Introduction - Modeling Users' Experiences with Interactive Systems - page 16

Part I
Understanding Interpersonal Diversity through Personal Attribute Judgments
Chapter 2 highlights the limitations of standardized psychometric scales and in-
troduces personal attributes judgments. It introduces attribute elicitation techniques
and in particular, the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT). It argues that the true value
of RGT is in quantifying rich qualitative insights and highlights the limitations of
relevant statistical techniques that are typically employed in the analysis of Reper-
tory Grid data. It presents an initial Multi-Dimensional Scaling procedure that aims
at identifying diverse views in Repertory Grid data. The procedure identifies distinct
user groups in a sample population and derives a two-dimensional view for each re-
spective user group. The technique is presented through a case study where users'
views on a set of product concepts were contrasted to the ones of designers.
Chapter 3 presents a second Multi-Dimensional Scaling procedure that aims at
identifying diverse views even within single individuals. The technique is applied
on an existing dataset (Heidecker and Hassenzahl, 2007). It is illustrated that the -
traditional - averaging analysis provides insight to only 1/6th of the total number
of attributes in the example dataset. The proposed approach accounts for more than
double the information obtained from the average model, and provides richer and
semantically diverse views on the set of stimuli.
Part II
Understanding the Dynamics of Experience through Experience Narratives
Chapter 4 presents two studies that inquired into how users experiences with
interactive products develop over time. In the first pilot study, grounded on reduc-
tionism, we asked participants to rate a novel product during the first week as well
as after four weeks of use. In the second study six participants were followed after
the purchase of a novel product and elicited rich experience narratives over a period
of one month.
Chapter 5 presents iScale, a survey tool that aims at eliciting users' experiences
with a product in the form of experience narratives. iScale employs sketching in
imposing a process in the reconstruction of one's experiences from memory. The
chapter motivates the development of two distinct versions of iScale which were
grounded in two opposing theoretical approaches to reconstructing one's emotional
experiences from memory. Finally, it presents two studies that compared the two
different versions of iScale with traditional methods.
Chapter 6 proposes a semi-automated technique for the content analysis of expe-
rience narratives. The technique combines traditional qualitative coding procedures
(Strauss and Corbin, 1998) with computational approaches for assessing the seman-
tic similarity between documents (Salton et al., 1975). This results in an iterative
process of qualitative coding and visualization of insights which enables to move
quickly between high-level generalized knowledged and concrete and idiosyncratic
insights.
Chapter 7 concludes the research described in this manuscript by reflecting on
its contributions and sketching directions for future research.