User Responsive User Experience Design: Building a Conceptual Framework

Sammanfattning: To a large extent, business-customer interactions are acted out on digital meeting places. When the possibilities for businesses to engage in face-to-face interactions decrease, relationship building and customer service becomes more of a challenge. Digital services are easily duplicated by competitors and with standardization of interfaces and products, customers tend to switch more frequently between providers. One area where the creation and maintenance of loyal customers appears to be highly relevant is the domain of e-banking. Studies have shown that by personalizing the experience for the user, customer loyalty can be enhanced. Existing methods of interface adaptation shifts the responsibility for the resulting user experience design from the designer to either the user or the system. However, research shows that handing over responsibility for the design to the user can damage the user experience. Furthermore, we argue that as long as computers cannot translate the meaning of what a human communicates, and understand the motivation that lies behind her actions, human designers and researchers need to own the responsibility for designing user experiences. Responsive web design differ from the concept of user responsiveness in the way that it is not truly responsive to the user but to the technical device that is used. Following a design science research methodology, this paper presents the development of a conceptual framework for user responsive user experience design (URUXD) that aims to strengthen the bond between user and provider by enabling a more relevant and personalized user experience. The conceptual framework introduces a way to design user responsive information systems that could be useful in domains where the user audience is large and diverse, as in the case of e-banking. A personalized user experience is enabled by transcending the current use of personas as design tools to also involve them in categorizing real-time users through the use of personas as mapping tools. Multiple persona sets are incorporated in the framework which gives the user experience designer the possibility of designing a holistic user experience for each persona set. The framework thus enables the incorporation of multiple GUI designs in an information system that is user responsive, without the risk of violating usability principles.