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2004 | Book

Introduction to Section 1 Read chapter Read first chapter

Funology

From Usability to Enjoyment

Editors: Mark A. Blythe, Kees Overbeeke, Andrew F. Monk, Peter C. Wright

Publisher: Springer Netherlands

Book Series : Human–Computer Interaction Series

Included in: Professional Book Archive

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About this book

This book reflects the move in Human Computer Interaction studies from standard usability concerns towards a wider set of problems to do with fun, enjoyment, aesthetics and the experience of use.

Traditionally HCI has been concerned with work and task based applications but as digital technologies proliferate in the home fun becomes an important issue. There is an established body of knowledge and a range of techniques and methods for making products and interfaces usable, but far less is known about how to make them enjoyable.

Perhaps in the future there will be a body of knowledge and a set of techniques for assessing the pleasure of interaction that will be as thorough as those that currently assess usability. This book is a first step towards that. It brings together a range of researchers from academia and industry to provide answers. Contributors include Alan Dix, Jacob Nielsen and Mary Beth Rosson as well as a number of other researchers from academia and industry.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter

Theories and Concepts

Frontmatter
Introduction to Section 1
Chapter 1. Let’s Make Things Engaging
Kees Overbeeke, Tom Djajadiningrat, Caroline Hummels, Stephan Wensveen, Joep Prens
Chapter 2. The Engineering of Experience
Phoebe Sengers
Chapter 3. The Thing and I: Understanding the Relationship Between User and Product
Marc Hassenzahl
Chapter 4. Making Sense of Experience
Peter Wright, John McCarthy, Lisa Meekison
Chapter 5. Enjoyment: Lessons from Karasek
Petter Bae Brandtzæg, Asbjørn Følstad, Jan Heim
Chapter 6. Fun on the Phone: The Situated Experience of Recreational Telephone Conferences
Conclusion
Fun in telephone conferences in this analysis is defined in relation to what it is not: having fun is a matter of transforming the (necessarily) formal structured basis of activity into moments of triviality and playfulness. And as such it complements early sociological appreciation of play as not work. However by understanding fun as the consequence of particular interpretive transformations in ongoing interaction, our sociology of fun becomes a dynamic conceptualisation: fun is always interactionally achieved by active social actors.
Our investigation of telephone conferences through applied or directed CA allows an appreciation of the interactionally situated experience of fun. A question might be how these insights benefit the future design effort. One way is that they can be recruited to inform experimental interventions. For example we might ask how changes in the opening routines affect interaction patterns and see if fluidity can be reached more quickly.
On a more general note, we might ask how we can make telephone conferences more ‘fun’. Initial answers appear counter-intuitive: fun is tied to engendering structure, and allowing for its re-framing; to have fun, we have to have seriousness first.
Darren J. Reed
Chapter 7. The Enchantments of Technology
John C. McCarthy, Peter C. Wright
Chapter 8. The Semantics of Fun: Differentiating Enjoyable Eeperiences
Conclusion
To summarise, this chapter has argued that although words like fun and pleasure are closely related and may each function as a superordinate category for the other, there are experiential and cultural differences between them. Fun has been considered in terms of distraction and pleasure in terms of absorption. This is not to suggest that pleasure is a more worthy pursuit than fun, it is rather an attempt to delineate different but equally important aspects of enjoyment. It is possible to appreciate Shakespeare and still acknowledge that The Simpsons is the greatest achievement of western civilisation. Both offer rich and fulfilling experiences but they are very different kinds of pleasures. As Peter Wright and John McCarthy argue elsewhere in this book, it is not possible to design an experience, only to design for an experience; but in order to do this it is necessary to have an understanding of that experience as it relates to and differs from others.
Mark Blythe, Marc Hassenzahl

Methods and Techniques

Frontmatter
User Empowerment and the Fun Factor
Questions and Answers with Jakob Nielsen
Jakob Nielsen
Introduction to Section 2
Chapter 9. Measuring Emotion: Development and Application of an Instrument to Measure Emotional Responses to Products
Pieter Desmet
Chapter 10. That’s Entertainment!
John Karat, Clare-Marie Karat
Chapter 11. Designing for Fun: User-Testing Case Studies
Randy J. Pagulayan, Keith R. Steury, Bill Fulton, Ramon L. Romero
Chapter 12. Playing Games in the Emotional Space
Kristina Andersen, Margot Jacobs, Laura Polazzi
Chapter 13. Deconstructing Experience: Pulling Crackers Apart
Alan Dix
Chapter 14. Designing Engaging Experiences with Children and Artists
Richard Hull, Jo Reid
Chapter 15. Building Narrative Experiences for Children Through Real Time Media Manipulation: Pogo World
Antonio Rizzo, Patrizia Marti, Françoise Decortis, Job Rutgers, Paul Thursfield

Case Studies in Design

Frontmatter
Introduction to Section 3
Chapter 16. The Joy of Telephony: Designing Appealing Interactions
Conclusions
While developing EasyCom, we learned that stimulating fun and pleasure is a noteworthy factor to be considered as an integral part of the conceptual design as early as possible to achieve “designs that engage and empower users [to] increase their enjoyment and encourage them to explore” (Nielsen, 2002). We hope, our observations produce further evidence for the thesis that fun and enjoyment is an important issue even for software products mainly used professionally. With the widespread use of mobile devices and services, the clearcut distinction between business and recreational tasks increasingly becomes blurred. People will use the same tools and applications in different usage contexts and environments. Thus, designing for both workable and enjoyable user interfaces will be a vital challenge in the near future. Have fun!
Hubertus Hohl, Klaus Wissmann, Manfred Burger
Chapter 17. From Usable to Enjoyable Information Displays
Sara Ljungblad, Tobias Skog, Lars Erik Holmquist
Chapter 18. Fun for All: Promoting Engagement and Paraticipation in Community Programming Projects
Mary Beth Rosson, John M. Carroll
Chapter 19. Storytelling & Conversation to Improve the Fun Factor in Software Applications
Conclusion
This chapter describes the impact of conversation and storytelling as short and medium period factors of user satisfaction, to be used in software applications. The author recommends an orientation of the user interface towards human needs to gain a short-period cycle of user satisfaction. This is achieved in regard to assistance and delegation with a conversational interaction metaphor, described as an explicit and symbolic top-down approach. For the medium-period satisfaction of the user, the author suggests the use of humanlike information structures like stories to access information in a way that is easily understandable for the user. The author suggests a morphological story engine as prototyped within the Geist project. The prototype implementation shows two general points:
First, the usage of literary approaches to interactive storytelling is generally possible. Suspense can be increased by using story models drawn from literary theory. Second, to involve the user in a dramatic story, one has to use humanlike interaction metaphors, like conversation, to focus the human on the story progress, rather than on the interface.
Norbert Braun
Chapter 20. Deconstructing Ghosts
Jonathan Sykes, Richard Wiseman
Chapter 21. Interfacing the Narrative Experience
Conclusion
Our knowledge of the physical world and the skills with which we engage with it are powerful facilitators to LRP games. The artefacts, costumes, game-specific locations and buildings transform the physical world into a magic place where fantastic narratives are spawned. The level of engagement such a game environment creates — with no physical division between player, character, space, and narrative — is the kind of immersion many interactive narratives and computer games seek to achieve but where they also fail. By looking at the appropriation of artefacts and physical game locations in LRP games, and observing how the stories emerge from the interaction between all these components, we can inform the design process for interfaces to interactive narrative applications.
Jennica Falk
Chapter 22. Whose Line is It Anyway? Enabling Creative Appropriation of Television
Erik Blankinship, Pilapa Esara
Chapter 23. The Interactive Installation ISH: In Search of Resonant Human Product Interaction
Caroline Hummels, Kees Overbeeke, Aadjan Van Der Helm
Chapter 24. Fun with Your Alarm Clock: Designing for Engaging Experiences Through Emotionally Rich Interaction
Stephan Wensveen, Kees Overbeeke
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Funology
Editors
Mark A. Blythe
Kees Overbeeke
Andrew F. Monk
Peter C. Wright
Copyright Year
2004
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Electronic ISBN
978-1-4020-2967-7
Print ISBN
978-1-4020-2966-0
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2967-5