Quality of experience

Quality of experience, often called QoE, is a way to measure how happy or annoyed someone feels when they use a service. This could be when they browse the web, make a phone call, or watch TV. It looks at the whole experience, not just small parts. This idea is similar to user experience, but it started in telecommunication.

QoE is a new area that brings together many different fields. These include social psychology, cognitive science, economics, and engineering science. It helps us learn what people need and want from the services they use every day. By studying QoE, companies and researchers can make services better and more enjoyable for everyone.

Definition and concepts

Quality of experience, or QoE, is how happy or unhappy someone feels when using a service like watching TV, making a phone call, or browsing the web. It is about whether the service does what the user hopes and needs. This idea was explained in 2013 and later used by an international group in 2016.

QoE comes from a related idea called Quality of Service (QoS), which looks at technical details like how well data travels. But QoE is different because it focuses on what the user feels. It asks questions like, "Does this service feel like what I wanted?" and "If not, what could be improved?" This helps companies learn how to make their services better for people.

QoE factors

QoE looks at what makes someone happy or unhappy when using a service or system. This includes the person, the system, and the situation.

Things about the person that matter include their senses, age, mood, and what they expect. Things about the system include the quality of the content, how well the technology works, and how fast the network is. The situation also matters, like where the person is, what time it is, who they are with, and what they are trying to do. Most studies focus on the system because QoE started with networks and technology.

QoE versus User Experience

QoE is related to User Experience (UX), but they are not the same. Both look at how people feel about the services they use. QoE began with studies in telecommunication, while UX started in Human–Computer Interaction. Both areas combine many different topics to study.

QoE grew because businesses wanted to make customers happier to help their success. This makes QoE a little different from UX in what it aims for and its history.

QoE measurement

QoE is important for designing systems and processes because it helps make sure users are happy with services like watching videos. When creating these systems, people often think about how good the experience will be for users.

To measure QoE, people sometimes ask users for their opinions. One common way is called the mean opinion score, which helps judge how good media like videos or music sounds and looks. However, this method has limits because it only looks at one type of media and doesn’t always consider what users expect.

There are also faster ways to measure QoE using computers, but these can sometimes be less accurate than asking real users. QoE can be affected by many things, like how well a video is compressed, how well the internet sends the video, or how well the device shows the video. All these parts can change how good the experience feels for the user.

QoE management

There are several ways to manage networks and bandwidth to improve the quality of experiences for users. These methods help make sure everyone is happy with the service they get.

When taking care of a network, it’s important to make sure everyone gets a fair and good experience. Instead of just focusing on old rules for network performance, QoE management looks at what users actually feel and tries to keep them happy.

One way to do this is by letting network nodes understand how users feel about a service. This helps improve how the service is sent over the network. For example, traffic shaping can be used. QoE management helps save space and network power by only using what’s needed to keep users happy. Because this might mean giving some users or services less, it’s important to follow rules about net neutrality.