Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

panies are more likely to publish reports on their work, but the quality of the
design work cannot be equated with the willingness to report it. However, it is
likely that within the published results there is a strong representation of best
practices and field leaders – review processes support this kind of positive bias.
Language issues and cultural affiliations have partly affected which geographic
areas and cultures have become represented in this study. There is a clear North-
European and Anglo-American emphasis in the selection of reviewed work, and
only material published in English (or, in a few cases Finnish) has been used.
However, English is the preferred language for international reporting of work
in this field, and as a source language it is probably the least limiting one both
culturally and regionally.
The research that has been used to exemplify and develop the analysis on
the concrete level in this work belongs for the most part to two projects involving
field studies. These are the Maypole project for designing social communication
product concepts for children (see article 1, Mäkelä & Battarbee
1999) and the Mobile Multimedia project for ascertaining what consumers of
mobile multimedia communication would like to do with it (see articles 2, Battarbee
2003a, and 3, Battarbee 2003b). The same issues are also discussed in
articles 2 (with anecdotes of product use involving a mobile phone and a internet
chat environment in Battarbee 2003a) and 6 (which describes a concept
design workshop group’s process and thoughts for developing communication
concepts for urban communities in Battarbee et al. 2002). The main key data
are field studies of technology use and involve mobile, personal technologies
for communication. In Maypole, users were given new products to experiment
with for a week and the results were collected in artefact interviews together
with the pictures the participants had taken. In Mobile Multimedia, groups of
users were given multimedia messaging capable phones and a free account for
messaging for five weeks. No interviews were conducted, but the messaging
data in itself provided a rich window into the groups’ new and evolving messaging
patterns.
Both projects represent design problems in which user experience is of the
highest importance and in which contexts of product use change. Both are a
challenge for conducting studies and consequently, these cases can be treated
as examples of extreme cases of user studies. (Naturally, each context has its
problems, but the mobile context is always a observational challenge.) It is not
surprising, then, that when observations from these cases were used to test
existing frameworks of user experience, the frameworks were found to be lacking
in accounting for and explaining the importance of social interaction and
its role in making user experiences meaningful.
31