Feature: A Framework for Analysing User Experience

[This material is drawn from the chapter: "Making sense of experience" to appear in "Funology" edited by Andrew Monk, Mark Blythe and Cees Overbeeke. It is due to be published by Kluwer in the next month.]

The concept of user experience has come to dominate in consumer arenas such as electronic commerce product design and branding. There is however an uneasy silence as to what actually constitutes experience. In short, despite a growing acceptance of the need to focus on experience, user experience is not well developed conceptually. Without conceptual development, there is a danger that user experience and related concepts such as trust, loyalty, identity, and engagement will not be fully realized in studies of people and technology. Our aim is to develop an approach to experience which is holistic, constructionist and pragmatic. Rather than isolate the elements of experience we seek to understand their interaction and how they mutually constitute each other.

Qualities such as trust, identity, enjoyment, fulfilment and fun are not properties of technology or people. They are better thought of as outcomes of people's experiences with- or through- technology. So if we are to understand what might make a particular product or design more pleasing or enjoyable to use, it would seem sensible to begin by trying to analyse experience of use.

CONCEPTUALISING EXPERIENCE
'Experience' is an elusive concept that resists specification and finalisation. In recent attempts to introduce 'experience' into consideration of relations between people and technology, it has been confused with subjective feelings, behaviour, activity, social practice, and knowledge. Thus the first major task in developing an experiential theory is to provide a basis for understanding experience that is not confused with any of these.

A person's own account to themselves of an experience of buying through the internet, is incurably social, plural, and perspectival. In Bakhtin's terms, it is 'interanimated' with the discourses of others. For example, my sense of myself as someone who supports small local bookshops is interanimated by discourses on the values of global capitalism, the importance of choice provided by small specialist booksellers, and the centrality of a personal relationship in choosing which books to buy. These discourses however might be accommodating of an internet bookseller who appears to try to develop a buyer-seller relationship with me based on an understanding of my reading preferences, provides specialist choices, and seems to support small specialist booksellers. If my book buying moves from the small local bookshop to an internet retailer who present themselves as engaging meaningfully with some of these discourses and also has other qualities of interest to me also, such as speedy fulfilment of an order, then my sense of my self is subtly changed through dialogue with that bookseller.

THE FRAMEWORK
We describe the framework for analyzing experience in two parts, the first is concerned with describing experience from four points of view which we refer to as the four threads of experience. The second part is concerned with how we make sense in experience.

The four threads of experience
We have found it helpful to think of four inter-twined threads making up a braid.

The compositional thread: The compositional thread of an experience is that aspect which is concerned with part-whole structure of an experience. In an unfolding interaction involving self and other this could be thought of as narrative structure. In an experience of an artwork, a poster or brand image it can be thought of as the compositional elements of the image their relations and implied agency. If you are asking questions like; "what is this about?", "what has happened?", "what will happen next?", "does this make sense?", "I wonder what would happen if?" then you are thinking about the compositional structure of experience.

The sensual thread: The 'look and feel' of a physical artefact or a web page are part of what we refer to as the sensual thread of experience. More generally, the sensual thread of experience is concerned with our sensory engagement with a situation. The sensations in an experience which we variously term thrill, fear, excitement are parts of the sensual thread, as are feelings such as walking into a room and finding it welcoming, or a slight sense of unease or awkwardness in a conversation. Sometimes the sensual defies precise description but can affect our willingness become involved. The look and feel of a mobile phone may be as important a determinant of our decision to become (or not to become) a mobile phone user as the functional possibilities it offers.

The emotional thread: The emotional thread of experience includes anger, joy, disappointment, frustration, desperation and so on. These are stark examples, but other more subtle things that are included here are fulfilment, satisfaction, fun and so on. We can reflect on the emotional thread of our own experience or we can through empathy, relate to the emotional thread of others' experiences. Relating to a character, in a movie is an obvious example, but we might also empathise with the designer or retailer of an e-shopping site even though they are not materially present.

Although the sensual and emotional threads are sometimes hard to separate, we need to distinguish between them since we can for example, engender the emotions associated with achievement through the exercise of control over sensations such as fear or anxiety. This is this case for example, when a rock climber climbs a dangerous cliff.

The spatio-temporal thread: All experience has a spatio-temporal thread. Actions and events unfold in a particular time and place. When we are rushed we may feel frustrated and perceive space as confined and closeting. In addition, emotional engagement can make our sense of time change, hours can fly by in minutes. Pace may increase or decrease and our sense of space may open up or close down. Both space and time may become connected or disconnected as an experience unfolds. We might also distinguish between public and private space, we may recognise comfort zones and boundaries between self and other, or present and future. Such constructions affect experiential outcomes such as willingness to linger or to re-visit places or our willingness to engage in an exchange of information, services or goods.

MAKING SENSE IN EXPERIENCE
Experiences do not present themselves to us ready-made, people actively construct them through a process of sense making. This process of sense making is reflexive and recursive. It is reflexive in the sense that we are always viewing experience through a person. Whether that is the first person or the third person or whether it is by recounting an experience to oneself or for others. This is not to be understood in some scientific way as an unfortunate consequence of our means of measurement. Rather it is central to what it means for something to be an experience. Without self and other, or subject and object interacting reflexively, there can be no experience. It is recursive in the sense that we are always engaged in sense making. Even when we reflect on experience as a completed object, we are having an experience. We describe sense making in terms of five inter-related processes.

Anticipating: When experiencing on-line for the first time a well-known off-line brand we do not come unprejudiced to that on-line experience. We bring with us all sorts of expectations, possibilities and ways of making sense of the episode. In anticipation we may have a sensation of apprehension or possibly excitement. We may expect the experience to offer certain possibilities for action or outcome and may raise questions to be resolved. We will also anticipate the temporal and spatial character of the experience. We may come to the experience with a desire for fulfilling certain needs or we may be looking for inspiration. It is natural to think of anticipation as something that is prior to whatever it is an anticipation of, and this is true. But anticipation is not just prior. Our anticipations are continually revised and renewed as events unfold. Indeed, it is the relation between our continually revised anticipation and actuality that creates the space of an experience.

Connecting: When a situation first impacts our senses we generate some response, pre-linguistically. In the spatio-temporal thread this may be an apprehension of speed or confusing movement or openness and stillness for example. An immediate impression of one frequently visited web-site is of redness and flesh tones which immediately gives an impression of sleaziness, yet on closer inspection it is a quite respectable e-commerce site. The colours are the company's brand colours but in the particular spatial-temporal context of the internet, they have other connotations. For the sensual thread, connecting may engender an immediate sense of tension or perhaps a thrill of novelty. For the emotional and compositional threads connecting may engender nothing more than a sense of relief or anticipation at something happening.

Interpreting: While the immediate impact of an event may be out of our conscious control, there is a process of discernment through which we try to discriminate what is happening and relate this to our anticipations and our previous experiences. Interpreting an unfolding experience implies for the compositional and emotional threads, discerning the narrative structure, the agents and the action possibilities, what has happened, what is likely to happen and how this relates to our desires, hopes and fears and our previous experiences. We may sense the thrill of excitement or the anxiety of not knowing how to proceed or what will happen or where we are. At an emotional level, on the basis of our anticipation we may feel frustration or disappointment at thwarted expectations or we may regret being in this situation and have a desire to remove ourselves from it. On the basis of our interpretation falling short of our anticipation we may reflect on our expectations and alter them to be more in line with the new situation.

Reflecting: At the same time as interpreting we may also make judgements about the unfolding experience and place a value on it. In reflecting on the compositional thread, we might ask ourselves whether we can we make any sense of things? Are we satisfied with a sense of progress or movement towards completion? From an emotional aspect, do we feel we are getting any sense of fulfilment or achievement? How does the experience tally with our anticipation and how do we feel about being in this situation at this time? From a sensual perspective are we anxious, bored, or excited. In addition to reflecting in an experience, we also reflect on an experience after it has run its course to completion. This often takes the form of an inner dialogue with oneself or with others. It is a kind of inner recounting. It serves to help us relate the experience to others in an evaluative way in support of appropriation and recounting which in their turn help us reflect.

Appropriating: A key part of sense making is relating an experience to previous and future experiences. In appropriating an experience we make it our own. We relate it to our sense of self, our personal history and our hoped for future. We may change our sense of self as a consequence of the experience, or we may simply see this experience as 'just another one of those'. The degree to which an experience changes our sense of self may also be the extent to which we see it as something we identify with and want to experience again. In relating experience to our future and past we also may look afresh at the experience or the setting engendering the experience. Sensual aspects of an experience may become just another "white knuckle ride" or they may become unique moments such as the unforgettable sense of immersion in pure translucent colour when, as a first-time scuba diver, we descend into "the blue" of the Red Sea. The emotional aspects of flow and engagement during a session of the computer game unreal tournament may be quintessentially cathartic, providing a means of escape from the mundanities of everyday life. The compositional thread of an experience may relate positively to our sense of self or not. For example, do we feel it is morally right or socially acceptable to go shopping at a virtual supermarket? Or how do we reconcile shopping at amazon.com with our commitment to 'the small bookshop' and to the concept of personal service?

Recounting: Like reflecting and appropriating, recounting, takes us beyond the immediate experience to consider it in the context of other experiences. It is through a process of internal recounting that we reflect and appropriate experiences, but having appropriated an experience it is also natural to recount it to others. In this way we savor it again, find new possibilities and new meanings in it and this often leads us to want to repeat an experience- to go shopping again, to buy another book or to take another holiday. Experience often takes on different meanings or is giving different value when recounted in a different place at a different time- Marco Polo is reputed to have once said that adventures are hardships and sufferings had in the re-telling. Through recounting to others we draw out an evaluative response from them that changes our own valuation of it. We might for example relate our experience of mobile phones or e-shopping as a zealot but through dialogue with others become something of an apologist.

CONCLUSION
An experience is as much about what the user brings to a situation as it is about what pre-exists in the situation. Thus we cannot design an experience- there are no guarantees. But we can design for an experience. This requires the designer to have ways of seeing experience and talking about it. Once we can see experience and talk about it we can begin to analyse the relations between its parts and to understand how technology does- or could- participate in experience to make that experience satisfying. The framework we have presented here is a conceptual tool for seeing and talking about experience.

Peter Wright, University of York
John McCarthy, University College Cork, Ireland

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