Experience characters: a design tool for communicating mobile phone experiences to designers

Different methods, techniques and tools exist for supporting design activities in a user-centered design process. Due to the increasing relevance of experience-centered design, the need to advance existing design methods and tools becomes evident. Within this paper we present "experience characters" as a design tool for communicating a richer understanding of mobile phone experiences towards designers. We conducted a qualitative text analysis study of written experience reports from an online forum in the tradition of grounded theory. Major experience types were grouped into categories and further transformed into five fictive characters that are easy to remember and likely to invoke empathy in design. Thus, designers' communication on and understanding of mobile phone experiences are supported. We describe in detail the steps taken for analysing experience reports and developing the experience characters, including relevant properties for informing and supporting an experience-centered design process.