Toward intimacy in user experience: Enduring interaction in the use of computational objects

Affective aspects of user experience, like friendliness and pleasantness, are said to be too subjective to be assessed by user-evaluation approaches. This paper connects the issue of affectivity to bodily experience, providing a theoretical reflection on the topic of engagingness in terms of sensory perception, motor action, and cognitive operation. It introduces the idea of "enduring interaction," grounded in phenomenology in philosophy, to refer to the phenomenon of continuingly engaging interaction within constantly changing computational environments, as opposed to the discrete, conversational type of computer-human interaction. Enduring interaction emphasizes the temporal pattern of user engagement with an interactive system. The author argues this new design perspective would lead to intimacy, which explains a user's affection for a design. With design exemplars from mechanical and digital artifacts, the paper shows how the framework assists in analyzing user experience of varying intimacy and opens up possibilities for creating more affective computational artifacts.