How to analyze an experience in detail
What is an “experience”? As an user experience professional, I often ask myself this question. What are some components I should consider when analyzing an experience, just like we analyze a piece of music? After reading the book In Technology as Experience (McCarthy et al, 2004), I gained more understanding of how to analyze an experience in detail to define our interactions with technology. The four threads of experience provided in the book does not define the components for an experience, but provided me with great guidance on how to analyze and describe an experience. In the following paragraphs, I will do a brief summary of each thread of experience and follow up with some reflections on each of them.
The first thread of experience is the sensual thread. Sensual thread describes how people feel when engaging with emerging technologies. Different people might have a distinct sensory experience with technology. For example, an experienced programmer might find writing codes quite enjoyable and they will be fully engaged and stay in a sense of flow while writing the program. They understand the algorithms, just like a musician hears the story behind the sound. They detect the problems in the syntax and solve them for a short length of time. Compared with someone who is new to the field, experts have a more engaged sensory engagement with the code when engaging with this activity. In contrast, someone new to programming might feel scattered as they often need to look up online for instructions or refer to other example code; they might end up losing their attention during the process. This experience might end up being incomplete. However, after days or months of practice, they might start to feel the process engaging as they started to gain a sense of accomplishment by solving a particular problem. Learning programming is like learning any type of language, requires practice and persistence.
The second thread is the emotional thread. Emotional thread describes how people’s emotions change when engaging with different services online. I would use customer service as an example. When a customer lands on an e-commerce site, what are some features we could design to improve their purchasing experience and make them feel valued? Are there enough ratings and reviews for a particular product so that the customer has the confidence to make the purchasing decision? Is there enough instruction for them to select the sizes and colors? Do they wish to save items later and come back to their wishlist right away? What are some other features that could influence online shoppers’ emotions when they interact with the platform? A quicker checkout process might meet the needs of a group of customers but not others since some people might prefer a more efficient way of completing the purchase, while others might need more time to make the decision, so having alternative options will help solve this problem.
The third thread is the compositional thread. The compositional thread is concerned with our relationships between the parts and the whole of an experience. The author in the chapter provided us with questions to keep in mind when considering the compositional thread of experience:
- What is this about?
- What has happened?
- Where am I?
- How do those things go together?
- What will happen next?
- Does this make sense?
- What would happen if..?
In order to create a meaningful experience, we have to think about a narrative or background against which the event could emerge. (McCarthy et al, 2004) The navigation bar in a website could serve as an example. When a user lands on a particular page, they might be thinking about those questions: what page is this? How may I navigate to other pages? Is this the place where I should be? What will happen if I click the button? Did I click something wrong?
User Experience Designers often need to think about those questions to ensure the compositional thread is well designed. It would be important to also think about how to make sure different technologies will facilitate learning for different people. For example, when we design for accessibility, the navigation bar will need to have borders, not just colors to indicate the current status of the user. Some people might find an activity interesting, whereas others might think it entirely meaningless. Having the courage and patience to test out our assumptions and prototypes will definitely help us make the right design decisions.
The last thread is the spatio-temporal thread. Space and time also construct our experience. An intense emotional engagement might make our sense of time change. A frustrating experience might let us feel space is confined. The author provides an example of the novel. Characters and personalities in novels are shaped by the time and places in which they live. A person’s behavior is strongly related to the values and customs of a specific place. (McCarthy et al., 2004) Take the online shopping example, space and time will influence how a customer engages with the mobile platform. An online shopper probably prefers a safer place such as their home or office to complete the checkout process. When they use a mobile phone to purchase items, they are more likely to be on the go and shop just for convenience. In this case, if the platform does not have features indicating a safe checkout process for customers, they might still quit the mobile shopping process on the go and proceed with the purchase when they return home using a desktop.
To sum…
After understanding the four threads of experience, I think we have just mastered a way to describe our experience with technology from different dimensions and angles. If you find this article helpful, or if you have any thoughts, feel free to leave me a comment!
Reference:
McCarthy, J. and Wright, P. 2004. In Technology as Experience. MIT Press.
