Towards designing more effective systems by understanding user experiences

Abstract

This work is about social technologies, user experiences and the problems of creative design. It is motivated by a desire to give people who are offline --- whether for reasons of poverty, disability, infrastructure or cultural background --- the access to social technologies that is currently provided via the web, letting them access the online content and communication facilities that so many of us take for granted. There exist simple technologically-oriented approaches to this problem, such as identifying functional requirements and prototyping tools. This focus on technology, however, comes at a cost of neglecting the experiential aspects which motivate the work, and can result in systems that are functional but unappealing to (or even unusable by) their target audiences.