The Aware User Experience Model, Its Method of Construction and Derived Heuristics

Abstract

Psychological experience possesses many different determinants of affective, cognitive, and behavioral order in complex interaction and mostly hidden to our consciousness. User experience models face this complexity by presenting a reduced set of variables and interactions. Most of these models have been created on a deductive but also largely intuitive basis. This poses three problems: First, the UX models’ authors don’t propose a systematic response to the question of “how to know what variables use into the UX model?” Second, most UX models overlook the components that arise to the user’s consciousness. Third, even with this multitude of UX models, UX designers continue to rely heavily on intuition. Based on previous work, we propose the Aware UX Model, built systematically, and gathering empirical users’ data. It focuses on the components, mostly thoughts, and feelings, that arise in the user’s consciousness. The model provides their characterization and a rational account of its emergence in the UX. In addition, we propose a construction method for UX models based on our own process. We expose a case study to substantiate the Aware UX model and to contribute to its validation. Finally, we propose heuristics coupled to the Aware UX model components.