An Exploration of the Relation Between Expectations and User Experience

Abstract

Before using an interactive product, people form expectations about what the experience of use will be like. These expectations may affect both the use of the product and users’ attitudes toward it. This article briefly reviews existing theories of expectations to design and perform two crowdsourced experiments that investigate how expectations affect user experience measures. In the experiments, participants saw a primed or neutral review of a simple online game, played it, and rated it on various user experience measures. Results suggest that when expectations are confirmed, users tend to assimilate their ratings with their expectations; conversely, if the product quality is inconsistent with expectations, users tend to contrast their ratings with expectations and give ratings correlated with the level of disconfirmation. Results also suggest that expectation disconfirmation can be used more widely in analyses of user experience, even when the analyses are not specifically concerned with expectation disconfirmation.

Notes

¹ When reporting effect sizes we use the following thresholds for η²: η² = .01 – small effect, η² = .06 – medium effect, η² = .14 – large effect (Cohen, 1988, Chapter 8).

² One participant did not provide the rating change, but did provide all the other data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jaroslav Michalco

Jaroslav Michalco is an IT Analyst at Gratex International (since 2014). He received his Bachelor degree from the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava in 2012 and MSc degree from the University of Copenhagen in 2014. His research interests include usability, user experience, and social networks.

Jakob Grue Simonsen

Jakob Grue Simonsen is associate professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen. He received his Ph.D. and Habilitation degrees from the University of Copenhagen in 2005 and 2012, respectively, and his MBA degree from Edinburgh Business School in 2008. His research interests include mathematical logic, computability and complexity theory, usability, and information retrieval.

Kasper Hornbæk

Kasper Hornbæk is professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen. He received his Ph.D. from University of Copenhagen in 2002. His research interests concern human–computer interaction, including user experience research, interaction techniques for large-displays, and using embodied cognition to drive midair interaction.