Introduction - Modeling Users' Experiences with Interactive Systems - page 4

reducing the richness of experience to behavioral logs and task-focused evaluations
(Wright and Blythe, 2007). As Hassenzahl (2008) argues:

“While UX seems ubiquitous in industry, a closer look reveals that it is
treated mainly as a synonym of usability and user-centered design”

Conversely, as Hassenzahl (2008) argues, academics “emphasize the differences be-
tween traditional usability and user experience”. A number of frameworks have tried
to conceptualize how experiences are formed (e.g., Forlizzi and Ford, 2000; Wright
and McCarthy, 2004; Norman, 2004; Hassenzahl, 2008) and tentative definitions
of experience have been proposed (Forlizzi and Battarbee, 2004; Hassenzahl and
Tractinsky, 2006; Hassenzahl, 2008).
Hassenzahl (2008) defines user experience as “a momentary, primarily evalu-
ative feeling (good-bad) while interacting with a product or service” which is “a
consequence of users' internal state (e.g. predispositions, expectations, needs, moti-
vation, mood), the characteristics of the designed system (e.g. complexity, purpose,
usability, functionality), and the context within which the interaction occurs (e.g.
organizational/social setting, meaningfulness of the activity, voluntariness of use)”
(Hassenzahl and Tractinsky, 2006). One may argue that such a definition, while be-
ing perhaps the best of what the field of user experience can offer at the moment,
is far from being mature or useful for grounding measures, methods and princi-
ples in the design and evaluation of interactive products. Yet, a common ground has
been established among various disciplines and schools of thoughts in the emerging
field of user experience, perhaps due to “a history of use of the term in ordinary
conversation and philosophy discourse” (Wright and Blythe, 2007). A number of
researchers have tried to identify the dominant schools of thought and several clas-
sifications have been proposed (e.g. Battarbee and Koskinen, 2005; Hassenzahl and
Tractinsky, 2006; Blythe et al., 2007).
We employ the distinction from Blythe et al. (2007) between reductionist ap-
proaches that have their roots in cognitive psychology, and holistic approaches that
are grounded in pragmatist philosophy and phenomenology. As it will become ap-
parent in section 1.4, we are primarily interested in distinct issues that these two
approaches pose when one is concerned about methodology for understanding user
experiences.

1.2.1 Reductionist Approaches

Reductionist approaches in user experience maintain a similar paradigm to usability
(ISO, 1996) and Technology Acceptance research (see Venkatesh et al., 2003) in
trying to identify distinct psychological constructs and propose and empirically test
causal relations between them.
One of the first and well cited studies in user experience, grounded on reduction-
ism, is that of Tractinsky (1997). Tractinsky was puzzled by the findings of Kurosu
and Kashimura (1995) who suggested that subjective perceptions of usability relate