Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

Interaction designers who focus on designing digital content address a particular
subset of product use in their frameworks. Garrett offers a model for
information design that connects structuring the user experience of hypertext
and interface with creating the interface for a website. The design of experience
happens on five levels: strategy, scope, structure, skeleton and surface.
(Garrett 2002) However, this model of user experience for information design
fails to include sensory qualities of experience, which can be included as an
elaboration of Garrett’s model towards all kinds of online experiences (Olsen
2003). Compared to the scene of experiences by Jääskö et al., these two versions
of the model relate to the development process, not the evaluation of a
product, and consequently they do not include the context of the experiencer
as a part of the experience.
Products can have different roles and stages over time – static views do not
always emphasise enough the ever-changing nature of product experiences.
Holman’s study of roles of products as seen in advertising demonstrates the
range they have from background and low intensity to higher intensity prod-
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APPARENT
PRODUCT
CHARACTER
pragmatic attributes
hedonistic attributes
SITUATION
appeal
pleasure
satisfaction
CONSE-
QUENCES
FIGURE 5
The user perspective of product experiences: in a situation, a product’s
pragmatic and hedonic attributes result in appeal, pleasure and satisfaction
(Hassenzahl 2003).