Correlations between information retrieval system performance and user satisfaction are an important research topic. The expectation of users is a factor in most models of customer satisfaction in marketing research; however, it has not been used in experiments with information retrieval systems so far. In an interdisciplinary effort between information retrieval and psychology we developed an experimental design which uses the so-called confirmation/disconfirmation paradigm (C/D-paradigm) as a

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... theoretical framework. This paradigm predicts that the satisfaction of users is strongly governed by their expectations towards a product or a system. We report a study with 89 participants in which two levels of both system performance and user expectation were tested. The results show that user expectation has an effect on the satisfaction as predicted by the C/D-paradigm. In addition, we confirmed previous studies which hint that system performance correlates with user satisfaction. The experiment also revealed that users significantly relax their relevance criteria and compensate for low system performance.