User Experience: Beyond Decoration and Usability

A foundational method of User Experience (UX) is usability. Practitioners assess the effectiveness and efficiency of their product: can users complete a given task, and can they do so with ease? However, usability is only one facet of a user’s experience. This paper draws attention to the subjective, intangible aspects of user experience. It reviews current approaches to assess subjective experiences and provides guidelines on how one may tailor these approaches to needs at the levels of users, teams, and products. Additionally, using digital health apps as a case study, the paper introduces the concept of a shared user-app journey and reviews the main stages the two traverse together. It provides examples of approaches to evaluate subjective experience at various phases along the user-app journey.