UX: old wine in new bottles?
Finnish researchers Antti Oulasvirta, Pertti Saariluoma, Rebekah Rousi and Jaana Leikas discuss replacing using intuitive notions of emotions with systematic psychological knowledge.
“Underlying the recent surge in interest in user experience may be the realization that consumers have increasing power over the fate of information technology. Taken literally, user experience concerns the subjective first-person feeling (hence “experienceâ€) arising when technology is being used for something (hence “userâ€). This is the interpretation we assume in the rest of this article.
We claim that the failure to produce a reliable scientific body of knowledge about UX is partly due to falsely treating it as a new topic, as if nothing has ever been said about it before. Although it is inaccurate to claim that UX has been entirely ignorant of psychology, treating UX as if it was something truly novel is one of the biggest impediments to scientific progress in this field, and it is manifest in the lack of reliable methods and actionable theories. We need to reformulate our understanding of UX in a way that connects it to areas of research that deal with human experience.”
