Experience, Context of Use and the User-Product Interaction Design

One of the evolving topics in design research is the study of experience as a source of inspiration for the design of more enjoyable user-product interactions. An issue that escapes these studies is the way in which human experience and a product's contextual information trigger users' understanding of a product's use. This paper introduces research that investigates how people's experience influence their understanding of a product's use. Findings of this study are translated into design principles that explain: (i) relationships between aspects of human experience and particular aspects of product usability, and (ii) areas of experience in which designers' and users' concepts of product usability show differences and similarities. The application of these design principles to a design process is trialled with a design tool (ECEDT); the trial verifies that these principles can assist the design of user-product interactions during the early stages of the design process.

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