Lecture 1 User Experience Design Woensdag 27 oktober
What is user experience?
- Important aspect = appreciation of products/designs
- Effectiveness/helpfulness of a tool that we create
- Focus on the user, the target group decides, it is not only about the viewpoint of the designer
- Can help create an experience that matches to what individuals are expecting. However,
people can be unpredictable and it can reach other people than you expected/not reach the
people you want.
“Waves” in human-computer interaction (= scientific version of UX design)
First wave of HCI
• Period: until the 1980s
• Context: Individual, task-based work. Lots of research done on an individual basis.
• Goal: Optimizing fit between human and computer to allow task performance, mostly based on
ergonomics (and thus optimizing the fit and come up with ways for people to be faster and perform
better).
• Research: Computer science and thus coming from the technical field/engineering approach.
Really detailed, really low-level because the computers were enormous, mostly you had only 1
computer in the room and it took ages to get some result of a computer. First, there was only 1
computer you had to share. Later, one computer per user, but still only bound to the workplace.
Second wave of HCI
• Period: 1980s -1990s
• Context: Situated work (in real-life work space)
• Goal: Optimizing accuracy and efficiency of task performance, we start to try to optimize how well
we can do tasks, the time we need to conduct our tasks = usability (how efficiently can I perform my
task by using the system? How can we make computers usable?)
• Research: Based on what we know about human cognition, system-focused, how can we make
tasks easier to perform by using the computer?
Mostly one computer per user, start of not knowing what the computer can do for you, after that
trying to optimize it and more people can perform tasks than only the experts.
Third wave of HCI
• Period: 2000s – around 2010 (slowly moved into the current wave)
• Context: Beyond work: computers are entering private & public everyday life. We use them also for
entertainment and not only for work anymore. Gaming started rising in the 1990 and was booming in
the 2000s. People use the computer for entertainment and connecting in their private life.
• Goal: Support situated actions in everyday life, self-expression started with the start of social
media. We could use the internet to identify ourselves and position ourselves.
• Research: Cultural studies & ethnography, person-focused
→ the shift from usability to user experience
→ start of the smartphone, a revolution wherein computers in a certain form had a great place in
our everyday lives
Fourth wave of HCI
• Period: Now! : we left the third wave, although we still take with us things from the other waves:
we still focus on bettering usability from the second wave and user experience from the third wave
• Context: Hypermobility, ubiquitous computing, data explosion, blending of humans and
technology: we have things that don’t look like computers anymore but they do the same things as
computers, e.g. cars
, • Goal: Design for the greater good; social responsibility
• Research: Values
→ not only focusing on the individual, but on the entire context: what does this design brings to the
world in general? How is it going to influence society in the future? What is the value for society now
and in the future?
Takeaways for today:
1. Shift from ‘utilitarian’ and work-oriented focus to a focus on non-utilitarian approaches
(everyday actions & self-expression).
2. Our relationships with computers have changed a lot. Interaction is more intimate (NUI) and
our lives are intertwined with computers (think about robots for example, this makes the
experience more interactive) and data (even without knowing is there is a lot of stuff that
companies know about us, data is all around us).
What makes an experience?
- Giving people the feeling of control/empowerment/emerging over something: for example
the experience I had in the NS VR train at the Dutch Design Week.
User experience = the same as any other experience we have, although the difference is that there is
some (interactive) product coming in the way. It does not have to only focus on the product: the
product can have a role in the experience but does not have to take a crucial and active role in the
experience. Think for example about an unboxing!
Experiencing vs. an experience
- Experiencing= an ever-present stream of feelings and thoughts while being conscious, for
example now experiencing the lecture. If you remember specific things from the lecture, it is
an experience:
- An experience = particular actions, feelings and thoughts tied to a particular episode –
something with a beginning and an end
An experience is a construct
- We tend to construct a coherent ‘narrative’ (Russel 2003) = a story out of what we are
experiencing
o We experience several different ‘things’: for example now light, thoughts, smell, etc.
o Meta process to create a coherent whole out of these things
o Cf. appraisal theories of emotion → you have a stimuli
coming in (e.g. light, smell, etc.), you have an appraisal
process wherein you try to make a coherent feeling of
this all and this leads to an appraisal outcome = a
combination of things happen to experience it as a
whole. An experience thus combines all of these
things, it is an overarching thing of what is happening.
- An experience is not identical to what we experienced at the
time = if you remember the lecture later, it will not be the
same as how you experience it now. The feelings and emotions
will not be as clear/heavy as now.
o Peak-end-rule = people will remember peak experiences and the end experience
they had (recency effect)
UX vs. experience
- User experience = the HCI version of experience → experience resulting from the use of
interactive products
