Technology as experience

Abstract

User experience is now becoming central to our understanding of the usability of technology. Today many interactive technology companies describe on their Web sites their commitment to experiencebased design. There is also a trend in HCI communities to foreground experiencecentered approaches to technology, a movement reflected in several recent articles offering theoretical statements about the sensual and emotional conditions of interaction with technology. Thinking about Technology as ExperienceIn a recent study we presented a basis for thinking about and evaluating technology as experience. We show how technology can be seen in terms of experience with technological artifacts. This approach orients us toward the felt-life of technology-toward engagement, enchantment, irritation, and fulfillment. But we also recognize that the feeling-life does not begin and end with the immediate quality of an experience, rather it extends across space and time to the sense we make of experience in terms of our selves, our culture, and our lives. To make these concepts usable, we have developed a framework for analyzing experience with technology [2]. The FrameworkEven though the framework is presented as a set of components, perhaps giving the impression of separable elements, each of these parts should be seen as intrinsically connected with each other, and, collectively constitutive of an integrated framework. The framework consists of four intertwined threads of experience and six sense-making processes. The Four Threads of Experience COMPOSITIONAL: How do the elements of an experience fit together to form a coherent whole?This refers to the narrative structure, action possibility, plausibility, consequences and explanations of actions. When we ask questions like, "What is this all about?", "What will happen next?" and "How do I tackle this problem?" the composition of the experience is not clear to us. SENSUAL: What does the design and texture and the overall atmosphere make us feel?This orients us to the concrete, palpable, and visceral character of experience that is grasped pre-reflectively in the immediate sense of a situation; for example, the look and feel of a mobile phone and the sense of warmth in a social space. EMOTIONAL: What emotions color the experience for us?This refers to value judgments (e.g., frustration and satisfaction) that ascribe importance to other people and things with respect to our needs and desires. The emotional quality of an experience tends to summarize the experience for us; for example, as fun, exciting, or frustrating. This is how we tend to remember an experience. SPATIO-TEMPORAL: What effects do place and time have on our experience?This draws attention to the quality and sense of space-time that pervades experience. Time may speed up or slow down; pace may increase or decrease; spaces may open up or close down, affecting our willingness to linger or to re-visit such places. The Six Sense-making ProcessesPeople actively construct or make sense of experience-reflexively and recursive...

Do Usability Professionals Think about User Experience in the Same Way as Users and Developers Do?

“…We included Kujala, Roto, Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Karapanos, and Sinnelä [12]'s classification of UX into general relation to the system, attractiveness of the system, ease of use, utility, and degree of usage because all of these categories were defined with a focus on the IT system. In contrast to this system-oriented UX definition, we chose McCarthy and Wright [16]'s four threads of experience: compositional, sensual, emotional, and spatio-temporal, because they focus on human experience in general. Objective vs. subjective UX Performance How well users perceive and interpret the interface of a system, how fast the users get used to the product and how well they remember it, and the users control activity and its results; Image/Impression Basic sense (the primitive and direct image/impression stemming from the design characteristics), description of image of a system, and evaluative feeling System-oriented UX General relationship and user experience with the system Any experience with systems that users find meaningful and important…”

Staging Urban Interactions with Media Façades

“…In their Technology as Experience [19], McCarthy & Wright propose that sense-making is at the core of how we experience technologies; following this line of thought, we will discuss the most salient sense-making themes relating to AbL in order to explore and elucidate users' experience and appropriation of large-scale urban installations.…”

What Needs Tell Us about User Experience

“…Other than experienceframeworks such as McCarthy and Wright's [8], needs address the content of experiences not only their structure. Where McCarthy and Wright, for example, stop with the observation that experiences have an emotional-motivational and a meaningmaking thread, the needs perspective clarifies where the emotion, motivation, and meaning comes from.…”

“…Despite the lack of an official definition and some debates about the actual scope of UX [e.g., 7], there is a common understanding that UX is holistic -it emphasizes the totality of emotion, motivation, and action in a given physical and social context -and that it is subjective -focusing on the "felt experiences" [8] rather than product attributes.…”