Before using an interactive product, people form expectations about what the experience of use will be like. These expectations may affect both the use of the product and users' attitudes towards it. We briefly review existing theories of expectations to design and perform two crowdsourced experiments that investigate how expectations affect user experience (UX) measures. In the experiments participants saw a primed or neutral review of a simple online game, played it, and rated it on various UX measures. Our results suggest that when expectations are confirmed, users tend to assimilate their ratings with their expectations; conversely, if the product quality is inconsistent with expectations, users tend to contrast their ratings with expectations and give ratings correlated with the level of disconfirmation. Our results also suggest that expectation disconfirmation can be used more widely in analyses of user experience, even when the analyses are not specifically concerned with expectation disconfirmation.

Social networks, especially Facebook as currently the largest one, made the organization of events apparently simpler. Facebook offers the event service, which has greatly simplified the invitation process. Still, organizing an event is usually coupled with the risk of guest's no-show. We report an investigation designed to identify factors that might help predict a person's likelihood of attendance to an event s/he is invited to. Our research tries to combine information research with information technology tool design. The factors affecting the probability were determined by an analysis of data acquired in surveys among hundred and fifty or so Facebook users. We also developed a program that implements (some of) these findings. Simple quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out on the data, sufficient to identify some of the key factors influencing invitees in their decision to attend a meeting. The factors as identified by the surveys are indeed relevant to attendance of meetings arranged using social media. Our application can help the event creator estimate how many people would attend his event and predict the likelihood of each invitee's attendance. Moreover, the application can also help the invited guest learn which of his friends are likely to attend the same event. Research that combines information side with information technology side can be fruitful as shown by this simple result. There is room for future work in this interdisciplinary space. His research interests are in the areas of software engineering, artificial intelligence, and information systems. He has published numerous research articles and the books Programming in Lisp, Microcomputers, Programs, People, and the textbooks Functional and Logic Programming, and Artificial Intelligence. He co-edited and co-authored several monographs and was the editor of a special issue on Knowledge Based Software