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.
Snapshots of the three signs used in the experiment.
Examples of three manipulations of the sign SAW. We tested about 68 sign manipulations in total. These were run through the automatic recognition algorithms we had been working on and they were rated by human signers. The paper is about how humans and machines can be compared.
