Measuring Anticipated and Episodic UX of Tasks in Social Networks

Abstract

Today, social networks are crucial commodities that allow people to share different contents and opinions. In addition to participation, the information shared within social networks makes them attractive, but success is also accompanied by a positive User eXperience (UX). Social networks must offer useful and well-designed user-tools, i.e., sets of widgets that allow interaction among users. To satisfy this requirement, Episodic User eXperience (EUX) yields reactions of users after having interacted with an artifact. Anticipated User eXperience (AUX) grants the designers the capacity to recollect users’ aspirations, assumptions, and needs in the initial development phase of an artifact. In this work, we collect UX perceived in both periods to contrast user expectations and experiences offered on social networks, in order to find elements that could improve the design of user-tools. We arrange a test where participants (N=20) designed prototypes on paper to solve tasks and then did the same tasks on online social networks. Both stages are assessed with the help of AttrakDiff, and then we analyze the results through t-tests. The results we obtained suggest that users are inclined towards pragmatic aspects of their user-tools expectations.