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 self-
expression.”
– 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 A more integrated
user. 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, pre- Trying to make sense of

linguistic. With spatio- the things that are
temporal >speed, confusion of happening, how we feel
movement, openness and
– ‘inner self’ dialogue.
stillness. With sensual – e.g.
colour and impression; May modify further
immediate sense of tension or experiences. Linked to
thrill. other sense-making and
threads.

Expectations. Include Making an experience our

desire, needs, hope. own, relate to our sense of
Shapes later parts of the self, history and hoped
same experience.
future

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.
 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