From doing to being: getting closer to the user experience

The research by Scheirer et al. (2002) is pivotal in promoting the use of psychophysiological measures in HCI. We argue that rather than inferring users' emotional states from the data, which is difficult to do reliably, the signals can be used as an indicator of user cost by monitoring changes in users' physiological responses. We applied this approach by monitoring Skin Conductance, Heart Rate and Blood Volume Pulse (as well as task performance and user satisfaction) to investigate the impact of media quality degradations on users. Five studies were conducted utilising this approach. Results show that psychophysiological data show responses to audio and video degradations: users respond to specific degradations with increased levels of arousal. In addition, psychophysiological responses do not always correlate with each other and subjective and physiological measures do not always concur, which means that psychophysiological data may detect responses that users are either not aware of or cannot recall at post-session subjective assessment. We thus conclude that psychophysiological measures have a valuable role to play in media quality evaluation. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.