Quality of Experience

Of many works that I read today using GOOGLE scholar the article “Quality of Experience” by Lauralee Alben striked me the most. Lauralee Alben is a principal of Alben+Faris Inc., a firm specializing in graphic and interface design for interactive multimedia. The article appeared in a special issue of interaction magazine devoted to first annual ACM interaction Design Awards.

These awards were first of its kind that acknowledged quality in interaction design, as distinct from software engineering and research.

The basic question of the award was “How does effective interaction design provide people with a successful and satisfying experience?”

The word experience was defined in form of the following 8 questions. And in my opinion these eight criteria define the quality of interaction media:

1. Understanding of users
How well the needs, task and environment of the users were understood by the design team?
2. Effective Design Process
Is the product a result of a well thought out and well executed design process?
3. Needed
What ‘need’ does the product satisfy?
4. Learnable and Usable
Is the product easy to learn and use?
5. Appropriate
Does the design of the product solve the right problem at the right level?
6. Aesthetic Experience
Is the product aesthetically pleasing and sensually satisfying one?
7. Mutable
** Well I couldn’t understand this criteria. Nor did I google it :p .. but I ll sure post something on this later
8. Manageable
Does the product account for and help users manage needs such as installation,training and maintenance?

I will post more on this later on. The article can be found at http://www.albendesign.com/albenfaris/downloads/pdf/quality.pdf

I have also been reading how blogosphere works. And the idea has caught me. We all should start interconnecting our blogs 