Re-examining the chatBot Usability Scale (BUS-11) to assess user experience with customer relationship management chatbots

Abstract Intelligent systems, such as chatbots, are likely to strike new qualities of UX that are not covered by instruments validated for legacy human–computer interaction systems. A new validated tool to evaluate the interaction quality of chatbots is the chatBot Usability Scale (BUS) composed of 11 items in five subscales. The BUS-11 was developed mainly from a psychometric perspective, focusing on ranking people by their responses and also by comparing designs’ properties (designometric). In this article, 3186 observations (BUS-11) on 44 chatbots are used to re-evaluate the inventory looking at its factorial structure, and reliability from the psychometric and designometric perspectives. We were able to identify a simpler factor structure of the scale, as previously thought. With the new structure, the psychometric and the designometric perspectives coincide, with good to excellent reliability. Moreover, we provided standardized scores to interpret the outcomes of the scale. We conclude that BUS-11 is a reliable and universal scale, meaning that it can be used to rank people and designs, whatever the purpose of the research.