Rhetoric and Experience Architecture

By Parlor Press, LLC

Organizations value insights from reflexive, iterative processes of designing interactive environments that reflect user experience. “I really like this definition of experience architecture, which requires that we understand ecosystems of activity, rather than simply considering single-task scenarios.”—Donald Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Release date: Aug 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781602359635

Book preview

Acknowledgments

We want to thank all the authors who contributed to this volume. Over a long and tumultuous path to publication, our contributors were patient, professional, and productive. Our goal from the outset was to create a forum for academics and practitioners to share their experience and, along the way, convince as many as we could that experience architecture was a term that accurately described their work. Charles Sides was convinced early on, and offered valuable feedback and advice at an important moment. Ashita Nichanametla, Erin Brock-Carlson and Michelle McMullen offered us great insight and helped us construct another interface for readers to encounter the book. We would also like to thank Laura Gonzalez whose work on international user experience is helping us plan our next project. Michael is grateful to Liza for pushing the project along when he just could not even, and Liza is thankful for Michael’s persistence. We presented early versions of this work at the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC), Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) and are thankful for our colleagues’ patient guidance and direction during early stages of the work, and are especially appreciative for the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication (ACM-SIGDOC) for helping us refine our approach and for providing excellent feedback in Silver Spring, Maryland and Limerick, Ireland. David Blakesley has a vision for the future of academic publishing; Jared Jameson has been sharp-eyed. Any value here is attributable to these collaborators and any missteps are of our own making.

Our spouses have been patient as we discussed what we affectionately refer to as The RXA, disrupting family time. And to our children, Liza’s Zöe, Katie, and Jayne and Michael’s Aila. Joy.

1 Introduction

Liza Potts and Michael J. Salvo

Experience architecture (XA) represents an emerging context for the practice of a variety of research and practical skills. On one hand, these proficiencies are incorporated into commercial design and development work. User experience (UX for short) has become an effective workplace moniker for this assemblage of practices. The study of language, and especially of persuasion, grounds user experience architecture. Rhetoric sustains the technology-rich discussion of language and design that characterizes the contemporary exploration of emerging practice and enriches UX’s research and methods. Experience architecture is a professional site merging the newest technologies with ancient knowledge, hence the need for a volume in which rhetoric and experience architecture are brought into dialogue.

With chapters contributed from twenty-five authors in three countries (and eleven US states), representing eighteen Universities and Research Institutions and design firms practicing experience architecture, this edited collection represents the evolving ideas of an emerging area of study. Experience architecture (XA) is focused on the research and practice of creating technologies, products, policies, and services that serve the needs of various participants. XA focuses on issues addressing usability; interaction design; service design; user experience; information architecture; and content management for websites, mobile apps, software applications, and technology services.

Definitions of Experience Architecture

We take experience architecture to be the architecture of mediated systems, resulting in a designed capability for those using those systems to communicate. Experience Architecture takes a systems approach to the reciprocal processes of analyzing and constructing social experiences in a variety of networked digital environments as well as a number of physical spaces. While social media represents the most immediate example, this collection demonstrates that a wide range of organizations deploy experience architecture in a broad application in virtual and physical space. These organizations value insights gained employing reflexive, iterative processes of designing interactive environments.

While Experience Architecture is new in comparison to Rhetoric, Donald Norman insists it isn’t a wholly new concept, emerging alongside Apple’s first generations of personal computing devices in the late twentieth century: the original book says nothing of what has come to be called user experience (a term that I was among the first to use, when in the early 1990s, the group I headed at Apple called itself the User Experience Architect’s Office) (Norman, 2013, p. xiii). Before the web became ubiquitous, long before the phenomenon of smartphone users started gathering likes and comments on their latest updates and photos, Norman named the infant disciplinary formation:

It requires a change to emphasize the human needs, to emphasize development for people. Such a change will not come effortlessly. It requires a new process for product development, one that involves the social side of development as much as the engineering and marketing sides. It requires bringing a new discipline—user experience—to the development table. And it requires that this new discipline live up to the challenges before it. (Norman, 1998, p. 229)

It is challenging indeed to emerge with a new disciplinary formation facing the always-ongoing crisis in the very Humanities and Social Sciences we are charged with making relevant to the public and engaging with our engineering and programming colleagues. We are, again in Norman’s words, victims of our own success (Invisible Computer, 229) because we have let technology lead the way. Experience architecture puts human experience first, ahead of technological change or disruption. Comprehension begins, through its Latin roots, with taking ahold of something, of grasping it. So we need to grasp how our artifacts emplace us within the world, revealing how we can use these devices to better enjoy our experiences and maximize our time with the people we want to include in our lives. This emerging discipline is part of the process of humanizing technology: it is a systematic approach to discovering with whom we want to share our time and attention. It is quite a different definition of technological development and of user-centered design—with fewer zombies in technology-addled comas and more time available to maximize our presence in our loved ones’ lives. It isn’t surprising to see so many resisting technology when it results in more distance between us, less time spent together while we update, upgrade, and reboot our devices searching for ever-better Wi-Fi signals. Perhaps we are designing the wrong kinds of immersive environments. We need to focus less on single activities that envelop us in technology, and more on creating experiences that are augmented by technology. Meaningful, rich, humane, and valuable technologically mediated experiences drive this field.

Experience architecture requires that we understand ecosystems of activity, rather than simply considering single task scenarios. When we build an app, we need to take into consideration the situations in which people will use that app. Are users rushed, racing between airplane terminals? Is the environment welcoming and comfortable, such as their home? Are they excited to use this app and engage with it? Or, is it a necessary evil in their day-to-day activities, worth wrestling with because of the utility it affords, such as a calendaring system? What other tools are at their disposal? What is around them, and what other media demand their attention? Will the app augment a physical experience, such as purchasing coffee as part of a personal or professional ritual at their local shop? What other apps might they use at the same time, either for cross-comparison or more information? Should these other attendant technologies be linked together, melding spaces, applications, websites, and other digital interfaces into seamless environments? Gone is the moment in which we thought we could build for a simple singular task, if we ever could. Here we must understand the context in which our participants are engaging with these experiences. This volume is designed to help specialists design methods for gathering and analyzing data and understanding network phenomena, ultimately improving the experience for those immersed in these techno-social networks.

To understand these ecosystems, we must move beyond isolated tasks of writing, designing, and programming. We need to gain a stronger understanding of strategy and be willing to lead initiatives in the name of the participants who will use these systems and the organizations that want to engage users as contributors. This requires questioning assumptions about technology, ethics, culture, economics, and politics. It requires preparing students to grasp bigger contexts about developing technological solutions that serve actual peoples’ needs, rather than simply driving us to technology for technology’s sake.

Experience architecture is the most generalizable expression of creating an environment: it includes investigative research such as contextual inquiry and survey design, analysis techniques like usability testing and task analysis, and practical applications such as interaction and information design and taxonomy creation. It is, perhaps, the name for one of the Sciences of the Artificial that Herbert Simon first wrote about in 1969.

Simon was an early proponent of process-oriented design and recognized the emerging field of computer engineering as a form of design. Simon was interested in a wide definition of design, but his work has been most influential in computing. Predating Norman’s work by two decades, Simon’s concern was the realm of the uncertain, what is now recognized as rhetoric. His concerns were distinct from the natural sciences, and hence his title. Simon articulated a range of design-intensive disciplines, from engineering to architecture, business, education, law, and medicine,(111) that he distinguished from natural sciences. Sciences of the Artificial concentrate not on describing how things were but on arranging how things ought to be. Design also brings a shift from analysis to productive action, and Simon asserted these concerns are re-emerging as the rightful focus of professional education.

Victor Margolin ends his book Design Discourse with a landmark bibliographic essay explicitly linking Simon’s work with rhetoric: "On the side of Theory, Herbert Simon, in The Sciences of the Artificial . . . looked at the potential of a unified science of design, but he did so from a process view only, without examining the ideological and cultural dimensions of theory" (Margolin, 1989 p. 286). As important as Simon’s work was in articulating design, Margolin points out his work was just a start to recognizing the ideological and ethical implications of human-constructed artifacts, of the power of technologies, institutions, and environments to shape—to both limit and expand—human action. Margolin goes on to discuss Ehses and Luptin’s work in the illustrated Rhetorical Handbook that includes a dictionary of visual rhetorical tropes. Whatever limitations history may have revealed in Simon’s approach, his work remains inspirational in its breadth and clarity—defining design as action-oriented, rhetorically imbued, and ultimately a human enterprise.

Experience architecture is an umbrella term, and many distinct subfields fit into it: information design, content strategy, usability, app development, user-centered design, project management, interaction design, information architecture, findability, and web development. This list is by no means exhaustive, nor is it simply a laundry list. These are places on a map we’ve learned to collectively gather under the moniker experience architecture.

For experience architects, every new project is an opportunity to create interactions with and between places, artifacts, and technologies. The editors of this volume understand experience architecture through the process of building a variety of experiences for a wide range of users, and then accounting for strategic decisions with the stakeholders who determine whether these projects and programs are worth maintaining. We have administered information repositories like our academic program websites and Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL), contributed to the architecture of commercial software, designed innovative curriculum like the Experience Architecture Program at Michigan State University, and created new scholarly outlets like Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy. We are also participating in the redesign of scholarly communities (notably SIGDOC) as well as academic conferences. But the most important and far-reaching experiences we participate in almost every day of our professional lives is architecting our students’ classroom experiences and the environments in which they learn to become professionals. We would not limit this to what is called interaction design or instructional design, as these titles miss so much of the context and responsibility of the strategic moves we must make as architects, writers, and designers of learning places. It is also too narrow a conception of what is within the (techno-) rhetor’s purview. That said, we can see emerging, similar (yet different) work being done in educational technology under the banner of learning experience (LX).

It is that continuous and rewarding pursuit of the emergent, the new—what our colleague Patricia Sullivan has recently called the constant of change¹—that is what we are after. Based in the ancient knowledge of rhetoric, performed using emergent digital tools of the current internetworked age, experience architecture is timely. This pursuit of the always-emergent is informed by ancient knowledge and by ethical action, cautioned by what we know about the problems of systems-centered and modern design. That is, we simply cannot train professionals to be Experience Architects. Instead, we have prepared this text in order to support the education of Professional and Technical Communicators (PTCs) and other advanced students. Such education requires that students learn about the requirements and demands, as well as the rewards of and vision for a future where we recognize, value, and self-consciously reflect upon numerous professional practices, entering realms that respond to these sciences of the artificial, these realms in need of rhetorical intervention and requiring innovative work that extends beyond our traditional notions of user-centered and participatory design.

How we define our work, our research, and our practice holds great meaning. Terminologies are swift to shift from user-centered design, to human-centered design, to user experience, to whatever new title emerges while this volume is in production, due in no small part to the demands of commerce and the whims of the market. This volume on experience architecture delineates its territories, in contrast, by being inclusive and aiming to supply foundational understanding for a new generation of professionals who will both anticipate and navigate the constant change that is our fluid context.

The Future of Experience Architecture Is Global

It is important to note that experience architecture is an international pursuit, taking place around the world. While the majority of chapters are contributed from researchers and professionals working across the United States, we received proposals from France, UK, Norway, Canada, India, and Australia. In the UK, there are service design professionals, user-experience designers, and design ethnographers working to improve the design of technologies, and in France and Germany, researchers link data with design. In Belgium, design is part of national identity with much to teach the world. Scandinavian design is here represented by Norway. Our authors represent a wide variety of approaches and traditions, and the collection is broadly international.

The future of experience architecture is strong both as a body of knowledge and as a professionalizing identity. Further, and perhaps more importantly, the future of user-centered work and what Pele Ehn named usability culture is stronger still: the commercial viability (and quiet failure!) of so many products has been demonstrated by marketing user-centered and user-participant design. Apple remains a touchstone for measuring the value added to its products through design, as corporate entities in such diverse competitive scenarios as Disney and Delta Airlines try to measure the impact of user-centered engagement.

Each of the authors in this collection traces a potential arc of the future of experience architecture. Yet, the power of its future is not in arguing over and deciding upon a single trajectory all its academic and practitioner adherents can follow, but rather to articulate our diverse successes, to study and determine what commonalities they share, and then re-articulate the practice of experience architecture. Informed as further co-creative extensions of the practice of experience architecture, the future of the field becomes a historical accretion of its most successful expressions over time.

This collection of approaches, methods, and projects represents the kind of identity-building narratives such luminaries in the field as Whitney Quesenbery advocate. In her work on storytelling and narrative, she emphasizes not finding the single right answer but a variety of possible working solutions, Every project is different, so the specific activities need to be adjusted, within an overall approach, to answer the questions each project poses (Interview, 2012). Quesenbery leads us to conclude that there is no single future of experience architecture, but rather the discipline will mature and advance by providing numerous routes to a variety of solutions, in effect, articulating not a single answer but a diverse range of solutions that together show a rich collection of potential trajectories, all of which together are futures of experience architecture.

Thomas Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric (Pittsburgh, 2013) imagines a more active rhetor attuned to the voices of culture. Articulating the chorus (chôra) as distributed, among the artifacts of the human-made world, or the anthroposphere, the rhetor need not wait as in Bitzer’s construction. Such active rhetorical arts require engagement with spaces and places as well as technologies that, with reference to Latourian thinking, act as allies in a network of people and things to strengthen one’s position. While the rhetor never controls the situation, Rickert’s attunements allow rhetorically-trained experience architects to work with design and designers to encourage some actions and discourage others—raising further complications, particularly ethical conduct and knowledge-making, of epistemology.

Sullivan, Grice, and Geisler, from part one of this volume, are important because of their contributions to rhetorical methodology. Sullivan explicitly connects Walter Ong’s work in audience analysis to usability research and indelibly links rhetoric to design, as in Kaufer and Butler’s Rhetoric and the Arts of Design (1996). Our focus honors these rhetorical foundations while moving forward. Experience architecture is grounded in the ancient arts of rhetoric applied to emerging contexts of experience architecture, defined as the architecture of the systems both above and below the surface (i.e., architecture of interactions, visuals, content, structure, and policy) (Potts, 2014).

Ancient rhetorical concepts of kairos, techne, and metis join user experience concerns with interface, design, and usability to sketch a field of inquiry uniting the most ancient knowledge with emergent media, requiring constant revisiting and revising of research methods. Revision requires reengagement and reconceptualization. The opening chapter by Sullivan articulates this process as a tripartite waltz—beckon, encounter, and experience—and argues for the need for supple, plastic methods that do not become blind in their rigidity. While the book presents foundations and theories in the opening, these four chapters are inspirational and contextualizing rather than prescriptive and limiting. Similarly, the second part presents six methodological essays that situate knowledge-making practices fluid enough to respond meaningfully to the ebbs and flows of designing to support meaningful human experience patterned with enough recognizable repeating elements to inform future meaning making. Finally, the third part offers a wide variety of cases of experience architecture in action, presented to inspire practitioners and researchers to take on their own projects and articulate their own practices. Equipped with meaningful rhetorical preparation, the additive logic present throughout this collection (and this, plus this, also . . . ) is meant to inspire experience architects to act with reassurance and articulate new sites of research. That so many professionals and classroom teachers recognize the need for their intervention, the exigence for this collection is clear. Perhaps at some far-off date, another collection concerned with the limits and boundaries of experience architecture will be necessary, but that time is not now.

Organization of Rhetoric and Experience Architecture

Part 1 of Rhetoric and Experience Architecture presents longer field-defining essays of 6,000–8,000 words. It consists of four single-authored chapters and represents over a century of experience in rhetoric, technical communication, and user-centered design theory. The opening essays trace the development of user experience as a rhetorical concept by contrasting system-centered with user-centered design.

Sullivan asserts the rhetorical dimension of user engagement as a central value of user experience architecture, while Grice articulates a bridge between workplace practice and rhetorical knowledge building. Geisler asserts key components of methodological inquiry in rhetorical experience design, while Sano-Franchini articulates a feminist ethics at the field’s core. Throughout, the first section articulates experience architecture as a rhetorical activity.

Part 2 offers a variety of methodologies for doing research in experience architecture that are grounded in projects and cases. While these methods are deeply enmeshed with rhetorical practice, the focus shifts from the relationship of rhetoric to experience architecture to revealing what counts as knowledge in the field. Each of the chapters in the second section is committed to experience architecture as rhetorical inquiry, providing links to and development of the arguments presented in the opening section. While each presents examples and sites, the focus is on the doing of research, designed to allow readers to find answers to a variety of questions: Why insert further data collection here? Why insist on reflection? How do I get started? Is this the best site to conduct this research? What benefits will stakeholders accrue? Essays in the second section invite interrogation of research methods so that readers can begin building their own approaches.

Friess develops a rhetorical introduction to building personas, while Howard and Christiansen push towards constructivism. Moore postulates unique characteristics of service design where citizens are encouraged to participate in decision-making. Pflugfelder returns to explicit discussion of rhetoric by contextualizing the utility of techne in the language of design studies. Mara and Mara employ ethnography to make knowledge, while Ryan returns discussion to the value of audience awareness, contextualizing thirty years of development in information design research. Finally, Ben Lauren’s articulation of Kairos as sensitive to both time and space bridges the knowledge-making methods of part two with the case studies of part three.

Part 3 presents seven sites of experience architecture research, from virtual game worlds to churches, from crisis and health communication to memorials and amusement parks, in shorter descriptive chapters. Together, these cases reveal a rich variety of sites that exemplify the practice of experience architecture. These seven exciting examples cannot begin to exhaust the reach and appeal of the methods and perspectives but only gesture towards the rich opportunities a rhetorical approach to experience architecture supports and nurtures.

Fagerjord narrates the process of filling churches across Europe with music and how these places reveal characteristics that sound designers can enhance for richer, more immersive experiences of place. Reimer traces the online community surrounding League of Legends and how an organization uses data to provide a better gaming experience for its customers. Rudy and Cassie McDaniel reveal Mozilla’s Webmaker as a site for teaching new literacy. Nostalgia, defined as bringing the past into the present, animates sites of memorialization in Kurlinkus’ chapter, while Walls and colleagues are engaged in production of activist tools, here articulating Fair & Square as an app designed to support the long search for social justice. Vie and her colleagues explore community communication built around badges earned in gaming spaces. Finally, Morris connects experience architects with Imagineers in amusement park design. Each case articulates a facet of experience architecture, describing a site or related group of sites that reveals key components of the rhetorical practice of experience architecture, thus establishing a broad range of sites for both professional practice and analytical study.

Conclusions

Since we began using the phrase Experience Architecture, academics and professionals have told us of their aha moments: of putting work in usability together with an ecological approach to genre, information architecture, and document design to create a coherent approach to the complex work of the technical and professional communicator in emergent environments of work and play. They want to read, use, and assign this book. From these conversations, we believe the book would challenge advanced undergraduates in the growing numbers of professional and technical communication degree programs, would be core reading for masters-level professionalization programs, and regularly assigned to PhD students in writing studies, rhetoric and composition, digital humanities, and communication programs to describe the current state-of-the-art for technical and professional communication specialists, writing generalists, and writing program administrators.

It is becoming more common to see the Experience Architect as a job title. More importantly, the core competencies of experience architecture are wrapped into the job responsibilities of a growing number of next-generation content and interface design positions in a widening array of industries. In our experience, even though the phrase experience architecture is making its way into employment materials, it is both broad enough and sufficiently theorized to support academic input from a broad range of participants. The field is a truly transdisciplinary pursuit: while interdisciplinary remixes invite participants to work together, they return to their disciplinary homes after collaboration. A trans-disciplinary pursuit promises no safety of return, and indeed, these academic origins may no longer be viable destinations as traditional disciplinary structures disappear.

As academic programs focused on experience architecture emerge, participants come from numerous academic backgrounds. Similarly, faculty will emerge with varying backgrounds, from technical communication and rhetoric to social scientists trained in Internet research methods, to cognitive psychologists, design anthropologists, arts and design, and computer science. More importantly, however, experience architecture testifies to the rich variety of approaches as well as the diversity of epistemologies that ground meaning-making in emergent disciplinary formations. Experience architecture represents the breadth of current practice as invitation and inspiration for further discussion and development. While an emergent field needs to establish best practices, it also must learn from as wide a variety of practice and ways of knowing as possible, to inform the important discussion of boundaries, of reach, and of expansion. That is, as a community of interested participants, we first have to understand the wide variety of methods we use to make meaning and to establish credibility, which is why we insist that this emergent practice of experience architecture is necessarily wedded to the ancient study of rhetoric as we establish shared community practices.

References

Burdick, A. (2012). Digital humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ehses, H., & Luptin, E. (1988). Design papers 5: Rhetorical handbook. Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Johnson-Eilola, J., & Selber, S. A. (2013). Solving problems in technical communication. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Kaufer, D. S., and Butler, B. S. (1996). Rhetoric and the arts of design. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Margolin, V. (1989). Design discourse: History, theory, criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Norman, D. A. (1998). The invisible computer: Why good products can fail, the personal computer is so complex, and information appliances are the solution. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Norman, D.(2013). The design of everyday things (Revised and expanded edition). New York, New York: Basic Books.

Potts, Liza. (2014). Social media in disaster response: How experience architects can build for participation. ATTW/Routledge Book Series in Technical and Professional Communication. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Ridolfo, J., & Hart-Davidson, W. (2015). Rhetoric and the digital humanities. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Scott, J. B., Bernadette, L., and Katherine V. W. (2006). Critical power tools: Technical communication and cultural studies. SUNY Series, Studies in Scientific and Technical Communication. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Simon, H. A. (1996). The sciences of the artificial (3rd ed.). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Tomlin, C. (2012). An interview with Whitney Quesenbery. Useful Usability. Retrieved from http://www.usefulusability.com/whitney-quesenbery-

interview/.

Part 1: Foundations and Theories

In her 20

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2 Beckon, Encounter, Experience: The Danger of Control and the Promise of Encounters in the Study of User Experience

Patricia Sullivan

This chapter confronts the paradox of control in research as it addresses user experiences that reside at the center of the rhetorical work done as a component of experience architecture. While the chapter acknowledges the importance of control for all species of research, it interrogates ways that a lack of balance between openness and control can hamper researchers’ understanding users’ experiences. The chapter recounts how key control mechanisms operate to sort experience into domains; identify roles users play; establish and maintain boundaries; and mine themes, metaphors, and analogies in order to model how a user’s experiences move and unfold. The chapter also acknowledges that some control is valuable to user research, but argues a better balance between control and open discovery can be achieved by focusing on doing, watching, logging, and reflecting. It also offers reasons why more loosely controlled encounters are needed in user experience architecture: online environments yield expanding types of user experiences, offer broader access to otherness, leverage the Internet’s ability to make the global local, and foster unexpected insights that may accompany more openness to encounters.

In the Odyssey, Sirens’ voices beckoned sailors to wreck their ships on a rocky shore. Beauty led to danger and death. What a heady encounter. Odysseus, who fancied himself so clever that he could experience encounters without enduring their potential downsides, had his men lash him to the mast and block their ears. That way he could hear and enjoy but none of his men would respond to those dangerous songs and crash the ship on the rocks. Did he encounter the Sirens and voyeur their songs or sidestep a real encounter through the measures of control he enacted? My initial response is that his tale scaffolded a faux encounter, one reminiscent of the sort of encounters qualitative researchers sometimes structure into their research designs. In this chapter, I argue that encounters important to understanding user experiences are increasingly being controlled by research rules (in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed method studies) that seek to control research moves in ways that restrict beckoning behaviors and to lock down encounters in ways the researcher can imagine before having any encounter or experience. If users’ experiences are to drive design, encounters should be less safe than our methods plan them to be. I begin by asserting that encounter is a routine user experience that runs counter to most researchers’ practices, even ethnographers, because it abandons both efforts to control a situation or event under scrutiny and also to shape researchers’ actions in ways that make them recognizable as research. Encountering users’ experiences without controlling them opens us to hearing/seeing beyond what we expect, beckons us to the new or unexpected, and in opening the events to others’ views and actions, we open new ways to experience.

Exerting research control is not inherently problematic; sometimes it is needed. Why do efforts to control user research matter to user experience (UX)? One of the reasons it matters is that broadening our knowledge of user experiences enriches our abilities to understand users, use, and experience in ways that positively impact our capacities to design, develop, and refine the sorts of products, environments, and interactions that support users and their needs. When usability started in the 1980s (roughly at the time of the rise of personal computing—see Weiser, 1991; Dieli, 1989; and Ramey, 1989), it used the fact that independent labs’ ease of use scores and HCI’s interest in reducing interface errors to fuel its establishment. Its acceptance in personal computing was usually related to saving money. I was shown an internal proposal in 1987 that argued for increased testing on the basis that testing would take 10% of the resources that engineering enough new features would require to meet a product’s independent lab score for GAO (using Government Accounting Office purchasing standards). At this time feature creep was expected in software development, so when this company emphasized increasing its ease of use scores in order to meet the government’s minimum requirements for purchase, it chose frugality over features to grow its market share. In choosing frugality, it also invested in a dimension of usability that reduced errors for beginning users. In addition, decisions such as this one prescribed that improving ease of use is integral to testing connected to users and use. Thus, it is little surprise that error reduction opened a door to including users and their experiences at the same time as it limited the study of experience to activities that would improve ease of use scores. Soon usability had become anxious in its efforts to advocate for users (particularly end users), to legitimate its findings by making them as scientific as possible. This move prompted them to emphasize research controls for studies of user behavior and human-machine interaction. At times they even retreated to referring to the work only as ergonomic testing, interface testing, interface-error reduction, or user testing. I am not saying that controlled research we connect with science is problematic; on the contrary, I find it needed. I am proud of the work these testers have contributed to reducing errors in products, to modeling better interactions, and to forging sounder paths for navigating virtual spaces.

What troubles me is a lack of space for research that proceeds along a path that is more open to the voice of another. Such openness to otherness is also needed perhaps even more today than it was in the past. I have long contended (Sullivan, 1989) that to achieve a deeper, wider, and fuller understanding of users’ interactions with built environments/products (so that we can better design and build them) we must be willing to let the other speak to us, move us, be free to disagree with us, and perhaps even that we should chance such encounters that might toss us onto the rocks. But two kinds of related actions have limited the spread and influence of encounters thus far—a tendency to quickly cordon user experiences into rigid domains and researchers’ investment in over-controlling user-experience encounters.

Of course, encounters have not always been so underwhelming in their contributions.

Encounter drew attention years ago (1987) in the opening of Suchman’s Plans and Situated Actions. An ethnographer working at Xerox PARC, Suchman had studied the interface of an advanced copying machine by sitting in a break room and watching workers interact with the machine in order to copy and collate documents. Somehow, as ethnographers often do, Suchman riffed a cultural turn and presented the workers’ journeys as competing philosophies of oceanic navigation, pitting European navigators against the Trukese (a Pacific Islander group). In her metaphor-driven example, the Europeans relied upon setting a goal before they started their journey, then they planned a route to meet that goal, while the Trukese set sail and responded to whatever situation arose. These diametrically opposed approaches to navigation were meant to illustrate that interactivity had more than one direction (and set of moves) that it might profitably work. Yet, usability, user testing, technology-product design, and human factors workers of the time did not embrace the situation-driven navigation and interface work Suchman ascribed to the Trukese; instead they focused, in a goal-based way, on eliminating user and machine errors. From Suchman’s perspective, these sailors encountered navigation (and sailing) in dramatically different ways—so differently that their problems could not be mapped into the same space. She wanted usability to make space to encounter and learn from the Trukese. But perhaps the timing of her insight was not right.

As I indicated earlier, goal-based or error-driven work was, and still is needed, but it also has been paint-by-numbers enough to open a door for the kinds of criticism that McCullough (2004) delivered as he avowed that interface designers have focused on mechanical usability and first-time use in the past, and that such activity must give way to interaction design that is more situated: Today we can no longer assume that mechanical efficiency is the root of usability, that more features will mean better technology, or that separately engineered devices will aggregate into anything like optimal wholes . . . We need to advance the science of computer-human-interface into a culture of situated interaction design. (p. 22) Positions such as those voiced by McCullough fuel the rise of interaction design because they attack the older views of user experiences embedded in HCI as a science (focused on typical work or home-use tasks, targeted users who would buy/use the program in the test, test a limited time frame—usually initial use, and focus on identifying interface errors and/or navigation problems). Today, with the rise of the Internet and social and mobile computing environments, emerging user experience urges us to revisit how encounters may shape us and our interactivity.

How/Why UX Has Expanded

Over the past two decades, the ways that users interface with products and processes have expanded to include devices and other things, and the expansion has called for a base of research that addresses the richness of experience as surely as it checks the correctness of user actions and interface responses. That expansion, which has been fueled by Internet use, social media, cloud computing, proximity mobile gaming, streaming video/audio/animation, ubiquitous environments, and mobile computing (to name some of the components of new and emerging user experiences), proffers richer and more natural experiences than were typical in most of the personal computing era. It beckons us to look more deeply into user experiences and to seek new ways to establish fuller portraits of how user experience is accumulated, understood, managed, and (when necessary) reshaped. It also inflects what it means to work as a technical communicator/UX designer. A recent blog post in UX Designer Magazine stated this rather pointedly:

Here’s the good news: designers are really far from being obsolete. Quite to the contrary, you can see that the demand for UX designers is still on the rise, and everyone seems to be redesigning their digital products these days. . . .

It’s time for us to grow up, because we have been part of the problem: we have helped to give birth to self-righteous web pages that assume they deserve to be watched and awarded just for the time we invested in crafting them. Now more than ever, in a world flooded with cognitive noise, the world needs simple, intelligent, integrated ecosystems of information. The sooner designers embrace this need, the better prepared we’ll be for the future. (Nouvel, 2015)

Some of our user experiences are routine and cumulative, while others shape our emerging thinking and/or actions, and still others slow us down and force us to reflect (often because they contradict other areas of our experience and surface what Festinger called a felt difficulty that serves as an indicator of cognitive dissonance). The literature describing and investigating user experience provides a glimpse of how widely user experience is/has expanding/expanded. As July 2015 began, a search for articles in First Monday addressing user experience yielded 216 relatively recent ones that featured user experiences (remember, users are people and things) as such agents as: blind transit riders, tweeters, stadiums as studios, urban churches, cybercafes, smart phones, grindrs,