CHI-ANNOUNCEMENTS Archives

ACM SIGCHI General Interest Announcements (Mailing List)

CHI-ANNOUNCEMENTS@LISTSERV.ACM.ORG

Options: Use Forum View

Use Monospaced Font
Show Text Part by Default
Show All Mail Headers

Message: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Author: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Subject:
From:
Effie Law <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Effie Law <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 4 Jul 2006 11:20:20 +0100
Content-Type:
text/plain
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (350 lines)
Dear Colleagues,

We would like to draw your kind attention to the following event:
NordiCHI'06 Workshop #2 - User Experience (UX): Towards a Unified View, 
14th October (Sat.), Oslo, Norway 
(http://nordichi.net.dynamicweb.dk/Default.aspx?ID=27).

Marc Hassenzahl, a co-organizer of the workshop and an expert in UX, 
will present a keynote speech in the workshop.

The submission deadline is extended to *29th July 2006*.
Should you have any query, please feel free to contact us:
- Effie Law ([log in to unmask])
- Ebba Hvannberg ([log in to unmask])
- Marc Hassenzahl ([log in to unmask])

TITLE:

User Experience - Towards a unified view 

(The Second COST294-MAUSE International Open Workshop)

 

BASIC INFORMATION:

One full day workshop will be held in conjunction with the international 
conference on human-computer interaction, NordiCHI 2006 
(http://nordichi.net.dynamicweb.dk/)

 

Date:             October 14, 2006 (Saturday)

Location:         NordiCHI'06 conference venue, Oslo, Norway.

Website:          http://www.cost294.org/

 

EXPECTED NUMBER, BALANCE AND SELECTION OF PARTICIPANTS:

25: academic researchers and practitioners in Human-Computer Interaction 
(HCI) and Software Engineering (SE)

The primary selection criterion is the quality of position papers, which 
can:

* contribute to a deeper understanding of User Experience (UX), 
especially its determinants and their relationships with existing HCI 
approaches

* stimulate participants to reflect on UX issues from inter-disciplinary 
perspectives

* lay a ground for integrating existing schools of thought on UX

* offer innovative and plausible methods to evaluate and measure UX 
attributes

* augment the scope of UX on the social level

 

WORKSHOP THEMES AND GOALS: Theorizing, Qualifying and Quantifying UX

The conception of usability has been evolving, along with the emerging 
IT landscape and the ever-blurring boundary of the field of HCI.  
Specifically, the so-called user experience (UX) movement is gaining 
ground.  The tenet of UX can be well captured by McCarthy and Wright's 
[8] words:

"Today we don't just use technology, we live with it. Much more deeply 
then ever before we are aware that interacting with technology involves 
us emotionally, intellectually and sensually. So people who design, use, 
and evaluate interactive systems need to be able to understand and 
analyze people's felt experience with technology"

UX is a broadly defined term, including attainment of behavioural goals, 
satisfaction of non-instrumental (or hedonic) needs, and acquisition of 
positive feeling and well-being. Neither a universal definition of UX 
nor a cohesive theory of experience yet exists that can inform the HCI 
community how to practically design for and evaluate UX.

      Traditional usability is characterized as task-oriented and 
performance-based. The three canonical usability metrics - 
effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction - basically address the 
instrumental and non-instrumental aspects of technology use. 
Satisfaction is a composite term, amalgamating a cluster of "felt 
experience" [8], and is measured in a coarse-grained manner. The current 
UX research efforts attempt to reduce the composite satisfaction into 
elemental attributes - fun, pride, pleasure, surprise, intimacy, joy, to 
name just a few - and thrive to understand, define and quantify such 
attributes.

      Hassenzahl and Tractinsky [7] describe the trend of work on UX, 
evolving from being programmatic in the 90s, conceptual in early 2000 to 
empirical in mid-2000. Apparently, the HCI community, to a large extent, 
has been convinced about the utility and necessity of looking into UX 
issues. In attempting to understand UX several approaches focusing on 
different aspects have been developed. Examples are:

 

* Focus on emotions and affect  (e.g. [4], [9])

* Focus on the Experiential (e.g., [5], [8])

* Focus on non-instrumental (hedonic) needs (e.g. [6])

* Focus on aesthetics (e.g. [11])

 

But even those approaches understand interactive products as primarily 
used for individual problem-solving. However, as software becomes more 
and more "social" UX has to address concomitant issues as well. Counter 
to the common understanding that experience is personal and private, it 
can be co-constructed and shared in social interaction [1,2], resulting 
in so-called "co-experience". The challenge is how to define, theorize, 
qualify and quantify co-experience, which is clearly not the sum of 
individual user experience.  In a digital social network, confounding 
issues of context awareness, tele-presence and synchronization can 
aggravate the difficulty of such a challenge.

      Furthermore, recent research on quality models of user interfaces 
[12] indicates that a mesh of so-called non-functional quality factors 
(e.g. security, privacy/trust, consistency, accessibility) determines 
user acceptance. As they are closely coupled, addressing them in 
parallel may invoke tradeoffs (e.g. [3]). It may be helpful to relate 
quality attributes from distinct fields of human factors, usability and 
software engineering to explore overlaps and similarities.

      Theoretically UX is currently incoherent, methodologically UX is 
not yet mature either. Some critics even argue that non-instrumental 
needs are too fuzzy, elusive and idiosyncratic to operationalize (i.e. 
they are simply dismissed as intractable) and that experience and 
emotion are too ephemeral and complex to measure. Proponents of UX are 
more optimistic. First, within UX there seems a shared understanding 
that UX needs to clarify and operationalize constructs to be taken 
seriously within the context of SE or user-centred design. Second, at 
least some approaches to UX believe that with a proper definition come 
valid and reliable measures.

      The later requires the integration of the many facets of UX into a 
more unified view. We reached a point, where the pressing question is no 
longer whether we need UX or not. We need it and we must work on a 
shared understanding of what UX is and how it can be addressed by 
design, engineering and research.

 

The goals of the present workshop are:

* To critically review theoretical frameworks for deepening our 
understanding of UX

* To explore means of how non-instrumental needs, affective requirements 
and experiential expectations can be translated into product quality

* To examine potential and pitfalls of traditional and alternative 
evaluation methodologies for measuring UX  

 

Specifically, we address the aforementioned challenges with the 
following research questions:

* Are UX elements tractable, quantifiable and measurable? Are we looking 
for more qualitative measures?  How valid and reliable are existing UX 
evaluation methods?

* What implications can we draw from UX research on the design and 
evaluation of social software?

* How does UX influence tradeoffs within software design? How does UX 
relate to existing quality approaches in Software Engineering?

 

SUBMISSION

Position papers addressing the above arguments, aims, research questions 
or related ideas are invited. Theoretical expositions, empirical 
studies, case studies and experiential reports will be considered. Of 
particular interest is to envision the role of UX in emerging 
technologies with expected impact of 5-10 years and beyond.

 

Position papers should be submitted to: [log in to unmask]

 

Important dates:

July 29. 2006:    Deadline for submission of position paper

August 8. 2006:   Authors of accepted position papers notified

August 14. 2006:  Early registration deadline

 

Position papers may be from four to six pages long and should be 
formatted according to the ACM SIGCHI format 
(http://nordichi.net.dynamicweb.dk/Default.aspx?ID=18):

     

Position papers should preferably be submitted as .rtf or .pdf files. 
All submitted papers will be reviewed by at least two program committee 
members. It is expected that at least one of the authors of each 
accepted position paper registers for the workshop.

 

OUTCOMES OF THE WORKSHOP:    

* Online/printed proceedings of the accepted position papers;

* Special issue in a refereed HCI journal;

* Joint research proposals

 

INTENDED AUDIENCE:

UI designers, usability researchers and practitioners, HCI students

 

DESCRIPTION OF ACTIVITIES PLANNED: 

i. Presentation: Top 10 quality position papers (~ 3.0 hours)

ii. Panel discussion: A panel of UX experts will engage the floor 
audience in debating some controversial topics in UX (~ 1.5 hour)

iii. Research proposal drafting: Participants will be divided into a few 
small groups to identify most significant research questions in UX that 
can be investigated in a large-scale research project (~ 1.0 hours)

iv. Integration : Participants will be divided into a few small groups 
to identify ways to a more integrated approach to UX (~ 1.0 hours)

v. Group reporting: Group leaders will report to the plenary their 
outcomes (~ 0.5 hour)

 

 

ORGANISERS' NAMES AND BACKGROUNDS: 

 

Organizers:

Effie L-C. Law, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), 
Switzerland

      [log in to unmask]

Ebba T. Hvannberg, University of Iceland, Iceland

      [log in to unmask]

Marc Hassenzahl, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany,

      [log in to unmask]

 

Program Committee:

* Mark Blythe, University of York, UK

* Gilbert Cockton, University of Sunderland, UK

* Antonella De Angeli, University of Manchester, UK

* Asbjørn Følstad, SINTEF, Norway,

* Kasper Hornbæk, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

* Andrew Monk, University of York, UK

* Mark Springett, Middlesex University, UK

* Chris Stary, University of Linz, Austria

* Noam Tractinsky, Ben Gurion University, Negev, Israel

* Arnold P.O.S. Vermeeren, TU Delft, the Netherlands

 

REFERENCES:

[1] Alben, L. (1996). Quality of experience. Interactions, 3, 11-15

[2] Battarbee, K. (2003). Defining co-experience. Proceedings of 
DPPI'03, June 23-26, Pittsburgh,   USA.

[3] Cranor, L.F., & Garfinkel, S. (2005). Security and usability. 
Cambridge: O'Reilly.

[4] Desmet, P. M. A., Overbeeke, C. J., & Tax, S. J. E. T. (2001). 
Designing products with added emotional value: development and 
application of an approach for research through design. The Design 
Journal, 4, 32-47.

[5] Forlizzi, J., & Battarbee, K. (2004). Understanding experience in 
interactive systems. Proceedings of DIS2004, August 104, Cambridge, MA, USA.

[6] Hassenzahl, M. (2003). The thing and I: understanding the 
relationship between user and product. In M.Blythe, C. Overbeeke, A. F. 
Monk, & P. C. Wright (Eds.), Funology: From Usability to Enjoyment (pp. 
31-42). Dordrecht: Kluwer.

[7] Hassenzahl, M., & Tractinsky, N. (2006). User experience - a 
research agenda. Behaviour and Information Technology, 25(2), 91-97

[8] McCarthy, J., & Wright, P. C. (2004). Technology as Experience. MIT 
Press.

[9] Norman, D. (2004). Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday 
things. New York: Basic Books.

[10] Preece, J. (2001). Sociability and usability in online communities: 
determining and measuring success. Behaviour and Information Technology, 
20(5), 347-356.

[11] Tractinsky, N., Katz, A. S., & Ikar, D. (2000). What is beautiful 
is usable. Interacting with Computers, 13, 127-145

[12] Vanderdonckt, J., Law, E. L-C., & Hvannberg, E.T. (2005). 
Proceedings of the First COST294 International Workshop on User 
Interface Quality Models. In conjunction with INTERACT 2005, 12-13th 
Sept 2005, Rome, Italy.


    ---------------------------------------------------------------
                To unsubscribe, send an empty email to
     mailto:[log in to unmask]
    For further details of CHI lists see http://sigchi.org/listserv
    ---------------------------------------------------------------

ATOM RSS1 RSS2