Argentine — Grande-Bretagne : des relations de réciprocité à la dépendance

The User Experience (UX) movement within HCI has sought to broaden the scope of research into technology use, away from a focus on usability and the successful achievement of tasks and towards a broader consideration of aspects of experience such as context, emotion and enjoyment. McCarthy and Wright (2004) argued that:

It is no longer considered sufficient to produce a computer system that is effective, flexible, learnable, and satisfying to use … it must now also be useful in the lives of those using it. (p. 5) In a review of UX studies published between 2005 and 2009, Bargas-Avila and Hornbaek (2011) detected:

… a shift in the products and use contexts that are studied, from work towards leisure, from controlled tasks towards open use situations, and from desktop computing towards consumer products and art.

These emphases on recreational technologies, on context, and on enjoyment suggest that UX is an ideal framework for researching use of virtual worlds.

UX takes a holistic view of the experience of using a technology, aiming to understand how the characteristics of users, products and social contexts together influence experience. Law et al. (2009) remarked:

HCI researchers and practitioners have become well aware of the limitations of the traditional usability framework, which focuses primarily on user cognition and user performance in human-technology interactions. In contrast, UX highlights non-utilitarian aspects of such interactions, shifting the focus to user affect, sensation, and the meaning as well as value of such interactions in everyday life. (p. 719)

The emphasis on context of use has caused the locus of study to shift from the laboratory into homes, workplaces and mobile situations. McCarthy and Wright (2004) argued that technologies and technology use are embedded in everyday life. People appropriate technologies and make their presence and use routine. While use of a technology can therefore be mundane - in the sense of ‘everyday’ - it is by no means precluded from provoking intense feelings.

Our interactions with technology can involve emotions, values, ideals, intentions, and strong feelings (McCarthy and Wright, 2004, p. 2)

Technology use is rarely a solitary pursuit. Forlizzi and Battarbee (2004) advocated an interaction-centred framework for understanding user experience, including not only user-product interaction but user-user interaction around a user-product. They described interactions such as occur around museum exhibits and through messaging systems as ‘co-experience’ – the creation of meaning and emotion together through product use.

Co-experience reveals how the experiences an individual has and the interpretations that are made of them are influenced by the physical or virtual presence of others. (Forlizzi and Battarbee, 2004, p.

263).

This concords with the concept of co-presence in CVE research.

The UX approach is well-suited to recreational contexts and has become important within HCI during the period that technologies such as smartphones, social network sites and computer games have become mass-market products. UX offers a way to understand consumer use of non-workplace technologies in non-workplace contexts that usability testing cannot capture.

It is as much about children playing with GameBoys, teenagers gender swapping, and elderly people socializing on the Internet as it is about middle-aged executives managing knowledge assets, office workers making photocopies, or ambulance controllers dispatching ambulances. (McCarthy and Wright 2004, p. 9)

Experience is of course profoundly subjective. As a result, the user experience movement has included a shift away from quantitative research methods. Bargas-Avila and Hornbaek (2011) found that while only 14% of usability studies were qualitative, over half of published UX research had embraced qualitative methods. These are more able to capture the richness and complexity of user experience, and are more open to unexpected findings. Bargas-Avila and Hornbaek quote Swallow et al. (2005) on the inapplicability of quantitative methods to capturing experience:

A common strategy ... is the reduction of experience into a number of factors or processes ... such approaches may be useful for experimental analysis but they can miss some of the insights available in accounts that resist such reduction ... qualitative data provides a richness and detail that may be absent from quantitative measures. (p. 91-92)

UX however is a nascent field whose “definition and distinct characteristics as a research field are currently unclear” (Bargas-Avila and Hornbaek, 2011, p. 2690). Because it is not clearly defined, UX can mean different things to many people, and there is no agreed-upon set of methods for studying it. McCarthy and Wright (2004) caution that the term ‘user experience’

has been used as a marketing buzzword. In their review of UX research, Bargas-Avila and Hornbaek discovered a number of criteria on which trends could be detected but on which the UX community did not have consensus. These included:

1. Products, use situations and context: 64% of studies assessed leisure products rather than work products. 61% assessed open use or left the decision to use up to participants, rather than assessing controlled use such as lab tasks. Half controlled the context of use (e.g. in a lab) while a third used uncontrolled settings such as online use.

2. The dimensions of experience measured: 41% sought to assess the overall experience while the remainder assessed a specific dimension of experience. Of those studying overall experience, 80% were qualitative studies. Where specific dimensions of experience were assessed, the most common were emotions and affect, enjoyment and aesthetics.

3. Data-collection methods: Half of UX studies were qualitative, a third quantitative and the remainder used both approaches. Most of the quantitative studies used questionnaires. A wide range of qualitative methods were used, including ‘probe’

methods. (Bargas-Avila and Hornbaek, 2011)

Bargas-Avila and Hornbaek reported that the plainest dichotomy was between the ‘general experience’ studies, usually using qualitative methods, and the ‘specific dimension’ studies, using mostly quantitative methods, suggesting that two research cultures are using the UX name but have different understandings of what experience is and how it should be studied.

While Bargas-Avila and Hornbaek emphasized the lack of consensus among UX researchers, this can partly be attributed too the immaturity of the field. Most authors acknowledge an overall focus on experience over usability, on the uncontrolled and unpredictable social context of everyday life, and on recreational or ‘lifestyle’ use of technology over the performance of tasks in a work setting.

2.6 Gap

My review of prior work demonstrates that while a significant amount of research has been conducted into the use of virtual worlds, and into mediated communication, comparatively few studies have specifically addressed the junction of these two fields: that is, mediated communication within virtual environments.

Many of the studies that addressed this intersection utilized early experimental CVEs, which did not have some of the key properties of current virtual worlds such as a large user-base, interaction among strangers and role-play in fictional settings.

Data-driven research on VWs has usually examined text communication only (Harris et al, 2009 is an example) possibly because text utterances are easier to store and count than voice utterances. Only one study (Williams et al., 2007) compared modalities within a modern virtual world, and it was limited to one system, a game (World of Warcraft), and to small groups whose members knew each other, both of which are factors likely to influence the suitability of voice.

The UX approach, with its emphasis on context, emotion, the holistic experience of using a technology and the influence that technology has in people’s lives, has rarely been brought to bear on research into virtual worlds.

This is the gap I have attempted to address.

At the start of my research, anecdotal evidence and prior work on multiplayer games indicated that voice was having a significant influence on the user experience of virtual worlds. I perceived a need to examine the influence of the introduction of voice across a range of virtual worlds, users, uses and contexts. I felt this influence was likely to be complex, and that in order to understand it I should gather rich data on the experiences of the people using these technologies.