Quality is in the eye of the beholder: meeting users' requirements for Internet quality of service

  • Authors:

  • Anna Bouch;Allan Kuchinsky;Nina Bhatti

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Department, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT UK;Hewlett Packard Labs, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA;Hewlett Packard Labs, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Growing usage and diversity of applications on the Internet makes Quality of Service (QoS) increasingly critical [15]. To date, the majority of research on QoS is systems oriented, focusing on traffic analysis, scheduling, and routing. Relatively minor attention has been paid to user-level QoS issues. It is not yet known how objective system quality relates to users' subjective perceptions of quality. This paper presents the results of quantitative experiments that establish a mapping between objective and perceived QoS in the context of Internet commerce. We also conducted focus groups to determine how contextual factors influence users' perceptions of QoS. We show that, while users' perceptions of World Wide Web QoS are influenced by a number of contextual factors, it is possible to correlate objective measures of QoS with subjective judgements made by users, and therefore influence system design. We argue that only by integrating users' requirements for QoS into system design can the utility of the future Internet be maximized.