AIT

							AIT: Analysing User Experience

Paul Cairns
pcairns@cs.york.ac.uk
What is user experience?




           User Experience, Paul Cairns
UX vs UCD

 Same thing!
 Or not
  – UCD: Usability, usefulness, satisfaction
  – UX: er… something else
 Need understanding before design



                User Experience, Paul Cairns
Where is the Science?
UX                             Science
 Personal                      Generalisable
 Unique                        Repeatable
 Subjective                    Objective




               User Experience, Paul Cairns
Objectives

 Can we analyse UX?
 Holism vs reductionism
 Empirical work on UX
  – Eduardo Calvillo-Gámez




              User Experience, Paul Cairns
User Experience, Paul Cairns
Reductionist

   Hassenzahl
   Questionnaire for beauty and goodness
   Hedonic and pragmatic qualities
   Let’s have a go




                User Experience, Paul Cairns
Exercise

 Assess your mobile phone using the
  AttrakDiff questionnaire




             User Experience, Paul Cairns
Hassenzahl’s Findings

 Beauty – HQ properties
  – Related to self
 Goodness – PQ properties
  – Related to use
 Problems?



                User Experience, Paul Cairns
Holistic

 McCarthy and Wright
  – Technology as Experience
 Can’t ignore the complexity
 Narrative: reflected and anticipated
 Prosaic experience



                User Experience, Paul Cairns
Exercise

 Tell a story (in pairs) about using your
  phone in the last few days. How would
  you summarise the UX in the story you
  heard?




              User Experience, Paul Cairns
Using stories

 Where to focus?
 From holism to design?
 Need analysis
  – Holism lacks teeth




               User Experience, Paul Cairns
Definitional

 Definitions solve the problem!
 Law et al: 23 statements, 5 definitions
 ISO def: “A consequence of a user’s
  internal state, the characteristics of the
  designed system and the context within
  which the interaction occurs”
 Does this help?

               User Experience, Paul Cairns
User Experience, Paul Cairns
Videogames

 Pure experience
  – Before, during, momentary, after
 Multifaceted experience
  – Transportation, immersion, social…
 UX challenge



               User Experience, Paul Cairns
Research question

 How do controls affect the gaming
  experience?
 HCI
  – Mappings, direct manipulation,
    instruments
  – Getting job done



               User Experience, Paul Cairns
Naïve experiments

   Manipulate “control”
     1. Knob vs keys in Tetris
     2. Guitar vs Pad in Guitar Hero
     3. Watching vs. playing
   “Measure” narratives
   Didn’t work!


                 User Experience, Paul Cairns
What is important in GX?




           User Experience, Paul Cairns
Scoping the domain

 Grounded theory study
 Reviews of games
 Validated with interviews
Key concepts

   Control – eg things to do
   Ownership – “you but not you”
   Facilitators – time
   Environment – sound and graphics
   Game-play – rules and scenario
Puppetry

   Object “double vision”
   Player is own audience
   Necessary for good GX…
   …but not sufficient
User Experience, Paul Cairns
Validating the model

 Questionnaire
 Structural equational modelling
  – PCA but harder
 Re-doing experiments




              User Experience, Paul Cairns
Outcomes

 Objective measures
 Lost “total” experience
  – CEGE is hygenic UX
  – No narratives, thrills or emotions
 Prediction and explanation
 Holistic? Reductionist?


                User Experience, Paul Cairns
Is this useful?

 Is it analytic?
 Is it relevant?
 What else could we have done?
Can we analyse UX?

 Love, happiness, well-being
 UX is peddling love potions?
 Aspects of UX (love/happiness) have a
  place in science




              User Experience, Paul Cairns
Reading
Hassenzahl, M. (2004) The Interplay of Beauty,
  Goodness, and Usability in Interactive Products
Wright, P., McCarthy, J., Meekison, L. (2004) Making
  sense of Experience. In Blythe et al, Funology, 43-53
Swallow, D. , Blythe, M., Wright, P. (2005) Grounding
  experience: relating theory and method to evaluate
  the user experience of smartphones.
Calvillo-Gamez, E., Cairns, P. (2009) Pulling the strings:
  a theory of puppetry for the gaming experience.



                    User Experience, Paul Cairns