Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

say things like “it was a nice conference and I met some people I knew”, or begin
to recount the story of the opening day when at the same moment three
different people called her name and she didn’t know who to greet first. The
first is the kind of description that Sacks (Sacks 1995) refers to as “doing being
ordinary”, where the aim of the description is not to focus on the unusual,
but rather on the expected and the normal, while the second story is an
account of something unusual. Actual stories are a production that take into
account rules of storytelling that affect the content: how it is introduced and
framed, who is entitled to what degree of emotional responses and so forth.
(Sacks et al. 1995)
Although the production of stories depends greatly on the situation in which
they are told, storytelling can be useful to collect information quickly about
key problems, relevant experiences and breakdowns (Erickson 1995 provides
some examples). How and what is communicated depends very much on how
the questions or recall situations are created. Images can also be used to
prompt stories in discussions (Mäkelä & Mattelmäki 2002). Direct questions
often force a presumption on people which they themselves would not have
used or considered. Designers and users alike can also use various media to
express their experiences: diaries and other written accounts, visual material,
drawings and diagrams, photographs, video and any combinations of these.
This media can help capture rich qualitative and sensory expeirences, document
findings and keep them fresh and convincing even for those who were
not there themselves.
In the following, several approaches to learning about the subjective experiences
of others are characterised and compared to each other. The characterisations
are not necessarily mutually inclusive, nor is this listing definitive
– however these are the ones that have been emerging in the field of design for
user experience.
64 2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED
• applied ethnography – analytical reporting of observations
• empathic approach – observations are balanced with empathy
• participatory approach – supporting the creative thinking of
participants
• inspirational approach – people’s idiosyncrasies fuel creativity
and ideation
Being user centred does not mean that designers even agree on how to best involve
the user in the design process and to what degree. The roles of the designer
and researcher vary. The inspiration-oriented approach is a designer-centred,