Quality of Experience (QoE)

Quality of Experience (QoE) is a way to measure how much a customer enjoys or is frustrated by their interaction with a service. This could be anything from browsing the internet, making a phone call, or watching a TV broadcast. Unlike traditional quality measures that focus on technical aspects, QoE looks at the overall experience from the user's perspective. It's about understanding human requirements for quality.

QoE is a holistic concept, meaning it considers every aspect of the service experience. It has roots in telecommunication and focuses on understanding the human factors that affect service satisfaction. These factors include social psychology, cognitive science, economics, and engineering science. Essentially, QoE examines what people expect from a service and how well those expectations are met.

A widely accepted definition describes QoE as the degree of delight or annoyance of a user when interacting with a service. This feeling comes from whether the service meets the user's expectations for usefulness and enjoyment, considering the user's personality and current state.

QoE differs from Quality of Service (QoS), which measures technical service parameters like data packet loss or network speed. While QoS focuses on the service's performance from a technical standpoint, QoE is concerned with the user's subjective experience, concentrating on aesthetics and enjoyment.

Three primary types of factors influence QoE: human, system, and context. Human factors include sensory abilities, cognitive processes, and individual expectations. System factors involve technical aspects like media encoding and network performance. Context factors consider the physical, temporal, social, and economic settings in which the service is used.

QoE is closely related to User Experience (UX), but they have different origins and focuses. QoE comes from telecommunication and aims to improve services for economic reasons, while UX originates from human-computer interaction, emphasizing human-centric design.

Measuring QoE typically involves human ratings, such as the Mean Opinion Score (MOS). However, it's challenging to capture QoE in a single number due to its subjective nature. Objective measures, like analyzing video quality without human input, can help but may not always match human perceptions accurately.

QoE management involves making network and system adjustments to improve the user's overall experience, often considering factors like net neutrality to ensure fair resource distribution. By focusing on end-user satisfaction, QoE helps service providers deliver better experiences and maintain customer loyalty.