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1.5 The goals of interaction design 19

The goals of designing interactive products to be fun, enjoyable, pleasurable,
aesthetically pleasing and so on are concerned primarily with the user experience.
By this we mean what the interaction with the system feels like to the users. This in-
volves explicating the nature of the user experience in subjective terms. For exam-
ple, a new software package for children to create their own music may be designed
with the primary objectives of being fun and entertaining. Hence, user experience
goals differ from the more objective usability goals in that they are concerned with
how users experience an interactive product from their perspective, rather than as-
sessing how useful or productive a system is from its own perspective. The relation-
ship between the two is shown in Figure 1.7.
Much of the work on enjoyment, fun, etc., has been carried out in the enter-
tainment and computer games industry, which has a vested interest in understand-
ing the role of pleasure in considerable detail. Aspects that have been described
as contributing to pleasure include: attention, pace, play, interactivity, conscious
and unconscious control, engagement, and style of narrative. It has even been
suggested that in these contexts, it might be interesting to build systems that are
non-easy to use, providing opportunities for quite different user experiences from
those designed based on usability goals (Frohlich and Murphy, 1999). Interact-
ing with a virtual representation using a physical device (e.g., banging a plastic

TfUn ----,

emotionally
satisfying
/ fulfilling
efficient
TI

effective
easy to
enjoiable how to use to use rewarding
remember
i 1

supportive
to use
learn
entertaining easy to safe of creativity
\ /
havetgood
utility
\ /
helpful aesthetically

motivating
Figure 1.7 Usability and user experience goals. Usability goals are central to interaction de-
sign and are operationalized through specific criteria. User experience goals are shown in
the outer circle and are less clearly defined.