Human experience and product usability: principles to assist the design of user-product interactions

This paper introduces research that investigates how human experience influences people's understandings of product usability. It describes an experiment that employs visual representation of concepts to elicit participants' ideas of a product's use. Results from the experiment lead to the identification of relationships between human experience, knowledge, and context-of-use - relationships that influence designers' and users' concepts of product usability. These relationships are translated into design principles that inform the design activity with respect to the aspects of experience that trigger people's understanding of a product's use. A design tool (ECEDT) is devised to aid designers in the application of these principles. This tool is then trialled in the context of a design task in order to verify applicability of the findings.