demystifying "user experience"

Describing Experience:How to Make what they Have,

and What to really call it.

An Archestra Notebook

© 2013 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research

What’s your experience of “Experience”?

• Poets, marketers, academics, consultants, evangelists, and enthusiastic innocents – they can gang up to make quite a mess of your attempt to understand a given idea or its boundary consistently. And you have limited 4th Amendment opportunity to issue restraining orders. Take the idea of “experience”, for example.

• Your sanity has a fighting chance if you have a dictionary, and a thesaurus and an index – or if you just pick a side to champion. But for the sake of communicating or making things, the question will still remain: do other people know what you mean or what they’re going to get from you? Do they know what you don’t mean, or what they’re not going to get?

JARGONTranslation

• In our perspective as providers of something, “experience” is always generallygoing to refer to the user’s awareness of how their own exposure to something and usage of something affects their own condition

• The user’s “condition” is a complex of things including a wide range of aspects regarding their own comfort, stability, and expectations

• As makers of products (items and services) for humans, our concerns for user “experience” are all about those numerous factors of the condition of the user

• As makers, we are distinctly invested in the idea that we can “produce” preferable “experience”

• The appropriate cover label for our “maker-orientated” group of concerns is Human Factors

Demystifications

• A framework of human factors clarifies how to indicate, position, and relate our concerns

• The framework identifies distinctive points of view within the overall perspective, allowing issues to be identified and grouped by the point of view

• The point of view is in effect a base of responsibility in accounting for the product coverage of the concerns

• The distinctions in the framework represent relative priorities; neither the responsibility nor the grouping of issues exclude issues from being relevant in more than one area

• The following framework includes a more specific view of “experience” as one factor of the product concept – in effect, as a production value

• Additionally, the framework recognizes both items and services as forms of “product”

Factors of Human Relation to Engineered Products (Items or Services)

Human Factors (production values)

Goal of Build Design objective

Architecture requirement

Testing focus Success Factor

ErgonomicsFit product to formal characteristics of the user

Integration Systemic relationship of forms

Synergy Congruence

InteractionFit product toability of user

Co-operation Complementary functions

Support Compliance

UsabilityFit product to conditions of user task

Compatibility Efficiency for purpose

Performance Sympathy

ExperienceFit product to desire and expectation of user

Relevance Benefit of effects Quality Empathy



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