Components Of User Experience Research Articles

Defining user value: A case study of a smartphone

Recently, value has been one of the important components of user experience (UX). Value that an individual can pursue has been widely studied in the field of social science, and some researchers in the field of marketing found that value may be connected to products. Agreeing to the linkage between value and products or services, this study intended to define what value is and distinguished life value from user value. Life value (e.g., happiness, freedom and equality) can be defined as desirable states of existence or modes of behavior. User value can be regarded as a subset of life value and an association with a certain product or service. In this study, user value elements of a smartphone were extracted from the list of life value elements through a case study using a longitudinal observation approach. The result of this study can provide insights to researchers probing user's value. Relevance to industryThis study proposed fifteen user value elements of a smartphone, including convenience, pleasure, beauty and friendship. Those elements can be used to investigate and understand how users are satisfied with their smartphones.

Explaining the user experience of recommender systems

Research on recommender systems typically focuses on the accuracy of prediction algorithms. Because accuracy only partially constitutes the user experience of a recommender system, this paper proposes a framework that takes a user-centric approach to recommender system evaluation. The framework links objective system aspects to objective user behavior through a series of perceptual and evaluative constructs (called subjective system aspects and experience, respectively). Furthermore, it incorporates the influence of personal and situational characteristics on the user experience. This paper reviews how current literature maps to the framework and identifies several gaps in existing work. Consequently, the framework is validated with four field trials and two controlled experiments and analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling. The results of these studies show that subjective system aspects and experience variables are invaluable in explaining why and how the user experience of recommender systems comes about. In all studies we observe that perceptions of recommendation quality and/or variety are important mediators in predicting the effects of objective system aspects on the three components of user experience: process (e.g. perceived effort, difficulty), system (e.g. perceived system effectiveness) and outcome (e.g. choice satisfaction). Furthermore, we find that these subjective aspects have strong and sometimes interesting behavioral correlates (e.g. reduced browsing indicates higher system effectiveness). They also show several tradeoffs between system aspects and personal and situational characteristics (e.g. the amount of preference feedback users provide is a tradeoff between perceived system usefulness and privacy concerns). These results, as well as the validated framework itself, provide a platform for future research on the user-centric evaluation of recommender systems.

Usability, aesthetics and emotions in human–technology interaction

In the past, research on human–technology interaction has almost exclusively concentrated on aspects of usefulness and usability. Despite the success of this line of research, its narrow perspective has recently become a target for criticism. To explain why people prefer some systems over others, factors such as aesthetic qualities and emotional experiences play an important role in addition to instrumental aspects. In the following, we report three experiments that illustrate the importance of such factors. In the first experiment, we study the role of emotions in human–technology interaction by using Scherer's (1984) component theory of emotions as a theoretical foundation. A combination of methods is derived from that theory and employed to measure subjective feelings, motor expressions, physiological reactions, cognitive appraisals, and behaviour. The results demonstrate that the manipulation of selected system properties may lead to differences in usability that affect emotional user reactions. The second experiment investigates the interplay of instrumental and non‐instrumental system qualities. The results show that users' overall appraisal of a technical device is influenced by both groups of qualities. In the third experiment, we join the approaches of the first two studies to analyse the influence of usability and aesthetics within a common design. The results indicate that systems differing in these aspects affect the perception of instrumental and non‐instrumental qualities as well as the users' emotional experience and their overall appraisal of the system. Summarizing our results, we present a model specifying three centralcomponents ofuserexperience and their interrelations (CUE‐Model). The model integrates the most important aspects of human–technology interaction and hints at a number of interesting issues for future research.