iScale: Studying Long-Term Experiences through Memory - Modeling Users' Experiences with Interactive Systems - page 86

is reporting actually happened. This is because, we are foremost interested in subjec-
tive reconstructions because those (and not “objective” data) will be communicated
to others as well as guide the individual's future activities. In other words, it may not
matter how good a product is objectively, it is the “subjective”, the “experienced”,
which matters (Hassenzahl et al., 2006). See also Norman (2009). To give a further
example: Redelmeier and Kahneman (1996) found retrospective assessment of the
pain experienced during colonoscopy to be biased. People put an extra weight on
the most painful moment and the end of the examination. This has interesting con-
sequences. One can, for example, deliberately prolong the examination (something
not approved by the patients), but make sure that these last, additional two minutes
are not painful. The consequence is an overall assessment of the examination as less
painful compared to people without the additional two minutes. While this is clearly
a bias, people simply have no memory for all the moments they experience, but will
remember their overall impression of the examination. The retrospective judgment
is more real to them than what actually happened. While the validity of remembered
experiences may not be crucial, their consistency across multiple recalls is. It seems
at least desirable that participants would report their experiences consistently over
multiple trials. If recall would be purely “random”, the value of respective reports
for design would be questionable. In other words, what we remember might be dif-
ferent from what we experienced; however, as long as these memories are consistent
over multiple recalls, they provide valuable information.
In the area of critical incident research, interviewing techniques have been devel-
oped with the aim to assist participants in remembering more details of and contex-
tual information around experienced critical incidents (Edvardsson and Roos, 2001).
However, interviews in general, however, need substantial skills and resources. It,
thus, seems desirable to create a self-reporting approach. Consequently, this chap-
ter presents iScale, a survey tool that was designed to increase participants' effec-
tiveness in reconstructing their experiences with a product over time. iScale uses
a graphical representation of change over time as a major support (i.e., time-line
graphing). Other than previous approaches (von Wilamowitz Moellendorff et al.,
2006; Kujala et al., 2011), the employed procedure is more firmly grounded on
theory, actually deriving variants of the procedure based on competing theoreti-
cal models of the retrospective reconstruction of episodes and experiences from
memory. Graphing is assumed to support the reconstruction process through what
Goldschmidt (1991) calls interactive imagery (i.e., “the simultaneous or almost si-
multaneous production of a display and the generation of an image that it triggers”).
The idea of using graphing as an approach to introspecting on past emotional expe-
riences can be traced back to Sonnemans and Frijda (1994).
We begin with laying out two different ways of obtaining retrospective recon-
structions of experiences and their theoretical foundation. We then present the re-
sults of two studies. Study 1 acquired a qualitative understanding of the use of iS-
cale in comparison to its analog equivalent (i.e. free-hand graphing). Study 2 as-
sessed how iScale compares to an experience reporting tool without graphic sup-
port, which, can be seen as a control condition to assess the impact of iScale on
participants' effectiveness and test-retest consistency in reconstructing experiences.