This doctoral research has inspired several avenues to continue the presented research work, related to the limitations and insights gained from the current research. Next, the possible topics for future research are discussed.
First, only a few earlier studies have explored the experience-driven design in practice and especially how UX goals are utilized over product development life cycle. The candidate shares the views with Roto et al. (2017) regarding the future research topics for UX goals utilization in experience design, including a need for more empirical research studying in which conditions UX
goals “can be translated to design implications, and how complex the relations can be” (Roto et al. 2017). Furthermore, keeping the product development team’s focus on experience over the product development life cycle is difficult (Roto et al. 2017). More empirical research studying the utilization of UX goals in different product development contexts is required to assess how UX goals can support product development activities. Furthermore, Roto et al. (2017) propose that when introducing the idea of UX goals to industry, the road should go through strategic operations, for example, by utilizing company-wide experience goals (Roto et al. 2015). Empirical research regarding such an approach is needed in the future.
The Experience Goal Elicitation Process and the instructions for defining UX goals could be iterated further in future studies. In the results, examples of stakeholders who had participated in UX goal definition and different means for communicating UX goals were reported. Future studies could aim at justifying with more rigor which stakeholders related to product development should participate in the UX goal definition, how this participation should be realized, what the potential contribution of each participant in this process is, and how the UX goals should be prioritized and chosen. According to P1, approaches to communicating UX goals between stakeholders include at least written and verbal communication, but also artifacts, such as personas and sketches. The survey presented in P1 did not include the respondents’ perceptions regarding how successful the used approaches were in communicating the UX goals. In future research, it would be interesting to study how well these different approaches support the communication of the intended experiences during different phases of the development process. This would also require research on the perceptions of different stakeholders participating in the product development regarding the used UX goals and approaches for their communication.
Furthermore, empirical findings from experience design projects conducted by practitioners from industry, instead of researchers from academia, could provide additional viewpoints to how UX goals can support product development activities.
Empirical research regarding retrospective UX evaluation methods and tools, such as DrawUX, is required in different contexts to inform other researchers and practitioners interested in utilizing these methods. For instance, the DrawUX tool should be evaluated in a systematic validation study, to evaluate its feasibility in supporting UX design work in product development. In addition, more studies inspecting the actual utilization of long-term UX evaluation results in industrial contexts could provide further evidence from the benefits of long-term evaluations in practice. One obvious step for future research would be to collect a database of experiences from the utilization of specific methods, for example, for long-term UX evaluation, in different contexts to guide the choices of suitable UX evaluation methods to support product development practitioners.
Websites already presenting various UX evaluation methods, such as the All About UX website1,
could act as a central hub for finding data related to specific methods and experiences reported from their utilization in different product development cases.
Finally, while Study 5 in the manufacturing automation context suggested that usage data logging has several potential benefits for practitioners working in different roles in product development, the realization of these benefits remains a topic for future research. In particular, it
would be interesting to study what kinds of insights and benefits logged usage data can provide for stakeholders in marketing, sales and user training, and study the customers’ viewpoints regarding the value gained from usage data logging in the manufacturing automation context. Interesting questions relate especially to data ownership and the value proposition for customers in sharing logged usage data with the supplier company. More research on these topics could provide useful advice for other supplier companies when interested in utilizing logged usage data collected from their customers’ systems. Finally, more example studies of how logged usage data is utilized to improve the UX of the product would be valuable. For instance in Study 5, logged usage data could help pinpointing challenges in the UI, but would still require more qualitative approach from product designers to understand why the product is used in a specific way. Such studies would make it more evident how beneficial usage data logging can be in UX evaluation. In future, one possible approach could be the combination of logged usage data with sensor data measuring users’ emotional responses during product use, such as measurements of the galvanic skin response (GSR) for the intensity of emotional arousal. However, providing an easy or automated way for designers to collect such sensor data from users in similar fashion as logging usage data today, is a challenge for future studies.