Archives of Design Research

An early notion of positive peak experiences in HCI is the introduction of emotions to usability. Carroll pioneered this through the idea of fun and enjoyment . Later, Jordan extended this idea of fun through his framework of The Four Pleasures (Jordan, 2000). Enchantment as a third concept underlines the importance of positive peak experiences in improving user experience that facilitates closer relationships between people and technology(McCarthy, Wright, Wallace, & Dearden, 2006). Finally, Engagement frames peak experiences on the basis of two underlying fundamentals, which are those of attentional and emotional involvement. Thereby, selective attention is brought to a stimulus as a form of engagement that often is limited to a quick glance (Overbeeke, Djajadiningrat, Hummels, Wensveen, & Frens, 2004).

Besides these positive peak experiences, more recent approaches have also discovered the value of negative peak experiences. Schnädelbach for example examines how Thrill augmented the experience of amusement rides. Similar to the previous examples the focus, again, is on a moment of experience only this time a moment of Perceived Crisis (Schnädelbach et al., 2008) Much in line with this study, Benford argues for deliberately creating discomfort for entertainment, enlightenment and sociality and highlights how those peak moments of uncomfortable interactions are embedded into an overall experience a dramatic act (Benford et al., 2012).All the above mentioned approaches share the strong focus on clear-cut and conscious moments of experience.

The first focus implies a research methodology for capturing lived and felt experience through a diary study. The second focus entails a conceptual framework for interpreting what impacts the quality of that lived and felt

Figure 1 The continuous experience of smartphone use

A move away from momentary peak experiences is found in a few approaches within HCI. These approaches are directed towards the continuous experience over longer periods, in which time gains more attention, up to the point that it itself becomes the subject of research. Regarding user experience the time dimension has been repeatedly noted as being particularly important (Hassenzahl & Tractinsky, 2006; Karapanos, Zimmerman, Forlizzi, & Martens, 2009), Nonetheless, time has usually been treated as a fixed measure along which other variables have been examined. For example, Karapanos conducted a longitudinal study on smartphone use to focus on the long-term effects of product adoption. He found that, with progressing time, people shifted their interest from hedonic aspects of product use, to aspects of how a product becomes meaningful in one's life. While this finding is valuable, the role that temporality takes is limited to being a passive dimension.

A closely related example is the study of a long-term evaluation of user experience with mobile phones. This study employs so-called UX Curves for a cost-effective elicitation of longitudinal user experience data (Kujala, Roto, Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Karapanos, & Sinnelä, 2011). The reasons that relate to customer loyalty are identified through retrospective self-reports. Here as well, while offering interesting insights to user experience, this experience is seen merely as a function of time, in which time itself does nothing but continue.

In contrast, the study of fractured attention does not just acknowledge the continuity of time, but goes further, to see time not just as a dimension along which experience unfolds, but as a feature that, more actively, shapes experiences. The issue of fractured attention refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding a topic and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much simultaneous information.

Friedman has termed the changed quality of time that impacts people’s experience with communication technologies as The age of interruption (Friedman, 2006). Thereby, he points out that people are not just communicating with each other, but that they are permanently in a communication and becoming the communication, so that interruptions occur continuously without prior notice.

Similarly, Stone has proposed her concept of the changed quality of time regarding multitasking with the term Continuous Partial Attention or CPA (Stone, 2008). CPA describes user tactics of superficially paying attention to simultaneously incoming information from multiple communication devices such as the PC or the mobile phone. Both approaches are notable for acknowledging a changed quality of time that impacts experience, and for heading towards an understanding of time’s malleability in how it is experienced, however, they limit their scope on how time is contracted when saturated with activities.

A notable exception to the study of time experience in HCI is offered by Rattenbury et al. who have introduced their concept of plastic time as a qualitative experience of time using mobile computing devices such as the Ultra Mobile PC (Rattenbury, Nafus, & Anderson, 2008). The authors posit that, although framed as the “negative space of busyness”, their metaphor of plastic, to describe how time behaves with personal and mobile technologies, has much farther reaching implications than that of scheduling. Indeed, plastic conceptualizes time as a design material, which has great impact for HCI.

Rattenbury describes the five characteristics of this light engagement as (1) occurring opportunistically (2) adapting durations (3) going by unnoticed (4) being non-immersive and (5) having no category affiliation. By comparing objective logging data and subjective self-reports, Rattenbury illustrates that plastic time is something that the people care about deeply, yet fail to remember. Although offering many new insights, this study, as well, leaves the critical question why people care about plastic time when it goes by unnoticed unanswered.

Experience Design’s lack of attention for the continuous time experience has also been noted by Carroll, who, alluding to his earlier article Fun , proposes a visionary agenda for HCI (Carroll, 2004):

As the use of computers expands into leisure activity […] our understanding of usability may broaden further to encompass qualities like eudaimonic well-being […]. Perhaps the most significant consequence of human-computer interaction is larger-scale and/or longer-term than those investigated so far.

This quote from 2004 is visionary to the present day, in that it posits that HCI should address eudaimonia over the then more common term of hedonia and that this shall be related to a different approach to time.

We aimed at subjective insights about the smart phone use of Korean youths. Our research focused on real-life use situations of the smartphone among 20 to 25 year old Koreans, who currently account for the highest rate of mobile internet usage (KCC, 2011; The Nielsen Company, 2013). We chose a narrow sample to focus on idiosyncrasies special to that age group and help improve the internal validity of this study. This approach helped to minimize a contamination of our data, since the chosen age group showed a limited involvement and overlap of activities with other Korean social or demographic groups. The recruitment process was enabled by announcements on public notice boards and online forums, as well as through recommendations. We recruited 13 participants with a mean age of M=23.5 (SD=1.5). Seven participants were female, 6 were male. Six participants owned an Android OS Device, five an iPhone. In addition, one participant used a Blackberry and the final remaining one a Nokia device (Symbian OS).

Data collection focused on the retrospective lived experience when people felt motivated to interact with their smartphone. Therefore, we based our approach on the Day Reconstruction Method (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004), in which participants were encouraged to apply storytelling techniques that uncover the meaningful experiences recalled from the preceding diary activities.

Our study adopted the research format of a design workshop that was based on the generative element of Storyboarding and the evaluation of the experience with Likert scales. The two elements structured each workshop session into two parts, with the former emphasizing the participants’ expressivity in crafting a visual narrative, and the latter focusing on their evaluative capacity to judge the quality of their reconstructed experiences. Over the course of 14 weeks five workshop sessions were held, in which participants were asked to reconstruct a previous day, dating back approximately three weeks into the past. The final body of study material consisted of five storyboards and 45 associated experience evaluation charts for each of the 13 participants.4

Figure 2 Storyline template to evaluate Key Events (black line) and Story Links (grey line)

The study was special in that it significantly built upon the participants’ generative capabilities. Accordingly, the analysis relied on the evaluative capacity of the user. For this we devised an evaluative component of the workshop sessions that allowed us to analyze the data through the participants’ perspective and co-interpret their subjective experiences. As the two key instruments we utilized Storyboards and Likert scales. Each storyboard provided us with five UX storylines. Several Likert scales for different experience qualities were mapped to each of the five storylines and resulted in a UX Curve. Figure 2 shows a template of a storyline with a corresponding UX evaluation for one reconstructed day. In accordance to the two instruments the analysis proceeded in two steps.

The first step of analysis had the participants distribute selected frames from their previously constructed storyboard onto two parallel storylines of six frames each, of which the upper presented six key events (main storyline) that consisted of memorable peak experiences, whereas the lower showed six story links (sub-thread of in-between events) that consisted of the less memorable continuous experience that connected the key events. The rationale behind extracting a sub-thread from the main storyline was a consequence of the frequent smartphone use instances, which we observed in the previous two studies, to be concentrated in the time between key events, especially those instances during idle time. We wanted the participants to realize and reconstruct the moments of smartphone use that had passed by unnoticed although those moments accounted for most of their interactions with the device.

The second step of analysis, mapped each story frame to a nine-point Likert scale to evaluate its quality. We assessed nine different quality aspects that are commonly referred to in UX Design. Following the pragmatic factors (do-goals) of Hassenzahl’s User Experience Framework (Hassenzahl, 2004b; Hassenzahl & Roto, 2007),the first three aspects were (1) ease of use, (2) usefulness, and (3) efficiency. These aspects represented activity-directed motivations and aimed at evaluating the usability of smartphone interactions.

Following the hedonic factors (be-goals) of the same framework, the subsequent three aspects were (4) beauty, (5) excitement, and (6) satisfaction. These aspects represented identitydirected motivations and aimed at evaluating the pleasure of smartphone interactions.

Based on the key psychological needs formulated in the Self-Determination Theory or SDT (Deci & Ryan, 2000),we defined impressionistic factors, leading us to the remaining three aspects of (7) engagement – feeling competent, (8) social connections – feeling related, and (9) being in control – feeling autonomous. These aspects, unlike the first six ones, did not aim at the momentary experience of smartphone use, but at its overall and continuous experience. They represented self-directed motivations and aimed at evaluating the general subjectivity of smartphone interactions.

SDT’s framework seemed particularly appropriate to accommodate the two aspects of continuity and subjectivity, because it builds upon the three psychological needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy that are characterized by their continuous significance and their emphasis on the subjective experience of self-determination. In other words, the needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy are always felt and they are felt differently by each individual.

In a more recent study Hassenzahl, as well, has focused on universal psychological needs and their fulfillment as source of positive experiences, whereby he highlighted the prominent role that hedonic qualities play in fulfilling those needs (Hassenzahl, Diefenbach, & Göritz, 2010). We add to this notion the idea that there are further qualities that contribute to psychological need fulfillment and that we identified those as the above outlined impressionistic qualities .

The final step of analysis returned us to our initial study question of what participants find noteworthy to remember. We, however, realized that this question excluded the continuous experience, which in the course of the study became more important to us. Thus, we modified our question from a sole focus on peak experiences, to a comparison of peak with the continuous experiences. We, then, wanted to understand (1) how peak and continuous experiences relate to the pragmatic, hedonic, and impressionistic qualities of smartphone interactions, and (2) how peak and continuous experiences relate to each other.

For that we examined key events and story links separately. The average rating for key events showed that positive key events were much likely associated with hedonic quality factors, whereas negative key events slightly tending to pragmatic quality factors. Impressionistic quality factors proved to impact the experience of key events much less than the pragmatic and hedonic factors. The average rating of the story links showed that the overall score was lower than that of the key events. However, the impressionistic quality factors received higher scores for the story links than those for the key events.

The quality of key events, which represent peak experiences, has shown to be dominated by hedonic factors, while impressionistic factors do not seem to contribute much to the experience. In contrast, the quality of story links, which represent the continuous experience, has shown a slight dominance of impressionistic factors, which we identified earlier as an indirect source of positive experiences through psychological need fulfillment.

Figure 3 Example of a completed Storyboard and UX-Curve

An initial result was confirming the assumption that people failed to remember most of their continuous experience with the smartphone, even though they care about this experience, much like they care about other low-priority yet comforting activities such as watching TV or browsing the web that reveal their actual value not through their presence, but rather through their absence when they are painfully missed. Study 3 has shown that we can relate the value that people see to the impressionistic qualities of smartphone interactions as well as to equivalent daily activities that are too generic to be remembered.

Generally, we observed that participants found it hard to remember details of their specific smartphone interactions through the filter of a three week period. Even the use of memory aids, consisting of the previously made photo snapshots and chat logs, was not always helpful in recalling meaningful details or just recognizing specific situations, so that the participants often started to describe recurring habits or behavioral patterns instead.

P4: I’m not sure what I did there or how I felt about it [the smartphone], because I didn’t think about it too much So there is not really much to tell… only that I felt bored and that it was good that I could make the time pass by quicker.
P1: That must have been one of those walks to school. I could totally make myself forget time. Especially, with the ear-phones plugged in. It makes it easier.
P12: I have those days where I really have to rush if I want to grab some lunch and just turning on the lock screen with every second or third bite gives me a little more time.

Instead of being able to address the product experience with the smartphone the experienced time with and through the device was easier recalled. More importantly, the quality of the experience was related to the capability of adapting the time experience, rather than to a positive affect concerning the experience itself. In other words, the participants willfully customized their experience of time through the smartphone to make them feel better.

As we expected, the average rating for “Key Events” that represented Peak Experiences was highest for the hedonic factors of beauty, excitement, and satisfaction, as positive experience were easier to remember. In contrast, the average rating for “Story Links” that represented the Continuous Experience was highest for the impressionistic factors of engagement, social connections, and being in control. We assume that this indicates what people might value unconsciously about the use of an omnipresent technology such as the smartphone. Indirectly, we assume that this might point to a reason why smartphone use makes people happy.

Yet, based on the preliminary findings of this empirical study it would be presumptuous to claim that the smartphone contributes significantly to peoples’ subjective well-being or even make them happy. In fact, there is much evidence to the contrary, that personal internet-enabled technologies such as the smartphone can have a rather negative impact on mental health and well-being. For example, Carr believes that the Internet is a medium based on interruption and that it is changing the way people read and process information. While the acquisition of knowledge is associated with deep reading and solitary concentration, he says, there is not much of that to be found online (Carr, 2011) And for Turkle, “the tethered self” is always on, connected and most of all conflicted (Turkle, 2011).

Figure 4 Ratings for peak and continuous experiences