A Practitioner-Centered Assessment of a User-Experience Framework

Abstract

In this article we outline a relational approach to experience which we have used to develop a practitioner-oriented framework for analysing user experience. The framework depicts experience as compositional, emotional, spatio-temporal, and sensual, and as intimately bound up with a number of processes that allow us to make sense of experience. It was developed and assessed as part of a participative action research project involving interested practitioners. We report how these practitioners used the framework, what aspects of experience they felt that it missed, and how useful they found it as a tool for evaluating Internet shopping experiences. A thematic content analysis of participants’ reflections on their use of the framework to evaluate Internet shopping experiences revealed some strengths and some weaknesses. For example, certain features of the framework led participants to reflect on aspects of experience that they might not otherwise have considered, such as, the central role of anticipation in experience. The framework also captured aspects of experience that relate to both the sequential structure of the activity and its subjective aspects. However, it seemed to miss out on the intensity of some experiences, and participants sometimes found it difficult to distinguish between some of the sense-making processes, for example, interpreting and reflecting. These results have helped to refine our approach to deploying the framework and have inspired an ongoing programme of research on experience-centred design.