So, does user experience design really exist?
A bit of rant, another of abstraction. Things that go by unspoken
In the wake of postmodernism, corporate jargon and above all, empty virtue signalling¹, we swiftly leave basics behind. This triggered me to write about the relation between User Experience and its Design. Since designing is about becoming acquainted with the object of design’s limits and restrictions let’s begin by understanding what User Experience actually is.
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Based on Norman and Nielsen’s², the User Experience Professionals Association defines User Experience³ as:
“Every aspect of the user’s interaction with a product, service, or company that make up the user’s perceptions of the whole.”
Though complex, the definition is concise and we can clearly differentiate its components. By order of appearance:
- Every aspect of the user’s interaction — user and interaction…
- …with a product, service or company — from here on product…
- …that make up the user’s perception of the whole.
Now that we’ve determined its components we can begin to understand how they articulate together molding the User Experience — from here on UX.
¿What’s interaction?
Our observed defintion begins by saying “Every aspect of the user’s interaction with a product…”. Let’s then see what interaction is:
“Interaction is an action, relationship or mutual influence between two or more actors”
Let’s continue un-framing! Here, the term “actor” means to count with the ability to act. Etymologically speaking, we can infer that acting is a critical condition for interacting. According to this new definition, the actors in the interaction — a user and a product in our case — mutually influence each other. This means that any of the acting parts can have an effect on the other’s response action.
These actors do not exist in the void. Any one of them can begin the interaction by releasing information into their environment for the opposite actor to perceive, process and release this new information back to the environment. This way, the initiator can repeat the process all over again, until any of the actors becomes tired. In summary, a conversation.
¿What’s a user?
Being its experience our main point of interest, let’s analyze our interaction’s first actor. We can be 99.99% sure that our user subject is a human being. At least for the time being.
Depending on the period or the discipline from where we look, there are so many available human being definitions we could probably fill another article. What we can certainly say is that we human beings are conscious of our own existence hence have the capacity to think and act consciously.
So a user, is a human being that performs the act of using. By using, our subject can consciously take advantage of said action’s effects, therefore transforming what was used to useful. This leaves us with two premises:
“there’s no user without use, and there’s no use without a user”
“use yields a result, which can be taken advantage of”
If the result is exploitable, this conscious action will eventually be automated, becoming an unconscious habit.
Here lies the relationship between use and emotions. Among other characteristics this complex structure called human being counts with an internal emotional state, fed with external results through a complex framework of needs, desires, motivations, purposes and expectations.
According to Winslow’s pyramid⁴, our subjects first target is to survive, for what it automates certain actions like breathing or generating hunger through a complex molecular signalling system so they feel hunger. Once basic needs are satisfied, they advance to the next levels formed by reflexion — our intellectual capacity — and aspirations — because we live in an opinionated society.
¿What’s a product?
We already know the first participant of our conversation. Let’s take a look at the second. The word “product” comes from the latin pro-ductus (forward, guided and driven) which means “produced, achieved, carried out”. If we understand product as a result of a natural, social or industrial process, we can consider language or culture, a spoon or an HDMI cable, a brand, the service it offers or their corporate identity, as products.
Here is where, because of business needs, some discipline practitioners intentionally trim their field of action to human-computer interaction, leaving behind the analog world.
We’ve now linked products to businesses that produce them. As Patrick Newbery and Kevin Farnham say in “Experience Design: A Framework for Integrating Brand, Experience, and Value”⁵, “the goal of business’s use of design is to ensure as much seamless experience of value as possible for the customer in order to keep the customer engaged”
¿What’s value?
Now that we mention it, there are diverse definitions of value according to the discipline that studies it. In economy, it quantifies the merits of the sum of satisfaction and utilities an individual obtains from consuming a set amount of goods, products or services. In Marketing it’s defined as the difference between a consumer’s evaluation when comparing other alternatives of the same good, product or service.
We can find two types of value that correspond to different desires, motivations, purposes, needs and expectations. In the first place, tangible value, which is objective, quantifiable, measurable, functional and perceivable by anyone. In second place, intangible value, which is subjective, qualitative, aspirational, reflexive and can only be perceived by the individual.
Sometimes an intangible value can be constituted by an excess of specialized tangible value — the famous “nice to have” — which adds an extra emotional value to premium users. We can also find aspirational value inside the intangible realm. Common in luxury, it’s an externally materialized internal need, aimed to pursue external opinions which will fulfill the original need. Because we live in an opinionated society ¿don’t we?
¿What’s perception?
Let’s return for the last time to our observed UX definition: “Every aspect of the user’s interaction…that make up the user’s perceptions of the whole”. Its capacity to act consciously was the first user characteristic of interest to us. Because it gives it the capacity to affect its environment and kickstart, or take part in interaction. Now perception is the second. Through it, users are capable of gathering information from their environment, therefore completing their ability to interact. For with it, they can detect information distributed by the product.
We human beings are capable of apprehension about our environment through our 5 senses. They all converge in a single and indivisible perception composing cognition.
Neuroscience⁶ provides the details. Vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste, all capture partial information from the environment and deliver information flows to the brain, triggering our attention. Our brain has the ability to recognize key features in those streams — usually ambiguous.
A single sensory signal does not provide enough reliable information about the tridimensional structure of the environment, so our brain composes all senses into a single stream. In this stream the most goal oriented signal will dominate. For example, in order to judge size, vision will dominate, or in order to judge time, hearing will dominate.
It’s impossible to reconstruct reality bottom-up from particular data, so our brain adds an extra stream of previously perceived information to the mix in order to resolve ambiguity more precisely. The more information stored, the easier it will become to resolve it, until we can build habits.
For example, our memories are not always perfect detailed records. Our brain cuts and polishes corners, fills empty gaps and adjusts inconsistencies according to our mental models. If two different human beings recall a single situation, memories will be similar but not completely the same. This is why certain people are better than others at remembering anecdotes.
This is also noticeable in language, insufficient to wholly express what we human beings feel and think. If we go back to our conversation example, the user, through its brain, will continue trying to provide an estimate understanding of the product’s messages until it can fit the user’s mental models the best way possible. Do we always understand what others say to you? Or do we need to previously agree on a common vocabulary?
Our ability to commit these streams to short and long-term memory will feed our recognition, intuition, emotion, thought, intellect, language and learning abilities, among others. So perception allows us to process, interpret and organize the huge amount of information that surrounds us. This is how our user can become acquainted with its environment and increase his knowledge about it as he continues to interact with it.
In conclusion, if the product casts and the users perceives in the same environment, the latter will be able to sense the former. Hence, UX exists, whether we “designed” it or not.
How does a user perceive value through interaction?
A user’s needs can be different from his expectations. For example he may need to eat a salad for health, but expect to have a cake. So we can say that user perceived value lies in the intersection between his needs, his expectations and the value that was produced or provided by the business. A balance must be stricken. Vices are not usually a human need in terms of health but they do usually feed emotional expectations.
We can also state it as follows. A product offers value in the interaction and the user perceives it by interacting with it. This value is the external result that feeds the user’s needs, purposes and expectations we mentioned earlier. So the product’s payload is value, delivered upon communicating with the user in this conversation we’ve called interaction.
We can say that value is in the positive range when users can take advantage of the value perceived in the interaction with a product. Now, if the value does not answer to their needs, value is neutral. An unfulfilled value promise will place value in the negative range.
How does time influence value perception?
As we mentioned earlier, a user must interact continuously through time with a product in order to increase his knowledge of it. Hence Time’s role is of utter importance in describing how a user perceives value. Users can expose themselves repeatedly over time and perceive value in each exposition.
It also helps to analyze interaction. Similar to filmmaking, it allows us to understand its different scales. Micro-interactions are the smallest indivisible unit, like pushing a button to elicit a result. We can construct scenes by adding them up. And by adding up scenes, we can talk about episodes, and by adding up episodes we can talk about the Experience as the sum of all interactions. All of a sudden, we’ve gone from exchanging glances, to chatting, to building a relationship.
So, user experience is…
Experience happens and it’s later imperfectly remembered by our user in the future. Summing up, we can now then say:
“User Experience is the sum of interactions that happened along time between a user and a product, in which the user perceived some degree of value from the product.”
This said, we can conclude that experience, interaction and use are 3 different but overlapping ways to analyze the relationship between a user and a product.
Given that experience is something that happens subjectively to our users, we can also conclude that there is no way to design experience. Nonetheless we can design for experience by designing interactions in such a way that they deliver as much value to the user as possible.
We’ll see what that entails in our next episode. What do you think? Do you agree? Don’t you agree? Would you change something?
References
- https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/stop-saying-virtue-signalling
- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/
- https://uxpa.org/resources/definitions-user-experience-and-usability
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow
- http://www.experiencedesignthebook.com/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15050512
Thank you José and Angela for your corrections and suggestions.
También podés leer este artículo en Español.
