Defining the "experience"
A concept so pervasive in the design and marketing lore, yet so ambiguous to pin down to a univocal definition. Some notes from literature unearth facets and nuances of what we call "UX".
What is “user experience” exactly ? We may intuitively get the gist of the term, however ambiguity still linger over this concept - as a recognition into academic literature and around the Internet shows.
Why does this matter?
There is still wide divergence about the way that we can measure the Human Experience on omnichannel brand ecosystems and this might partly stem from the absence of universal clarity around what experience actually means and what it encompasses as a concept.
In this post I’ll try to get to the bottom of the topic to unearth all the unsuspected nuances that matter for everyone who designs experiences on the Web.
“The concept of experience went from being the most useful concept for philosophical purposes to being one of the most neglected or vilified concepts over the course of the twentieth century”. (Marianne Janack)
Conceptual definitions and ambiguities
The domain of online UX Design has changed dramatically since the first decade of the 21st century.
Evolutionary trends in business and technology have continued to push experimentation in the field of design of the interaction between people and Web interfaces, giving rise to new formats and languages.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Automation, Virtual Reality, Machine Learning and Deep Learning in particular have contributed to "changing the way users experience physical and virtual environments" (Flavián, Ibáñez-Sánchez, Orús, 2018) in various sectors, from education to retail, from entertainment to health (Berg, Vance, 2016).
In 2015, many practitioners began to spot a major shift, as that the emergence of high-quality models, mature design models, automation, artificial intelligence and mobile technology seemed to signal the end of an era for online design.(Nouvel, 2015).
The study of the concept and of the different embodiments of user experience in the Web environment is very important to understand how the Web is changing, how the relationship between the physical world, the digital world and the virtual world, is panning out.
On the one hand, in fact, UX design as a domain of studies has been taking shape as a founding discipline for the realisation of the functional aspects of digital products. This reflected an era in the history of the Web, where digital products/interfaces were conceived to serve a mere “informative” user intent. (Zimmerman, 2008)
On the other hand, it has intersected the domain of marketing and communication, thus focusing on the characteristics of the experience that most affect the subjectivity of the user-audience, such as persuasive and cognitive processes, as well as emotional characteristics. This has been very much the case as the Web evolved into what has been dubbed as Web 2.0, which saw a more active role performed by users even in content creation and sharing. Moreover, as noted by Desmet, In addition, it has often been argued that the experiential or emotional quality of products is becoming more and more important for differential advantage in the marketplace because products are now often similar with respect to technical characteristics, quality, and price.
At the same time, the dichotomy outlined here mirrors the ambiguity of the very concept of "user experience", an ambiguity that seems to constitute a limit to the consolidation of a unitary and standardized UX project culture.
The absence of a unambiguous definition of the term has contributed both to the extreme fragmentation of design practices and methodologies, and to the difficulty in establishing standards for measuring and evaluating experiential "artifacts". (Forlizzi and Battarbee, 2004, Vermeeren et alii, 2010).
On the flipside, a plurality of approaches can be understood as the natural design response to what seem to be the most critical attributes of the experience: 1) a complex causal structure; 2) the "background noise" (March, 2011).
Understanding these aspects is essential for companies in the context of the so-called "digital transformation", and even more so from the perspective of Web 3.0 which, starting from 2020, is establishing itself as the new paradigm of the Internet.
Back to the roots: experience philosophy and psychology
The following round - up is a tentative mapping of the concept through the different approaches of pundits and schools of thought over time.
According to John Dewey, experience is the outcome of the interaction of organism and environment. He describes it to be dynamic, unified, communicative, historic and socially oriented. Experience always changes because there will always be a new and fresh interaction between organism and environment.
Aristotele maintains that experience comes about from perception and memory, and that art and science in turn come from experience. However, as noted by some authors, the philosopher never provided a definition of experience. Another great philosopher, Plato, wrote in his Gorgias that experiences relies entirely on the memory of what usually happens, without a direct connection with the knowledge of the objects experienced.
In phenomenology a common attribute to every experience seems to be intentionality, meaning that all experience is experience of something.
According to empiricism, experience is the only and main driver of all knowledge.
Evolution of the concept of UX
Between the end of the last century and the first decade of the new millennium, the literature on the subject of UX was configured mainly as programmatic (Hassenzahl et al. 2001, Overbeeke et al. 2002), that is, aimed at convincing the HCI community to take more seriously the experiential aspects of the interaction between people and digital interfaces.
Over time, this has been replaced by more conceptual contributions, with the aim of building a univocal vision of what constitutes a "good user experience".
In this process, we have witnessed the shift from an idea of UX as a punctual (and limited in time) interaction between a person and an interactive system (site, app, interface, etc.), to a broader vision that takes into account the elements context before and after the interaction itself: the user experience thus coincides with the user journey through a set of contact points (touchpoints).
In the digital context, the user experience takes shape in these touchpoints on the basis of causal links - i.e. the user gets to interact with the digital product on the basis of circumstances or events that occurred before the contact and the user experiences certain situations or events as a consequence of its interaction with the digital product (Mäkelä, Fulton Suri, 2001).
The framework of Mäkelä and Fulton Suri (Fig1) follows the model widely used in the current teaching of UX design and which distinguishes between three moments on a linear time axis, i.e. experience before the use of a digital product (expectations), during the use (satisfaction of use) and subsequently use (achievement of expectations).
This model is adopted, among others, by the Interaction Design Foundation and UXQB, two of the training bodies of international reference in the disciplines of digital design for the Web.
In both these representations, the conceptual shift of the user experience from the product of fruition emerges on a single point of contact (the digital product in its individuality), as a sum of multiple interactions, which take place on different channels but connected by an ecosystem strategy. A shift that therefore requires extending the field of UX design to the domains of corporate communication and marketing.
In fact, it is evident that the value of the interaction between user and digital product is determined not only by the quality of the punctual interaction, but also by actions that take place in the context in which the user moves on a daily basis (queries to the search engine, display of an advertising banner while browsing, word of mouth, in-app messages and so on), both from perceptions and expectations that the user possesses by virtue of his knowledge or relationship with the company or brand. The experience on the Web seems to be configured as the combination of two conceptual levels:
that of (informative) content
and that of the relationship, between a user and the entity that has built and voices the online experience.
The combination of these two points mirrors the polarity of Paul Watzlawick’s second axiom (Every communication has a content and relationship aspect, such that the latter classifies the former, and is therefore a meta-communication; a secondary communication about how a piece of information is meant to be interpreted.1967). This relationship can be created or modified through business and brand strategies. (De Sand, Frison, Zotz, Riener, 2020).
The American psychologist also makes explicit the concept of the impossibility of non-communication: if every behaviour, verbal or non-verbal, promotes a message to the interlocutor in a relational context (ibidem) it is intuitive to apply this principle also to the interpretation of the behaviour of the web interfaces.
Not only that: the concept of UX has clearly differentiated itself from that of usability, which describes the user-digital product relationship mainly in functional terms.
Today it is unanimously accepted that the quality of interaction on a single digital product must also be evaluated from the perspective of personal purposes, which can include emotional and perceptual factors (Pucillo, Cascini, 2014).
After reviewing several existing g definitions within HCI, Shulze and Kromker suggest a definition of experience as “the degree of positive or negative emotions that can be experienced by a specific user in a specific context during and after product use and that motivates for further usage”.
A fundamental turning point in the history of the discipline was undoubtedly the Honeycomb framework by Peter Morville, one of the most important pioneers in the study of UX. In this model, the user experience is represented by the synergistic addition between various aspects - usability, utility, desirability, accessibility, possibility of being found (findability), credibility (credibility) value (value).
The perspective of the user-subject
A definition of UX design that takes into account all the aspects considered so far is the one offered by the Interaction design Foundation (IDF).
"User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function. "
In addition to suggesting the importance of multidisciplinary synergy in the production of a quality user experience, here particular attention is paid to the concepts of "meaning" and "relevance" for the user, which allude to the relative, personal and highly individual nature of the concept: the user experience happens as it were "inside" a person and has much less to do with the attributes of the product than it has to do with the mental states of the user (Roto, 2009).
This assumption is also confirmed by other researches, in which a conception of UX emerges as a dynamic, context-dependent and subjective event. An individual (rather than social) value that emerges from the interaction with a product, system, service or object (Law et alii, 2009).
Alongside the product attribute dimension - the user's mental state, in fact, another interesting analysis perspective is that of the process - knowledge dimension.
The design of the experience can therefore be understood both as the creation of the user path and as the design of the information content that derives from that process. People browse sites and use applications animated by "information needs" (Morville, Rosenfeld, 2006) and the interactions they make with an information system are aimed at integrating or building their knowledge in order to conclude activities (tasks) and achieve certain objectives . The concept of experience is therefore closely linked to that of knowledge by a causal link.
It is possible to summarize a definition of experience useful for this discussion starting from various contributions that highlight the aspect of experience as a perceptive and conscious event (Borchert, Donald, 2006, Smith, David Woodruff, 2018):
-Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these conscious processes "
Understood as a conscious event in the broadest sense, the experience involves a subject to whom various elements are presented-
In the context of the Web, the "elements" presented to the subject-user correspond, on a first interpretative level to what constitutes the interactive system, or digital product, in its physicality that can be experienced with the senses: we are therefore talking about contents, visual and graphic components , texts, audio-video multimedia elements, and all the behaviours of the interface that arise in response to the actions of a user on it.
At a second and broader level of interpretation, on the other hand, the user is exposed to elements on other channels and through different types of formats. The experience is no longer that of the digital-product only (site, app, platform), but of the brand ecosystem of which the digital product is part.
The user experience with a brand on the Web therefore takes place on two distinct but somewhat contiguous levels: the narrow and circumscribed one of the product-interface and the enlarged and widespread one of the multichannel ecosystem. On both of these levels, the user acquires knowledge of the brand / company through interaction with the digital product. The experience of using the digital product is in effect a relationship with the "corporate world".
There is a value circle between brand, user and product-interface, in which the experience that a person has of a brand affects the user experience that occurs on the digital product; at the same time the experience lived on or through the digital product ends up influencing the experience (understood as a cognitive result) that a person has of a brand, according to the notion formulated by Aaker (1991) that the brand identity is the sum of the identities of products, symbols, people and in general of everything attributable to that brand.
This suggests a couple of thoughts:
on the one hand, that the user experience is intangible physical evidence of the brand;
on the other hand, the construction of the user experience, both on the single digital product and through all the points of contact, is an activity to be strategically planned and designed.
UX design can therefore be understood as a process of strategic creation and implementation of both a particular online experience and the impact that this experience has on the people who interact with it.
This is an activity of crucial importance: as users / customers, people seem to be less influenced by the quality of the business offer than by the levels of experience surrounding that offer (Stickdorn at alii, 2018).
references
(update in progress!!)