Digging Into the Experiential Qualities

This is a sharing on an assignment I recently did in the class by Erik Stolterman, Experience Design. I'm studying HCI at Indiana University Bloomington.

Intro

As a UX designer, we focus on creating a great experience, meaning we are tackling a very big problem and trying to control how users feel when they touch and immerse in the things we design. I won’t spend paragraphs explaining what you could find online — what user experience is. The short thing is, we could find the things we could control to achieve the things we might not be able to control. Then we might learn what contributes to a great experience.

Edited. Original photo by Alexander Hafemann on Unsplash.

In order to understand the relationship between controllable and uncontrollable elements in our future design, we can investigate it in the app we love, we use every day, or just simply the app on hype. Before jumping into the steps of analyzing an experience, I have to note that there are two elements we have to be aware of. One is artifact qualities, meaning the things designers could change and manipulate, for example, the shapes, colors, fonts, layout, etc. The other is experiential qualities, meaning the things often out of a designer’s control and standing for the words of feelings.

Steps

This a brief version from my assignment instructions that Erik created.

1. Describe the app, its purpose, functionality, and design
2. Describe the overall experience with three words, not obvious qualities of the app
3. Analyze each app by relating artifact qualities with experiential qualities

Examples

In the following, I will introduce three apps, Pocket Cast, Robinhood, and Grammarly that I used a lot and demonstrate how I tried to grasp the experiential qualities among these apps.

Pocket Cast is an app for listening to, exploring, and sharing podcasts. Its design is super simple but intuitive.

Intimate: The highlight of a podcast’s cover and the language of “Notes” give me a feeling of listening to a podcaster and thus forgetting the app.

Understated: The designs of layout, font size, and weight, as well as the playing indicator, are super clear and don’t hide the podcast itself.

Feel-good: There is a lot of usage of the rounded corner and rounded icons, which makes me feel lively and that I’m not just absorbing the information.

Robinhood provides a simple interface for general investors to learn the market and manage their investment in various financial products.

Captivating: The app has a lot of details that capture my attention and present them differently. The artifacts allow me to check the app more actively.

Witty: It’s a small thing but I feel very interesting. The language plays a crucial role here.

Friendly: Trading and managing financial products are daunting and easily make people overwhelmed. The clearer and fewer amount of information in the app help a lot.

Grammarly is a digital writing tool that corrects your grammatical mistakes and makes your writing more understandable and impressive.

Rewarding: The bar chart and numbers kindly give me confidence in writing. And I can see my progress as I revise my paragraphs.

Focused: It decreases the weight of technical terms like punctuation and applies actionable language besides the errors, which allows me to focus on what instead of why.

In Control: The app doesn’t “force” me to do any action through a couple of comfortable color schemes.

Final Thoughts

That’s it. The assignment itself allowed me to learn what an experience is. I learned how I related my feelings to the interface design, and how I could capture the emotions beyond the functions. It’s been a great way to learn our perception of an experience. Would recommend you take a little time and give it a try!

One last thing is that, when all classmates shared their works, we came up with a list of experience words that provided us with a glance at others’ insight. Big shout-out to Sagar who took initiative to this list and everyone for their inputs!

Thank you, Erik, Oscar, and all my classmates for creating a wonderful class experience!

Also thank you for reading this far! Any feedback or thoughts are welcome and appreciated. If possible, please clap 10+ times for your love in this article, or 30+ times for your interest in this kind of topics to my future post! You can find my past articles here.

See you in my next post 🍻