What is “Experience” anyway?

In their paper “Understanding Experience in Interactive Systems”, Forlizzi and Battarbee describe a framework for thinking about experience, which they describe as the result of the interaction between people and a product, looking at all aspects:- sensual, cognitive, emotional and aesthetic.

Essentially, they break down experience two ways:

In terms of the types of user-product interaction, they identify three types:

• Fluent – where you use the product automatically, and think only about your end goal, not the product, e.g. riding a bicycle
• Cognitive – where you focus on the product and how to use it. There may be confusion or error. You engage in meta-thinking. An example is trying to identify the flushing mechanism of a foreign toilet.
• Expressive – where you form a relationship with the product through customisation, personalisation and making the product better fit your needs. An example is restoring a chair and painting it a different colour.

They also break down experience in a social and temporal sense:

• “experience” – is a known, repeated experience and the stream of self-talk and adjustment that happens during use. e.g. walking in a park.
• “An experience” is more edged and defined. It is a specific, time-boxed event that has significance to because it inspires behavioural or emotional change. e.g. discovering an online community of interest.
• “Co-experience” is where people create meaning and emotion together through product use and social interaction. e.g. playing a mobile game with friends.

Emotion and scalability are also mentioned as important aspects of experience, the latter concerning the different between “small experiences” such as a particular button or menu versus the whole experience.

The paper offers valid insights, but does lack substance when talking about how to apply the framework in real design situations. Also the “model” itself is not grounded in anything other than the authors’ own conjecture. As such the names, and in particular the structure, that they have chosen are somewhat arbitrary. Fluent and Cognitive could be considered as two ends of a single continuum. “Experience” could be called “doing”, “an experience” could be called “significance”, co-experience could be called “collaboration”.

Nonetheless, the paper does offer value by providing a vocabulary and a set of aspects to consider when designing user experience.