Recent studies have highlighted transparency and explainability as important quality requirements of AI systems. However, there are still relatively few case studies that describe the current state of defining these quality requirements in practice. This study consisted of two phases. The first goal of our study was to explore what ethical guidelines organizations have defined for the development of transparent and explainable AI systems and then we investigated how explainability requirements can be defined in practice. In the first phase, we analyzed the ethical guidelines in 16 organizations representing different industries and public sector. Then, we conducted an empirical study to evaluate the results of the first phase with practitioners. The analysis of the ethical guidelines revealed that the importance of transparency is highlighted by almost all of the organizations and explainability is considered as an integral part of transparency. To support the definition of explainability requirements, we propose a model of explainability components for identifying explainability needs and a template for representing explainability requirements. The paper also describes the lessons we learned from applying the model and the template in practice. For researchers, this paper provides insights into what organizations consider important in the transparency and, in particular, explainability of AI systems. For practitioners, this study suggests a systematic and structured way to define explainability requirements of AI systems. Furthermore, the results emphasize a set of good practices that help to define the explainability of AI systems.

We develop and test a model that suggests that expectations influence subjective usability and emotional experiences and, thereby, behavioral intentions to continue use and to recommend the service to others. A longitudinal study of 165 real-life users examined the proposed model in a proximity mobile payment domain at three time points: before use, after three weeks of use, and after six weeks of use. The results confirm the short-term influence of expectations on users’ evaluations of both usability and enjoyment of the service after three weeks of real-life use. Users’ evaluations of their experiences mediated the influence of expectations on behavioral intentions. However, after six weeks, users’ cumulative experiences of the mobile payment service had the strongest impact on their evaluations and the effect of pre-use expectations decreased. The research clarifies the role of expectations and highlights the importance of viewing expectations through a temporal perspective when evaluating user experience.

The aim of this research was to explore the role of Schwartz's ten universal human values in the context of using products and services. Seventy-five participants were asked to qualitatively describe a product or service especially well in line with their values and a product or service in conflict with their values, and to evaluate them on a number of rating scales. The scales included 30 statements (three statements per universal value) probing the presence of each value in user experiences related to products and services and 10 statements studying the perceived importance of each value. The results showed that all the ten universal values were relevant in the evaluations of products and services both in line with the users’ values and in conflict with the users’ values. In the current sample, hedonism and self-direction were rated as the values most frequently present and most important in the evaluations of products and services in line with values. Power was rated as a moderately important value for products in conflict with values, but significantly less important for products in line with values. Achievement values were frequently reported in the qualitative descriptions, but they were less prominent in the quantitative data. The results suggest that the model of ten universal values is promising in understanding the role of users’ value preferences in using products and services, and it seems to have potential for complementing the psychological needs approach in understanding user experience.

Projective techniques are used in psychology and consumer research to provide information about individuals' motivations, thoughts, and feelings. This paper reviews the use of projective techniques in marketing research and user experience research and discusses their potential role in understanding users, their needs and values, and evaluating user experience in practical product development contexts. A projective technique called sentence completion is evaluated through three case studies. Sentence completion produces qualitative data about users’ views in a structured form. The results are less time-consuming to analyze than interview results. Compared to quantitative methods such as AttrakDiff, the results are more time consuming to analyze, but more information is retrieved on negative feelings. The results show that sentence completion is useful in understanding users’ perceptions and that the technique can be used to complement other methods. Sentence completion can also be used online to reach wider user groups.

Positive emotional experiences with an interactive product are assumed to lead to good user experience and, ultimately, to product success. However, the path from emotional experiences to product evaluation may not be direct, as emotions fluctuate over time, and some experiences are easier to recall than others. In this study, we examined emotions and experience episodes during real-life mobile phone use over a five-month period. The goal is to understand how emotions and memories are related to overall evaluation of a product: usability, user experience and behavioral intentions. The results show that both emotions and how people remember them had strong unique roles in the overall evaluation of the product. Positive emotions were mostly related to good user experience and negative emotions to low usability. In the early stages of use, users overestimated their positive emotions and seemed to focus on user experience, the importance of usability increased over time.

The goal of user experience design in industry is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product. So far, user experience studies have mostly focused on short-term evaluations and consequently on aspects relating to the initial adoption of new product designs. Nevertheless, the relationship between the user and the product evolves over long periods of time and the relevance of prolonged use for market success has been recently highlighted. In this paper, we argue for the cost-effective elicitation of longitudinal user experience data. We propose a method called the “UX Curve” which aims at assisting users in retrospectively reporting how and why their experience with a product has changed over time. The usefulness of the UX Curve method was assessed in a qualitative study with 20 mobile phone users. In particular, we investigated how users’ specific memories of their experiences with their mobile phones guide their behavior and their willingness to recommend the product to others. The results suggest that the UX Curve method enables users and researchers to determine the quality of long-term user experience and the influences that improve user experience over time or cause it to deteriorate. The method provided rich qualitative data and we found that an improving trend of perceived attractiveness of mobile phones was related to user satisfaction and willingness to recommend their phone to friends. This highlights that sustaining perceived attractiveness can be a differentiating factor in the user acceptance of personal interactive products such as mobile phones. The study suggests that the proposed method can be used as a straightforward tool for understanding the reasons why user experience improves or worsens in long-term product use and how these reasons relate to customer loyalty.

User involvement has been shown to be beneficial in the development of useful and usable systems. The trend of software development becoming a product-oriented activity creates challenges to user involvement. Field studies appear a promising approach, but the analysis of the gathered user needs has been shown to be demanding. This study presents, on the basis of seven case studies, an early user-involvement process showing how user needs can be analysed and how the input to product development can be identified. In addition, the process is evaluated in two industrial cases with interviews and a questionnaire. The results show that the process supports effective early user involvement; the resulted requirements were evaluated as being more successful and their quality as better than average in a company. However, the case studies show that user involvement not only provides useful information about users' needs but also increases the understanding of users' values.

User involvement is the key concept in the development of useful and usable systems and has positive effects on system success and user satisfaction. This paper reports the results of interviews and a survey conducted to investigate the role of user involvement in defining user requirements in development projects. The survey involved 18 software practitioners working in software related development projects in 13 companies in Finland. In addition, eight software practitioners working in three companies were interviewed. By combining qualitative and statistical analysis, we examine how users are involved in development projects and how user involvement influences projects. The analysis shows that, although it is rare in development projects, early user involvement is related to better requirements quality. The analysis also shows that involving users and customers as the source of information is related to project success.

Companies moving into the software product business and growing in size face new challenges that cannot be tackled completely with old practices. For example, the future development steps of the off-the-shelf products cannot be negotiated with just one or a few customers any more. This means that practitioners should be able to take aspects such as their company's own strategy and available market information more effectively into account in such decision-making. However, usually the company or business unit strategy is so high level that the gap to single requirements documents is far too long. Roadmapping is one technique that companies have used for long-term product planning in order to link the business view to requirements engineering (RE), and to make more business oriented product development decisions. In addition, roadmapping has been used to share a common understanding about the future development steps of products with different stakeholders. However, the application of the technique is not always easy. This paper gives an overview of roadmapping as a technique, and describes lessons learned from one Finnish software product company that has developed and evaluated its own roadmapping processes in their organization.

User involvement is a widely accepted principle in development of usable systems. However, it is a vague concept covering many approaches. This study first clarifies the nature of user involvement and its expected benefits, and secondly reviews three streams of research, to evaluate the benefits and problems of varied user involvement approaches in practice. The particular focus of this study is on the early activities in the development process. An analysis of the literature suggests that user involvement has generally positive effects, especially on user satisfaction, and some evidence exists to suggest that taking users as a primary information source is an effective means of requirements capture. However, the role of users must be carefully considered and more cost-efficient practices are needed for gathering users' implicit needs and requirements in real product development contexts.

Introducing requirements engineering appears to involve a cultural change in organizations. Such a cultural change requires that requirements are defined and managed systematically, not only from a technical point of view, but also from the customers' and users' points of view. This paper describes experiences gained from four Finnish organizations that have started to introduce requirements engineering to their product development. The goal of this study was to evaluate which factors support, and which prevent, a cultural change. Linking business goals to technical requirements via user needs and user requirements was one of the key improvement actions that supported cultural change. Eliciting needs directly front real users and representing user requirements in the form of use cases were also key activities. However, bringing about a change of culture was challenging because both managers and product development engineers held beliefs that prevented active user need elicitation and systematic user requirement documentation.