Grounding Experience: Relating Theory and Method to Evaluate the User Experience of Smartphones

The field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has become increasingly concerned with user experience. A variety of theoretical accounts of what experience is have been articulated in recent years which offer a number of important insights but it can be unclear how they inform design. While they stress the importance of aspects of experience such as anticipation and reflection they seldom offer data collection or analysis techniques, nor do they demonstrate how such data can be related to the design process. This paper examines several techniques to analyse and evaluate user’s experiences of interactive technology and demonstrates how a grounded theory approach can be used to generate design ideas. The paper presents three evaluative cases studies of user experience with the Orange SPV E200 “Smartphone”.