mix of positively-and negatively-toned items, there is a body of research that argues against this practice [5, 10, 13, 15, 16].”
European Portuguese Validation of the System Usability Scale (SUS) (2015, background): “Sauro and Lewis [22] found that there were some problems both on the part of users in responding to questions and of researchers in scoring the questionnaires.”