‘My favourite UX research method is…’ — This is an example of a sentence stem, the type of stimulus used in the sentence completion technique. Respondents are provided with the beginnings of sentences that they complete in ways that are meaningful to them. It is based on the principle of ‘fill in the blanks’. Transferred to HCI from the field of psychology, SCT is a promising user research technique. One of the main interests of the method lies in its ability to collect rich qualitative data remotely and in a cost-effective way.

In the past years, I have conducted several studies on the Sentence Completion Technique (SCT), to understand how to optimize these sentence stems for qualitative (e.g., during a focus group, workshop, or interview) or quantitative studies (for instance, within an online survey).

The SCT has its roots in psychology, where this semi-structured projective technique is popular in several application areas, such as intelligence tests (introduced by Ebbinghaus, 1897) or psychological assessment. In user research, the method is not used as a projective tool, but rather serves to elicit information without leading the participants, and as an alternative format to collect qualitative insights within surveys. The SCT gives participants some structure by providing the beginning of a sentence (i.e. a sentence stem), but allows participants to freely formulate their response, using their own words to complete the sentence. Amongst other benefits, participants thus have greater autonomy on their answers as compared to the widely used Likert-scale items, where they can only voice their agreement or disagreement with a statement or compared to multiple-choice questions presenting a limited, pre-defined list of choices. The nature of SCT can be helpful, as it guides the participant on the insight that the researcher is looking for without introducing prominent response biases. It is also usable on populations who may face difficulties with open-ended questions and provides a degree of standardization that facilitates data collection and analysis.

I have co-authored two key articles on the SCT, including examples and recommendations on the best use of the method:

• Denise Schmidt, Karsten Nebe, Carine Lallemand, Sentence Completion as a User Experience Research Method: Recommendations From an Experimental Study, Interacting with Computers, 2024, iwae002, https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwae002
• Carine Lallemand and Emeline Mercier. 2022. Optimizing the Use of the Sentence Completion Survey Technique in User Research: A Case Study on the Experience of E-Reading. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 319, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517718

You can also watch the video of my presentation of the paper during the British Computer Science HCI/UX seminar by the Editor-in-Chief of the Interacting with Computers journal, Prof. Helen Petrie.