Using and intending: How personal intentions can influence the user experience of interactive technologies

Usability and User Experience evaluations often collect users’ opinions about products/technologies regardless of users’ intentions. Specifically, in order to analyze quality features of a technology, random users can be interviewed about experienced/expected usability, emotional responses, mental workload after or before actual use. Nevertheless, according to the Perfect Interaction Model, an emergent framework in the field of User Experience, users’ responses may vary depending on their tendency to perceive the technology as an opportunity to achieve their own personal goals. In order to test this hypothesis, seventy-one participants were asked to evaluate a website (specifically, a web service for honeymoon planning) in terms of expected usability, emotions and mental workload. Participants in the experimental group provided their evaluations identifying themselves with characters in fictional narratives containing an intention related to the main function of the website, while those in the control group evaluated it acting as impartial evaluators. Results showed that the participants in the experimental group evaluated the website as related to more intense emotions and higher mental workload. Moreover, an interaction effect appeared while considering gender: females in the experimental group considered the website less usable than control ones, while the opposite happened for males. The importance of taking into account users’ intentions prior to User Experience and Usability evaluations is discussed.