Evaluating the User Experience Reading 1: Virpi Roto’s User Experience Building Blocks

In this review, I analyse Virpi Roto’s User Experience Building Blocks, a paper written in 2006 on the need to better define User Experience as a means to be able to evaluate UX (as opposed to simply evaluate usability, as this is a limited approach that does not address user experience as a whole).

The text begins by exploring established definitions of User Experience, such as Norman’s and Jordan’s goals. By drawing parallels between those two and Nokia’s own definition, he comes up with certain levels of experience: behavioral (functionality, usability), visceral (pleasure) and reflective (pride). Personally, I feel quite vindicated because, as an Industrial Design student, I felt there was too much value being put on the reflective aspects of  modern design (image, beauty, the need to belong) as opposed to the Bauhaus ideals of functionality dictating design (which I also feel is a limited view of things). A tripod of behaviour, reflection and pleasure makes so much more sense to me as the domain where a balance must be stricken.

The author moves on to attempt to identify the building blocks of experience, all the components that influence the subjective feel that experience is. By exploring different authors, he lists components that exist in different levels of abstraction, such as Hassenzahl & Tractinsky user’s internal state (experiences and expectations), system and context and, in a much lower level, Arhippainen & Tähti’s user, social factors, cultural factors, context of use and product. From Forlizzi, he extracts the reference period, as UX can be analysed as a long, multi-temporal attitude which can, itself, be broken in much smaller perceptions and sensations.

Using Hassenzahl & Tractinsky high level of abstraction as a scaffolding, the author, through empirical evidence collected during his analysis of mobile browsers, derives his own building blocks of User Experience, as follows:

• System is everything with which the user interacts, products, objects, services, people and the infrastructure. It avoids the reductionist pitfall of equating usability with user experience by, instead of evaluating a single product, making it part of a whole that builds the experience, hence system.

• Context is built of external systems and objects that, although not part of the system, affect the User Experience. It begins in the physical context (humidity, temperature, luminosity etc.) to social context (expectations, culture), temporal context (period dedicated to the Experience) and task context (what part the system has in the greater whole of achieving a goal for the user).

• The User itself is the last block, as its expectations and personal experience (which affect and are affected by the social context) will affect the User Experience itself. Its mood has great effect on the final Experience as well, because s/he might have lowered patience (affecting the perceived temporal context). Last but not least, he moves away from the user’s internal state to list user’s physical factors, both temporary and permanent, as affecting the Experience (i.e. the user can have only one free hand at the time, or only possess one hand, or none).

Bibliography

• Arhippainen, L., Tähti, M. 2003, Empirical Evaluation of User Experience in Two Adaptive Mobile Application Prototypes. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia, Norrköping, Sweden.

• Hassenzahl, M., Tractinsky, N. 2006, User Experience – a Research Agenda. Behaviour and Information Technology, Vol. 25, No. 2, March-April 2006, pp. 91-97

• Forlizzi, J., Ford, S. 2000, The Building Blocks of Experience: An Early Framework for Interaction Designers. Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2000). New York City, USA

• Jordan, P.E. 2000, Designing Pleasurable Products. Taylor & Francis, USA.

• Norman, D. 2004, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Basic Books.
• Roto, V. (2006, October). User experience building blocks. In proceedings of 2nd COST294-MAUSE Workshop–Towards a Unified View (Oslo, Norway, 2006) (pp. 124-128).