User:Zefeng jing/User experience

History[edit]

Early developments in user experience can be traced back to the Machine Age that includes the 19th and early 20th centuries. Inspired by the machine age intellectual framework, a quest for improving assembly processes to increase production efficiency and output led to the development of major technological advancements, such as mass production of high-volume goods on moving assembly lines, high-speed printing press, large hydroelectric power production plants, and radio technology, to name a few.

Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford were in the forefront of exploring new ways to make human labor more efficient and productive. Taylor's pioneering research into the efficiency of interactions between workers and their tools is the earliest example that resembles today's user experience fundamentals.^{[citation needed]}

The term user experience was brought to wider knowledge by Donald Norman in the mid-1990s. He never intended the term "user experience" to be applied only to the affective aspects of usage. A review of his earlier work suggests that the term "user experience" was used to signal a shift to include affective factors, along with the pre-requisite behavioral concerns, which had been traditionally considered in the field. Many usability practitioners continue to research and attend to affective factors associated with end-users, and have been doing so for years, long before the term "user experience" was introduced in the mid-1990s. In an interview in 2007, Norman discusses the widespread use of the term "user experience" and its imprecise meaning as a consequence thereof.

Several developments affected the rise of interest in the user experience:

1. Recent advances in mobile, ubiquitous, social, and tangible computing technologies have moved human-computer interaction into practically all areas of human activity. This has led to a shift away from usability engineering to a much richer scope of user experience, where users' feelings, motivations, and values are given as much, if not more, attention than efficiency, effectiveness and basic subjective satisfaction (i.e. the three traditional usability metrics.)
2. In website design, it was important to combine the interests of different stakeholders: marketing, branding, visual design, and usability. Marketing and branding people needed to enter the interactive world where usability was important. Usability people needed to take marketing, branding, and aesthetic needs into account when designing websites. User experience provided a platform to cover the interests of all stakeholders: making web sites easy to use, valuable, and effective for visitors. This is why several early user experience publications focus on website user experience.
3. As we have seen with the transformative impact of mobile, ubiquitous, social, and tangible computing technologies on user experience, a similar evolution is unfolding within industrial settings. Human-robot collaboration (HRC) is emblematic of this shift, representing a significant movement from usability engineering to a more comprehensive user experience. This new paradigm in HRC prioritizes the emotional and cognitive experiences of the human worker in tandem with the functional interactions with robots​​. The alignment with user experience is about enhancing the efficiency of tasks and the quality of human-robot interactions, reflecting a holistic concern for users' feelings, motivations, and values. This approach to industrial design resonates with the practices in website design, where the interplay among marketing, branding, visual design, and usability is crucial. Similarly, in HRC, the objective is to harmonize technological capability with human-centric design principles, ensuring that the integration of robots into the workforce amplifies human skills and enriches the overall job experience​​.

The field of user experience represents an expansion and extension of the field of usability, to include the holistic perspective of how a person feels about using a system. The focus is on pleasure and value as well as on performance. The exact definition, framework, and elements of user experience are still evolving.

User experience of an interactive product or a website is usually measured by a number of methods, including questionnaires, focus groups, observed usability tests, user journey mapping and other methods. A freely available questionnaire (available in several languages) is the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ). The development and validation of this questionnaire is described in a computer science essay published in 2008.

Higher levels of user experience have been linked to increased effectiveness of digital health interventions targeting improvements in physical activity, nutrition, mental health and smoking.

Google Ngram Viewer shows wide use of the term starting in the 1930s. "He suggested that more follow-up in the field would be welcomed by the user, and would be a means of incorporating the results of user's experience into the design of new machines." Use of the term in relation to computer software also pre-dates Norman.