Decision theoretic modeling of affective and cognitive needs for product experience engineering: key issues and a conceptual framework

User experience (UX) design plays a critical role in product experience engineering. To create a theoretical foundation of UX design, it is imperative to develop mathematical and computational models for elicitation, quantification, evaluation and reasoning of affective–cognitive needs that are inherent in the fulfillment of user experience. This paper explores the key research issues for understanding how human users’ subjective experience and affective prediction impact their choice behavior under uncertainty. A conceptual framework is envisioned by extending prospect theory in the field of behavioral economics to the modeling of user experience choice behavior, in which inference of affective influence is enacted through the shape parameters of prospect value functions.