UX CURVE : A Method for Evaluating Long-Term User Experience
INTRODUCTION
User Experience relates to measure important things like customer satisfaction and product usability. But most of the user experience design related studies are more focused on the evaluating short term user experience and also on areas related to the new product adoption in day to day life. However, Long-term relationship of user with product and their experience during the interval is important in highlighting market success. User Experience not only depends on usability of the product but also on the enjoyability of it as well but a shorter time frame for judging a product sometimes misses out important data to make business decisions. In the paper i studied, “cost-effective elicitation of longitudinal user experience data is argued” which means long term user experience will be evaluated in a cost effective method. A Method called “ UX CURVE” is developed which helps or assists user in reporting their experience over the time with the product retrospectively.
EVALUTATION OF USER EXPERIENCE OVERTIME
User Experience with product covers the aspects like learning to use the new product to use in daily life. but the reason that users use a product for a long time or recommend it to others is Long Term User Experience — not the momentary details or initial experience. Various Methods and Tools were developed to collect the data or information related to people’s feelings about the product in different situations like -
ESM (Experience Sampling Method) and DRM (Day Reconstruction Method) are developed to analyse information collected from the users and these methods showed that Eventual Long Term UX depends on the order of the events and the kind of experience users has with the product over time.As author said “In particular, people like happy endings and prefer experiences that improve rather than ones that get worse”. Some other techniques like CORPUS & iScale also gain popularity as the former is used in reconstructing the user experience over long period of time generally more than a year and later one assists user in expressing their experience over time with the help of a ‘Sketch’. What UX CURVE does is that it is developed in such a way that users and researchers sit face to face and researchers inquire into participant’s thought process and main points to discuss are Attractiveness, Degree of usage, Utility and Ease of use.
DEVELOPMENT & IMPLEMENTATION OF THE UX CURVE METHOD
This method is used to evaluate Long Term User Experience by finding out the sequence of the events. A Template has been developed on which user can draw that how their experiences with respect to increasing time. Users plot the first general curve to express what they feel about product overall. This helps users to report meaningful experiences they had with the product. The next step as described by the writer is “In order to complement the general view, we next asked users to consider their experiences from four other viewpoints, three of which were selected to correspond to the user experience factors found in the literature”. It means that users shares their views regarding aspects like ease of use, degree of freedom , attractiveness etc.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION
Overall in numbers , 100 curves were collected from 20 users in which 20 curves are general curves while remaining were for each viewpoints. A trend has been noticed that users learns initially and get better over time. Users also pointed out their negative experiences that may be due to the awkward features and also good experiences due to easy to understand features. The users initially give a summary about their experiences and main reasons that impacted their experience with the product.According to the results evaluated after the test “When drawing the General UX Curve, users gave an average of 6.5 reasons (3.5 positive and 3.1 negative, N = 20)” which means there are mixed number of positive and negative experiences. The primary reasons for long ise of product were related to functionality, practicality and durability.
According to the users, they are many reasons to use the product for a long time while there are also many negative experiences as well. Ease of use of product became normal over the time as user get to know the product better after multiple usage. In addition,The main reason of the products failure is the initial experiences and novelty, bugs and Technical glitches. These factors deteriorate UX experience.
