NordiCHI 2006, Workshop #2

Duration: 9:00 – 18:00 (full day), Saturday 14.10

Location: Sal D, Oslo Kongressenter

User Experience - Towards a unified view (The Second COST294-MAUSE International Open Workshop)

October 14, 2006 (Saturday)

Cost294 website: http://www.cost294.org/

25 academic researchers and practitioners in Human-Computer Interaction

(HCI) and Software Engineering (SE)

The primary selection criterion is the quality of position papers, which can:

• Contribute to a deeper understanding of User Experience (UX), especially its determinants and their relationships with existing HCI approaches
• Stimulate participants to reflect on UX issues from inter-disciplinary perspectives
• Lay a ground for integrating existing schools of thought on UX
• Offer innovative and plausible methods to evaluate and measure UX attributes
• Augment the scope of UX on the social level

Workshop Themes and Goals

Theorizing, Qualifying and Quantifying UX

The conception of usability has been evolving, along with the emerging IT landscape and the ever-blurring boundary of the field of HCI.  Specifically, the so-called user experience (UX) movement is gaining ground. The tenet of UX can be well captured by McCarthy and Wright's [8] words: "Today we don't just use technology, we live with it. Much more deeply then ever before we are aware that interacting with technology involves us emotionally, intellectually and sensually. So people who design, use, and evaluate interactive systems need to be able to understand and analyze people's felt experience with technology"

UX is a broadly defined term, including attainment of behavioural goals, satisfaction of non-instrumental (or hedonic) needs, and acquisition of positive feeling and well-being. Neither a universal definition of UX nor a cohesive theory of experience yet exists that can inform the HCI community how to practically design for and evaluate UX.

Traditional usability is characterized as task-oriented and performance-based. The three canonical usability metrics - effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction - basically address the instrumental and non-instrumental aspects of technology use.

Satisfaction is a composite term, amalgamating a cluster of "felt experience" [8], and is measured in a coarse-grained manner. The current UX research efforts attempt to reduce the composite /satisfaction/ into elemental attributes - fun, pride, pleasure, surprise, intimacy, joy, to name just a few - and thrive to understand, define and quantify such attributes.

Hassenzahl and Tractinsky [7] describe the trend of work on UX, evolving from being programmatic in the 90s, conceptual in early 2000 to empirical in mid-2000. Apparently, the HCI community, to a large extent, has been convinced about the utility and necessity of looking into UX issues. In attempting to understand UX several approaches focusing on different aspects have been developed. Examples are:

• Focus on emotions and affect (e.g. [4], [9])
• Focus on the Experiential (e.g., [5], [8])
• Focus on non-instrumental (hedonic) needs (e.g. [6])
• Focus on aesthetics (e.g. [11])

But even those approaches understand interactive products as primarily used for individual problem-solving. However, as software becomes more and more "social" UX has to address concomitant issues as well. Counter to the common understanding that experience is personal and private, it can be co-constructed and shared in social interaction [1,2], resulting in so-called "co-experience". The challenge is how to define, theorize, qualify and quantify co-experience, which is clearly not the sum of individual user experience. In a digital social network, confounding issues of context awareness, tele-presence and synchronization can aggravate the difficulty of such a challenge.

Furthermore, recent research on quality models of user interfaces [12] indicates that a mesh of so-called non-functional quality factors (e.g. security, privacy/trust, consistency, accessibility) determines user acceptance. As they are closely coupled, addressing them in parallel may invoke *tradeoffs* (e.g. [3]). It may be helpful to relate quality attributes from distinct fields of human factors, usability and software engineering to explore overlaps and similarities.

Theoretically UX is currently incoherent, methodologically UX is not yet mature either. Some critics even argue that non-instrumental needs are too fuzzy, elusive and idiosyncratic to operationalize (i.e. they are simply dismissed as intractable) and that experience and emotion are too ephemeral and complex to measure. Proponents of UX are more optimistic.

First, within UX there seems a shared understanding that UX needs to clarify and operationalize constructs to be taken seriously within the context of SE or user-centred design. Second, at least some approaches to UX believe that with a proper definition come valid and reliable measures.

The later requires the integration of the many facets of UX into a more unified view. We reached a point, where the pressing question is no longer whether we need UX or not. We need it and we must work on a shared understanding of what UX is and how it can be addressed by design, engineering and research.

The goals of the present workshop are:

• To critically review theoretical frameworks for deepening our understanding of UX
• To explore means of how non-instrumental needs, affective requirements and experiential expectations can be translated into product quality
• To examine potential and pitfalls of traditional and alternative evaluation methodologies for measuring UX

Specifically, we address the aforementioned challenges with the following research questions:

• Are UX elements tractable, quantifiable and measurable? Are we looking for more qualitative measures? How valid and reliable are existing UX evaluation methods?
• What implications can we draw from UX research on the design and evaluation of social software?
• How does UX influence tradeoffs within software design? How does UX relate to existing quality approaches in Software Engineering?

Position papers addressing the above arguments, aims, research questions or related ideas are invited. Theoretical expositions, empirical studies, case studies and experiential reports will be considered. Of particular interest is to envision the role of UX in emerging technologies with expected impact of 5-10 years and beyond.

Position papers should be submitted to: law@tik.ee.ethz.ch <mailto:law@tik.ee.ethz.ch>

July 29. 2006:           Deadline for submission of position paper

August 8. 2006:        Authors of accepted position papers notified

August 14. 2006:      Early registration deadline

Position papers may be from four to six pages long and should be formatted according to the ACM SIGCHI format:

SIGCHI Publications format (word file)

SIGCHI Publications format (pdf version)

SIGCHI Publications format (LaTeX files)

SIGCHI Publications format (Open Office)

Position papers should preferably be submitted as .rtf or .pdf files.

All submitted papers will be reviewed by at least two program committee members. It is expected that at least one of the authors of each accepted position paper registers for the workshop.

Outcomes of the Workshop

• Online/printed proceedings of the accepted position papers;
• Special issue in a refereed HCI journal;
• Joint research proposals

UI designers, usability researchers and practitioners, HCI students

Description of Activities Planned

1. Presentation: Top 10 quality position papers (~ 3.0 hours)
2. Panel discussion: A panel of UX experts will engage the floor audience in debating some controversial topics in UX (~ 1.5 hour)
3. Research proposal drafting: Participants will be divided into a few small groups to identify most significant research questions in UX that can be investigated in a large-scale research project (~ 1.0 hours)
4. Integration: Participants will be divided into a few small groups to identify ways to a more integrated approach to UX (~ 1.0 hours)
5. Group reporting: Group leaders will report to the plenary their outcomes (~ 0.5 hour)

Effie L-C. Law, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), Switzerland law@tik.ee.ethz.ch

Ebba T. Hvannberg, University of Iceland, Iceland ebba@hi.is

Marc Hassenzahl, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, hassenzahl@psychologie.tu-darmstadt.de

Mark Blythe, University of York, UK

Gilbert Cockton, University of Sunderland, UK

Antonella De Angeli, University of Manchester, UK

Asbjørn Følstad, SINTEF, Norway

Kasper Hornbæk, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Andrew Monk, University of York, UK

Mark Springett, Middlesex University, UK

Chris Stary, University of Linz, Austria

Noam Tractinsky, Ben Gurion University, Negev, Israel

Arnold P.O.S. Vermeeren, TU Delft, the Netherlands

[1] Alben, L. (1996). Quality of experience. /Interactions, 3/, 11-15

[2] Battarbee, K. (2003). Defining co-experience. /Proceedings of

DPPI'03/, June 23-26, Pittsburgh, USA.

[3] Cranor, L.F., & Garfinkel, S. (2005). /Security and usability/.

Cambridge: O'Reilly.

[4] Desmet, P. M. A., Overbeeke, C. J., & Tax, S. J. E. T. (2001).

Designing products with added emotional value: development and

application of an approach for research through design. /The Design

Journal, 4,/ 32-47.

[5] Forlizzi, J., & Battarbee, K. (2004). Understanding experience in

interactive systems. /Proceedings of DIS2004/, August 104, Cambridge,

MA, USA.

[6] Hassenzahl, M. (2003). The thing and I: understanding the

relationship between user and product. In M.Blythe, C. Overbeeke, A. F.

Monk, & P. C. Wright (Eds.), /Funology: From Usability to Enjoyment

/(pp. 31-42). Dordrecht: Kluwer.

[7] Hassenzahl, M., & Tractinsky, N. (2006). User experience - a

research agenda. /Behaviour and Information Technology, 25/(2), 91-97

[8] McCarthy, J., & Wright, P. C. (2004). Technology as Experience. MIT

Press.

[9] Norman, D. (2004). /Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday

things./ New York: Basic Books.

[10] Preece, J. (2001). Sociability and usability in online communities:

determining and measuring success. Behaviour and Information Technology,

20(5), 347-356.

[11] Tractinsky, N., Katz, A. S., & Ikar, D. (2000). What is beautiful

is usable. /Interacting with Computers, 13/, 127-145

[12] Vanderdonckt, J., Law, E. L-C., & Hvannberg, E.T. (2005).

/Proceedings of the First COST294 International Workshop on User

Interface Quality Models/. In conjunction with INTERACT 2005, 12-13^th

Sept 2005, Rome, Italy.