Exploring the Meaning of User Experience

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.

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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?

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Why Oregonians are Different...

Our yoga group meets at lunchtime in the company's health center. Today, it was an absolutely gorgeous late Spring day - 80 degrees, clear skies. As I was leaving the changing room, I saw the group returning to the yoga room from the grassy area.

"Aren't we practicing outside?" I asked, a little confused - I had just seen them going out to setup not a few minutes before.

"Too sunny," one of them offered without irony.

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Jammin' with high tech...

Tripped across a new use of the termed "jammed" today. New for me at least. In a recent article in the NY Times A High-End Remote for a High-Tech Life journalist Anne Eisenberg describes Logitech's recent offering in the market of universal remotes. As part of her review, she mentions ways in which she needed to get help while setting the thing up.

At one point, she writes: "Some of the fixes were minor: for instance, when the remote jammed, I took out the battery and popped it back in."

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Usually, I expect to hear "jammed" to refer to a door that's hard to open, to the paper stuck in a copier, to a paper shredder, or to date myself, to entangled typewriter keys.

It's kind of quaint to think about the term being used for a digital device.

I might start using it myself. It sounds so much more innocuous than "crashed" or "hung." Like something that might happen around the house - no big deal.

I particularly liked the way she describes "unjamming" the remote: just remove the batteries and put them back.

Does any of this bother anyone in any way? Once we become accustomed to digital devices "jamming" will manufacturers create easier ways to "unjam" them? Will the competition think of ways to prevent them from jamming in the first place? Why do we have to wait?

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High Technology Requires High Pain Threshold

It's not news that "high technology" requires extraordinary pain thresholds. Only the intrepid, the very young, masochists or folks with profound memory loss would choose to continue purchasing new products and services dependent on high technology solutions.

Cell phones are an easy target, and their horrific "user experience" is nothing new. That the problems I'm describing are mundane only underscores the pitiful state we're in.

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Bill Moggridge in his keynote at CHI2007 (the annual international conference on Human/Computer Interaction) this year gave us a tour through his latest book Designing Interactions. He dedicates quite a bit space to discussions of the failure of DoCoMo services, specifically the unfortunate and in end highly entertaining and amusing attempts by an office administrator to use her DoCoMo enabled phone to purchase a can of coke.

My wife (The Reluctant User) and I finally made the decision to purchase a cell phone for our daughter RELa on her 17th birthday. Its absurd (at this juncture in history) to even think there's a need to list the reasons for our decision, the bigger question might be why we waited so long. We have been a long-time supporter of Working Assets recently moving our wireless accounts to their Sprint PCS based service. While they don't provide a huge selection of phones, it seemed for our daughter's needs, the Nokia 6165i would be more than sufficient.

When we had moved our own accounts over, we chose an LG phone, mostly because it was free and had more options and features than we would ever need or use. The 6165i, while not the sleekest, coolest or most advanced device on the planet, was sufficiently feature laden and not the LG that it seemed like it would do. So in spite of the dread I was feeling in learning all of the new options and interactions required to support this different device, I recommended we go with it.

All was well. We ordered the phone well in advance of the day in case there might be problems and were delighted that it fired right up. On the big day, RELa unwraps it, turns it on and of course immediately begins the process of customizing it - ringers, wallpapers, etc.

In every case, the phone indicated that no such files existed.

My daughter has built up a much larger tolerance for technology's brittleness over the past year as she has taken on more and more ambitious projects on her iMac. The screams of frustration and declarations of "Pathetic!" and "Stupid" have died down to mere mutterings. So I was impressed this time as she looked with only mild annoyance and almost clinical objectivity as the phone failed to do what was clearly being asked of it. She was all too ready to hand the thing over to me to see if I might tease out what the problem was.

After trying the several pathways to various content/customization "galleries," I agreed with her that Something Was Wrong. As it was too late on a Thursday night to call anyone, we left it for the next morning.

The first call, on Friday, to Nokia's tool-free number, was efficient and supportive: that's not the way the phone should work. The customer service rep suggested I call our service provider who sold us the phone.

"Tanya" at Working Assets immediately understood the problem: the 6165i was stripped of any content before it was sent to end users.

Tanya took my shrieks of "foul" in stride - she'd obviously been down this road before. Even as I was sputtering about changing the web-site to make this apparent "feature" more clear to the shopper, she was offering to a) gladly pursue my suggestion of replacing the phone, or better yet, she suggested, b) provide a credit to my daughter for her to download some ringtones and wallpaper from the Working Assets site.

As I spoke with her, I took a quick tour of the offered content and decided it would be much less hassle to just let RELa download what she wanted...the base ringers and wallpapers were usually so lame anyway, I rationalized.

With our account now properly credited, I expected we had resolved the situation.

Stupid.

When next we approached the device, it was late on a Saturday night, waiting in line for a dance recital to begin. RELa deftly navigated her way to the Web connection (one button click on the navigation key) and watched in amazement as the pretty icon of a spinning world kept spinning, with the comforting words: "preparing service." Again, without the slightest sign of annoyance, she turned the thing over to me. My ratlike sniffings at the various maze entries returned slightly different reactions, but the same result.

It being too late on a Saturday to reach "Tanya," we put it down for the evening.

After exactly one week, with no fewer than 6 support calls to Working Assets, all of which were the most civil, understanding and truly supportive calls I've experienced in years, we finally have a phone that can connect to the Web. It still doesn't have content on it, but at least it can connect. The gymnastics we all went through during those calls are too demeaning and meaningless to log in detail, but suffice it to say, entering "secret" codes, "provisioning" the service, re-entering secret codes and the like, ultimately forcing Sprint to do a network check, finally led Working Assets to conclude that the phone needed to be replaced. Which they did, overnight without charge to us.

Of course, it still needed to go through the 4 hour provisioning cycle, but once that was complete, voila! the little spinning earth resolved into the Working Assets website. Nirvana!

I've tried to sum up the cost to Working Assets, Nokia, and Sprint to resolve this issue and I suspect it's well into the 100s of dollars. I'm not bothering to account for the cost of my inconvenience and my time in being complicit in rectifying this decision on Sprint's part to eliminate content from the phone. I was as amused as I was annoyed, and the incredibly patient and service-oriented Working Assets staff made that whole side of the experience as comfortable as it could be.

We still don't have content downloaded, but that's RELa's problem at this point...until I hear her cries of anguish from the computer room.

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