UX Curve: A method for evaluating long-term user experience

Abstract

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.

Do Usability Professionals Think about User Experience in the Same Way as Users and Developers Do?

“…The third and the fourth classifications were chosen to maximize the differences among the four classifications. We included Kujala, Roto, Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Karapanos, and Sinnelä [12]'s classification of UX into general relation to the system, attractiveness of the system, ease of use, utility, and degree of usage because all of these categories were defined with a focus on the IT system. In contrast to this system-oriented UX definition, we chose McCarthy and Wright [16]'s four threads of experience: compositional, sensual, emotional, and spatio-temporal, because they focus on human experience in general.…”

Energy-efficient peer-to-peer networking for constrained-capacity mobile environments

“…Fair load balancing is very important in mobile P2P systems since the excess load of a mobile device affects both the short-term and long-term user experience through lower performance and shorter battery life (Ickin et al 2012, Doherty & Sorenson 2015, Kujala et al 2011, Heikkinen & Nurminen 2010. So far, there are very few studies in the literature considering energy-awareness in P2P load balancing, although some studies have provided models for energy-aware load dispatch-ing among servers in distributed server clusters.…”

“…Since mobile devices are most of the time running on their batteries, battery life is one of the centric factors of long-term user experience of mobile devices (Ickin et al 2012, Kujala et al 2011, Heikkinen & Nurminen 2010. Load balancing can be used as an effective measure to increase the battery life of mobile devices participating in P2P networks.…”

“…Since the battery technology has not developed at the same pace, the average battery life of a typical high-end smartphone, for instance, has significantly reduced during the past fifteen years. However, as battery life is one of the centric factors of long-term user experience of mobile devices (Kujala et al 2011, Ickin et al 2012, Heikkinen & Nurminen 2010, sufficient battery life is one of the core requirements of future mobile systems.…”

Application of Learning Curves for Didactic Model Evaluation: Case Studies

“…As such quality attributes are highly dynamic [9] and contextdependent, researchers posit that their changes over time can more reliably and validly be represented by curves. The tools iScale [10] and its variant UX curve [11] are used to capture users' evolving experiences with an inter- Figure 1. Two sample learning curves [2], one for an individual student (right-hand side) and the other one for a group of learners (lefthand side) active product/service over a longer-term duration (cf.…”