Conceptualizing and Understanding User Experience

2016 4th International Conference on User Science and Engineering (i-USEr)

Conceptualizing and Understanding User Experience Nor Laila Md. Noor1, Wan Adilah Wan Adnan2, Fauzi Mohd. Saman3 and Ahmad Hanif Ahmad Baharin4

Nasrah Hassan Basri Department of Multimedia Kolej Poly-Tech MARA Ipoh, Malaysia [email protected]

Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences Universiti Teknologi MARA Selangor, Malaysia1,2,3 Perlis, Malaysia4 {norlaila1, adilah2, fauzi3}@tmsk.uitm.edu.my [email protected] TABLE I : DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES OF UX [1]

Abstract—Over the years, User Experience (UX) becomes a main term in designing an interactive product. The term itself lacks proper theoretical definition and is used in many different ways especially in academic and industry. This paper reviews and explores various existing approaches to conceptualize and understand user experience better. It covers both theories from the academics as well as studies conducted by the industries. Industries seem to treat user experience as a conventional usability while academics are more dynamic in defining user experience. Thus, this paper is trying to provide a base in conceptualizing and understanding user experience by covering different topics related to user experience.

Perspective

- Describing what is UX - Identifying the different types of UX - Explaining the circumstances and consequences of UX

UX as a field of study

- Studying the phenomenon, for example how experiences are formed or what a person experiences, expects to experience, or has experienced - Finding the means to design systems that enable particular UXs - Investigating and developing UX design and assessment methods

UX as a practise

- Envisioning UX, for example as part of a design practice - Representing UX, for example building a prototype to demonstrate and communicate the desired UX to others - Evaluating UX - Delivering designs aimed at enabling a certain UX

Keywords—user experience; dynamic; pragmatic; hedonic

I. INTRODUCTION In recent years, many conferences and workshop were conducted to better understand User Experience (UX) and to come up with the unified meaning of UX. However, it is very challenging to reach a common definition of UX. A widely accepted and shared understanding of UX is still lacking. Many perspectives exist on User Experience (UX) and it is understood in different ways by several disciplines and be viewed from different perspectives as in Table I.

The studies presented in this paper will merely looking at different perspectives discussed in various literature reviews.

Despite the fact that there are various understanding of UX found in literature, there is a common understanding that it is a dynamic and complex concept [2]. Thus UX should not be labeled as usability or equaled to user interface. However in reality, there is no consensus on how UX should be defined and researched [3].

II. UX DEFINITIONS To better understand UX, it is advisable to look at some of the most cited definitions in the literature among the many currently available ones. A very official one comes from ISO FDIS 9241-210 which has defined UX as “a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use and/or anticipated use of a product, system or service”. According to [4], this definition is to be a promising approach to define UX. In one of the most cited UX papers [7], UX is summarized as a consequence of a user’s internal state, the characteristics of the designed system and the context within which the interaction occurs.

According to [4], there are several reasons why it is hard to get a universal and much-agreed upon definition of UX. First, UX is associated with a broad range of dynamic concepts such as emotional, affective, experiential and aesthetics. Second, the unit of analysis for UX is easily influenced, ranging from a single aspect of an individual end-user’s interaction with a standalone application to all aspects of multiple end-user’s interaction with all kinds of disciplines [5]. Third, the landscape of UX research is fragmented and complicated by diverse theoretical models with different interest such as pragmatism, emotion, affect, etc. [6].

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Descriptions

UX as a phenomenon

Apparently, Fig. 1 shows that there is a gap between the research community’s and the product developers’ understanding of what UX is and how it should be evaluated [6].

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Fig. 3. User experience in relation to other experiences

Fig. 1. The comparison between academic and developers’ understanding of UX

In [10] mentioned about UX that could either be productcentered or interaction-centered while [9] developed the product ecology framework which encompasses of people, adaptation and place to accumulate the experience of use in order to enhance user experience design.

In defining UX, one must separate it from the usability. There are important distinctions between traditional view of usability and UX. UX takes a more holistic approach by balancing between pragmatic aspects and other hedonic aspects of product possession and use. This statement is further discussed in [8] by assuming that the introduction of a hedonic quality to complement pragmatic quality varies with several contextual factors: Individual, Product, Situation and Time as shown in Fig. 2. Looking into a broad dimension of UX, the evaluation criteria should not only measuring pragmatic aspects but also the hedonic aspects and the overall system attractiveness.

In terms of scope, UX is obviously not restricted to work systems, as it concerns many subjective aspects beyond performance [11]. IV.

There are designers and researchers who have put some effort into crafting suitable frameworks to describe user experience. These frameworks are created either by reviewing the work of others or reflecting on their own work. The following three loose groups will elaborate more on the classification of these frameworks. A. Person Centred Frameworks These frameworks looks at ways of understanding people. Some focuses on the people’s needs while others may focus on the relationships between people and products. It revolves on matters why certain products are pleasurable compared to others. There are four kinds of pleasures that people can have with products as listed in [12]. The first one is ideo pleasures which refers to values that products can satisfy. Second pleasure is socio pleasure that deals with interaction with others. The third pleasure, physio pleasure relates with human’s senses comprises of audio, visual, tactile and olfactory qualities. Lastly, psycho pleasure looks at how people’s mind are perceiving the enjoyment of certain products. It is further elaborated that enjoyment has more to do with the human mindset than with the product [13].

Fig. 2. Four sources of diversity in User Experience

III. UX SCOPE In addition, [4] recommends the term UX to be scoped to products, systems, services and objects that a person interacts with through a user interface as in Fig. 3.

B. Product Centred Frameworks As design is also about creating something, it is common that models also focus on the qualities of the design and their relationship to people’s experiences and evaluations of them. Product centred frameworks describes UX in relation to products and how the qualities of a products affects people’s experiences [14]. People value products on the basis of how it satisfies needs in particular situation. These are discussed in relation to five different viewpoints which are the world of

According to [9], UX in user-product interaction is mainly influenced by the user and the product within a context of use embodied with social and cultural factors. While the product influences UX through its form, features, a user influences UX through emotions and feelings, and prior knowledge.

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UX FRAMEWORKS

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activities, the world of products meanings, the physical world, the world of products and the world of humans. The framework acts as a tool to study product related experiences and it presents the qualities pertaining to the role of a product as a whole.

1) An elaboration of the satisfaction component of usability [18]. 2) An umbrella term for all the user’s perceptions and responses, whether measured subjectively or objectively.

C. Interaction Focused Frameworks This frameworks view looks at individual and describes experience in relation to time. Focusing on the interaction means the subjective of the experience and the observable action during the interaction. UX is not only mediated by product’s use, but also by social processes. It is further describes UX as the trace between what has happened in the past and what is expected in the future. Experience is describes as both the moment and as something that connects past experiences to the moment and to future experiences [15]. In a nutshell, this framework perceives UX as interaction before, during and after usage.

3) Distinct from usability and has a historical emphasis on user performance [19]. 4) Definition and the perceived qualities (pragmatic and hedonic) varies according to a number of factors; product, user, context and time.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the Faculty of Computer & Mathematical Sciences, UiTM Shah Alam for funding this paper.

Referring to the Fig. 4 below, [16] proposed a bottom-up approach framework in which the emergent dimensions are impacting factors that affect UX, UX characteristics and the effects produced by UX.

REFERENCES [1]

Roto, V., Law, E., Vermeeren, A. and Hoonhout, J. (2010). User Experience White Paper: Bringing clarity to the concept of user experience. … Seminar on Demarcating User Experience, 12. [2] Forlizzi, J. (2004). Understanding Experience in Interactive Systems. Proceedings of the 5th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques – DIS’ 04. 261–268. [3] Glanznig, M. (2012). User Experience Research: Modelling and Describing the Subjective. Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems, 10(3), 235–247. http://doi.org/10.7906/indecs.10.3.3 [4] Law, E. L.-C., Roto, V., Hassenzahl, M., Vermeeren, A. P. O. S. and Kort, J. (2009). Understanding, scoping and defining user experience. Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 09, (April 2016), 719. http://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518813 [5] Desmet, P. M. a., and Hekkert, P. (2007). Framework of 10. product experience. International Journal of Design, 1(1), 57–66. http://doi.org/10.1162/074793602320827406 [6] Väänänen-vainio-mattila, K., Hassenzahl, M., Landau, C. and Fort, I. (2008). Towards Practical User Experience Evaluation Methods, Proceedings of the COST294-MAUSE Workshop on Meaningful Measures: Valid Useful User Experience Measurement (VUUM),1-4 [7] Hassenzahl, M., and Tractinsky, N. (2006). User experience - A research agenda. Behaviour & Information Technology, 25(2), 91–97. http://doi.org/10.1080/01449290500330331 [8] Karapanos, E., Hassenzahl, M. and Martens, J.-B. (2008). User experience over time. Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’08, 3561. http://doi.org/10.1145/1358628.1358891 [9] Forlizzi, J. and Ford, S. (2000). The building blocks of experience: an early framework for interaction designers. Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Designing Designing Interactive Systems, pp(6), 419– 423. http://doi.org/10.1145/347642.347800 [10] Battarbee, K. and Koskinen, I. (2005). Co-experience: user experience as interaction. CoDesign, 1(1), 5–18. http://doi.org/10.1080/15710880412331289917 [11] Scapin, D. L., Senach, B., Trousse, B. and Pallot, M. (2012). User experience: Buzzword or new paradigm? ACHI 2012 - 5th International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions, 336–341. Retrieved from http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.084883218765&partnerID=40&md5=744ea909df799253f848d5c5953ff2 4e

Fig. 4 The proposed UX conceptual framework

V. CONCLUSION This paper was presented in order to get further understanding of what is UX, the scope and the theoretical framework of UX. Based on the literature, it can be concluded that the concept of UX is wide due to a holistic experience and to the business point of view. It is hard to have a general and agreed upon definition for user experience due to the variety of concepts and the flexibility of these concepts depending on the situation. UX encompasses all aspects of interacting with a product. UX objectives are to optimize human performance and user satisfaction with achieving both pragmatic and hedonic goals [17]. To sum up, user experience can be conceptualized in different ways:

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2016 4th International Conference on User Science and Engineering (i-USEr) [17] Bevan, N. (2009b). What is The Difference Between The Purpose of Usability and User Experience Evaluation Methods? Interact 2009, (August), 1–4. [18] Bevan, N. (2009a). Extending quality in use to provide a framework for usability measurement. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 5619 LNCS(1991), 13–22. http://doi.org/10.1007/9783-642-02806-9_2 [19] Law, E. L.-C., Roto, V., Hassenzahl, M., Vermeeren, A. P. O. S. and Kort, J. (2009). Understanding, scoping and defining user experience. Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 09, (April 2016), 719. http://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518813

[12] Han, F., and Bowerman, J. (2015). Product Pleasure : A Tale of Two Cultures. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention [13] Hassenzahl, M., and Universit, F. (2005). Funology, 3(December 2004). http://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2967-5 [14] Jääskö, V., Mattelmäki, T. and Ylirisku, S. (2003). The scene of experiences. The Good, The Bad and The Irrelevant, 341–345. [15] Sanders, E. B. (2006). Scaffolds for Building Everyday Creativity.Design for Effectiive Communications: Creating Contexts for Clarity and Meaning. Jorge Frascara (Ed.) Allworth Press, New York. [16] Hellweger, S. and Wang, X. (2015). What is User Experience Really: towards a UX Conceptual Framework. CoRR, In print.

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