Hedonic Enjoyment and Personal Expressiveness in Positive User Experiences.

Understanding different facets of positive user experience (UX) is of great interest to researchers. Recently, 'positive design' and fostering happiness through technology is gaining more attention. However, little empirical research has been conducted. We adopted a concept from positive psychology that describes different facets of positive experience: 'hedonic enjoyment' and 'personal expressiveness'. The aim of the present study was to explore how hedonic enjoyment and personal expressiveness relate to established UX concepts, such as affect and need satisfaction. We found that hedonic enjoyment was associated with less negative affect, more stimulation and hedonic qualities, whereas personal expressiveness was correlated with both increased positive and negative affect and psychological needs such as competence, relatedness, popularity and security. Our findings suggest that UX research might benefit from including personal expressiveness as a complementary concept when investigating experience with interactive technology.