I asked an innocent question the other day in various fora (AnthroDesign and IxDA) in which I participate:
Could someone give me the "canonical" definition of "User Experience" and perhaps a definition of "experience?"
I got a wonderful set of responses in return that surprised me. That I learned something new along the way was even more delightful.
Peter Merholz's response was the canonical source I was looking for. Heartening to know that the expression was used as far back as the late '80s. Also good to know that Don Norman truly did say it.
I also learned about Bob Jacobson for the first time (where have I been all this time?). Bob spends a lot of time thinking about the idea of "experience." His blog is dedicated to the subject. Bob and I had a reasonable dialog going for a couple of days in which he made it clear to me that "user experience" was a terrible expression; that Don himself has recently recanted and wished he'd never coined the term, and so on.
After I got beyond Bob's rhetoric and intentional trivialization of the meaning of user experience (merely a "popular euphemism for web design")I caught on to his deeper concern: limiting the discussion of "experience" to the 10% of people's lives that might be focused on an "instrumental purpose" diminishes the other 90% of their "experience."
That was a delightfully refreshing stance. Extraordinarily humanistic and that appeals to me. Unfortunately, it fails to help me in my efforts to actually create an experience for the users I've been hired to help. I guess Bob and I did agree that if we were given the task of designing an experience for a set of people for an instrumental purpose, then it would be better to figure out a really great way of doing it. I believe that stance can be equally humanistic.
But the references that really helped me a lot were from Richard Anderson.
Richard sent me to Tom Guarriello's entry in UX Magazine where I got the canonical discussion of why we can't really design for a user experience. I've heard this argument before, in passing, but a as dyed-in-the-wool designer, I've never quite understood it. I've always chalked it up to some wimpy fear about 'laying a trip' on people. Tom spells it out really clearly: you can't design an experience because experiences are necessarily, by definition, subjective. Each individual "experiences" the world internally so it's impossible to design an experience that is truly shared.
Tom does agree that we can design for meaning, and that we can design contexts that increase the opportunities for people to have experiences. But experiences are personal so we can't design for them.
I can't argue with Tom. A) he's spent 30 years studying "phenomenological psychology", essentially the psychology of the human experience, so I literally don't have the ammunition to argue his points and B) I don't really disagree with him - what people experience is truly personal, internalized and therefore impossible to know or really design for.
But then it just comes down to an exercise in semantics. Okay, I can only design the occasion for experience, not the experience itself. Can I design a "context" in such a manner as to elicit a smile from my participant? Not all the time for all participants? Okay, how about for "most" participants, especially the one's I care about most? Can I up the chances that the folks I care about most will react to a situation I've created in a way that they would like? Do I really know or care what it is that's going on internally that ultimately expressed itself as a smile-that from an external observer's perspective appears to be pleasure?
I'm fine being a Skinnerian. Stimulus/response. I've always claimed to be a behavioralist (to anyone who's bothered to ask or been in earshot). I've never claimed to know or care what's really going on in people's heads. I only want to understand what they do, what they choose to do, what they want done to them and so forth. If they seek pleasure, let me find out what they find pleasurable and I'll "design the occasion" for that.
If they seek challenge, same deal.
So does it really matter whether I can design for "experience" or simply design for the occasion to have an experience, if, in the end, the participant ultimately elicits emotion, takes an action, or behaves in a way that they have asked me to help them behave in such circumstances? more...
