User Experience & Public Product

...

[pic 2]

Figure 2.1 Presumed social context-emotions-task performance model

So, in this study, the focus is on the social context, using the interactive public products when others exist, and its effects on public product-user interaction regarding the users’ feelings and task performances. Hence, essential questions which are wanted to be explored with this study are indicated below.

Main Research Question:

- What are the effects of presence of other people on public productuser interaction?

This question was investigated by consulting to literatures of different disciplines, but mainly, social psychology and design literatures and by conducting three empirical studies. The research questions address different themes such as user experience, context, social influence and task performance. However, it is also crucial to concentrate on other studies about public products.

While attempting to comprehend what user experience means and how user experience with public products shows up, specifically concerning the effects of the presence of other people, it is foremost essential to explore the literature about public products. So, this chapter commences with a definition of the public products, continues with the examples of studies conducted about the public products, and ultimately draws attention to the necessity of a study focusing particularly on the user experience with the public products.

-

Public Product Definitions

The products which our daily interactions with do not merely involve the ones that we own. Products used by public have an important place since many of our transactions, information retrieval processes, or quick purchase actions are realized by the products or systems used by public.

As a matter of fact, the range of the products which involve public use is quite broad. Inherently, products like street furniture get involved into the domain. The products or systems in question have been referred by different names. Rowley and Slack (1998) refer to the products and systems such as ATMs, catalogues in libraries, multimedia kiosks, and store guides as public access information systems. They highlighted the importance of the public use of database systems since the contexts in which people involve in these processes are getting more and more frequent. Yarlikas (2009), mentioned about the ATMs as being public technology devices which are situated and used in public spaces. Information systems for public use are also named as public information systems (Sundgren, 2005). However, internet based systems; i.e. web services, were also included in many of those kinds of studies. So, in order to eliminate confusion, the products and systems in the scope of this study are referred as (interactive) public products since the public access of information systems such as electronic books, web-shopping, and so on, are wide off the mark.

-

User Experience

User experience (abbreviated as UX) involves a person's behaviors, attitudes, and emotions about using a particular product, system or service. User experience includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership. Additionally, it includes a person’s perceptions of system aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency. User experience may be considered subjective in nature to the degree that it is about individual perception and thought with respect to the system. User experience is dynamic as it is constantly modified over time due to changing usage circumstances and changes to individual systems as well as the wider usage context in which they can be found.

User experience is how a person feels when interfacing with a system. The system could be a website, a web application or desktop software and, in modern contexts, is generally denoted by some form of human-computer interaction (HCI).

Those who work on User Experience (called UX designers) study and evaluate how users feel about a system, looking at such things as ease of use, perception of the value of the system, utility, efficiency in performing tasks and so forth.

UX designers also look at sub-systems and processes within a system. For example, they might study the checkout process of an e-commerce website to see whether users find the process of buying products from the website easy and pleasant. They could delve deeper by studying components of the sub-system, such as seeing how efficient and pleasant is the experience of users filling out input fields in a Web form.

[pic 3]

Figure 4.1 User Experience

Compared to many other disciplines, particularly Web-based systems, UX is relatively new. The term “user experience” was coined by Dr. Donald Norman, a cognitive science researcher who was also the first to describe the importance of user-centered design (the notion that design decisions should be based on the needs and wants of users).

-

UX Importance

Nowadays, with so much emphasis on user-centered design, describing and justifying the importance of designing and enhancing the user experience seems almost unnecessary. We could simply say, “It’s important because it deals with our users’ needs — enough said,” and everyone would probably be satisfied with that.

However, those of us who worked in the Web design industry prior to the codification of user-centered design, usability and Web accessibility would know that we used to make websites differently. Before our clients (and we) understood the value of user-centered design, we made design decisions based on just two things: what we thought was awesome and what the client wanted to see.

We built interaction based on what we thought worked — we designed for ourselves. The focus was on aesthetics and the brand, with little to no thought of how the people who would use the website would feel about it.

[pic 4]There was no science behind what we did. We did it because the results looked good, because they were creative (so we thought) and because that was what our clients wanted.

Figure 4.2 Design Process

But this decade has witnessed a transformation of the Web. Not only has it become more ubiquitous