User Experience Over Time - Modeling Users' Experiences with Interactive Systems - page 58

4.2.1 Temporal Aspects in Frameworks of Experience

The holistic thread of user experience has contributed a number of frameworks de-
scribing how experience is formed, adapted, and communicated in social contexts.
Forlizzi and Battarbee (2004) described how experience transcends from uncon-
sciousness to a cognitive state and finally becomes “an experience”, something
memorable that can also be communicated in social interactions. Battarbee and
Koskinen (2005) elaborated on the social mechanisms that lift or downgrade expe-
riences as they participate in our social interactions. McCarthy and Wright (2004)
described how sense-making takes place in the development of experience by de-
composing it into six processes, from anticipation to reflection and recounting.
Although one can note that these frameworks approach temporality through a
micro-perspective, i.e. how experiences are formed, modified and stored, one could
also raise a number of macro-temporal issues. For instance, does the distribution
between unconscious and cognitive experiences remain stable over time or do cog-
nitive experiences reduce as users' familiarity increases? Next, what motivates the
process of lifting up experiences and communicating them in social contexts? Do
these underlying motivations change over time, e.g. as users' initial excitement fades
out? A framework of temporality of experience, proposed in this chapter, aims at
providing answers to these questions by conceptualizing the missing dimension of
time.

4.2.2 Beauty, Goodness and Time

Reductionist approaches to user experience have contribute a wealth of new mea-
surement and structural models. Hassenzahl (2004) distinguished between two qual-
ity perceptions: pragmatic and hedonic . Pragmatic quality, he argued, refers to the
product's ability to support the achievement of behavioral goals (i.e. usefulness and
ease-of-use). On the contrary, hedonic quality refers to the users' self; it relates to
stimulation , i.e. the product's ability to stimulate and enable personal growth, and
identification , i.e. the product's ability to address the need of expressing one's self
through objects one owns. Tractinsky and Zmiri (2006) drew on the work of Rafaeli
and Vilnai-Yavetz (2004) to propose three distinct product quality attributes: usabil-
ity , aesthetics and symbolism . Forlizzi (2007) extended this model to further account
for the emotional and social aspects of product use.
An interesting question relates to how these quality perceptions are combined
to form an overall evaluation of the product (Hassenzahl, 2004; Mahlke, 2006;
Tractinsky and Zmiri, 2006; Hartmann et al., 2008; Van Schaik and Ling, 2008).
Hassenzahl (2004) suggested two distinct overall evaluative judgments of the qual-
ity of interactive products: beauty and goodness . He found goodness to be affected
primarily by pragmatic aspects (i.e. usefulness and usability). On the contrary he
found beauty to be a rather social aspect, largely affected by identification (i.e. the
product's ability to address the need of self-expression). In a similar vein, Tractin-
sky and Zmiri (2006) distinguished between satisfying and pleasant experiences.
They found perceptions of usability to be better predictors for a satisfying rather