An Exploration of the Relation Between Expectations and User Experience

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.