FEATURE
Foci and Blind Spots in
User Experience Research
Javier Bargas-Avila

Google/YouTube User Experience Research | [e-mail]

Kasper Hornbaek

University of Copenhagen | [e-mail] 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