UX - positive experiences and their importance

For some years now, we have been experiencing a shift in innovation - from purely technical to customer-centric development. So we're putting people at the center. Usability and user experience are two success factors that you should not underestimate for your company. Because products that are characterized by a positive user experience are usually preferred by users.
Representatives of the Mittelstand 4.0 Competence Center Usability will provide information on the background to this: Anne Elisabeth Krüger (research associate in the User Experience team at Fraunhofer IAO), Prof. Dr. Michael Burmester (Professor of Ergonomics and Usability at the Media University) and Anja Groß (working in the Technology and Innovation Management department at Bayern Innovativ).

What does the term User Experience (UX) mean? And how does it differentiate itself from usability?

Anja Groß: Usability and user experience are often mentioned in the same breath because the two concepts have one very crucial and important thing in common: In both, the human being is at the center. This is why we also speak of so-called human-centered design. In detail, however, the terms then differ.

• Usability: The goal of usability is intuitive usability. For me, that means a product is easy to use. I know what to do when I hold it in my hand or use it on the computer. They say this is a hygiene factor, because this intuitive usability, this knowledge of what to do, is a basic requirement of the product. That is my expectation. By definition, you can say that this is accomplished when the goals can be achieved efficiently, effectively and satisfactorily.
• User Experience: UX goes a whole step further. Here, the focus is on the experiences. The goal of user experience is to create emotionally positive experiences and thus contribute to well-being. For example, let's imagine someone goes running in the park every evening and the person uses a fitness app that tracks progress. That is, one can always see exactly one's performance, how much one has run, in other words, how much one has accomplished today. Through the visual performance display, the app evokes positive emotions, that is the user experience.

In this context, the technical term of positive user experience or positive UX often falls. Can you explain it to us in more detail?

Anja Groß: Positive UX is about creating positive experiences and emotions and thus creating a positive character in a thing or application. But how can you influence the emotional world then? How can these emotions be evoked? It is said that psychological needs play a very crucial role. For example, everyone has social needs, such as the feeling of belonging or connectedness.

Another example: to strengthen this feeling of connectedness, so-called friendship lamps have been developed, for example. If a couple is in a long-distance relationship, they can signal to each other across miles that the partners are thinking of the other person without communicating with each other in writing or verbatim. To do this, one simply touches one lamp and thus the light also lights up for the second person in the distance. Over the lamp thus positive messages are sent.

Just with psychology and also with emotions, the human being is the focus. Anne, what role do psychological needs play in this context?

Anne Elisabeth Krüger: The human being is the focus for us - yes, that's right. Primarily, we always consider the users and their psychological needs. We look at their needs and consider how we can meet them in the context of a product or service. The goal is to avoid negative experiences and to systematically design positive experiences, in other words, to create a "design for well-being. In doing so, we work in a fundamentally human-centered way.

This means that all stakeholders must be considered in human-centered design. So you can't just focus on the users, you have to additionally keep the design and development team in mind. These people also have needs that should not be ignored. In order to be able to design optimally for positive experience, the psychological needs and requirements of the creators should also be met. For example, do they feel connected to the others in digital meetings (the topic of socializing) or can everyone handle the digital tools or do they lack the necessary skills for this?

In addition, it is important that the needs and the associated scientific needs theory are prepared in such a way that they become accessible to the creators. This is a major theme of our research - how can abstract concepts and psychological models be presented in a more vivid and comprehensible way? We have developed various methods for this, such as the needs persona. In the needs persona, the abstract needs are personified. Thus, for example, the need persona Karl Competence is created, which makes all aspects of the need competence vivid in the form of a persona.

Now it was just talked about the development, the design and the methods behind it. What does such a concrete procedure look like, Michael?

Prof. Dr. Michael Burmester: Anne has just said it already. We have developed certain procedures to integrate these somewhat unwieldy theoretical models, which come from psychology, into the design processes. In addition, we also pursued a second very helpful approach for designers. For this we collected the positive experiences in a certain context, for example in a work environment, through special experience interviews.

In a research project we conducted 400 interviews, after we sorted out a few, because the answers were not really positive experiences, we still had 360 experiences left. We combined these into categories. This resulted in a total of 17 experience categories that fit work contexts and can be used to develop helpful ideas. These include, for example, something like "creating something together," which in turn expresses the group's common goals and teamwork. In our Mittelstand 4.0 Competence Center Usability , we develop such procedures and we also further optimize existing procedures.

That is, you have filtered out certain categories from a huge treasure trove of data from these interviews that are generally important for positive experiences and needs in the work context. And after that you can design the workplace or products, is that right?

Prof. Dr. Michael Burmester: Exactly. With these categories, we know what is important in the work. For this I have three examples:

1. Keeping track of one's own progress:
People have in the working world a psychological need for competence. Appropriate experience categories for this are "getting feedback" or "having an overview". The appropriate feedback for this you get either from a computer or from someone in the colleagues.

2. Group work and gratitude:
Inside a created communication tool, we have developed a way that you can express gratitude to each other, for example, for a successful group work. However, the gratitude must be exclusive and between two people. Because otherwise it is rather a kind of "liking" and that would be public, which in turn could contribute to a competition, which may be motivating, but is experienced rather negatively.

3. Assistance systems and contribute to something higher:
We have implemented various positive experience categories in design ideas in an assistance system for production in a project. On the one hand, the system assists employees with the order in which certain components must be screwed together. On the other hand, the system can indicate how important the completed work is for the company, for the customer or for the team, e.g. it can indicate who will continue working with my work result. This creates a feeling of "contributing to something higher", that is, something that goes beyond myself, which is a very profound, positive experience.

In recent months, we have seen a kind of digitalization push. How can we ensure human-centeredness or emotions even in a digitized world of work?

Prof. Dr. Michael Burmester: We need to understand work a bit more broadly than is often the case. Work is much more than just doing one's tasks, because it is a big part of our lives. In psychology, there used to be something like job satisfaction. That disappeared at some point, but we want to get back to that. And the good thing is, with digitization , we have many opportunities to do what is often overlooked. Networked digital systems have more knowledge about work processes and can display them, better than analog systems ever could.

At first glance, it sounds paradoxical because you think digitization does not create proximity. But you deliberately say it does, and it can even be the factor that favors this.

Prof. Dr. Michael Burmester: You just have to formulate that as a design goal and design in that direction as well. If you have a traditional view of digitization, then digital systems are seen more like tools. So if I have to deal with a lot of data, then a database helps me and I don't have to remember or otherwise document everything. The database is a tool that makes my work easier. And we now have to go a step further and ask what else is important in work beyond just completing tasks? How can I create well-being at work? And that's where digital technology offers a lot of opportunities.

There are bound to be skeptics or you face certain hurdles yourself. What are generally hurdles that you have identified from your work?

Prof. Dr. Michael Burmester: We are indeed dealing with a strange area of tension. Companies show great interest in design for positive experiences and well-being. In response, we often support companies in finding appropriate solutions. But then we find that the results we develop are not implemented at all. That's why we've now started to ask directly: "You've developed this after all, why aren't you implementing it?" The answer is, for example, that the customer's requirements were ultimately more important. And so companies have fallen back into their old understanding of digitization. But what is the reason for this, that positive aspects fall behind "tangible" problem solutions?

In psychology, there is an approach called negativity bias, which, cautiously formulated, perhaps offers a possible explanation. The negativity bias states that we as humans are particularly calibrated to solve problems, i.e., to fix negatives, and pay a great deal of attention to this endeavor. That is, I have several objects, positive and negative, and I notice mainly the negative ones. There are psychologists who say that it was an evolutionary advantage. To exaggerate, in the past all optimists were stupidly eaten. So, there was a rustling in the bushes and then it wasn't something friendly, but something dangerous. And that means we are geared to pay attention to negatives.

And that's where we come in: In design teams, we need to sharpen the mindset for this. People should see and also be sensitized to the fact that we as humans very easily revert to these pragmatic behavior patterns. It doesn't mean that problem solving is not right. In fact, we absolutely need it. But in order to develop a real sense of well-being, we must also create positive things. It is not enough to just take away the negative and hope that the positive will emerge on its own. But that is often the attitude we find ourselves confronted with.

The interview was conducted by Dr. Tanja Jovanovic, Head of Technology and Innovation Management at Bayern Innovativ GmbH.

Listen to the full interview as a podcast: