Bridging the gap between users' expectations and system evaluations

What users expect of a robot strongly influences their ratings of the interaction. If the robot satisfies the expectations, the users are usually pleased. If not, their experience of the interaction is negative. We as robot designers strive to design for positive interaction experiences. Therefore, users' expectations need to be taken into account. However, in this paper we argue that not all expectations are equally important. Based on a semantic differential questionnaire, we show a correlation between the perceived importance of users' expectations and the difficulty to satisfy them in interaction. The paper argues that this correlation allows to identify the most important improvements that should be made to robot systems but also to find attributes which the robot is quite good at already.