User experience over time

Abstract

Product evaluation practices have traditionally been focusing on early interactions. Recent studies and trends in the consumer electronics industry, however, highlight the importance of understanding prolonged use. This chapter presents two studies that inquired into how users' experiences with interactive products develop over time. The first study assessed the ways in which ten individuals formed overall evaluative judgments of a novel interactive product at two moments in time during the adoption of a product, more precisely, in the first week and after four weeks. The second study followed six individuals through an actual purchase of a novel product and inquired into how their expectations and experiences developed from 1 week before until 4 weeks after the purchase of the product. The chapter attempts two contributions. Firstly, it provides some initial insights into the differences between initial and prolonged experiences in terms of the way users form overall evaluative judgments about a product. Secondly, it raises a number of methodological issues in the assessment of the dynamics of user experience over time. This chapter ends with a proposal for a new approach to the study of the dynamics of experience over time and raises two research questions that will be addressed in chapters 5 and 6 respectively.