Design and implementation of a prototype for capturing immediate user experiences

Abstract

Everywhere we go we are overwhelmed with impressions and experiences making our day. Research has proven these to change over time, thus psychologists and experimenters in surveys are interested in what a person actually experienced at a particular point in time, referred to as immediate experience. Whether it was as a reaction to some event or just at specific times during the day, is determined by the purpose of the project. By allowing an experimenter to ask questions to a set of participants at predefined times and dates, the approach called Experience Sampling Method (ESM) aims at capturing user experiences. To be able to ask such questions participants are required to carry some kind of device running the actual survey. Since most people possesses a mobile phone, this can serve as an excellent host for ESM surveys. In this thesis we have studied the ESM approach, and the design and implementation of a prototype framework for creating, running and collecting results from surveys based on ESM will be presented. Several mobile operating systems and devices exist, hence an important concern in our work has been interoperability between different devices. To achieve this goal we have emphasised on expressing all information exchanged between a computer and a mobile device in eXtensible Markup Language (XML). From our work we have seen that the flexibility of the prototype makes the system not limited to psychological surveys only, but the approach can be used as a very powerful tool for example in market analysis.