Our paper is about the systems that greenhouse growers who actually work here use.
The systems that they use inside these kinds of greenhouses, and in particular the user
experiences that the growers get.
What we do in our study is that we ask growers to fill out questionaires three times a day
and also in the evening, about their user experience of using a climate management system
to control the climate within these greenhouses.
As you can see, we are in Denmark, it is really cold and you need to spend a lot of energy
to preserve the indoor climate in those greenhouses, and also you need to avoid fungi and other
kinds of diseases for the pot plants and tomatoes, vegetables, and so on.
By doing this diary study with the greenhouse growers, we were actually able to get data
points about their user experiences when the actually used their system, not only when
they walked around in their ecosystem where the climate management system was present.
We were able to get the momentary, concurrent experience when they had the feeling, but
also in retrospective, each evening, inspired by Kahnemanns (day retrospective method).
We used two tools to capture experiences during the day and evening.
We used our own questionaire that was developed from field studies that my self and a couple
of other people have done in greenhouses like this, looking at the growers, talking to them,
and we developed our own questionaire based on that.
And also, we used that during the day, because that was domain-specific and able to capture
the actual work tasks and who they were with and where they worked, whether they worked
inside the greenhouses or whether they worked in the offices sitting from a desktop computer
and managing the climate.
For the evening questionaire, we used AttrakDiff, Marc Hassenzahls questionaire, because it
is kind of a standardized questionaire (and it turned out to be usable).
When we analyzed the results what we found was somewhat surprising result - this is why
our title of the paper is Ordinary User Experience at Work - that these user experiences of the
growers were pretty kind of ordinary.
It was really hard to see anything both from the quantitative data and also from the qualitative
data, which you can find in the paper, which can of revealed that the users, the growers,
really experienced their work systems as around the middle-of-the-scale and pretty ordinary
and nothing extraordinary.
So very far from this experience of "vauw, i got a new iPhone" which is kind of associated
with most users experience theory that we have around in the world.
So no dramatic peaks in the experiences, and also over the days, we studied it over 10
days over several weeks, the user experience was not high, it kind of the middle-of-the-scale,
it was not like high up and very good and it was not very poor.
So the growers were 'happy' with the system, or satisfied, and not really extraordinary
happy.
Of course that raises the question of how high should user experience of work actually
be, what are we aiming for when we design for this kind of work.
If you actually come and listen to the presentation of the paper, I will be able to give you some
details about data and also about the trends over the weeks.
Maybe you could ask me some questions because we could compare our study to existing UX
literature and ask the question why it seems like when you are past the first initial period
of using a new system and if there are no dramatic kind of errors or re-installments
of systems or things like that, in most of the time when you are actually working with
the system, in most of a system's lifetime, the user experience tend to be pretty ordinary
in work situations.
How is it that we have not discussed in HCI, at least not enough, and how to design for
that, and should we change our theories of that?
These are some of the things that we sould be happy to talk about.