This is Pinar Simsek Caglar, and my study is titled as 'User Experience Research
in the Work Context: Maps, Gaps, and Agenda'.
One third of our lives is spent at work, and this is an immense amount of time.
We spend more and more of it interacting with digital work tools. Our experiences with these
tools are one of the most prominent determinants of our well-being. Therefore, UX at work
matters. A vast majority of UX research addresses the experiences in leisure contexts and overlooks
the work context. This causes two issues. First, emotions and experiences around the work tools
fall behind pragmatic considerations, such as usability, efficiency and effectiveness.
Second, existing work models rely heavily on the experiences gathered from the leisure
context which makes them biased and potentially unreliable for understanding work experiences.
Today I would like to review the current state of UX at work research and share
the identified research gaps. To do so, we adopted a systematic review approach
and reviewed 52 publications that studied UX in work contexts.
Based on our results we want to initiate creating a solid understanding of UX at work.
Since the area is still relatively immature and highly ambiguous
we believe that it is time to start building UX at work knowledge base.
Based on our findings i will discuss four major issues: motivations of the studies,
the conceptualizations of UX at work, the work domains that have been scrutinized,
and how UX at work researchers have studied contextual factors specific to workplaces.
And finally I will suggest a research agenda based on each finding.
I will start with presenting the varying motivations behind UX at work research.
We have found four main motivations.
Fix problems: the papers in this category aim at detecting and solving usability problems.
They talk about these problems as obstacles that hinders work performance. So besides
removing frustrations for the users, they also target at solving business related problems.
Improve work: In this category there is an over-arching motivation which is
improvement of the work performance. Although it is not openly stated in the papers,
their emphasis on certain terms such as efficiency, productivity, simplification
of work and creativity support indicate their concentration on work performance improvement.
When fix problems and improve work categories come together, they form the vast majority of
the publications and this indicates the business orientedness of UX at work research. The papers
in this category aim to provide knowledge for improving the design process of the work tools.
Unlike fix problems category, these papers do not focus on problems. Rather they are interested
in understanding the mechanisms affecting tool usage. This category is important for two reasons
first it highlights positive UX at work which has been a highly overlooked topic. And second
it talks about clashing needs of users and business and the necessity of balancing
them out. Although these papers are few in number they are worth mentioning because
they indicate a change in the mindset from performance towards employee well-being.
The final motivation is raising discussions. The papers in this category
aim at launching a discursive space for either new or controversial topics.
Regarding motivations of the studies we suggest future research to attend more to
the discussions on engagement and well-being at work and not only on work performance.
We also suggest focusing on non-instrumental needs of the users as well as instrumental ones.
And we suggest paying more attention on the varying needs of the users
and businesses to balance them out.
Second issue is the conceptualizations of UX at work.
I will discuss definitions and dimensions that are mentioned in the papers.
Only 6 out of 52 papers explicitly define or talk about characteristics of UX. The rest do not
indicate their stance on what UX means. This makes UX a popular umbrella term with ambiguous usage.
Some authors use the terms usability and interface interchangeably with UX although
they do not refer to the same meaning. Based on the experiences studied in the publications,
we are happy to provide the first list of work-related experiences
caused by interactive technologies. Among these experiences there are positive ones such as flow
pride and happiness, as well as negative ones such as difficulty and discontinuity. This list
helps us better understand how UX at work differs from UX in leisure
For future research we invite researchers to be more descriptive about their stance
on the definition of UX and the meanings of UX dimensions. This will help us generate a
more solid ground of UX at work research and prevent confusions. We propose an expansion
of our UX at work dimensions list with more empiric research so that we can have
a better understanding of the differences between experiences at work and in leisure.
The third issue is the orientation of work domains in UX at work studies.
UX at work has been studied mostly in knowledge intensive work domains and
lacks the diversification. Moreover and more importantly, most papers mention
the work domain only as a part of participant information. They do not consider the effects
of particular occupational culture on tool usage. So we do not yet know how specific
occupations, their conventions and practices influence experiences with the work tools.
For future research we encourage researchers not only to mention the work domain as a
background information, but also to observe and report the aspects of the occupational culture.
This will help us to see occupational variations of work experiences.
The last finding I would like to present is how UX at work research addresses the contextual factors.
Context is specifically important to understand how work experiences differ from the leisure ones.
We have found that there is no shared understanding of contextual factors
affecting UX at work. Although some of the factors are captured, the studies do not address how they
influence the experiences. We invite researchers to pay more attention on what differentiates work
context from leisure. What are the typical context factors to capture at work, which factors are
critical in which conditions and how to capture them in an ethical way? And finally we suggest
researchers to provide rich descriptions of context when applicable. This will help identify
contextual factors and see their influence on the formation of experiences. To conclude the
state of UX at work research is still immature, ambiguous and scattered. With our review study
we want to bring researchers to a common ground and increase the awareness on the controversies.
Now that the world of work is changing and we have seen how important the technology
experiences at work are, we hope this study helps UX at work grow and flourish. Thank you!