  Architects and systems designers artfully balance multiple competing design
constraints during the design process but are unable to translate between
system metrics and end user experience. This work presents three methodologies
to fill in this gap. The first is an incentive-compatible methodology that
determines a "ground truth" measurement of users' value of speed in terms of US
dollars, and find that users would accept a performance losses of 10%, 20%, and
30% to their personal computer in exchange for \$2.27, \$4.07, and \$4.43 per
day, respectively. However, while highly accurate the methodology is a
painstaking process and does not scale with large numbers of participants. To
allow for scalability, we introduce a second methodology -- a lab-based
simulation experiment -- which finds that users would accept a permanent
performance loss of 10%, 20%, and 30% to their personal computer in exchange
for \$127, \$169, and \$823, respectively. Finally, to allow for even greater
scalability, we introduce a third methodology -- a survey -- and observe that
the lack of incentive compatibility and the lack of hands-on experience with
throttled device performance skews the results significantly, thus
demonstrating the need for lab-based or incentive compatible study designs. By
quantifying the tradeoff between user satisfaction and performance, we enable
architects and systems designers to make more nuanced tradeoffs between design
requirements.
