Jax Wechsler

User Experience, Design and Research

I have been doing a lot of reading lately for my university literature review and have been thinking a lot about the relationship between user experience, design and research.

These are some rough notes which are influencing my current, and continually evolving thinking on this topic.
As my paper gets written, I will share more of my thoughts about these topics….

Some factors informing my current thinking about this topic include:

– Experience by definition is subjective
– A users experience is holistic
– Experience is always influenced by context
– You can not design for user experience without some kind of research
– In considering the user experience of ubiquitous devices context is incredible important but so is the recognition and consideration of the social dimension of a users experience – which is also a very dynamic thing

HENCE user experience is increasingly becoming a very complex thing to research!

ALSO

Research and design involve different ways of thinking.
How can we meld these two perspectives during idea-tion, and the design phase.
As an aside, when I refer to design I am referring to much more than the look and feel of the product.
I refer to the design and selection of features for inclusion, layout, information architecture, the workflow required by various features of the product, content relationships etc.

ANOTHER QUESTION:
Research needs to inform design….
but can design also inform research?

Additionally, designers being associative thinkers and usually quite visual, what are the best ways to communicate design research to designers?

These are a few of uni related questions on my mind…..