User experience til forhandling - Dansk Kommunikationsforening

ABSTRACT
Thesis title and statement
Negotiating user experience – How can we, on the basis of analysis and discussion of leading
theory and practice, put into perspective by a case, understand user experience and
the connection to usability, as well as how we can work with user experience in practice?
Abstract
In this thesis, I explore the concept of user experience. My starting point is the increasing
interest in user experience both in theory and among practitioners and a curiosity about
how to understand and work with user experience, a concept which appears to be relatively
vaguely defined by an apparently fragmented theoretical field. I attempt to demystify user
experience by exploring the connection between user experience and the usability paradigm,
which user experience in theory is claimed to supersede. It is my aim to contribute to
the demystifying of user experience, inform and qualify user experience in practice and
propose fruitful issues and guidelines for further studies. I develop a synthesis based on a
qualitative comparative study of leading theory and practice, which is put into perspective
by my observations during the design process of a social software project, and an e-mail
interview with a leading theorist. I conclude that we are witnessing an epistemological shift
in our understanding of digital design and social interaction with technology. A shift which
is reflected both in the development of user experience and in the increasing interest in
user experience. My study identifies a gap between theory and practice as well as between
practitioners and their clients which, on the one hand, suggests that theory is ahead of
practice, and on the other hand, that the usability paradigm apparently only now is beginning
to take hold among the clients. These issues complicate the work of practitioners,
trying to exhibit and communicate the value of user experience. The technological development
and the growth of digital culture are in a similar way, yet on a more basic level,
complicating the comprehension of and the work with user experience, especially in practice.
This suggests that user experience is part of a wider and more fundamental paradigm
shift which gives rise to a need for demystifying and articulating user experience. I argue
that it is useful to understand user experience as a synthesis or rather as a design perspective
and not as a paradigm, and thus I reject the dichotomy between user experience and
usability. The two are mutually dependent on each other in a design process if they are to
produce any value, even though user experience is the overall value creating ‘principle’. In
closing, I conclude that there is a relatively unexploited and in theory underplayed potential
in thinking user experience as not only design for positive experiences, but as design
for positive social experiences. My observations regarding the design case suggest, on the
one hand, that fields and conceptual universes increasingly are converging, which confirms
the notion of user experience as a design perspective. On the other hand, my observations
also suggest that the paradigm shift has only just begun. I argue that the design case is an
example of a new ‘generation’ of more ‘intelligent’ digital user experience design, operating
on a higher, more positive and action oriented conceptual level and driven by user generated
‘social data’. The value of user experience in this form of design is produced by the
social data developing from the users’ interaction with both each other and the technology.
As a consequence, the relationship between designers and users is reconstructed since the
design and technology make it possible for the users to negotiate and renegotiate the rules
of the ‘system’. The users become co-designers and therefore the traditional concept of
digital design and the role of the designer are both disintegrating and being renegotiated.
Lars Wiedemann | wiedemann@itu.dk | IT-Universitetet i København Side 3 af 170