Towards a Framework of Interaction and Experience As

It Relates to Product Design

Theories to Talk About

Over time, we have summarized the following theories as critical contributions in

helping designers understand what experience is and if we can design for it. See
the Resources section for full citation. Additions are welcome!

Alben, Quality of Experience

Battarbee, Defining Co-experience
Cain, Experience-Based Design
Dewey, Experience and Education
Forlizzi, Design for Experience
Hudspith, Utility, Ceremony, and Appeal
Jaasko and Mattelmaki, Observing and Probing
Makela and Fulton Suri, Supporting Users' Creativity
Margolin, Getting to Know the User
Pine & Gilmore, Welcome to the Experience Economy
Rhea, Focusing on Customer Experience

Alben: Quality of Experience

Alben and her colleagues developed a set of criteria for assessing quality of user
experience in order to judge entries in the first ACM/interactions Design Awards.
The jury was interested in how effective interaction design could provide people
with sucessful and satisfying experiences. They defined experience as "…the way it
feels in their hands, how well they understand how it works, how they feel about it
while they're using it, how well it serves its purpose, and how well it fits into the
entire context in which they are using it." If these experiences are successful and
engaging, they argue, then they are valuable to users.

The criteria fall into two categories: those that directly impact user experience
(e.g., learnable and usable), and those that make their contribution indirectly (e.g.,
understanding of users and effective design process).

Understanding of users refers to how well the design team understood the
needs, tasks and environments of the users, and how well this understanding was
reflected in the process.

Effective design process refers to having a well thought-out process that

addresses various project concerns and included user involvement, iteration, and
multidisciplinary collaboration.

Needed refers to whether the product meets some recognized need, and makes
some significant social, economic, or environmental contribution.

Learnable and Usable refers to how well a product communicates its purpose and
operation, and how well it supports different personal styles, given users different
knowledge, skills, and strategies for problem solving.

Appropriate refers to whether a product solves the right problem at the right
level, with a good fit to social, cultural, economic and technical factors.
Aesthetic refers to whether the product is aesthetically pleasing and sensually
satisfying, and whether it performs well within its technological constraints. There is
also some reference to contributing factors, such as cohesive design, and continuity
across interaction, information, visual, and industrial design.

Mutable refers to how well the product can adapt, both to individual needs and
over time.

Manageable refers to whether the designers have taken a more systemmic view of
the product, for example by thinking about how the product might be purchased,
installed, maintained, and disposed of.

Battarbee, Defining Co-

experience

This article proposes that users be

considered the designers of
experience. In addition, the concept
of co-experience is introduced, to
take into account the social nature of
experience. Using a study of mobile
multimedia messaging, the author
demonstrates that experiences creatively come to life when they are created
together or shared.

Cain: Experience-Based Design

This article introduces the idea of Experience-Based Design (EBD) as a way to make
great design a more frequent and predictable outcome by connecting a rigorous
understanding of everyday consumer experience with a company's business goals.

At the core of EBD, argues Cain, are methods for examining, interpreting, and
organizing everyday experience in a way that is useful to the people involved in all
aspects of design development, including business strategists, product and brand
managers, designers, marketers, and engineers.

One key element of EBD is a simple model of experience that looks at what people
think (ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and expectations that are informed by sociocultural
systems); what people do (patterns and routines of action, their meaning and
identity) and what people use (artifacts and environments and their impact on what
people think and do).

Another key element of EBD is the idea that using ethnography, you can
understand the relationships between think, do, and use, creating a picture of
experience that is represented by a framework. Once you have this framework, you
have a tool for understanding the structure of the experience, which in turn allows
you to 1) frame the problem in the customer's terms, 2) identify opportunities to
change the experience, and 3) know the levers that will allow you to effect positive
changes the experience.
The article concludes by introducing the POSE model, which defines a sequence of
developmental targets in moving from problem to embodiment (form). P stands for
defining and framing the problem, and is an area where understanding consumer
experience is key. O stands for identifying opportunities, which brings an
understanding of experience together with business goals and objectives. S stands
for inventing solutions, in which concepts for a specific opportunity are developed,
keeping in line with a company's core competencies and market strengths. And E
stands for creating embodiments, in which particular solution concepts are
developed through detailed design and form-giving.

Dewey: Experience and Education

Although Experience and Education is an analysis of "traditional" and "progressive"

education, it is also a clear and concise statement of Dewey's basic criteria of
experience. He uses continuity and interaction to describe the latitudinal and
longitudinal aspects of experience.

Continuity describes the aspects of experience as they relate to the individual. An

appropriate experience modifies the person who has the experience, and the quality
of subsequent experiences. Continuity is desirable when it fosters growth, arouses
curiosity, and carries a person to a new and stronger place in the future.

Interaction describes the aspects of experience as they relate to the environment.

An experience has an active component which changes the context in which
experiences are had: society and the physical world and its conditions.

An experience should have appropriate interaction between objective and internal

conditions. When the individual components and environmental components of an
experience are working together, they form a situation -- a complete and whole
experience which changes both the user and the context of use.
Forlizzi: Design for Experience

Forlizzi attempts to understand experience as it is relevant to interaction design.

Two types of experience, satisfying and rich, are identified in user�product
interactions. A satisfying experience is a process�driven act that is performed in a
successful manner. A rich experience has a sense of immersive continuity and
interaction, which may be made up of a series of satisfying experiences. Designers
are given a set of principles for designing rich, immersive experiences.

Hudspith: Utility, Ceremony, and Appeal

Hudspith's work is meant to help designers think beyond the usability of products
that they design. He claims that in order for designers to support user experience,
they need to consider the psychological experience needs of the user. He proposes
a three-dimensional model to help designers derive psychological information --
perceptions, latent needs, beliefs, and emotions -- from the user: utility, ceremony,
and appeal.

Utility is a dimension that has been traditionally addressed by usability studies.

Simply defined, it is how well an artifact accomplishes its intended task. For
example, a usable VCR has easy to use buttons and on-screen programming.

Ceremony describes how well an artifact satisfies human ritual surrounding its use.
Rituals can be public or personal. For example, money, although it is made of
paper, has many ceremonies and rituals surrounding its use. These differ from
society to society.

Appeal describes the emotional aspects of user experience that depend on the
user's perception of an artifact, or how well they become connected to it. For
example, gifts are often artifacts that have high appeal to those who have received
them. Brands, such as Nike or Starbucks, can have appeal.

Hudspith has used this model successfully with numerous product design classes.
With continued work, he hopes that designers can talk about the emotional and
perceptive needs of experience as easily as they currently talk about usability.
Jaasko and Mattelmaki, Observing and Probing

This paper presents a framework of user experience from the point of view of
concept design. The framework provides a holistic view incoporatiing historic
meaning, socio-cultural meaning, marketing and brank, context and environment,
and usability.

Makela and Fulton Suri: Supporting Users' Creativity

This paper discusses the role of consumer experience in the design of new digital
consumer products. It also presents a framework for understanding user
experiences. According to Makela and Fulton Suri, experiences are subjective,
resulting from motivated actions in context. Experiences are also influenced by
previous experiences and expectations for future experiences.

The authors assert that the most successful new digital products will be the ones
that support users' creativity in creating new experiences, rather than desiging
particular kinds of experiences for them. They also advocate that new products
uphold the following design principles: open-ended, social, user-controlled, robust
and forgiving, physical and sensory, flexible, and personal.

Margolin: Getting to Know the User

As designers, we strive to address product* function in our designs; it is much

harder to address product use, which adds a social dimension to the more
restrictive definition of function. Margolin asserts that while product function is well
understood by designers, product use is little understood.

To help designers understand product use, Margolin uses four dimensions to

describe the relationship between the designer and the user: the social dimension,
which relates to values that shape a collective group of people; the inventive
dimension, which relates to the needs of the user and the utility of the product; the
operational dimension, which refers to product simplicity (much like the work of
Don Norman); and the aesthetic dimension, which relates to individual values and
how meaning is attached to products.

Margolin also believes that designers should help people use their own experience
as a source of new products.

*Margolin uses the term 'product milieu' to represent the array of objects, activities, services and environments
that fill the world.

Pine & Gilmore:

Welcome to the Experience Economy

Pine & Gilmore see the history of economic progress as a four-stage evolution: from
agrarian to industrial, to service, and now, to the emerging experience economy.
Each stage is characterized along a number of points, such as the primary offering
(commodity, product, service or experience) and relationships bewteen buyers,
sellers, and suppliers.

Pine & Gilmore claim that "consumers unquestionably desire experiences." The
mark of success, for them, is the ability to wrap products and services with
deliberately designed, engaging experiences that command a fee. "An experience
occurs whan a company intentionally uses services as a stage and goods as props,
to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event."

Pine & Gilmore explore some early examples of the intentional design of
experiences, primarily from the "shoppertainment" and "entertailing" world - such
as Niketown and the Rainforest Cafe - and from new media applications such as
virtual reality and chat rooms. While they are careful to explain that experiences
are not exclusively about entertainment, their text is biased in this direction,
towards having "an experience" in Dewey's terms.

They also offer a model for characterizing experiences, and principles for designing
memorable experiences: 1) Theme the experience, 2) Harmonize impressions with
positive cues, 3) Eliminate negative cues, 4) Mix in memorabilia, 5) Engage all five
senses. They do caution, however, that following these principles is no guarantee of
success, and hint that constant updating of the experience is necessary for long-
term success.
Rhea: Focusing on Customer Experience

In this article, Rhea argues that the real opportunities for design come from
assessing all the ways in which products and services might influence and benefit
customers -- physically, emotionally, intellectually, and culturally. But taking
advantage of these opportunities demands a shift in focus from products
themselves to customer experience.

Cheskin research has developed a model to conceptualize how a customer's

everyday experience with products moves through a cycle. The cycle is comprised
of four stages: Life Context, Engagement, Experience, and Resolution. Rheas states
that while the emphasis on any given stage may be different for different products,
customers do move linearly through the stages, progressing as long as their
product experience remains satisfactory (thus, if they do not become engaged, they
will not buy and therefore not move to the Experience stage).

The article describes each stage in detail, and mentions tools to measure "the
quality of customer experiences" for each stage. Briefly, Life Context refers to the
background of consumer's lives, including everything the consumer thinks, feels,
and does (behaviors, needs, attitudes, perceptions, etc.). This context is mostly
unarticulated, and constantly changing.

Engagement refers to the initial interaction a customer has with an artifact. The
importance of this initial involvement is "profound", and may be influenced by a
number of factors, including prior experience with the product, advertising, word-
of-mouth, the product's "cognitive presence", attraction, and communication.

Experience refers to the period of ownership and use. During use, customers
continually assess the quality of their experiences with the product. In this stage,
the product must be reliable, creating a pleasing experience that meets
expectations, addresses concerns, solves problems, and fits into customers' lives.
And, gives customers something extra.

Resolution refers to both the experience of disposing of the product and how
customers resolve (or think about) their overall experience with the product to form
a lasting impression. This impression then feeds back into Life Context, and forms a
basis for expectations and desires for the next cycle.
Dispon�vel em:

http://goodgestreet.com/experience/home.html