lecture 1 : introduction to ux research

Lecture 1

Introduction to User Experience Research

UX Theory / IIT 2014 Spring Class hours : Monday 4 pm – 7 pm 3rd March

HELLO & WELCOME Beginning of the Semester

Lecture #1 IIT_UX Theory 2

Goals & Overview

• UX theories, and methodologies.

– User experience in practice needs a wide range of knowledge from computer

science, design, and psychology. It requires technological understandings,

process refinements, and humanity insights.

– The course will discuss each perspective of the theoretical fields that

complete the full picture of HCI/UX. User experience is the area of managing

the user experience cycles and issues in the help of sophisticated analytical

skills.

– For the introductory overview, the course will track the basic steps of analysis,

design, implementation and evaluation in a brief and essential way.


Class Operations

• Lectures

– This is a lecture focused course that will cover introductory literatures of HCI and User

Experience, which will give an overview of the subject area leading to in-depth self-

motivated studies later.

• Class discussions

– The class participation, and active discussion will be highly recommended and the

activities will be reflected in grades.

• Homework

– Weekly homework will guide the successful midterm and final achievements so that

students should be attentive to each week class activities and assignments following to

them.


Evaluation

• Homework 30 %

• Midterm 30%

• Final 30%

• Attendance 10%


Textbooks

– Hartson, R., & Pyla, P. (2012) The UX Book : Process and Guidelines for

Ensuring a Quality User Experience, Morgan Kaufmann.

– Alber, W., & Tullis, T., (2013) Measuring the User Experience: Collecting,

Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics, Morgan Kaufmann.

– Buxton, B. (2007) Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and

the Right Design, Morgan Kaufmann.

– Carroll, J. (Ed.) (2003) HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks: Toward a

multidisciplinary Science, Morgan Kaufmann.


INTRODUCTION Lecture


The components of UX

• User Experience

– User experience is the totality of the effect or effects felt by a user as a

result of interaction with, and the usage context of, a system, device, or

product, including the influence of usability, usefulness, and emotional

impact during interaction, and savoring the memory after interaction.

– “Interaction with” is broad and embraces seeing, touching, and thinking

about the system or product, including admiring it and its presentation

before any physical interaction.



• Usability

– Usability is the pragmatic component of user experience, including effectiveness,

efficiency, productivity, ease-of-use, learnability, retainability, and the pragmatic aspects

of user satisfaction.

• Usefulness

– Usefulness is the component of user experience to which system functionality gives the

ability to use the system or product to accomplish the goals of work(or play).

• Functionality

– Functionality is power to do work(or play) seated in the non-user-interface

computational features and capabilities.



• Emotional Impact

– Emotional impact is the affective component of user experience that

influences user feelings. Emotional impact includes such effects as

pleasure, fun, joy of use, aesthetics, desirability, pleasure, novelty,

originality, sensations, coolness, engagement, appeal and can involve

deeper emotional factors such self-identity, a feeling of contribution to the

world and pride of ownership.


Ubiquitous Interaction

• Desktop, Graphical User Interfaces, and the Web Are Still Here and

Growing

– The “old-fashioned” desktop, laptop, and network-based computing

systems are alive and well and seem to be everywhere, an expanding

presence in our lives.

– Word processing, database management, storing and retrieving

information, spreadsheet management.



• The Changing Concept of Computing

– Computer systems are being worn by people and embedded within

appliances, homes, offices, stereos and entertainment systems, vehicles,

and roads.

– Computation and interaction are also finding their way into walls, furniture,

and objects we carry (briefcases, purses, wallets, wrist, watches, PDAs,

cellphones)

– Most of the user-computer interaction attendant to this ubiquitous

computing in everyday contexts I staking place without keyboards, mice,

or monitors.



• The Changing Concept of Interaction

– With an obviously enormous market potential, mobile communications are perhaps the fastest

growing area of ubiquitous computing with personal devices and also represent one of the

most intense areas of designing for a quality user experience.

– Interaction, however, is doing more than just reappearing in different devices such as we see

in Web access via mobile phone. Weiser (1991) said “. . . the most profound technologies are

those that disappear.”

– Russell, Streitz, and Winograd (2005) also talk about the disappearing computer—not

computers that are departing or ceasing to exist, but disappearing in the sense of becoming

unobtrusive and unremarkable. They use the example of electric motors, which are part of

many machines we use daily, yet we almost never think about electric motors per se. They talk

about “making computers disappear into the walls and interstices of our living and working

spaces.”



• The Changing Concept of Interaction

– When this happens, it is sometimes called “ambient intelligence,” the goal of

considerable research and development aimed at the home living environment. In the

HomeLab of Philips Research in the Netherlands (Markopoulos et al., 2005), researchers

believe “that ambient intelligence technology will mediate, permeate, and become an

inseparable common of our everyday social interactions at work or at leisure.”

– In these embedded systems, of course, the computer only seems to disappear. The

computer is still there somewhere and in some form, and the challenge is to design the

interaction so that the computer remains invisible or unobtrusive and interaction appears

to be with the artifacts, such as the walls, directly. So, with embedded computing,

certainly the need for a quality user experience does not disappear. Imagine embedded

computing with a design that leads to poor usability; users will be clueless and will not

have even the familiar menus and icons to find their way!


From Usability to User Experience

• The Traditional Concept of Usability

– Usability is that aspect of HCI devoted to ensuring that human–computer

interaction is, among other things, effective, efficient, and satisfying for

the user. So usability1 includes characteristics such as ease of use,

productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, learnability, retainability, and user

satisfaction (ISO 9241-11, 1997).



• Misconceptions about Usability

– First, usability is not what some people used to call “dummy proofing.”

– Usability is not equivalent to being “user-friendly.”

– To many not familiar with the field, “doing usability” is sometimes thought

of as equivalent to usability testing.

– Finally, another popular misconception about usability has to do with

visual appeal.



• The Expanding Concept of Quality in Our Designs

– The field of interaction design has grown slowly, and our concept of what constitutes

quality in our designs has expanded from an engineering focus on user performance

under the aegis of usability into what is now widely known as user experience.

– Thomas and McCredie (2002) call for “new usability” to account for “new design

requirements such as ambience or attention.”

– At a CHI 2007 Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting (Huh et al., 2007), the discussion

focused on “investigating a variety of approaches (beyond usability) such as user

experience, aesthetic interaction, ambiguity, slow technology,2 and various ways to

understand the social, cultural, and other contextual aspects of our world.”



• Is Not Emotional Impact What We Have Been Calling User Satisfaction?

– Some say the emphasis on these emotional factors is nothing new—after

all, user satisfaction, a traditional subjective measure of usability, has

always been a part of the concept of traditional usability shared by most

people, including the ISO 9241-11 standard definition.

– Technology and design have evolved from being just productivity-

enhancing tools to more personal, social, and intimate facets of our lives.

Accordingly, we need a much broader definition of what constitutes

quality in our designs and quality in the user experience those designs

beget.



• Functionality Is Important, but a Quality User Experience Can Be Even

More So

– The iPod, iPhone, and iPad are products that represent cool high

technology with excellent functionality but are also examples that show

the market is now not just about the features—it is about careful design

for a quality user experience as a gateway to that functionality.

– To users, the interaction experience is the system.



• Functionality Is Important, but a Quality User Experience Can Be Even More So

– Hassenzahl and Roto (2007) state the case for the difference between the functional view

of usability and the phenomenological view of emotional impact. People have and use

technical products because “they have things to do”; they need to make phone calls,

write documents, shop on-line, or search for information.

– Hazzenzahl and Roto call these “do goals,” appropriately evaluated by the usability and

usefulness measures of their “pragmatic quality.” Human users also have emotional and

psychological needs, including needs involving self-identity, relatedness to others, and

being satisfied with life.

– These are “be goals,” appropriately evaluated by the emotional impact and

phenomenological measures of their “hedonic quality.”



• A Good User Experience Does Not

Necessarily Mean High-Tech or “Cool”

– The best user experience requires a

balance of functionality, usability, aesthetics,

branding, identity, and so on. (eg. Microsoft

Vista Package)

– In addition to user experience not just being

cool, it also is not just about technology for

technology’s sake. (eg. University

Conference Call system)


Figure 1-1 A new Microsoft software packaging design


• Design beyond Just Technology

– Design is about creating artifacts to satisfy a usage need in a language

that can facilitate a dialog between the creator of the artifact and the user.

That artifact can be anything from a computer system to an everyday

object such as a door knob.



• Components of a User Experience

– The newer concept of user experience still embodies all these implications of usability.

How much joy of use would one get from a cool and neat-looking iPad design that was

very clumsy and awkward to use? Clearly there is an intertwining in that some of the joy

of use can come from extremely good ease of use.

– The most basic reason for considering joy of use is the humanistic view that enjoyment is

fundamental to life. (Hassenzahl, M., Beu, A., & Burmester, M. (2001). Engineering joy.

IEEE Software, 18(1), pp. 70–76.)

– As a result, we have expanded the scope of user experience to include:

• effects experienced due to usability factors

• effects experienced due to usefulness factors

• effects experienced due to emotional impact factors



• User Experience Is (Mostly) Felt Internally by the User

– User experience, as the words imply, is the totality of the effect or effects

felt (experienced) internally by a user as a result of interaction with, and

the usage context of, a system, device, or product.

– Here, we give the terms “interaction” and “usage” very broad

interpretations, as we will explain, including seeing, touching, and

thinking about the system or product, including admiring it and its

presentation before any physical interaction, the influence of usability,

usefulness, and emotional impact during physical interaction, and

savoring the memory after interaction.



• User Experience Cannot Be Designed

– A user experience cannot be designed, only experienced. You are not

designing or engineering or developing good usability or designing or

engineering or developing a good user experience.

– There is no usability or user experience inside the design; they are

relative to the user. Usability occurs within, or is revealed within, the

context of a particular usage by a particular user. The same design but

used in a different context—different usage and/or a different user—

could lead to a different user experience, including a different level of, or

kind of, usability.




– We illustrate this concept with a non-computer example, the experience of

enjoying Belgian chocolates. Because the “designer” and producer of the

chocolates may have put the finest ingredients and best traditional processes

into the making of this product, it is not surprising that they claim in their

advertising a fine chocolate experience built into their confections. However,

by the reasoning in the previous paragraph, the user experience resides within

the consumer, not in the chocolates. That chocolate experience includes

anticipating the pleasure, beholding the dark beauty, smelling the wonderful

aromas, the deliberate and sensual consumption (the most important part), the

lingering bouquet and after-taste, and, finally, pleasurable memories.




– When this semantic detail is not observed and the chocolate is marketed

with claims such as “We have created your heavenly chocolate

experience,” everyone still understands. Similarly, no one but the most

ardent stickler protests whenBMWclaims “BMWhas designed and built

your joy!” In this book, however, we wish to be technically correct and

consistent so we would have them say, “We have created sweet treats to

ensure your heavenly chocolate experience” or “BMW has built an

automobile designed to produce your ultimate driving experience.”




Figure 1-2 User experience occurs within interaction and usage context


• Role of Branding, Marketing, and Corporate Culture

– For example, consider the case of Apple. The culture of designing for user

experience is so deeply engrained in their corporate culture that

everything they produce has a stamp of tasteful elegance and

spectacular design. This kind of fanatic emphasis on quality user

experience at Apple extends beyond just the products they produce and

even seeps into other areas of their company. When they make an

employment offer to a new employee, for example, the package comes in

a meticulously designed envelope that sets the stage for what the

company stands for (Slivka, 2009b).




– Similarly, when Apple sent call center technical support employees a T-

shirt as a gift, it arrived in a carefully designed box with the T-shirt folded

in a way that inspires a sense of design emphasis (Slivka, 2009a). From the

time one walks into an Apple store to the sleek industrial design of the

device, everything comes together in one harmonious whole to ensure

that users love the device. (NB: We are agnostic in the PC vs. Mac

religious wars, so please consider this objectively.)




– And, again, it is all about design for the user experience. A New York

Times article (Hafner, 2007) extols the enchanting aura of Apple stores,

“Not only has the company made many of its stores feel like gathering

places, but the bright lights and equally bright acoustics create a buzz

that makes customers feel more like they are at an event than a retail

store.” The goal of one new store in Manhattan was to make it “the most

personal store ever created.” This carefully designed user experience

has been very successful in generating sales, return visits, and even

tourist pilgrimages.



• Why Have Such a Broad Definition?

– We believe that the user experience can begin well before actual usage.

It can start as early as when the user beholds a system or product and its

packaging or presentation. It does not necessarily end with actual usage.

After usage, the pleasure, or displeasure, can persist in the user’s mind.

This perspective of what the user experiences about the product includes

initial awareness of the product, to seeing its advertising, to visiting the

store, to viewing it and buying it, to taking it out of the box, to using it, to

talking with others who have used it—in other words, it is about a broad

cultural and personal experience.



• Why Have Such a Broad Definition?

– It needs to implicitly recognize the need for multiple roles to work together,

to collaborate and communicate, and to work synergistically to ensure a

quality user experience. It frames the efforts toward designing for a user

experience in an interdisciplinary context, where everyone from

hardware engineers, to visual designers, to branding experts, to

interaction designers need to collaborate and coordinate their efforts to

define and execute a shared design vision.


Homework

• Personal Statement

– Length : 1,000 words or less

– Who I am, and What I have been through

– Things that I like

– What I like to study/research

• In general

• Relating to HCI/UX

– My dreams

• Upload on one of below

– Blogger

– Wordpress

– Tumblr

• Due

– 11: 59 pm Sun. 9th March


Contacts

• Email

– [email protected]

• Facebook

– https://www.facebook.com/UX.theory


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