Knowing users’ expectations about what they expect on a website and where they expect to find it is crucial for the success of a website. For the last decade, technological advances have entailed major changes in website design but the impact of these changes on users’ mental representations of websites remains unclear. In an online study (N = 841), we asked users to sketch their prototypical version of an online shop, a news website and a company page, thereby indicating the interface elements they expect on the website and their expected location. We compared our results to those of a previous study to investigate changes in users’ mental representations of websites over time. This comparison suggests that interface elements such as the logo, main content and navigation area are still expected in the same location although others have shifted to the rich footer area at the bottom of the website. In addition, new elements such as links to social networks have been incorporated into users’ mental representations whereas other interface elements have disappeared. By providing updated consolidated blueprint models for all three website types, we help designers to create expectation-based websites. Further implications for research and practitioners are discussed.

Recent research suggests that psychological needs such as competence and relatedness are involved in users’ experience with technology and are related to the perception of a product's hedonic and pragmatic quality. This line of research, however, predominately focuses on positive leisure experiences, and it is unclear whether need fulfillment plays a similar role in negative experiences or in other activity domains such as work. Therefore, this study investigates need fulfillment in positive and negative experiences, and in work and leisure experiences in two separate studies by analyzing almost 600 users’ experiences with technology along with ratings on need fulfillment, affect, and perceived product quality. Results suggest that work and leisure experiences as well as positive and negative experiences differ in terms of need fulfillment. Hence, both activity domain and valence of experiences are important factors that should be taken in account when modeling user experience.

This article investigates Herzberg's [1959] notion of hygienes, factors contributing to dissatisfaction but not to satisfaction, and motivators, factors contributing to satisfaction but not to dissatisfaction, in the context of user experience (UX). Earlier work has theorized that the notion of hygienes and motivators applies to UX but has neither shown empirical evidence for this theory nor exemplified what such factors would look like in UX. We adapt Herzberg's methodology to analyze 303 events where users felt good or bad about their smartphone and derive factors that may work as hygienes or motivators. We identified technical quality and price as hygienes, and utility and convenience as motivators. These factors do not correspond to those mentioned as typical examples of hygienes and motivators in the UX literature (i.e., instrumental qualities such as usability for hygienes and non-instrumental qualities such as beauty for motivators). We discuss this discrepancy in the context of pragmatic and hedonic quality and psychological need fulfillment.

Enjoyment has been identified as a central component of the player experience (PX), but various, overlapping concepts within PX make it difficult to develop valid measures and a common understanding of game enjoyment. We conducted a systematic review of 87 quantitative studies, analyzing different operationalizations and measures of game enjoyment, its determinants, and how these were related to other components of PX, such as flow, presence and immersion. Results suggest that game enjoyment describes the positive cognitive and affective appraisal of the game experience, and may in part be associated with the support of player needs and values. Further, we outline that enjoyment is distinct from flow in that it may occur independently of challenge and cognitive involvement, and argue that enjoyment may be understood as the valence of the player experience. We conclude with a discussion of methodological challenges and point out opportunities for future research on game enjoyment.

Technologies for capturing and generating smell are emerging, and our ability to engineer such technologies and use them in HCI is rapidly developing. Our understanding of how these technologies match the experiences with smell that people have or want to have is surprisingly limited. We therefore investigated the experience of smell and the emotions that accompany it. We collected stories from 439 participants who described personally memorable smell experiences in an online questionnaire. Based on the stories we developed 10 categories of smell experience. We explored the implications of the categories for smell-enhanced technology design by (a) probing participants to envision technologies that match their smell story and (b) having HCI researchers brainstorm technologies using the categories as design stimuli. We discuss how our findings can benefit research on personal memories, momentary and first time experiences, and wellbeing.

This study reports a controlled eye tracking experiment (N = 65) that shows the combined effectiveness of 20 guidelines to improve interactive online forms when applied to forms found on real company websites. Results indicate that improved web forms lead to faster completion times, fewer form submission trials, and fewer eye movements. Data from subjective questionnaires and interviews further show increased user satisfaction. Overall, our findings highlight the importance for web designers to improve their web forms using UX guidelines.

Recent research in user experience (UX) has studied narratives, users' account of their interaction with technology. It has emphasized specific constructs (e.g., affect, needs, hedonics) and their interrelation, but rarely analyzed the content of the narratives. We analyze the content and structure of 691 user-generated narratives on positive and negative experiences with technology. We use a multi-method approach consisting of manual (structural analysis of narratives) as well as of automated content analysis methods (psycholinguistic analysis and machine learning). These analyses show converging evidence that positive narratives predominantly concern social aspects such as family and friends. In addition, technology is positively experienced when it enables users to do things more efficiently or in a new way. In contrast, negative narratives often express anger and frustration due to technological failures. Our multi-method approach illustrates the potential of automated (as opposed to manual) content analysis methods for studying text-based experience reports.

There are many ways of placing error messages in web forms. A study of web conventions shows that the most common approach is to display error messages embedded in the form at the top of the entire form. Six frequent locations (right, left, above and below the erroneous input field, as well as on the top and at the bottom of the form) were tested in an online study with n = 303 participants. Results of efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction show that the locations near the erroneous input field lead to a significantly better performance than the error messages on the top and at the bottom of the form; in addition error messages on the right side of the erroneous input field were subjectively evaluated as the most satisfying and intuitive by participants. The results indicate possible improvements for online shops, where error messages are currently mostly placed on the top of the form.

In this study, we tested whether the visual complexity (VC) of webpages influences viewer's affective reactions. In a laboratory experiment, 48 students viewed 36 webpages varying in VC while subjective feelings, behavioral, and cardiovascular responses were recorded. Less complex webpages were associated with more positive affect, decreased eye movements (specifically in the first few seconds of viewing), a triphasic heart rate response, and increased finger pulse amplitude. Results suggest that affective responses to webpage viewing differ as a function of VC and that webpage displaying could be made adaptive to the user's emotions.