Undestanding Experience in Interactive Systems

This week I reviewed the paper entitled ” Understanding Experience in Interactive Systems” by Jodi Forlizzi and Katja Battarbee. The paper discusses experience and its role in multidisciplinary research and practice.

According to the paper, authors include contributions from design, business, philosophy, anthropology, cognitive science, social science,and other disciplines to examine experience from different perspectives, and group models and theoretical approaches as product-centered, user-centered, and interaction-centered. Product-centered models provide straightforward applications for design practice, and these kind of experiences usually have a criteria or checklist to assess the quality . User-centered models help designers and developers to understand the people who will use their products, and experience is understood from peoples interacting with the product. Interaction-centered models explore the role that products serve in bridging the gap between designer and user, and experience is totality engaging self in relationship with object in a situation.

Moreover the paper presents an interactive-centered framework of experience where it focuses on interactions between individuals and products and experiences the results, as well as stressing the importance of these experiences in context of social interaction. In accordance to the framework, there are three ways to describe user-product interactions:

• Fluent that focuses on the automatic and skilled interactions with products, like riding a bicycle
• Cognitive interactions that focuses on the product hand, and can result in knowledge or confusion and error, for instance using online algebra tutor solving a mathematical problem
• Expressive interactions that help user from a relationship to the product, for example setting background images for mobile phones

Furthermore, the framework characterises three type of experience. The first, experience is the constant steam of self-talk that happens while interacting with the products, like walking in the park. The second, an experience refers to something that could be articulated or named, and has a beginning and often inspires emotional and behavioural change in the experiencer, for instance attending a dinner party.  The third, Co-experience talks about user experience in social contexts, and takes place as  experiences are created together or shared with others through use of products, for example playing a mobile messaging game with friends.

Besides, the paper notes that emotions is at the heart of any human experience and an essential component of user-product interactions and user experience, because of three basic functions that are to shape our plans and interactions, to organise the plan procedures, and to evaluate the outcomes. In addition, the paper points at scalability of experience as the infinite amount of smaller user-product interactions and emotional responses that build up larger experiences over time. As the conclusion, the framework can be used by multidisciplinary design teams to understand and generate kinds of interactions and experiences that new product and systems might offer.