Compensating Qualitative Rating Distortion of User Experience Evaluation Based on Prospect Theory

Abstract

Psychophysical assessment may be affected by cognitive distortion. Although the theory was originally developed to revise decision making in uncertain situations, prospect theory can be applied to psychophysical measurements, which was verified in a previous preliminary study. Two case studies were used to validate the utilization of prospect theory in psychophysical measurements. Affective satisfaction dimensions were rated by participants for an experimental device using a 0–100 scale. Performance of affective satisfaction models increased with the application of prospect theory-based compensation. Hundreds of participants evaluated the user value of their own devices via an online questionnaire. Although model fit performance increased slightly with transformed data, more case studies are needed to investigate the utility of prospect theory on user value or on a range of target constructs. The application of prospect theory in various situations of psychophysical measurement can be expected to improve and compensate for measurement results.