The goal of user experience design in industry is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product. So far, user experience studies have mostly focused on short-term evaluations and consequently on aspects relating to the initial adoption of new product designs. Nevertheless, the relationship between the user and the product evolves over long periods of time and the relevance of prolonged use for market success has been recently highlighted. In this paper, we argue for the costeffective elicitation of longitudinal user experience data. We propose a method called the "UX Curve" which aims at assisting users in retrospectively reporting how and why their experience with a product has changed over time. The usefulness of the UX Curve method was assessed in a qualitative study with 20 mobile phone users. In particular, we investigated how users' specific memories of their experiences with their mobile phones guide their behavior and their willingness to recommend the product to others. The results suggest that the UX Curve method enables users and researchers to determine the quality of long-term user experience and the influences that improve user experience over time or cause it to deteriorate. The method provided rich qualitative data and we found that an improving trend of perceived attractiveness of mobile phones was related to user satisfaction and willingness to recommend their phone to friends. This highlights that sustaining perceived attractiveness can be a differentiating factor in the user acceptance of personal interactive products such as mobile phones. The study suggests that the proposed method can be used as a straightforward tool for understanding the reasons why user experience improves or worsens in long-term product use and how these reasons relate to customer loyalty.

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a b s t r a c tA wealth of studies in the field of user experience have tried to conceptualize new measures of product quality and inquire into how the overall goodness of a product is formed on the basis of product quality perceptions. An interesting question relates to how the perception as well as the relative dominance of different product qualities evolve across different phases in the adoption of a product. However, temporality of experience poses substantial challenges to traditional reductive evaluation approaches. In this paper we present an alternative methodological approach for studying how users' experiences with interactive products develop over time. The approach lies in the elicitation of rich qualitative insights in the form of experience narratives, combined with content-analytical approaches for the aggregation of idiosyncratic insights into generalized knowledge. We describe a tool designed for eliciting rich experience narratives retrospectively, and illustrate this tool by means of a study that inquired into how users' experiences with mobile phones change over the first 6 months of use. We use the insights of the study to validate and extend a framework of temporality proposed by Karapanos et al. (2009b).