Enhancing the Design Process by Embedding HCI Research into Experience Triggers

Over the last decade, User Experience (UX) has become a core concept in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Beyond the fact of understanding and assessing the User Experience derived from the use of interactive systems, practitioners and researchers from a wide range of disciplines are now facing the challenges of designing for User Experience.
Some authors have pinpointed the existence of a gap between the theoretical knowledge developed in HCI Research and the practical knowledge actually used by designers to create rich experiences with interactive artefacts. A special focus of this paper is to translate theoretical work into experiential objects (or situations) called “Experience Triggers” [1]. Through their materiality, these artefacts bring emotions and sensations to the design process and designers can immerge into and understand the theories on experience. As a consequence of this immersion, the final product designed by the team is assumed to be more experiential. Experience Triggers are introduced here as a new tool for science-based UX design.