Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

62 2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED
ences with them regardless of how much this was part of the initial specifications.
It is necessary for design, however, to understand the relationships between
products and their specifications as well as what people actually come to experience.
In real life there are many ways in which people can learn about the subjective
experiences of others, even if they can never exactly know them, as discussed
in the previous section. Through observing what people do and how they
behave, by becoming exposed to the same or similar experiences and interacting
with people designers can create working interpretations of the experiences of
others. The more two people have shared common experiences and learn about
each other, the better and closer their empathic understanding of each other.
The limitations of sharing become evident when trying to design for people
with different abilities. For example, a visually disabled engineer in Helsinki has
often consulted architects on how to design public spaces that are friendly for
people with visual disability. He had often tried to explain the painful and temporarily
debilitating effects that strong direct light, especially when reflected
off shiny surfaces, has on people with these conditions. This advice had completely
been ignored several times. Contrast problems are, according to him,
the one thing that normally sighted people always forget first, and most often
ignore. Eyes with normal vision accommodate faster and better to changes in
light, and hardly ever experience it as a problem. Many visual disabilities cause
such changes to become much more difficult to manage: a simple transition
from outdoors to indoors can render a partially sighted person completely blind
for several minutes. His conclusion was that sighted people cannot relate to
such an experience, cannot imagine the significance of the experience, and thus
cannot relate to it (personal communication, 11th June 2003).
Sanders’ framework offers an explanation for this by suggesting that what
people do, what they say and what they make are all needed for forming an
understanding of the experience of others (Sanders 1999). No one method or
tool alone can give a reliable account of experience; instead many methods and
techniques need to be used in parallel (e.g. Sanders 1992, Black 1998, Buchenau
& Fulton Suri 2000). The matter of communicating experience depends on
both people, the person who is the (potential) user and the person who is the
designer and/or researcher.
As the approach examples in this chapter illustrate, there are many ways
to support processes that help people to become more aware of their experiences
and to find ways to share them. But it is not only a matter of how to get
the user person to communicate; it is also necessary for the designer or researcher
to receive them properly. As the example above of the design of public