User Experience

I have worked as an interaction designer and usability specialist for many years. At the moment, the fashionable thing to be designing for is 'user experience'. Several colleagues here at TU Delft are trying to define user experience to help designers and researchers. Arnold Vermeeren organized a workshop on the definition of user experience at the last SIGCHI conference, and he gave me this link to some reading material: MAUSE. Towards the MAturation of Information Technology USability Evaluation. Paul Hekkert and Rick Schifferstein, also colleagues wrote a book called Product Experience which contains many interesting chapters but is a bit of an investment at $170. Arnold is also working on a nice graphic that contains the elements of User Experience. He is not the only one though, see this collection of images that try to capture user experience. Emotion is the core Utility/Usability, Personal Social Meaning, and Aesthetics are the first contributors Finally, there is a timeline involved starting with anticipation and ending with reflection But other people have other opinions. Here is a nice graph too. Here is a nice paper on it. The link between user experience and gesture is that through gesture control one might expect an increased aesthetic appraisal. It might appeal to your senses because you like to move. Or because you like to move in ways that you are familiar with.