Pleasure and Pain: Perceptual Bias and Its Implications for Software Engineering

  • Authors:
  • Sheila Guilford;Gordon Rugg;Niall Scott

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Software
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

This article describes a bias in human perception that has practical and ethical implications for product evaluation in general and software evaluation in particular. The bias affects a user's recall of how pleasant or unpleasant an experience was overall; this recall is skewed by the most intense episode within the experience and by the last few minutes of the experience. As a result, a user's recall of an experience could significantly differ from their feelings during the experience. This has practical and ethical implications for usability design and for debugging strategy, as well as other areas. The authors describe the effect and discuss its implications for software engineering.