The Characteristics of User Experience

After thinking about non-web or software experiences for a while i’ve decided to redefine the “connectedness” and “controllable” principles as characteristics.  So the only ‘must have’ principles are; Relevant, Comprehensible and Aesthetic, the two moved characteristics i’ve redefined as:

• Controllable: (Merged with Actionable) Does the ‘provider’ (left side) or ‘user’ (right side) have control over the experience? e.g. riding a roller coaster (provider control) vs playing World of Warcraft (user control).
• Connected: Is the experience a single ‘stand-alone’ interaction or ‘integrated’ across many parts? e.g. renting a movie at a rental store (stand-alone) vs renting a move at Netflix (where the website, emails and mail envelope are integrated).

I’ve also added three new characteristics:

• Sensory: To what degree does the experience engage all of the five senses? e.g. listening to a song in your car (one-dimensional – audio) vs listening to the same song at a concert (immersive – audio, visual, smell, touch).
• Accessible: To what degree is the experience ‘fixed’ (you go to it) vs ‘portable’ (it comes to you). e.g. Driving 15 miles to a movie theater to see a movie (fixed) vs Watching a movie on your iPod (portable).
• Findable: To what degree is the experience ‘hidden’ vs ‘obvious’. e.g. Playing World of Warcraft (where many things are hidden) vs playing Monopoly (where board position, properties, money, etc are obvious).

I’m not completely comfortable with the term ‘accessible’, because ‘accessibility‘ is already in common use. I haven’t been able to find an alternative yet though – i’ve considered ‘proximity’ and ‘movable’ but neither are great.

I’ll be posting more (multi-channel) examples of these in the coming days and an updated set of diagrams to reflect the changes.