Browsing by Author "Häggblom, Svante"

Background: User experience (UX) is seen as an important quality of a successful product and software companies are becoming increasingly interested in the field of UX. As UX has the goal to improve the experience of users, there is a need for better methods in measuring the actual experience. One aspect of UX is to understand the emotional aspect of experience. Psychophysiology studies the relations between emotions and physiology and electrodermal activity (EDA) has been found to be a physiological measurement of emotional arousal. Aims: The aim of this thesis is researching the utility of measuring EDA to identify moments of emotional arousal during human-computer interaction. By studying peaks in EDA during software interaction we expect to find issues in the software that work as triggers or stimuli for the peaks. Method: We used the design science methodology to develop EDAMUX. EDAMUX is a method to unobtrusively observe users, while gathering significant interaction moments through self reporting and EDA. A qualitative single-case study was conducted to evaluate the utility of EDAMUX. Results: We found that we can discover causes of bad user experience with EDAMUX. Moments of emotional arousal, derived from EDA, was found in conjunction with performance issues, usability issues and bugs. Emotional arousal was also observed during software interaction where the user was blaming themself. Conclusions: EDAMUX shows potential in discovering issues in software that are difficult to find with methods that rely on subjective self-reporting. Having the potential to objectively study emotional reactions is seen as valuable in complementing existing methods of measuring user experience.