Quality of Experience (QoE), In business terminology QoE is also known as "Quality of User Experience," and is a subjective measure of a customer's experiences with a vendor. It looks at a vendor's or purveyor's offering from the standpoint of the customer or end user, and asks, "What mix of goods, services, and support, do you think will provide you with the perception that the total product is providing you with the experience you desired and/or expected?" And then asks, "Is this what the vendor/purveyor has actually provided?" If not, "What changes need to be made to enhance your total experience?"

It is related to but differs from Quality of Service (QoS), which attempts to objectively measure the service delivered by the vendor. It is tied closely to the black and white of a contract and measures how well the vendor lives up to its end of the bargain. In the fields of packet-switched networks and computer networking, the traffic engineering term Quality of Service (QoS) refers to control mechanisms that can provide different priority to different users or data flows, or guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow in accordance with requests from the...

A vendor/purveyor may be living up to the terms of a contract's language, thus rating high in QoS, but, the users may be very unhappy, thus causing a low QoE. Conversely, the users may be very happy with a product or a vendor, resulting in an artificially high QoE if the vendor is not, in fact, doing what he was paid to do, thus rating low in QoS.

In medical terminology QoE is also known as "Quality of Patient Experience," and is a subjective measure of a patient's experiences with a medical practice. It looks at a care provider's offering from the standpoint of the patient's holistic experience, and asks, "How did patient fare after the treatment was concluded over an extended period of time? Did they enjoy a higher, similar, or lower quality of life after the treatment? For how long? How did this patient's quality of life, post-treatment compare with other patients who received similar treatment" And then asks, "What changes need to be made to the treatment to enhance the patient's quality of life?" Medical terminology is a process of accurately describing the human body and associated components, conditions, processes and procedures in a science based manner. ...

QoE as regards telecommunications networks is a purely subjective measure from the user’s perspective of the overall value of the service provided. Apart from its being user dependent, it will invariably be influenced by the user’s terminal device (for example Low Definition or High Definition TV), his environment (in the car or at home), his expectations (cellular or corded telephone), the nature of the content and its importance (a simple yes/no message or an orchestral concert). Mean Opinion Score (MOS) used for assessing the quality of telephone connections is a limited form of QoE measurement process, relating to a specific media type, in a controlled environment and without specific user expectations. No multi-media version of the MOS process seems yet to have been developed.