Three points about User Experience

Evangelos Karapanos
Eindhoven University of Technology

User experience should not be only about use

We seem to undermine what is happening to computing.
Interactions with computing systems become subtle, part of
natural human activities, such as walking in a city,
participating in conversations. Usability and joy derived from
interaction will eventually blur out. Instead, we should strive to
understand in what ways computing can support human
experiences.

We should be inquiring into prolonged use

HCI and UX consequently has focused on initial use. But
there are a number of trends that ask our attention for
prolonged use. First, products are increasing becoming
service-center, with revenues rooted more in the services
than in the actual product. Second, length and coverage of
product warranties increase. Soft reliability project: “48% of all
returned products, are technically fully functional, i.e.
according to specifications”

Memories are (sometimes) more relevant than

experiences
Literature in Psychology suggests that experiences can only
be measured at the time of their occurrence. Once they have
ended, experiential information does not exist; it can only be
reconstructed from recalled contextual cues. But memories
are not necessarily a source of bias. They are just a different
source of information. Often, memories are more relevant
than experiences, for example when evaluating our past or
predicting our future.
•Karapanos, E., Martens, J., & Hassenzahl, M. (2009). Reconstructing Experiences through Sketching. Available as ArXiv pre-print
from http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.5343.
•Karapanos, E., Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J., & Martens, J. (2009). User experience over time: an initial framework. In CHI '09:
Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 729-738). New York, NY, USA: ACM.