The Double-Edged Impact of User Customisation on QoE in Personalised Media Experiences

User-driven experience customisation can potentially enhance the Quality of Experience (QoE) in personalised multimedia. Such experiences could be, for example, delivered using HTTP Adaptive Streaming - the most prominent way of consuming media over the Internet. In this paper, we present a subjective study designed to investigate the QoE impact of user-driven customisation in personalised media experiences. We offered participants the option to customise their video layout, after which we asked them to score a range of quality impairments found in HTTP Adaptive Streaming. Based on our analysis of the collected Mean Opinion Scores (MOS), we found that experience customisation impacts the QoE in a surprising way. We found that experience personalisation caused participants’ expectations to increase when it comes to QoE, as they perceived the most severe quality impairments worse than the control. This establishes the need for specialised QoE models that take into account different levels of user expectations.