Towards a Shared Definition of User Experience (UX)

In order to obtain a better understanding about the experience design, we (Zeinab, Tag and me) found three papers for ourselves, which are related to its definition, the examples of the interactions with products and the future direction of UX. The paper I chose to read is an ongoing paper to investigate shared definition of UX. This paper basically tries to address the following questions: Why people have different interpretation about UX? Do these differences have any impacts on the outcomes of the research? How can we draw a shared definition of UX from the entire field of HCI?

According to the paper, there are several negative factors to reach a common notion of UX. First of all, UX is associated with a variety range of concepts including emotional, experiential, and affective. As a multidisciplinary field, the important value of UX can be interpreted differently depending on the researchers’ background and their interest. Secondly, the units of analysis for UX are too flexible. Depending on the its target audiences (i.e. whether their targets are individual users or multiple users), the different strategies will be applied. The paper also states that the landscape of UX-based research is fragmented by diverse theoretical models and their different focusing elements, such as emotion, beauty and pleasure.

The authors assert that lack of a shared definition of UX has negative impacts on not only academic area but also commercial area. However, as they mentioned in the paper, if the multi-interpretations and values towards UX are acceptable, what is the point to investigate the common definition of UX? Is it really more valuable and helpful? Thus, I argue that the notion of UX doesn’t necessary to escape its multiple ways of interpretation. As this paper is ongoing paper, the shared definition has not come out in the paper. However, it seems a good theme to discuss with people in a group. I hope Tag’s and Zeinab’s paper can give another good point of view towards this theme.