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1
C H A P T E R 1
Follow me!
The Kolonel Begaultlaan in Leuven, Belgium, is a straight, dull road, running parallel to a canal. Just
across is Stella Artois—a huge industrial complex, where one of the most internationally successful
lagers is brewed. Number 15, Kolonel Begaultlaan, is a building as non-descript as the road. After
entering and climbing some stairs, you will find yourself in a low-ceilinged hallway leading to a room
that resembles a multi-story car park. In one corner, a wall opens to a passage.The passage is painted
black. Large candles show the way. Behind a wooden door at the end of the passage is Luzine, the
restaurant of Joeren Meus, a Belgian cook with his own TV show—some call him the Jamie Oliver
of Flanders. Luzine presents itself in the Boudoir style: luscious, decadent, grey, black, gold, and
subdued lights. On the occasion I went there, the food was marvelous, my company was splendid,
and the whole evening was a true success. However, what especially struck me and what I kept in
mind, was the stark contrast between the actual interior of the restaurant and its environment.
Luzine was an experience. It was an episode, a chunk of time that I went through and I am
going to remember. It was sights and sounds, feelings and thoughts, motives and actions, all closely
knitted together and stored in memory, labeled, relived and communicated to others. Experiencing
is the stream of feelings and thoughts we have while being conscious—a continuous commentary on
the current state of affairs. Forlizzi and Battarbee (2004, p. 263) describe it as a “constant stream of
self-talk” and are careful to distinguish experiencing from an experience. The latter is something with a
beginning and end; it is something that can be named, whereas the former describes an ever-present
stream.
While I am writing this passage, I feel excited and expectant. I am about to write a book! At
the same time, frustration mounts,given the difficulty to find the appropriate words and expressions;
it is made even more difficult by a nagging and distracting thought about a birthday present I have
to find—“something with a princess, Daddy”—to bring to kindergarten before(!) my six year old
daughter is darting-off empty-handed to her friend’s birthday party. I am experiencing, and I can
willingly make at least a part of it conscious and verbal (Kahneman, D.,1999, p. 7). In retrospect,
writing the book will become an experience, that is, particular actions, feelings, thoughts tied to
a particular place and time. Eating at Luzine was an experience, but the moment I entered the
restaurant, I was struck by the surprising contrast between exterior and interior, or the moment I
tasted the little fleck of cucumber sorbet, I was amazed by the incongruent feeling of salty ice cream
I was experiencing.
Things—technology in its widest sense—made the Luzine experience possible: furniture,
wallpaper, lights, all carefully designed and combined to create a particular atmosphere; a fully
equipped professional kitchen set to prepare the delicious food; telephones to make the reservations
2 1. FOLLOW ME!
and to order the chicken, vegetables, chocolates, and wines; in addition, credit cards to make sure
that the restaurant will not cease to exist. Interestingly, we rarely think of the technology behind all
of this.
It is the same with interactive products. In a recent study, we asked people to share a positive
personal experience with technology (Hassenzahl et al.,2009). A young woman wrote, “I was on a
short trip to Dublin. In the early hours, my mobile phone woke me up. My boyfriend, who stayed at
home, had just texted a sweet ‘I love you’.” This episode is not about a mobile phone. It is all about
feeling related to others, feeling loved and cared about.It is about her annoyance and disorientation,
being woken so early, and how these feelings turn into something warm. The mobile phone itself is
only important insofar that it allows for this episode; it mediates and shapes the experience.
One may argue that without the mobile phone, this young woman would never have had
this experience. This is at the same time true and not true. She would not have had this particular
experience, but the couple would have found other ways to feel related over the distance. He would
have given her a piece of jewelry, maybe a ring, before the journey, and she would have made a
vow to touch the ring every morning at 8 o’clock sharp and think of him. In return, he would
have promised to do the same. The product itself, mobile phone or ring, is only interesting because
it mediates a personally meaningful experience. Without their love, and the couple’s seemingly
necessary but painful separation, touching rings or writing sweet texts is senseless. In other words,
the actual product has no value beyond the experiences it allowed for became inevitably attached.
Yet, through shaping what we feel, think and do, it has the power to create particular experiences.
With the ring, embedded in the agreed upon ritual, the lovers have no chance to surprise each other.
Their bond is rather the consequence of a moment in time, dedicated to each other, and the very
idea of being “in sync.” In contrast, the mobile phone allows for surprising the partner, it allows
for instantaneous emotional expression. Here the bond is created through the receiver’s knowledge,
that—most likely—the sender just experienced what he wrote: “I love you and I can’t hold it back.”
Both experiences get their meaning through a need to feel close to other people. The products in
themselves are only instrumental to this. Nevertheless, they create qualitatively different experiences,
which can be more or less appropriate and enjoyable.
This book is about User Experience (UX), Human-Computer Interaction’s (HCI) version of
experience (see Hassenzahl and Tractinsky,2006 for an overview)—experience that comes about
through the use of (interactive) products. Note, however, that I do not believe the phenomenon
of User Experience and its underlying principles to be very different from experience in general.
Experience becomes User Experience by focusing on a particular mediator of experiences—namely
interactive products—and the according emerging experiences. Be it services, products, events or
other people—to distinguish the emerging experiences is only important insofar as each source
offers different ways to create and shape experiences. From a designer’s perspective, the distinction
is worthwhile, from a recipient’s, consumer’s, or user’s perspective, experience remains experience,
no matter whether mediated by an object, a service, or other people. The experience approach
to designing interactive products, thus, starts from the assumption that if we want to design for
1.1. A FIRST GLANCE ON EXPERIENCE 3
experience, we have to put them first, that is, before the products. Without a clear understanding of
experience, the interactive products we design will never be able to properly shape experiences, let
alone, to create novel experiences.
I close this chapter with further clarifying experience. In Chapter 2, I discuss the key aspects
of experience and its implications for the design and evaluation of products. Chapter 3will expand
on reasons why we should bother with an experiential approach to interactive products. Chapter 4
presents a high-level model of experience and Chapter 5takes a specific design perspective.
1.1 A FIRST GLANCE ON EXPERIENCE
In a seminal paper on emotions, James Russell (2003) advances the idea that emotional experience
is the consequence of self-perception and categorization, a construction. In other words, if you find
yourself being negatively aroused and running away from a bear,you may—unconsciously—integrate
all this into a coherent experience of fear.Russell actually calls it emotional meta-experience because
all its components produce low-level experiences in themselves—the felt arousal, the felt valence, the
sensation of running, the smell of the bear and so forth—but a process on top,a meta process, creates
a coherent whole. As Russell (2003, p. 165) puts it: "Emotional meta-experience is the construction
of a coherent narrative, interpreting, packaging, and labeling the episode—thereby integrating this
episode with general knowledge."
In the context of interactive products, we may use the same basic notion of experience as an
emergent story,packaged, labeled, and integrated into our general knowledge of the world. But from
what does experience emerge? What are the elements and underlying processes?
John McCarthy and Peter Wright (2004) offer the "emotional "as one of their four "threads
of experience." Referring to John Dewey, an American Philosopher of the last century, McCarthy
and Wright note that "emotions are qualities of particular experiences" (p. 83). To me, it is beyond
question that emotion is at the centre of experience. The most compelling argument for this is the
observation that emotion, cognition, motivation, and action are inextricably intertwined. Antonio
Damasio (1994) made a persuasive case by exposing the consequences of physical severances, through
accidents and so forth, of the affective and the cognitive system in the brain. Learning, decision-
making and many other higher order intellectual functions crucially depend on emotion. Damasio
(1994), for example, wrote about Elliot, one of his patients. Elliot suffered from a brain tumor.
Upon removal of the tumor, damage was done to the physiological structures, which connect the
cognitive with the affective. Elliot’s intelligence and memory remained intact after the operation;
however, he was suddenly unable to even make the simplest decisions. With the heritage of the
Cartesian separation of body and mind and the longstanding dismissal of emotions as lowly, savage,
and uncivilized, the central role of emotion in cognition was surprising, leading to a resurgence of
the interest in emotions in itself and their function.
Emotion is further closely linked to action and motivation (e.g., Carver & Scheier, 1989),two
aspects not explicitly addressed by McCarthy and Wright’s thread account. However, it permeates
their discussion of the emotional thread when they point out that emotions are best viewed from
4 1. FOLLOW ME!
the perspective of our goals (p. 84). This implies motivated action. Note that this is neither novel
nor controversial (see Ortony et al., 1988, for an example), but nevertheless important.
All in all, the underlying elements and processes boil down to what Kees Overbeeke and col-
leagues (2002, p. 9) dubbed the "wholly trinity": perceptual-motor, cognitive and emotional skills.
In other words, experience emerges from the intertwined works of perception, action, motivation,
emotion, and cognition in dialogue with the world (place, time, people, and objects). It is crucial to
view experience as the consequence of the interplay of many different systems. Russell’s (2003) sug-
gested meta-process, for example, does this. It easily integrates physiological processes (e.g., arousal),
affective evaluation (e.g., valence), cognitive processes (e.g., attribution), and behavior (e.g., flight).
While many processes together produce experience, emotion is at its heart and has an accentuated
position. One may go as far as saying that emotion is the very language of experience.
1.2 A NOTE ON THE UNIQUENESS AND IRREDUCIBILITY
OF EXPERIENCE
In their book Technology as Experience, McCarthy and Wright (2004) stress the uniqueness and
irreducibility of experience. They argue that while we can certainly focus our analysis on certain
aspects, such as the spatio-temporal structure of an experience, we must be careful to not reduce the
experience to this aspect. By doing so, it will inevitably lose its very essence. Based on this, they
argue for an approach, which describes single instances of experiences instead of modeling classes of
experiences—the latter certainly a reduction of experiences to their common core. And they eschew
attempts to understand experience as reducible to, predictable or explainable by their underlying
processes and elements.
Interestingly, Russell’s (2003) notion of experience as a meta-process allows for both, the
focused analysis of single elements or processes and the notion of experience emerging as a unique,
irreducible whole from the configuration of these elements.The difference is important, given the—
from my perspective—odd debates in Human-Computer Interaction, repeatedly fuelled by papers,
such as Kirsten Boehner and colleagues’ (2007) piece on emotions. Emotions, they argue, are cultural
constructions, different from and irreducible to physiological processes. True, however, it is not a
question of either culture or physiology.Emotional experiences are both. They emerge fully-fledged
as a narrative, how Russell puts it, heavily colored by our knowledge of the world. Nevertheless, they
do not emerge from thin air.They are attempts to makes sense of ourselves, our bodily reactions, our
behavior, other people’s behavior and so forth. It is just a matter of complexity, the sheer amount of
single aspects which are integrated into an experience, which let it appear so unique and irreducible.
Without culture, emotions would not have the quality they have, but without our bodies, we would
not have emotions at all. Again,it is not a question of either physiology or culture, it is to understand
that emotions emerge by drawing upon, and actually "meta-processing" many different elements
and sub processes. As emergent entities, emotions, such as experiences in general, may not be fully
explainable and predictable from single underlying elements, but they are not detached from them.
2.2. HOLISTIC (VERSUS INSTRUMENTAL) 11
near miss feels substantially worse. Norm Theory explains this by counterfactual thinking, which is
essentially a comparison process. To determine how to feel about something, people compare reality
to a salient possible alternative (a fantasy). The near miss makes the alternative of having caught the
plane salient. We then start to contemplate about the “what if ” rather than accepting the fact.
This mechanism explains a number of puzzling findings. In an analysis of the emotional
reactions of bronze and silver medalists at the 1992 Summer Olympics, Victoria Medvec and col-
leagues (1995), for example, found bronze medalists to be happier than silver medalists. This is
explained by the fact that the most compelling alternative for the bronze medalist is finishing with-
out a medal (a downward counterfactual; the fantasized alternative is worse than reality), whereas
the most compelling alternative for the silver medalist is winning gold (an upward counterfactual;
the fantasized alternative is better than reality). The former boosts satisfaction with the outcome,
the latter subdues it; hence, the difference in experience.
HCI tends to dismiss the subjective. A lack of correspondence between an objective condition
and its experience is often understood as an error—on the behalf of the experience. The examples of
the wheel of fortune, the missed plane, and the Olympic medals, demonstrate traceable processes,
which transform the objective into the subjective. As long as experience is our design goal, the task
at hand is clear: to better understand and to consider these transformation rules while designing
and in evaluation. The same objective condition may lead to different experiences. A performance
measure, such as task completion time,may not predict directly, that is, without transformation, the
experience of efficiency. At the same time, by knowing the rules, we may shape experiences. From
studies of waiting time in service queues, for example, it is known that occupied time is perceived as
shorter than unoccupied time. Peter Jones and Emma Peppiat (1996),for example, found experienced
waiting time to generally overshoot actual waiting time by 36%. However, the effect was smaller,
that is, the wait felt shorter and was closer to “reality,” given a running television set was present as
a distractor. Thus, by applying known transformation rules, we can shape experiences. Unearthing
those rules will be an important future objective for any research-oriented, experiential approach to
HCI. Note, however, that experience remains an emergent, that is, it might be shaped but never
fully explained and predicted by objective conditions and transformation rules.
2.2 HOLISTIC (VERSUS INSTRUMENTAL)
I understand HCI as goal-directed action mediated by an interactive product. Many action theories
agree upon the notion of a hierarchical organization of goals (see Carver and Scheier,1989, p. 67).
Figure 2.1 presents a simplified three level goal hierarchy, similar to what, for example, Activity
Theory suggests (e.g., Kaptelinin and Nardi,2006). The model relates the actor’s self to the world
through activity.
On the middle level are do-goals. A do-goal is a concrete outcome, an actor wants to attain,
such as “making a telephone call” or “watching a movie.” Do-goals exist to a good part outside of
technology, but are not fully independent. “Making a telephone call” can be achieved through many
different phones, Skype, and so forth; “watching a movie” can achieved through a TV set,a cinema, a
12 2. CRUCIAL PROPERTIES OF EXPERIENCE
self
world
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).45
-
678'29':5'$
Figure 2.1: A three level hierarchy of goals.
PlayStation Portable, or a laptop. However, without the invention of technology-mediated commu-
nication in itself—and I would already understand two tins connected by a string as technology—the
very goal would not exist at all, hence the do-goal in itself is at least born out of a general technology.
On the lowest level of the hierarchy are motor-goals.“Making a telephone call” can be decom-
posed into sub-goals down to pressing buttons and reading single letters from a display. Traditionally,
designing interaction is understood as designing the structure below the do-goal, that is, arranging
and covering all the sub-goals, down to the motor-goals. For example, to “make a telephone call”
with my Samsung F480, I touch the word “Dial.” This takes me to a screen where I can thump in
the numbers via a touch screen. Finally, I have to press a hard key with the pictogram of a telephone
receiver.The sub-goals and motor-goals below the do-goal are deliberately designed. They may be
similar for different interactive products, but they are never the same.Just take your Nokia or iPhone
and check what those require “to make a telephone call.” Sometimes interaction design extends to
the do-goal level itself, if,for example, a designer decided to put a “calendar” into the phone. By that,
s/he actually adds the potential achievement of “managing an appointment”—a further do-goal. In
2.2. HOLISTIC (VERSUS INSTRUMENTAL) 13
other words, the interactive product embeds do-goals (by providing according functionality) and
provides ways to achieve them through interaction.
It is not astonishing that HCI primarily focuses on models, methods, and theories of do-
goal achievement. Usability testing (e.g., Rubin, J.,1994), for example, helps assessing, whether a
designed interaction is comprehensible, in line with the skills and the knowledge users have, and
properly communicated by the product. Hierarchical Task Analysis (see Rosson and Carroll,2001,
for a discussion, p. 38, and an example, p. 59) is a tool to better understand action in the world to
address it adequately through an interactive product. Although HCI has an impressive repertoire of
methods and tools, it more or less addresses solely the question of decomposing, representing, and
deliberately designing the course of action to achieve a given do-goal. HCI in this sense is primarily
concerned with the “what” and the “how” of interaction.
There is another level of goals on top of do- and motor-goals, the so-called be-goals (see
Figure 2.1). “Being competent,” “being admired,” “being close to others,” “being autonomous,” and
“being stimulated” are examples of be-goals. Their nature is self-referential, that is, close to people’s
selves, whereas motor-goals are close to the world, triggered by the actual interactive product and
context. Be-goals motivate action and provide it with meaning. “Making a telephone call” in itself is
not a meaningful action. However, when feeling lonely, estranged and irritated, maybe because you
just missed the last flight home, another night in an anonymous hotel and a lost Saturday ahead,
calling your spouse to feel related, for “being close to others,” may be a sensible thing to do. Given
a salient be-goal, “making a phone call” becomes meaningful.
In their book On the Self-Regulation of Behavior, Charles Carver and Michael Scheier (1989)
note the close link between affect (and emotions) and behavior. “Much of human behavior is ac-
companied by feelings, good and bad. […] Our feelings color our experiences in ways that make
those experiences three-dimensional. In doing so, feelings tell us critical things about those experi-
ences” (Carver and Scheier,1989, p. 120). Feelings are integral to experiences (maybe even its core),
inextricably intertwined with our action. It is the unpleasant feeling of lostness, being alone in the
anonymous hotel room, in the wrong city or even country,which finally makes me pick up the phone
to call my wife. And it is the warm feeling of being loved, and the feeling of confidence that I will
make the best of my situation, which signals that my actual be-goal of “being related to others”
was attained by the phone call. The experiential approach to HCI must consider be-goals. Being
holistic, thus, means to extend our view beyond the mere do-goals—“beyond the instrumental,” as
Noam Tractinsky and I w rote elsewhere Hassenzahl and Tractinsky (2006, p.92)—to the underlying
reasons for action, the “why” of interaction. Given the suggested three level model, it becomes clear
that experience comprises of perception, action, motivation, and cognition—it emerges from the
simultaneous activation of those sub-processes represented by the three levels and integrates them
into a meaningful, inseparable whole. Designing and evaluating experiences implies to take all three
levels seriously.
Although Chapter 5 of this book will be devoted to the challenges of Experience Design,
let me provide a personal example where a holistic, experiential perspective on interactive products
14 2. CRUCIAL PROPERTIES OF EXPERIENCE
guided design. Some years ago, I was working at the Darmstadt University of Technolog y, Germany,
in the Department of Psychology. The municipality of Darmstadt was interested in concepts of
bringing science into the community, thinking along the lines of public science fairs, information
booths and the like. I suggested a “bag of knowledge” (see Figure 2.2 for a conceptual drawing and
Figure 2.3 for pictures of materials and the prototype).
Figure 2.2: The bag of knowledge, concept.
The “bag” contained an MP3 player connected to a tiny speaker, built into the “neck” of
the bag (see Figure 2.3, upper right picture). It played back pre-recorded snippets of psychological
knowledge, such as “Did you now … your arguments are less persuasive, given the target person
is forewarned. Forewarning initiates a search for counterarguments. The more counterarguments,
the less efficient persuasion becomes. Thus: always surprise people with your attempt to persuade.”
From a traditional perspective,that is, concentrating on do- and motor-goals,I would have wondered
about how to provide the snippets efficiently, how to navigate among them, how to pause, skip, and
replay, in short: how to control their consumption. However, I decided to focus rather on particular
2.2. HOLISTIC (VERSUS INSTRUMENTAL) 15
Figure 2.3: The bag of knowledge, prototype.
experiences, around the themes of surprise, curiosity, and competence. In other words, I attempted
to design for the “why” (including the “what” and the “how”) rather than for the “what” and “how”
only.
To do so, I made some crucial conceptual decisions:
• The bags were to be placed in surprising locations, such as supermarket shelves, side by side
with regular products.
• The bag continuously played back the snippets of knowledge, the users had no control about
pace, sequence and so forth.
• The volume was so low that a user had to bring her ear close to the neck of the bag. Because
of this, users could only consume individually, not as a group.
16 2. CRUCIAL PROPERTIES OF EXPERIENCE
Imagine being in a supermarket. Suddenly, you hear a faint whisper,trickling from somewhere
between the marmalade and the cereals. Curious, you look out for its source, and here it is, a bag
spilling “talk.” You shoot a questioning glance at your spouse, who smiles encouragingly. You bring
your ear closer to the bag until the whisper becomes intelligible. You listen with a smile, turn to your
spouse, and proclaim “Did you know …?”
For the bag, I used a good part of psychological knowledge to create a particular experience.
For the experience of surprise and curiosity, I relied on the irresistible power of voices in low key and
an apparent opportunity “to listen in.” For the experience of competence, I created the impression
of being told secrets, to be shared immediately or stored away for later use.The goal of the bag was
to make psychology a part of the community. I tried to achieve this by choosing specific experiences
as design objectives rather than concentrating on the do-goals related to the consumption of the
knowledge snippets. I took a holistic perspective, which sought to understand all levels of goals—
be-goals, such as “being stimulated” and “being competent,” included.
I built a working prototype of the bag. It was never placed in a supermarket, but it was used for
some time in the course of university road shows at the psychology booth. I also never did any formal
evaluation study—the question of whether the bag actually created the experience intended remains
open. However, I saw potential future students to be attracted by the whisper, and I witnessed the
occasional conversation started by the one having listened to the bag’s content. I am aware that this
will not convince any seasoned HCI professional and even less the eager HCI student. However, the
primary point to be made is not whether the bag works or not, but what it takes to design holistically,
that is, for an experience.
2.3 SITUATED (VERSUS ABSTRACT)
Single experiences are highly situated, idiosyncratic, emerging entities. Experiences are never alike,
neither between nor within experientors. My next visit to Luzine—if ever—will be different. Luzine’s
potential to surprise may already be exhausted; it might have other experiences in stock. The friend
of the young woman, who created the wonderful experience of closeness while being apart through
a simple SMS, will surely send many other SMS in his life, but never one that will create the
exact same experience for his lover. And there will be many future occasions to miss my wife, but
the experience will never match the one of being in Minneapolis, realizing that the return flight I
booked is bound for the day after tomorrow instead of tomorrow. I wanted to go home, desperately.
I rebooked the flight, patiently accepting the extra charges, but nearly missed the connecting flight
in Chicago O’Hare—a nightmare of an airport. I can still re-feel the strange mixture of exhaustion
and enthusiasm, after being seated and finally bound for home.
In his book on Experiential Marketing, Bernd Schmitt (1999, p. 61) uses the term “perpetual
novelty,” borrowed from work on chaos and complex systems, to describe that“no two experiences are
exactly alike.” This is due to experience’s strong dependence on context, its“situatedness.” Experience
emerges from the integration of action, perception,motivation, and emotion, however, all being in a
dialog with the world at a particular place and time. In every moment, we take the world in through
