Last Time On…Experience Design

Last time during our discussion on the Swallow paper, we got to see how their research agenda was carried out through their methodologies. There were 5 of them, and led to some interesting findings about the 3 disparate people they followed during their study. This time, we got to see how these methods ended up revealing design insights.

We didn’t get a chance to get to all the groups, but we hear’s what we did hear from (we went back in our groups to discuss the major findings and implications for design): from those who took a look at identity, they found out personalization is linked to intersubjectivity and the holistic notion of self; from those who took a look at sociability, they found out it was good to be social, and the phone’s different types of remediations are linked to an intersubjective ettiquette; from those who took a look at security, they found out many different things and double hypothetical views from the participants (meaning that either the personas originally were wrong, or the woman taken for the study is crazy); for those who looked at relevance, they found out it wasn’t relevant to anybody.

One other important aspect of the study was the relationship of technical features and people’s lifeworlds. Many thought “if I was the kind of person who did x, then I would be the type of person to use the phone”. This shows that people are actively constructing what it means to be a certain type of other person, and how they evaluate that type of person and lifeworld. Could be interesting to know for the future.

“What if…” Land

So this is our theory about the user experience, but there is another one: this theory says the user experience is all about usability. So if we were to assume this, this totally changes everything about our outlook on people and people as users. We then took this life-changing thinking to this study and asked how one could execute such a study by using just usability, and found out we would be doing lots of tasks and user preferences research. We were also informed about 80-90% of our community thinks this way.

Ultimately, the point of this thought experiement (and double hypothetical state of being) lead to this statement: if one is not aware of the operational theory they are working with, one cannot really consent to it. One will just find the insights the theory tells him/her to find. On the other hand, if one is critical and can challenge the theory and bring in other theories as well, this is where the juicy bits of insights start being generated, and then one’s design can truly be well-informed.

One More Step

So then we were asked what we thought of this paper’s implications for design. After going around the class for a little bit, we came to the conclusion that they weren’t really all that special, awesome, or downright inspiring. We have heard of these kinds of designs before, and we were just un-impressed. After talking about what their implications were, we analyzed how they stated these implications and came to a conclusion that if one attempts to universalize these, it ends up creating more problems, as it leads to “banal statements”, like “people are paranoid”, which don’t really end up helping the designer out at all.

The Big To-Go Point(s)

This ultimately led to a “big rock” idea from the past couple of weeks of readings: it is extremely hard to disentangle our horizons from users, but the more we interact with them and can attempt to fuse our horizons with them to become better informed. This is a fancy way of expressing the hermeneutic circle, a recursive way of researching and trying to become objective, but really cannot.

We also need to have the strength and ability to expose our theories, be able to critique them, know what their strengths and weaknesses are, know what we want to find out, and match what we want to know with the strengths of the theory and methods we end up choosing to carry out our research and studies.

Also be aware the usability is not the only part of experience. Good usability doesn’t make a good experience, but it certainly will make a bad one if usability is poor (unless otherwise intended).