FEATURE
Foci and Blind Spots in
User Experience Research
Javier Bargas-Avila
Google/YouTube User Experience Research | bargas@google.com
Kasper Hornbaek
University of Copenhagen | kash@diku.dk
November + December 2012
interactions
In recent years, HCI has been
influenced by a movement known
as user experience. Take a look at
current job postings and you can’t
help but notice that companies
often look for “user experience
specialists” (rather than “
usability experts”) or “user experience
designers” (rather than “
interaction designers”). At conferences,
an increasing number of papers
describe “user experience” (rather
than “usability”).
The phrase user experience (UX)
denotes new ways of understanding and studying the quality in
use of interactive products, ways
that represent a reaction against
usability research and “
traditional” HCI. UX researchers have
argued that usability research is
too focused on optimizing task
efficiency, removing problems in
the user interface, and studying
interactive products used for work.
Traditional HCI is seen as having a
mostly instrumental, task-oriented
view of interactive products.
In contrast, UX focuses also
on hedonic qualities of use and
much more broadly on experi-
ence. Hedonic qualities concern,
for instance, aesthetics, fun, and
identification that people experi-
ence during interaction. This focus
requires new approaches for design-
ing and evaluating interactive prod-
ucts because existing methods are
unable—it is claimed—to capture
experience. Thus, many research-
ers in the field of UX state that they
methodologically break new ground
or study new facets of interactive
products’ use.
What Does UX Research Study?
Some researchers posit that the
focus of UX research should be
interactive products used in everyday life, whereas other researchers
are willing to apply UX methods
in any domain. We took a look at
the products researchers study and
found that the most frequent topics
of research are consumer products,
like mobile phones or apps, and art
(each 21 percent of our sample; see
Figure 1). The context of use is typically leisure ( 64 percent), whereas
work or a combination of work/lei-sure is studied less frequently (each
18 percent).
It seems that the UX movement
not only shifted the focus from
usability to experience, but also
changed the products and use contexts that researchers study. The
broadening of products studied is
one motivation for UX research.
Nevertheless, many studies in our
sample speak generally about UX,
yet fail to reflect on the products
used to study UX. The UX movement criticized traditional HCI for
focusing on work-related products.
The narrow focus on consumer
products and art seems comparably
harmful because it may preclude
conclusions about experience in