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1.3
Diversity in User Experience
While one may quickly note that holistic approaches emphasize the uniqueness of
experience across different situations and people, both approaches to user experi-
ence have readily accepted that diversity in users' experiences is prevalent. A wealth
of empirical studies, grounded on reductionism, acknowledge and tackle diversity
empirically (e.g. Hassenzahl and Ullrich, 2007; Mahlke and Lindgaard, 2007).
This section introduces the notion of diversity in user experience. We introduce
a framework of diversity in subjective judgments and identify four different sources
of diversity in users' experiences with interactive products. Only later, in section
1.4 we will introduce the methodological differences between the two approaches,
reductionist and holistic, in accounting for diversity.
1.3.1
A Framework of Diversity in Subjective Judgments
Diversity was readily accepted in the HCI field as a key issue. Not all users like
the same things and different product qualities suffice in different situations (e.g.
Cooper, 1999). But, other fields have been constructed on the assumption of homo-
geneity across different individuals. In the field of psychophysics, for example, the
principle of homogeneity of perception states that different participants will more
or less agree on perceptual judgments such as how much noise, or blur, an im-
age contains, or how much friction, or inertia, one may find in a haptic control.
This assumption has been instrumental in the development of respective statistical
techniques; for instance, Multi-Dimensional Scaling (Green et al., 1989; Martens,
2003), motivated by this principle, assumes that judgments of different individuals
may be visualized in a shared K-dimensional configuration of stimuli, for which
the coordinates of the stimuli in the configuration space along different axes can be
monotonically related to the observed attribute ratings of the participants.
It seems natural to accept that while different individuals might agree on low-
level perceptual judgments, e.g. friction in a haptic control, a relative disagreement
would be found as one moves to more cognitive judgments, e.g. the degree to which
this haptic control is perceived as playful. Indeed, in an exploratory study we tried
to inquire into whether people agree on product character judgments (Janlert and
Stolterman, 1997) of a physical rotary knob. A project done by Bart Friederichs in
his Master's studies, in collaboration with BMW, aimed to prove that physical con-
trols, i.e. rotary knobs, can be designed so that they comply with the personality of
a given car. But, how much do different users agree on high level product charac-
ter judgments of haptic controls? Eighteen participants experienced fifteen different
haptic scenes programmed in a haptic feedback knob and rated them in terms of
four different bipolar scales: Dynamic - Static, Agile - Plump, Playful - Serious, and
Luxurious - Austere . One may quickly note that the last two judgments, those of
playfulness and luxury, are higher level judgments, allowing for more disagreement
on what one considers playful or luxurious. We applied a uni-dimensionality test,
by applying two Multi-Dimensional Scaling solutions on the four ratings: a 1D and
a2D.A
2
χ
test, showed that the first two judgments, which we assumed as lower
 
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