More than I ever wanted or just good enough? User expectations and subjective quality perception in the context of networked multimedia services

Abstract

This article addresses the overall relevance and the influence of user expectations in the context of perceptual quality evaluation of technical systems, and how information about individual expectations can be integrated into research on Quality of Experience (QoE). Based on a literature survey on expectations in the fields of psychology, service quality and consumer satisfaction theory, an existing conceptual QoE perception model is extended by explicitly including desired and adequate expectations in the quality perception process. A direct expectation assessment paradigm is proposed that uses dedicated questionnaires. Further, it is shown how expectation-related knowledge can be used to increase the accuracy of quality prediction models. In addition, experimental setups are presented that enable controlled triggering of expectations in user studies. It is discussed how the role of expectations for QoE can be investigated in future research as well as how to further validate the proposed methods.