Frustration: A Common User Experience

The use of computer applications can be a frustrating experience. This study replicates previous studies of the amount of time users – involuntarily – spend trying to diagnose and recover from problems they encounter while using computer applications such as web browsers, email, and text processing. In the present study, 21 users self-reported their frustrating experiences during an average of 1.72 hours of computer use. As in the previous studies the amount of time lost due to frustrating experiences was disturbing. The users spent 16% of their time trying to fix encountered problems and another 11% of their time redoing lost work. Thus, the frustrating experiences accounted for a total of 27% of the time, This main finding is exacerbated by several supplementary findings. For example, the users were unable to fix 26% of the experienced problems, and they rated that the problems recurred with a median frequency of about once a week. Experiencing the same problems repeatedly is likely to add to the frustration. The users in this study were highly experienced, precluding that frustration is only a concern for novices.