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.)

Reviewing Process

The first round will involve reviewing papers and notes. Within a few days after 28 September, I will send each of you a few titles and ask you to tell me which ones you’d like to review. (You will receive titles targeted to the interests you’ve already communicated to me, to the extent that they match the titles I am asked to manage.) I need to get at least three reviews per paper, so if there are gaps or excessive overlaps in reviewers’ choices, we may have a wee bit of negotiating to do.

Once we have agreed which papers you’ll review, I’ll enter your choices into the CHI reviewer data base, which will take care of sending you the links to download submissions and enter your reviews. (It will also nag you about getting your reviews in.

Reviews of papers and notes will be due to me by 5pm EDT on 25 October.

The CHI review process is described at http://www.chi2010.org/authors/chi-review-process.html.

Criteria

You’ll review submissions according to the guidelines provided by SIGCHI for the authors of submissions. The various types of papers and notes, and the criteria for each one, are described at http://www.chi2010.org/authors/selecting-contribution-type.html. (Although as of this writing I have not yet seen the papers I’ll be curating, I am confident that they do not include any theory papers. )

The most important criterion for CHI papers and notes is that they contribute new knowledge, techniques, or approaches to the field. For practitioner submissions, this often means using established techniques in new ways or in new contexts, or interpreting findings in new ways. It may mean devising a new way of making usability methods more effective or efficient.

Note: The criteria for other submission types are less focused on breaking new ground than are those for papers and notes.

Next Steps

After papers and notes, we will be reviewing submissions for panels and case studies. These are due on October 9, so I expect to have my assignments by about 20 October, which would make your reviews due to me by about 17 November. (I’m just guessing here, as I don’t yet know the exact dates.)

After that, we have alt.chi, SIGs, and works-in-progress. Those submissions are due on 4 January, so I’ll probably be farming them out starting about the 15th and expecting your reviews by about 10 February. Again, just a guess.

User Experience Community Chairs

• Elizabeth Buie (Luminanze Consulting, LLC)
• Susan Dray (Dray & Associates, Inc.)
• Keith Instone (IBM)
• Jhilmil Jain (HP Labs)
• Gitte Lindgaard (Carleton University)

If you have signed up to review — or even if you are just thinking about it — please feel free to contact me with questions. You may email me at ebuie [at] luminanze [dot] com or use my Contact Us form.