The concept of user experience (UX) is widely used but understood in many different ways. The multidisciplinary nature of UX has provoked several definitions and perspectives to UX, each approaching the concept from a different viewpoint.

UX is seen as a holistic concept covering all aspects of experiencing a phenomenon, but we are facing the point where UX has become a concept too broad to be useful in practice. Practitioners have difficulties to understand the concept and to improve UX in their work, and researchers rather use some other term to make their research scope clear.

So our job was to “demarcate” UX.

Most of the group was from academia, so I set myself the goal of keeping some level of focus on practitioners’ needs, to maintain a balance. Each participant had to prepare a poster to present at the beginning of the seminar; mine is at http://www.luminanze.com/writings/DagstuhlPosterBuie.pdf (note: PDF). My main point was this:

UX already has a thriving practitioner community.
We must address their needs.

After the introductions were complete, we spent the next few days discussing UX — what it is, how it’s measured, how long it lasts, how to design for it — until finally our time ran out. (We could have gone on a lot longer, I suspect.) Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one urging that we consider design, and we ended up adding to the outline of the white paper a section on design for user experience.

At the end, we talked about next steps, in particular how we could publicize the seminar’s results. Among other things, we decided to submit a panel proposal to the CHI2011 conference. Jofish Kaye agreed to recruit the panelists and prepare the proposal; and two days ago when I asked him how it was going — surprise! — he added me to the panelists. This meant I had to write a position statement.

Now, I’m pretty good at writing short, pithy comments, such as tweets and Facebook statuses. A statement of two paragraphs, however, was much more daunting. But I managed, and here’s what I wrote:

“User experience” abounds and thrives in the practitioner community. Events and organizations identify themselves with the “UX” label — from “UX Magazine” (http://uxmag.com), to Adaptive Path’s “UX Week” conference (http://www.uxweek.com), to the various “UX Book Clubs” (http://uxbookclub.org), to the titles of numerous practitioner books. Nowhere is the label more evident than on Twitter: People and organizations use “ux” in their handles (@lynneux, @uxmike, @inspire_ux, @ux_jobs, @uxfactory, @ux_dc, etc. etc.), in content-related hashtags (#ux, #uxdesignjobs), and even in social hashtags related to the community (#uxsters, #uxlovelies, #uxboots). Even the Usability Professionals Association titles its magazine “User Experience”.

As practitioners, we generally agree that we are not designing experiences per se; “UX design” is just shorthand for designing for experience. We do lack a rigorous definition for “user experience” (we often refer to “DTDT” — “defining the damn thing” — to express the difficulty of agreeing on it), but I suspect we don’t actually need one. To design for experience, we don’t have to decide whether “experience” is immediate (e.g., three seconds) or it lasts from anticipation through memory of use; we need only recognize that it occurs throughout these phases and consider them all as we design. To create products that give users experiences along the lines of what we have in mind, we conduct user research and employ other time-honored as well as innovative design and evaluation techniques. We treat user experience as a focus in everything we do in our practice (see http://explainux.com), and most of us are passionate about giving our users good experiences. Academic research can help by paying attention to the issues of practice and by making sure we know when it has discovered something that can make us more effective in realizing these goals.

Unfortunately, space limitations meant that only a very small part of each panelist’s statement made it into the submitted proposal. I think the proposal turned out well, though, and I’m optimistic that the panel will happen. Stay tuned.

(I will write more about the seminar in a later post. For now you can see our photos on Flickr.)

Ada Lovelace Day

Dr. Susan Dray is an international consultant on human-computer interaction design and usability. She has contributed tremendously to the profession of human-computer interaction throughout her 30-year career in the field, beginning with managing a human factors department and then pioneering the development of usability labs in corporations outside the computing industry. In recent years she has been instrumental in spreading the use of cross-cultural and ethnographic user research throughout the developing world. She works tirelessly to facilitate the appropriate design and use of technology in cultures where it can make a profound difference in their lives.

Susan Dray really does it bright. Although I have been in the field just a few years less than she has, Susan has been a role model for me — not only as a professional, but also as a human being. She inspires me to reach beyond what I already know I can do, to stretch myself, and to care even more deeply about how my work helps improve people’s lives.

I met Susan in 1983, during my first time at a conference of the Human Factors Society (now called the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society ). She was co-leading a workshop on how to deal with being the only human factors person on a project, and as someone new to the field, not only did I find her knowledge and experience enlightening, but her energy and warmth encouraged me to persist with it; and I went on to get a second master’s, in a discipline related to the field. Our paths have crossed frequently over the years, and right now we are working more closely together than ever, co-chairing the User Experience Community at next month’s CHI 2009 , the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer and Human Interaction. The last time I saw Susan, at CHI 2008, she had just finished leading a workshop on “HCI for Community and International Development” and was handing out pairs of socks left over from the workshop.

Socks?

Yep, socks. Socks with hearts on them.

“Anyone can wear their heart on their sleeve,” Susan explained. “But to make a real difference, to go in the right direction, we have to wear them on our feet as well.”

I took the purple ones.