science

Quality of experience

Quality of experience is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Quality of experience rather than just read about it. In short: Quality of experience (QoE) is a measure of the delight or annoyance of a customer's experiences with a service (e.g., web browsing, phone call, TV broadcast). QoE focuses on the entire service experience; it is a holistic concept, similar to the field of user experience, but with its roots in telecommunication.

Key takeaways

Quality of experience belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Quality of experience to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Quality of experience from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Quality of experience (QoE) is a measure of the delight or annoyance of a customer's experiences with a service (e.g., web browsing, phone call, TV broadcast). QoE focuses on the entire service experience; it is a holistic concept, similar to the field of user experience, but with its roots in telecommunication. QoE is an emerging multidisciplinary field based on social psychology, cognitive science, economics, and engineering science, focused on understanding overall human quality requirements.

Definition and concepts In 2013, within the context of the COST Action QUALINET, QoE has been defined as:The degree of delight or annoyance of the user of an application or service. It results from the fulfillment of his or her expectations with respect to the utility and / or enjoyment of the application or service in the light of the user’s personality and current state.This definition has been adopted in 2016 by the International Telecommunication Union in Recommendation ITU-T P.10/G.100. Before, various definitions of QoE had existed in the domain, with the above-mentioned definition now finding wide acceptance in the community. QoE has historically emerged from Quality of Service (QoS), which attempts to objectively measure service parameters (such as packet loss rates or average throughput). QoS measurement is most of the time not related to a customer, but to the media or network itself. QoE however is a purely subjective measure from the user's perspective of the overall quality of the service provided, by capturing people's aesthetic and hedonic needs. QoE looks at a vendor's or purveyor's offering from the standpoint of the customer or end user, and asks, "What mix of goods, services, and support, do you think will provide you with the perception that the total product is providing you with the experience you desired and/or expected?" It then asks, "Is this what the vendor/purveyor has actually provided?" If not, "What changes need to be made to enhance your total experience?" In short, QoE provides an assessment of human expectations, feelings, perceptions, cognition and satisfaction with respect to a particular product, service or application. QoE is a blueprint of all human subjective and objective quality needs and experiences arising from the interaction of a person with technology and with business entities in a particular context. Although QoE is perceived as subjective, it is an important measure that counts for customers of a service. Being able to measure it in a controlled manner helps operators understand what may be wrong with their services and how to improve them.

QoE factors QoE aims at taking into consideration every factor that contributes to a user's perceived quality of a system or service. This includes system, human and contextual factors. The following so-called "influence factors" have been identified and classified by Reiter et al.:

Human Influence Factors Low-level processing (visual and auditory acuity, gender, age, mood, …) Higher-level processing (cognitive processes, socio-cultural and economic background, expectations, needs and goals, other personality traits…) System Influence Factors Content-related Media-related (encoding, resolution, sample rate, …) Network-related (bandwidth, delay, jitter, …) Device-related (screen resolution, display size, …) Context Influence Factors Physical context (location and space) Temporal context (time of day, frequency of use, …) Social context (inter-personal relations during experience) Economic context Task context (multitasking, interruptions, task type) Technical and information context (relationship between systems) Studies in the field of QoE have typically focused on system factors, primarily due to its origin in the QoS and network engineering domains. Through the use of dedicated test laboratories, the context is often sought to be kept constant.

QoE versus User Experience QoE is strongly related to but different from the field of User Experience (UX), which also focuses on users' experiences with services. Historically, QoE has emerged from telecommunication research, while UX has its roots in Human–Computer Interaction. Both fields can be considered multi-disciplinary. In contrast to UX, the goal of improving QoE for users was more strongly motivated by economic needs. Wechsung and De Moor identify the following key differences between the fields:

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Quality of experience

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Quality of experience claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Quality of experience before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Quality of experience ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Quality of experience

In research: Quality of experience appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Quality of experience in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Quality of experience is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Customer experience, Multimedia, Telecommunications, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Quality of experience outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Quality of experience in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Quality of experience means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Quality of experience out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Quality of experience in simple terms?

Why does Quality of experience matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Quality of experience?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Quality of experience.