User Experience & Design

Content • Why study Experience? • Approaches to ‘User­Experience’ – – – –

HCI and others Product­centred  User­centred Interaction­centred 

• The wicked problem of ‘Experience’  • McCarthy & Wright: Technology as Experience • Looking ahead

Why is ‘experience’ important? • The Experience Economy (Pine & Gilmore, 1998) • “Users as consumers” (Kuutti, 2001)

“When people started to use the phone as a means for self-expression, a new concept of the user was needed – a user who besides rationality and reason has also emotions and needs for pleasure and selfexpression.” – 1970s: User as a cog in a rational machine – the influence from organization theory – 1980s: User as a source of error – the influence from human factors and psychology – 1990s: Users as partners in social interaction - the influence from anthropology and microsociology

• “Designing for the full range of human experience may well be the theme for the next generation of discourse about software design” (Winograd, 1996)

HCI THEORETICAL/CONCEPTUAL • Frameworks analyse UXP – Pragmatist Philosophy, Literary theory, film, Psychology – Pragmatist aesthetics – Somatic marker hypothesis + somaesthetics – Co-experience • Psych modelling - goals and actions • Action-Motivation-Context guidelines for design • Krasek’s model of demand-control-support model METHODS & TECHNIQUES design guidelines criteria for assessing the XP visual appeal using aesthetics fantasy games to generate emotional ideas Cue from augmented reality – tangibility Rich interactions Measuring preference, facial muscles, transcendence DESIGN CASES ‘Resonance’ - observing people’s interactions. Loop iterations. Horror to enhance fun (via Augmented reality) Tool enabling a network of people to share stories about daily experiences

others INDUSTRIAL DESIGN Theoretical/conceptual • "concentrate on appearances" • framework to analyse person-product interaction • categorising, operational, inventive, aesthetic and social use: how people interact with products • product semiotics Methods and Techniques • Learning from augmented reality guide to designing for rich interactions • “fun of use’ attractive interactions, customisation, personalisation MULTIMEDIA Using digital media to represent inner experiences BUSINESS Methods and Techniques tools to learn people's XP with products and expectations engaging storytelling GAMES design case studies Extending traditional usability testing on computer games (check users against designers) LRP experience to inform design (games) PERVASIVE COMPUTING cafe based digital design

Product-centred approach Assist designer and non-designers to create products that evoke compelling experiences

Describe kinds of experiences and issues to be considered in design and evaluation

Usually lists of topics or criteria used as a checklist

User-centred approach For designers and developers to understand users Integrate knowledge from other disciplines to understand people’s actions and aspects of experience that people find relevant when interacting with a product

Interaction-centred approach

Explore the role that products serve in bridging the gap between designer and user.

A more integrated and holistic approach

The wicked problem of experience Impossible to extricate person from experience Experience is unique to the individual and on each occasion Experience is multi­dimensional Experience is owned across many disciplines Experience is potentially arbitrary

The wicked problem of experience Experience is never neutral Experience is dynamic Experience transforms

 

Designing for experience is a wicked problem

Approach to felt experience “…some social-theoretical approaches used to reflect on relationships between people and technology, put social processes at the centre and marginalise self and identity, emphasising the routine and sameness in life. An orientation toward felt experience emphasises the ways in which people deal with routine.” “...focusing on the routine itself misses out on the variety of feelings toward the routine and ways of dealing with it. If we sacrifice the uncertainties, the anxieties, the clarity and the insight that we experience when dealing with the routines of life to a synthesis at the level of social practices, we close off our conceptualising to variety, change and complexity.”

McCarthy & Wright: Making sense of Experience Draw together works by Dewey, Bakhtin and Boorstin to try to understand experience in order to help designers and evaluators create fulfilling interactive experiences.

Irreducible totality of people acting, sensing, thinking, feeling, and meaning making in a setting, including their perception and sensation of their own actions.

McCarthy & Wright: Framework use An analytical tool to help explain why particular interactive experiences are satisfying and others not. A space within which things can be juxtaposed, related, separated, coalesced but never isolated. Useful in design and evaluation without losing too much of the relational, holistic approach from where it is derived.

McCarthy & Wright: Framework components Four threads of experience Four aspects as four inter-twined threads making up a braid.

Six sense-making processes associated with meaning Experience not engaged as ready-made. Making sense - reflexive and recursive No experience without self and object, or subject and object, interacting reflexively. No implication of linear or causal relations between these processes

M & W’s Framework – Four threads of experience How we perceive space & time Space: confined? Enclosed? Open, close Public and private, comfort zones? Time: faster? Slower? Connected, disconnected

Rlshp b/n parts & whole - coherence, plausibility, affects the way person and event relate to each other What is this about? What has happened? Where am I? How do these things go together? What will happen next? Does this make sense? I wonder what will happen if…?

How we feel - the importance we place on something with respect to our needs, desires and values - empathy, relate to emotions of others Need to distinguish from sensual

Sensory engagement: - concrete, palpable and visceral; grasped pre-reflectively, immediate. - Sound of words, intonation, body language Could complement ‘emotional thread’

M & W’s Framework – sense-making components Cognitive processing. May evoke emotional, sensual response etc. At the same time as interpreting we may reflect. Immediate impact, prelinguistic. With spatiotemporal >speed, confusion of movement, openness and stillness. With sensual – e.g. colour and impression; immediate sense of tension or thrill.

Expectations. Include desire, needs, hope. Shapes later parts of the same experience.

Similar to reflecting and appropriating. Can be internal or to others. Re-savour the experience. In the process XP change meanings or given different value.

Trying to make sense of the things that are happening, how we feel – ‘inner self’ dialogue. May modify further experiences. Linked to other sense-making and threads. Making an experience our own, relate to our sense of self, history and hoped future

Testing the Framework ‘A practitioner-centred assessment of a user experience framework’ (McCarthy, Wright, Meekison, 2005)

Used it with practitioners (action research) undergoing an Internet shopping experience – How they used the framework – What aspects of experience they felt was missing – How useful a tool to evaluate Internet shopping experience

Limitations • Difficult to distinguish some sense-making components • Lacked ability to capture intensity of experience • A priori introduction • contemporaneous note taking • Could contribute to shaping as more reflective than usual

Looking ahead

Theoretical/Conceptual

• using & testing current XP framework with more users • toward informing theoretical understanding • to gain insight towards modifying Framework into a more usable tool for • designers to use to guide design • designers to use to ‘evaluate’ design

Methods & Techniques

• ways to capture the subjective, rich, felt and lived experiences described • ways to analyse the captured experience

Design

Ways to translate understanding of user-experience into tangible design outcomes