Needs, affect, and interactive products – Facets of user experience

TLDR

User experience research seeks to define what makes technology pleasurable, and this study posits that satisfying universal psychological needs—such as competence, relatedness, popularity, stimulation, meaning, security, and autonomy—is the primary source of positive experience with interactive products. The authors gathered more than 500 self‑reported positive experiences from users of mobile phones and computers to investigate this hypothesis. The analysis revealed that need fulfilment strongly predicts positive affect, especially for stimulation, relatedness, competence, and popularity, and that hedonic quality ratings correlate with need satisfaction while pragmatic quality does not, with hedonic ratings further moderated by users’ attribution of responsibility to the product.

Abstract

Subsumed under the umbrella of User Experience (UX), practitioners and academics of Human–Computer Interaction look for ways to broaden their understanding of what constitutes "pleasurable experiences" with technology. The present study considered the fulfilment of universal psychological needs, such as competence, relatedness, popularity, stimulation, meaning, security, or autonomy, to be the major source of positive experience with interactive technologies. To explore this, we collected over 500 positive experiences with interactive products (e.g., mobile phones, computers). As expected, we found a clear relationship between need fulfilment and positive affect, with stimulation, relatedness, competence and popularity being especially salient needs. Experiences could be further categorized by the primary need they fulfil, with apparent qualitative differences among some of the categories in terms of the emotions involved. Need fulfilment was clearly linked to hedonic quality perceptions, but not as strongly to pragmatic quality (i.e., perceived usability), which supports the notion of hedonic quality as "motivator" and pragmatic quality as "hygiene factor." Whether hedonic quality ratings reflected need fulfilment depended on the belief that the product was responsible for the experience (i.e., attribution).