A Standardised Format for Exchanging User Study Instruments

Increasing re-use in Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) has been an ongoing aim in IIR for a significant amount of time, however progress has been limited and patchy. While re-use of some study aspects can be difficult due to the varied nature of IIR studies, the use of pre- and post-task self-reported measures is widespread and relatively standardised. Nevertheless, re-use of elements in this area is also limited, in part because systems used to implement them are not able to exchange question, instruments, or complete study setups. To address this, this paper presents a standardised, but extendable, format for IIR survey instrument exchange.