Anticipated user experience in the early stages of product development

Abstract

People no longer use a product solely as a tool, but more importantly for the pleasurable experiences it provides. Positive user experience, therefore, has increasingly become the goal in designing and developing interactive products. To ensure this goal is reached, user experience assessment should be conducted from the earliest stages of product development. However, the early assessment of user experience is difficult and challenging, as no functional prototypes to be tested are yet available. Moreover, the majority of existing user experience frameworks and evaluation methods have not fully supported the initial design phases. This research aims to gain a deeper understanding of anticipated user experience to support early assessment of user experience. In this context, anticipated user experience is defined as the experiences and feelings that users expect to have when imagining an encounter with an interactive product or system. The study is driven by two research sub-questions: How do users anticipate experiences with interactive products; and what are the differences between anticipated and real user experiences? Two qualitative studies were conducted. The first experiment investigated anticipated user experience by asking twenty pairs of participants to individually imagine and sketch a desired product, and to anticipate their experiences with the conceived product. The second experiment explored real user experience by prompting forty participants to individually use a given digital camera over a period of three days, to report their experiences using a diary, and to discuss their experiences with another participant. The first study shows that when anticipating experiences with an imagined product, users perceive the pragmatic (instrumental) quality of the product as the dominant factor that determines their positive future experiences. The second study, however, demonstrates that while the users also mostly focus on pragmatic quality when judging an actual product, it is its hedonic (non-instrumental) quality that contributes more to their positive real experiences. The studies also show that real user experience involves familiarisation and expectation disconfirmation factors, which are not identified in anticipated user experience. The main outcome of this research is the Anticipated User Experience (AUX) Framework that describes the processes through which users imagine a desired product and anticipate positive experiences with the conceived product. Furthermore, based on the findings, design recommendations are proposed. This research provides new knowledge of anticipated user experience. It contributes to the area of design for experience, and concurrently addresses the knowledge gap related to user experience before interaction. The AUX Framework provides a guide to assist designers to identify and prioritise the key factors that need to explore during the early stages of design. The exploration of these factors allows designers to better predict users‟ underlying needs and potential contexts related to positive experiences with the designed product. The design recommendations also support the creation of pleasurable interactive products. Thus, the application of these research outcomes can potentially support design for positive experiences from the very outset of product development.