A Performance Perspective on UX
Brand managers apply UX to many situations to gain insight into how consumers engage and gain satisfaction. Read this novel perspective on UX, which studies consumer experience within the mobile phone market. Compare the theoretical foundation in phenomenology, where individual subjective experience is the primary and natural focus of inquiry, versus the model of consumer journey discussed in section 7.3.
Introduction
The evaluation of user experience has become an increasingly important aspect of usability and human computer interaction research. However, as a relatively new area of research it has lacked a clear and unified theory, methodology and understanding. Given the multidisciplinary nature of user experience research, which incorporates designers, psychologists, sociologists, computing scientists, and researchers from the mixed background of human computer interaction and beyond, it is not surprising that the community is having trouble finding common ground. This diversity of definitions and approaches has led to a rather fragmented community lacking both common understandings and comparability of results. There have been a variety of activities and special interest groups in the community tackling these disparities by discussing appropriate methods for user experience, developing shared understandings or definitions of user experience, and discussing the theory, if any, behind user experience. While some important overarching aspects of user experience have been identified there is still a lack of clear direction in the community as a whole.
This paper presents a performative perspective on UX, combining phenomenology and dramaturgical metaphors in order to understand experience as performance. This is a compelling approach to understanding interactions that occur while mobile or in public places because these interactions are often performed in front of spectators, where the very presence of these spectators significantly changes the experience of interacting. The influence of spectators is particularly interesting for highly visible actions, such as whole body interactions, where alternative input and output techniques such as gesture, speech or proximity make use of the whole body as an interactive part of the interface. These kinds of interfaces, which often require users to perform new and possibly strange actions in public places, may be unacceptable or undesirable to use in certain public spaces. This performative approach to user experience stems from the embodied interaction tradition. However, where Dourish's embodied interaction builds on the combination of social computing and tangible computing, this performative perspective on UX builds on social computing and whole body interaction. This slightly different foundation leads to less of a focus on embodiment, and more on performance.