“User experience – a research agenda,” highlights one of the important aspects in creating technology in the 21st century: it’s being made cater to individuals needs to attract them to the product. “Early writings on usability already expressed the notion that manifestations of usability such as productivity or learnability are not primary. Primary is the person’s experience now experienced,” describes the importance of the user experience when making new technologies.
The authors state that there are three ways to look at user experience: beyond the instrumental, emotion and affect, and the experimental. Overall, emotion and affect were the more interesting points the authors made. The authors surprised me by saying, “humans interacting with technology are depicted as having mostly negative emotions,” and that designers are trying to undo these negative emotions. It seems odd to think about individuals using technologies with negative emotions, as it seems as if the opposite would be true. It has become conditioned into people’s minds that if they pick up their phone and scroll on Tik Tok it will provide some happiness in some way. However, as I further think about it, when I pick up my phone, I may not be consciously aware of it, but for a couple of minutes while scrolling through Tik Tok I am so focused on the videos, that any negative thoughts I may have are drifting away. It’s rooted in our unconscious that if we are stressed or having a bad time, that picking up technology will reduce it. Therefore, an important part of user experience is, “to contribute to our quality of life by designing for pleasure rather than for absence of pain.” If people are not feeling happiness while using a certain type of technology, they will most likely stop using it.
In all, the clearest takeaway from this article expresses the importance of positivity during a user experience.
As sad as it may be, I agree with your analysis of mindlessly scrolling as a distraction that makes you forget your stress. I also do this. However, at the same time, in the back of my head there is always this sense of guilt—guilt that this shouldn’t be relieving your stress and that you should be doing something more meaningful with your time. I feel as though the ease at which it is to scroll on social media sites has made us lazy to finding more meaningful outlets for our time just in general, or when we are stressed. In this way, I personally don’t feel like social media makes me happy, but I still do it because I know that it works to distract me and I haven’t broken the habit. Following this point, our quality of life would be improved if the design was for “pleasure” and not simply “absence of pain,” but if it is already working for social media sites, why would they change it?