Temporal Anchors in User Experience Research Chung-Ching Huang Indiana University 919 E 10 th Street, Bloomington, IN 47408 huang21@indiana.edu Erik Stolterman Indiana University 919 E 10 th Street, Bloomington, IN 47408 estolter@indiana.edu ABSTRACT As HCI becomes more aware of long-term use experience, users’ retrospection might be one starting point to explore prior interactive use. However, due to the limitation of current methodologies and human memory, research participants might recall specific prior use episodes and less their experience over time. In this note, we examine how to encourage retrospection and reflection concerning the changes of use experience in the past and over time. We have reviewed relevant research and traced the usage of temporal references in those studies, such as diagrams of use measurement over time or the history of interactive products. We propose the notion of temporal anchors as way of capturing and grounding temporal aspects of long- term use experience. We have found that methods that include temporal anchors have facilitated opportunities for rich reflections and communications around use experience and temporality. Author Keywords User experience; temporal anchors. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION Longitudinal user research has been widely adopted and applied in the field of HCI research and practice aiming at exploring long-term use experience with products or systems. The common approaches to examine interactive experiences in research settings or in-situ use contexts are with methodologies such as experiments, software log, observations, or long-term user engagements. While those methodologies enable researchers to investigate interactive use, it is less suitable to use the same approaches to study use experiences that have occurred in the past. The reason is quite straightforward: we cannot go back to the previous use case in space and time and research interactive experiences with approaches originally designed to understand what is happening right now. For example, experiments can only be conducted after the researchers raised specific research questions and set up a relevant experimental context. Instead, in order to grasp a glimpse of what has happened in the past, researchers can only rely on user’s retrospection of their interactive use, for instance by using interviews, focus groups, or survey studies. When participants recall their prior use in research procedures such as structured interviews or questionnaires, they might simply follow the questions, respond based on brief recall and reflect less on their changing experience over time. Also, we all know that it is difficult to remember everything in detail and to arrange prior use scenarios in proper chronicle order. Human memory has inherent limitations; as a result, researchers might only get fragmented, piecemeal story of use (see figure 1). Figure 1. Study use experience in the past In this note we explore how it may be possible to encourage and support research participants to “tell more” about their prior use stories in order to inform design practice and research. We are of course not aiming at providing an ultimate method capturing all possible memories about prior use; instead, this paper is an analytic review of selected user studies to see how they encourage rich retrospection of use experience in the past. Through our analysis we expect to reveal some core aspects of successful exploration of prior use experience. THE CHANGING USER EXPERIENCE HCI research has focused on measuring various changes within users that occur throughout the process of use. For example, over time people improve their skills and feel more confident toward using their artifacts. Users learn, become familiar and proficient, and also change their attitudes toward those interactions. Meanwhile, interactive products or systems are constantly changing, such as new generation of products or updated version of software. When a new version of interactive software has altered the original flow of use, users might adjust their attitude toward this interactive product. We have found that retrospective Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. DIS '14, June 21 - 25 2014, Vancouver, BC, Canada Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-2902-6/14/06…$15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2598510.2598537 Design Methods DIS 2014, June 21–25, 2014, Vancouver, BC, Canada 271