User Experience from Product Creation Perspective

This paper describes some viewpoints for user experience from a large corporate. Nokia manufactures mobile devices, towards which people often have strong emotions, so user experience is highly valued inside the company. Nokia has a long history in designing for, evaluating, and managing user experience, and is well aware of the challenges in these activities. It is relatively easy to investigate UX with existing products, but it is much harder to investigate UX with an early concept idea or a single new feature that does not actually work yet. It requires understanding the fundamentals of user experience. REFLECTION SECTION As user experience (UX) covers many research fields, and each discipline has different viewpoints to UX, shortly explaining my route to UX research hopefully helps to understand my viewpoints in this workshop. I come from HCI field, with computer science education but a long career in usability of software and hardware systems. My main motivation is to make user experience easy to manage in a product creation process, so that customers would be happy and loyal users of the resulting products. I am also hoping to include value of an experience (Cockton 2006) inside the definition of user experience, as it is the longterm value of the system that makes our customers loyal. I grew confident for the need of user experience years ago, starting from the design perspective: some people just love their gadget because of its industrial design. They do not care too much about usability, as long as the look pleases them. Second, in long-term field studies, we often notice users give feedback about social and emotional aspects, not only about utility and usability of the tested system. Third, when conducting user needs studies in contextual inquiry manner, the findings point us to needs that are well beyond efficient task accomplishment. Why a family man prefers a mobile phone to a PC for browsing the Internet at home? Why do we see so many fancy phones on the tables of a popular Indian café? I have examined the theories behind UX in my PhD thesis (Roto 2006), and since then I have been working e.g. on the UX elements that help in UX evaluation. Understanding the underlying user needs, both pragmatic and hedonic, is the key in providing good systems for customers and thereby in business success. PRINCIPLES Before we can gain a common understanding about UX and make science out of it, we should be able to formulate a definition that everyone can agree on. There are a number of UX definitions out there; below a few of them. “All the aspects of how people use an interactive product: the way it feels in their hands, how well they understand how it works, how they feel about it while they’re using it, how well it serves their purposes, and how well it fits into the entire context in which they are using it” (Alben 1996) “The overall experience, in general or specifics, a user, customer, or audience member has with a product, service, or event” (Shedroff, online). Shedroff defines experience separately as “the sensation of interaction with a product, service, or event, through all of our senses, over time, and on both physical and cognitive levels”. “Every aspect of the user's interaction with a product, service, or company that make up the user's perceptions of the whole”. (UPA 2006) “All aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products. ” (Nielsen-Norman group, online) “The overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system. ” (Wikipedia, online) “A result of motivated action in a certain context. ” (Mäkelä & Fulton Suri 2001) “A consequence of a user’s internal state (predispositions, expectations, needs, motivation, mood, etc.), the characteristics of the designed system (e.g. complexity, purpose, usability, functionality, etc.) and the context (or the environment) within which the interaction occurs (e.g. organisational/social setting, meaningfulness of the activity, voluntariness of use, etc.). ” (Hassenzahl & Tractinsky 2006) Subjectiveness: Few definitions communicate even the very fundamental fact that user experience happens inside the person. Lesson one in differentiating user experience from usability is to understand that usability is a product attribute but user experience is personal, subjective feeling