Co-experience: user experience as interaction

Abstract

User experience is becoming a key term in the world of interactive product design. The term itself lacks proper theoretical definition and is used in many different, even contradictory, ways. This paper reviews various existing approaches to understanding user experience and describes three main approaches and their differences. A missing perspective is noted in all three: their focus is on only the individual having the experience and neglects the kinds of experiences that are created together with others. To address this, a new elaboration called co-experience is presented. It builds on an existing approach but borrows from symbolic interactionism to create a more inclusive interactionist framework for thinking about user experiences. Data from a study on mobile multimedia messaging are used to illustrate and discuss the framework.

Factoring User Experience into the Design of Ambient and Mobile Systems

“…In the context of the method proposed here these social aspects are captured through the probing of individuals, however it would be envisaged that social modeling would provide additional clarity about how human human interactions contribute to experience and can be supported by the ambient systems. Further techniques would be appropriate for identifying such requirements as discussed in [4]. These considerations are left for future work.…”

Exploring social context in mobile information behavior

“…at the situation or activity level (McCarthy & Wright, 2004). With regard to the latter, "co-experience", for instance, is a term used to define the social context of technology use, where experiences are coconstructed around a product that is used concurrently or independently (Forlizzi & Battarbee, 2004); personal experiences are created and altered as a result of social interaction (Battarbee & Koskinen, 2005). Co-experience demonstrates that activity-and situation-level interactions are not isolated, but build and converge over time, thus impacting broader individual or societal contexts.…”

Empathy and Design. A new perspective

“…The adjective 'empathic' in relation to design was introduced in the late 1990s (Battarbee & Koskinen, 2005) when companies started to realise that customers' responses on questionnaires were not enough to develop successful products (Leonard & Rayport, 1997;Sanders and Dandavate, 1999). Empathic design has rapidly evolved in response to the popular notion of design for user experience (Postma et al, 2012).…”