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    Vol. 6 (February 16, 2018).

    Methodology

    Abstract

    User experiences have been the focal research issue in service design (SD), as it has various benefits. As it will be demonstrated in this paper, developing an efficient, yet usable crisis management service requires a deep understanding of the experience (UX) of all stakeholders involved in the crisis. While many SD studies have proposed different principles, practices and tools, there is a lack of a practical comprehensive design framework that empowers designers to integrate effectively UX in the SD lifecycle. In this paper the authors propose a methodological framework called UXD-IS (User eXperience Design of Interactions and Services) that combines UX characterization and touchpoints analysis. The framework has been validated through a case study related to flooding crisis management. The investigations reveal that the framework is a powerful support tool during the first phases of the development of a new service or the improvement of an existing one.

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    Abstract

    One approach to getting to know a user and understanding the user experience (UX) is phenomenology. Currently, there is a lack of clearly defined methods for phenomenological analysis of user experience in design projects. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is an approach developed in psychology, and in this article, it is adapted to the case of a pro bono design project at a UX design agency supporting a disadvantaged group of people, newly arrived immigrants to Sweden. The design project involved research on how the immigrants experienced a service that introduced them to the job market. The adapted method, UX IPA, contributed to the pro bono project with a focus on both experience and meaning, which is important in design projects that relate to major events in users’ lives. The method was considered less appropriate in UX projects for specific products with highly instrumental use. The method can, in many cases, be too costly. However, costs can possibly be reduced by top-down approaches. In commercial UX projects, the method may be appropriate for the fuzzy front-end of design and innovation, but clients may be unimpressed by the small sample size. This can potentially be alleviated by mixed-methods approaches.

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    Research

    Abstract

    Design artefacts are vital to communicate design outcomes, both in remote and co-located settings. However, it is unclear how artefacts are used to mediate interactions between designers and stakeholders of the design process. The purpose of this paper is exploring how professional design teams use artefacts to guide and capture discussions involving multidisciplinary stakeholders while they work in a co-located setting. An earlier draft of this paper was paper published in the Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE 2017). This work adds substantial clarification of the methodology followed, further details and photographs of the case studies, and an extended discussion about our findings and their relevance for designing interactive systems. We report the observations of six design meetings in three different projects, involving professional design teams that follow a user-centered design approach. Meetings with stakeholders are instrumental for design projects. However, design teams face the challenge of synthesizing large amounts of information, often in a limited time, and with minimal common ground between meeting attendees. We found that all the observed design meetings had a similar structure consisting of a series of particular phases, in which design activities were organized around artefacts. These artefacts were used as input to disseminate and gather feedback of previous design outcomes, or as output to collect and process a variety of perspectives. We discuss the challenges faced by design teams during design meetings, and propose three design directions for interactive systems to coordinate design meetings revolving around artefacts.

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    Abstract

    Human-computer interaction (HCI) research has recently become more interested in studying practices. Looking beyond the novelty of technology, practice studies try to understand how technology becomes integrated into everyday life and how it shapes everyday practices in the longer time span. The contribution of this article is to demonstrate how ubiquitous computing practices develop. The article also sheds light on children´s and their families´ smart device practices in private and public settings. This paper responds to the recent call for practice studies in HCI and tries to understand technology-mediated practices of children and their families in their everyday lives. We first focused on children´s practices with a multipurpose public display through an ethnographic field study, and then broadened our focus to the children´s and families´ smart device practices through a diary study. We showed that children´s practices with a public display were surprisingly similar to their other information and communication technology (ICT) practices at home and elsewhere. In both settings, displays were used for entertainment and time-killing, as well as for babysitting and social interaction. This study indicates that technology-mediated practices do not spring up from the ground fully formed. There are several factors contributing to the practices´ emergence: the artefact itself and its affordances, the nature of the space, and the mind-set of the users. This finding has many implications for research and design, indicating that when developing technology, we should pay attention to a variety of factors that might be contributing to the emergence of practice around that technology - factors not yet fully explored by current research.

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