A case study in visualizing disruptions to service quality

This study measured Session Quality of Experience (SQE) by letting people look at visual proxies of a video play bar without having to watch the actual video, with its associated impairments and/or failures. We supplemented a laboratory study of 10 participants with two further online samples of 14, and 20, participants respectively, obtained using online surveys. Cluster analysis was carried out on the entire data set of 44 participants and clusters were obtained representing differences in sensitivity to pricing and to types of disruption. Crucially, there was no significant dependency between samples and cluster demonstrating that visualization can be used in a crowdsourcing, as well as a laboratory, context. This study demonstrates the combined use of crowdsourcing, visualizations of service experience, and cluster analysis to create more efficient, and nuanced, interpretations of SQE.