Designing+for+experience

=Designing for experience=

As computers become a ubiquitous part of our lives, no longer confined to the workplace, the focus of design and evaluation has turned towards user experience. The concept of user experience has already been influential in the design and evaluation of electronic commerce system, computer games and other leisure applications, and it is now beginning to have an influence in other areas. In our textbook argue that interaction designers should concern themselves with setting not only usability goals for their products but also user experience goals to assess whether the product is, for example, enjoyable, satisfying and motivating. They also point to the multidisciplinary nature of interaction design teams comprising engineers, programmers, graphic artists, writers and so on as a means of ensuring the user experience is given due consideration in the design process.

Despite this commitment to user experience as a design driver, our understanding of experience and how it might be positioned with respect to design, remains underdeveloped in the research of interaction design. A key feature of our approach to experience emphasised by this case study is that how an individual makes sense of a situation, interaction, episode or artefact is as much about what the individual brings to the experience as it is about what the designer puts there. if we take, for example, the everyday experience of watching a movie, different people may take away different things from watching the same movie. Even the same person watching a movie for a second time may have different feelings about it and understand it differently.

Our experiences are different because we bring different experiences to the movie. We bring experiences of past films into a movie with us, but in addition we also bring our experiences of the day we have just had and the day we expect tomorrow to be. Our expectations, and the quality of the felt experience,are likely to be different when go to the movies having had a bad at home or work than when we go after a good day. Moreover, the feeling that we should really be at home preparing for what is likely to be a demanding day tomorrow brings an expectation of a future experience into the present one of watching the movie.

Having put forward a substantive conception of what we mean by experience, one which places felt life and sense making at its centre, and having argued that experience cannot be designed, it remains to be seen what it might mean to design for experience. Like our account of experience itself, our account of what it might mean to desin for experience leans heavily on ways of thinking about design that emerge from arts and humanities rather than from sciences and engineering.

=__Reference:__= = =
 * http://www.nathan.com/ed/glossary/index.html
 * http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/navigation/chapter/ch05.html
 * http://www.uwex.edu/ics/design/desexp.htm