Effie Lai-Chong Law
Virpi Roto
Marc Hassenzahl
ABSTRACT
Despite the growing interest in user experience (UX), it has been hard to gain a common agreement on the nature and scope of UX. In this paper, we report a survey that gathered the views on UX of 275 researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. Most respondents agree that UX is dynamic, context-dependent, and subjective. With respect to the more controversial issues, the authors propose to delineate UX as something individual (instead of social) that emerges from interacting with a product, system, service or an object. The draft ISO definition on UX seems to be in line with the survey findings, although the issues of experiencing anticipated use and the object of UX will require further explication. The outcome of this survey lays ground for understanding, scoping, and defining the concept of user experience.
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Slides from the presentation
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Digital Library
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Index Terms
- Understanding, scoping and defining user experience: a survey approach
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Reviews
Susan Chopra
User experience (UX) is a term that has been gaining a lot of momentum lately. For a company that provides products and services, UX is often thought to be a critical factor that significantly impacts its success. But what exactly is UX__?__ According to this paper, in spite of its increasing momentum, there is no real agreement on a definition of UX. Law et al.'s survey attempts to gain a wider perspective on researchers' and practitioners' perceptions of UX. This paper presents the results of the survey, along with the authors' conclusions as to how they would define UX. The bulk of the paper focuses on the survey and its results. The survey asked 275 researchers and practitioners involved with UX to complete three sections. In the first section, "UX Statements," the respondents were asked to indicate how much they agreed or disagreed with a given statement pertaining to UX. In the second section, "UX Definitions," the respondents provided their opinions of five different proposed definitions for UX. The final section, "Your Background," solicited demographic information, including work experience and education. While the survey is quite interesting, the findings, as presented in this paper, are hard to digest without a solid background in statistics. Understandably, the authors must demonstrate the accuracy of their results, but the excessive treatment of variables and confidence intervals limits what the layperson can take away from this paper. Based on the results of the survey, Law et al. conclude that many researchers and practitioners tend to agree that UX is dynamic, context-dependent, and subjective. Online Computing Reviews Service
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