Identifying Experience Categories to Design for Positive Experiences with Technology at Work.

Transcription

1 Katharina M Zeiner Magdalena Laib Katharina Schippert Michael Burmester Information Experience and Design Research Group (IXD) Stuttgart Media University Stuttgart, Germany zeiner@hdm-stuttgart.de magdalena.laib@hdm-stuttgart.de e schippert@hdm-stuttgart.de burmester@hdm-stuttgart.de Identifying Experience Categories to Design for Positive Experiences with Technology at Work. Abstract In order to create positive experiences with technology at work we have go gain a better understanding of positive experiences at work in general. Here we describe how experience interviews can be used to distill experience categories that capture the essence of clusters of positive experiences at work. These experience categories can then form the basis of new positive experiences with technology at work. This process allows practitioners to draw from the wealth of positive experiences in areas that easily lend themselves to those experiences and apply them to areas that might not have been the focus of positive design so far. We find 21 distinct experience categories for situations at work and show how they can be applied when creating concepts for situations involving technology. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). CHI'16 Extended Abstracts, May 07-12, 2016, San Jose, CA, USA ACM /16/05. Author Keywords User Experience; Work; Experience Categories; Positive Design; Interviews ACM Classification Keywords A.O. General: Conference Proceedings; H.4.1. Information systems application: Office automation; H.5.2. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): User Interfaces: User-centered design 3013

2 Introduction Knowledge workers spend on average 28 hours of their workweek interacting with technology [5]. Designing for good usability ensures that users are able to work effectively and efficiently (which in turn can lead to satisfaction). Explicit positive user experience, however, can not be achieved relying on this [10]. Research on positive user experience for enterprise software is rare. Bargas-Avila and Hornbæk [2] criticized that within UX research, there is a lack of studies on positive experiences with technology in work contexts. This raises the question: How can we create positive experiences at work using technology? Rather than evaluating only existing interactive systems in work contexts we chose to take a step back and ask what do people enjoy about their work? Which positive experiences do we find in an average workweek? Can we categorize them and use those categories to facilitate new positive experiences through the design of software? To extract these experience categories we have collected and analyzed descriptions of 349 experiences, so far. Here we will describe the reasoning behind interviewing participants about positive experiences at work when we are interested in interactions with technology. We discuss our preliminary findings and an application for these experience categories when designing enterprise software. Positive Experiences and User Experience Hassenzahl [8, p12] defines User Experience (UX) as a momentary, primarily evaluative feeling (good-bad) while interacting with a product or service. [..] Good UX is the consequence of fulfilling the human needs for autonomy, competency, stimulation (self-oriented), relatedness, and popularity (others-oriented) through interacting with the product or service (i.e. hedonic quality). While we agree that human needs are the root of positive experiences, we started with a more general approach and were interested in identifying positive experiences at work first and then to describe categories of comparable experiences. Approaches like Positive Design [6], Positive Technology [3] or Positive Computing [4] make use of theories and results of Positive Psychology [17]. Positive Experiences at work Steger and Dik [18, p. 131] argue that work affects how we understand our lives and our environment. Drawing on the Critical Incidents method developed by Flanagan [7], Herzberg, Mausner, and Snyderman [12] asked what factors motivate people at work. They found that environmental factors can dissatisfy us at work but rarely motivate. These factors are also called Hygiene Factors. What motivates us are intrinsic factors (also called motivators). Amongst these are achievement or quality performance, recognition for achievement or feedback, and advancement and growth. In most modern jobs we spend the majority of our workday interacting with technology, therefore designing for positive user experience of that technology might contribute to more fulfilling work environments. Positive Experiences and Technology Outside of work environments, the experience of technology and its contribution to well-being (e.g. Positive Design [6]) has been explored repeatedly. Our lab has found that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that develop software perceive a lack of tools that allow them to create better UX in their software 3014

3 Online Study: We are still collecting more experiences at periences_at_work/ Participants: All participants volunteered and gave informed consent. [14]. However, even though there is a norm [13] that gives a definition of UX and that a more specific definition was suggested by Hassenzahl [8, 9], the understanding of user experience is rather superficial. Studies showed that this is true for software design and development [14] as well as in HCI research on ubiquitous computing [20]. Here, we deal with the limited knowledge about positive experiences with technology at work by comparing experiences at work with and without technology to draw conclusions about both of them. In order to gain a better understanding of the different positive experiences at work, we are in the process of conducting experience interviews. From the results of these interviews we are extracting categories that can be used to facilitate new positive experiences. Experience Interviews Interviews In our semi-structured interviews, we ask participants to tell us about a positive experience they recently had at work and then ask for more detailed information about the situation and factors (such as technology or other people) as well as structures within the experience that might have played a role. For example, even though the focus of the interviews is on positive experiences at work in general, participants are specifically asked whether technology influenced the situation and, if so, whether there was a specific aspect of the technology that had an effect on the experience. Just like, for example, Experience Reports [10] or Experience Narratives [19] our experience interviews are a variation on Flannagan s [7] Critical Incidents method. So far we have conducted 200 face-to-face interviews (generating 220 experience descriptions) and have collected 131 descriptions of positive experiences using an online version of the interview. The next step is to run cluster analyses on our data. Here we present the qualitative results which reveal categories of positive experiences at work. Participants have a wide range of occupational and educational backgrounds such as various types of engineers, academics, landscape gardeners, teachers, therapists, military personnel, and students. Furthermore, the online version is available both in German and English. This means we are collecting our data crossculturally. By continuing to collect further data we are able to draw more informed conclusions about our data. Analysis Of the 351 experiences (220 from face-to-face interviews, 131 online) 29 contained a series of smaller individual experiences and were split up into segments representing those experiences. This left us with 381 experiences. 32 experiences were not used because they either described Usability or were not positive. Note that we believe that Usability can generate positive experiences. However, some participants described positive experiences where, for example, SAP allowed them to use existing data and thus supported a task. This type of situation that only led to moderate positive experiences was excluded. The remaining 349 experiences (320 German, 29 English) were analyzed and classified. The experiences were classified by three members of our lab and either the pattern with the highest proportion of agreement was chosen or, in cases of disagree- 3015

4 Experience Categories Receiving feedback Giving feedback Appreciation Rising to a challenge Being given a challenge Helping others Receiving help Teaching others Solving a problem Experiencing creativity Finishing a task Keeping track of things Prioritizing Connecting with others Exchanging ideas Stimulating experiences Creating sth together Contributing to sth greater Competition Earnings Aesthetics Figure 1: List of the 21 Experience Categories we found and are using to classify the positive experiences. ment, the ratings were discussed amongst the raters to reach consensus. Results We found that other people play an important role in the positive experiences described. 274 experiences (79%) involved interactions with other individuals while only 75 (21%) were experienced alone. Technology was involved in 124 experiences (36%). Of these 124 experiences 74 (60%) were with others and 50 (40%) alone. This might not seem crucial but if we have a look at how this compares to the numbers of experiences in each group a different picture emerges. The 50 experiences with technology alone represent 67% of the 75 experiences alone while the 74 experiences with technology with others represent only 27% of the experiences we have with other people. Other People The majority of positive experiences described involved others (79%), yet not all were described in the same way. Person Number Percentage Superior % Equal % Subordinate % External % Alone % Table 1: Number and percentage of experiences with or without other people. Early on we discovered that the hierarchy within our work environment affects the descriptions. We are much more likely to report positive experiences involving people we consider our equals (e.g. our colleagues) than people we consider our subordinates (e.g. students or employees). Experiences with someone outside our hierarchy (e.g. a client or a trainer coming in for a workshop) are described much more positively than those with our superiors (e.g. line manager, CEO, HR). Table 1 shows the distribution of experiences with the different types of individuals. Note that the majority of positive experiences are with people we consider our equals while positive experiences with subordinates barely seem to register. This is especially interesting because it means while you might remember a feedback situation with your boss, it appears your boss might be less likely to remember the same situation as a positive one. Technology 36% of experiences involved technology. While technology seems to play an important role for the experiences alone (67%), only 27% of experiences with others involve technology. Both the low overall influence of technology and the lower importance for experiences with others could have two possible reasons: 1. Technology is less important/salient than people; when we interact with both we only remember our interactions with other people. 2. Given that other people are important for positive experiences at work, current enterprise software does not facilitate positive experiences involving others. Experience Categories For our purposes, Experience Categories are defined as follows: 3016

5 Feedback Categories Receiving feedback Proud, relieved, confident Giving feedback Connected, appreciation Appreciation Proud, connected, appreciated Rising to a challenge Excited, happy, competent, relieved, empowered Being given a challenge Proud, important Figure 2: List of the feedback Categories and typical emotions described in relation to these categories. An Experience Category is a repeatedly reported positive experience at work Within an Experience Category there are similarities in the structure of the facilitating factors (e.g. presence of others, special activities, technology). This means the categories describe the essence of clusters of positive experiences. Each experience was assigned to a category that describes the situation. We are currently working with a list of 21 categories which have evolved as we collected more experiences. A full list of the categories found is depicted in Figure 1 in the sidebar. Here we will give descriptions of the most common categories. Help related categories involve both altruistic forms of helping but also situations where we help others in order to show off our abilities (the majority of teaching situations in our sample). Solving a problem and experiencing creativity are categories for experiences that are similar to flow [16]. The situations are often described as just flow[ing] (O79). Finishing a task, keeping track of things, and prioritizing are all categories that center around control, and competency. Participants often describe how good they felt finishing a task and knowing how that task fit into a larger project. A common group of categories describe community connecting with others, exchanging ideas, creating something together, stimulating experiences, or contributing to something greater. They involve descriptions of project work done in groups or working on freeware projects, but also spirituality. Feedback is slightly different from most of the other categories in so far as it is not only a pattern in itself but also a mediator for other categories. Interviewees often noticed having completed a difficult task after having received feedback. Being given a challenge is a form of feedback because a challenge that is perceived as something positive also implies that the person giving the challenge expects you to be able to rise to it. This means more than half of the experiences in our current sample involves feedback, either feedback from other people, from technology, or internal feedback. We have tried to avoid overgeneralization by only classifying situations as feedback if it did not involve appreciation or other forms of more personal feedback. This distinction is, by no means, perfect but it is an attempt to disentangle the two kinds of situations because we believe they can be harnessed in different ways to create positive experiences. Feedback Categories Generally, feedback experiences describe situations in which a person receives information about their performance on a task. However, feedback can take many different forms. This means we differentiate between the categories in figure 2 in the sidebar that closely involve/are affected by feedback. In these categories feedback mediates the experience. Figure 2 also highlights the words used to describe the different situations. Note how slightly different words tend to be used to describe the different categories. This suggests that feedback can take many different forms which should also be treated differently. 3017

6 Figure 3: Best facts of the day Success feedback on sold products and increased number of customers visited compared to the last three weeks Applying Experience Categories Based on the experience categories it is possible to create designs for software in work contexts. For instance the feedback pattern can be differentiated in information telling the user what they have achieved during the work with the software (successes), and appreciation from another person for their contributions. We developed design concepts for both cases in a customer relationship management system (CRM) for sales personnel who sell tools and materials to craftsmen by visiting them. Information on their customers and interactions they had with customers are stored in the CRM. In order to show what they have achieved during a workday, they can access several success statistics, such as, how many customers they visited during the day or the increase in product sales compared to the week before. Figure 3 shows how this was implemented. The success feedback is collected from data stored in the CRM. The feedback is always positive. Appreciation can be shown when information on customers stored in the CRM was helpful. For example, salespeople can enter information on customer interests, which could be helpful for other colleagues when initiating conversations with the customer. When using such information provided by a colleague they can express their thankfulness by using a that was helpful button, which is a variant of appreciation of the work of another person. According to the results of positive psychology expressing gratitude is positive both for the person expressing it and for the person receiving it [1, 17]. Results from an evaluation study showed that both concepts lead to positive experiences. But it became clear as well that certain conditions must be met. Concerning success feedback it must be clear, that the information could not be seen by other users (like the manager of the sales department). Expressing thankfulness seems to be rather personal and it is important that just the individuals involved can see it. Outlook Based on the current results we are continuing to collect positive experiences at work and to analyze them by using statistical measures like cluster analyses. With a stabilized set of experience categories we are planning to develop software design methods. One is a variant of the semi-structured experience interview that allows practitioners to understand the context specific features of typical experience categories. Inspired by the experience pattern approach of Hassenzahl and colleagues [11] we are currently analyzing the invariant components and temporal structure of the experience categories in more detail. Based on that a second method has to be developed and tested to support software designers to design for positive experience for a certain work domain and context. Acknowledgements We would like to thank all participants who described their experiences as well as students who helped with the interviews and initial classification as well as the prototype design and evaluation. This study is being conducted as part of the project Design4Xperience which is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy as part of the initiative Einfach intuitiv Usability für den Mittelstand. The project consists of: Stuttgart Media University, Fraunhofer IAO, IAT University of Stuttgart, bwcon, SIC! Software AG, points Internet Agentur. 3018

7 References 1. Sara B Algoe, Jonathan Haidt, and Shelly L Gable Beyond Reciprocity: Gratitude and Relationships in Everyday Life. Emotion 8(3): Javier A Bargas-Avila, Kasper Hornbæk Old Wine in New Bottles or Novel Challenges? A Critical Analysis of Empirical Studies of User Experience. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 11), C Botella, G Riva The Present and Future of Positive Technologies. CyberPsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 15(2): Rafael A. Calvo, Dorian Peters Positive Computing - Technology for Wellbeing and Human Potential. MIT Press. 5. M Chui, J Manyka, J Bughin, R Dobbs, C Roxburgh, H. Sarrazin, G Sands, M Westergren The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies. Retrieved ( ) on 6. Pieter Desmet, Anna E. Pohlmeyer Positive Design : An Introduction to Design for Subjective Well-Being. International Journal of Design 7(3): J C. Flanagan The Critical Incident Technique. Psychological bulletin 51(4): Marc Hassenzahl User Experience (UX): Towards an Experiential Perspective on Product Quality. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference of the Association Francophone d Interaction Homme-Machine, ACM, Marc Hassenzahl Experience Design: Technology for All the Right Reasons. Breinings-ville: Morgan & Claypool. 10. Marc Hassenzahl, Sarah Diefenbach, Anja Göritz Needs, Affect, and Interactive Products Facets of User Experience. Interacting with Computers 22(5): Marc Hassenzahl, Kai Eckoldt, Sarah Diefenbach, Matthias Laschke, Eva Lenz, Joonhwan Kim Designing Moments of Meaning and Pleasure. Experience Design and Happiness Understanding Experiences. International Journal of Design 7(3): Frederick Herzberg, Bernard Mausner, Barbara Bloch Snyderman The Motivation to Work. New Brunswick, USA: Transaction Publishers. 13. ISO Ergonomics of Human- System Interaction - Part 210: Humanacentred Design for Interactive Systems. 14. Magdalena Laib, Michael Burmester, Chiara Ficano, Nora Fronemann, Bianca Kolb, Anne Krüger, Marieluise Quesseleit, Katharina Schippert, Marina Shinkarenko User Experience Bei Softwareanbietern. In Mensch Und Computer 2015 Tagungsband, eds. Sarah Diefenbach, Niels Henze, and Martin Pielot Tara Lamas, Jeffrey J. Froh, Robert A. Emmons, Anjali Mishra, Giacomo Bono Gratitude Interventions. In The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Positive Psychological Interventions, eds. Acacia C. Parks and Stephen M. Schueller Jeanne Nakamura, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi The Concept of Flow. Handbook of Positive Psychology, eds. C. R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez. Oxford: University Press, Martin E. P. Seligman, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Positive Psychology: An Introduction. American Psychologist 55(1): Michael. F. Steger, Bryan J. Dik Work as Meaning: Individual and Organizational Benefits of Engaging in Meaningful Work. In The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology and Work, eds. P Alex Linley, Susan Harrington, and Nicola Garcea

8 19. Alexandre N. Tuch, Rune N. Trusell, Kasper Hornbæk Analyzing Users Narratives to Understand Experience with Interactive Products. In Proceedings of CHI 13, April 27 May 2, 2013, Paris, France, Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Thomas Olsson, Jonna Häkkilä Towards Deeper Understanding of User Experience with Ubiquitous Computing Systems: Systematic Literature Review and Design Framework. In Proceedings of Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT 2015, eds. Julio Abascal, Simone Barbosa, Mirko Fetter, Tom Gross, Philippe Palanque, and Marco Winckler. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing,