11 Design Thoughts … August 2010 Pramod Khambete, Uday Athavankar Introduction The term “Experience” is generally considered to be self- explanatory, but remains ill deined. Chamber’s dictionary deines the verb experience simply as “to feel or undergo”[1]. Noting that experience is an elusive notion, Knutson and Beck (2003) propose that it however has two essential dimen- sions: it results from participation (of an individual in a situation) and is internal in nature; therefore individual- ized [2]. While “Experience” has always been implicitly a part of all design activity and outcomes in various domains like ar- chitecture, product design and visual design, the notion of “Experience Design” is somewhat recent. Varied views prevail about the term Experience Design; what it means, whether one can design experiences at all, and even whether such a construct is necessary. Nonetheless, one must acknowl- edge that the term is now well ensconced in the lexicons of several disciplines. Particularly, the domains of market- ing, service marketing, and Human Computer Interactions (HCI) (!) have embraced the terms such as Experience, User Experience and Customer Experience, from their own per- spectives. Starting with Pine and Gilmore’s late ‘90s concept of Experience Economy and assertions that fundamentally irms should “stage” experience for their customers [3], we seem to be now living in a paradigm that treats experience environments and experience networks as the primary source of customer value[4]. User Experience Design can be viewed to be about things that are actively experienced: something that involves the dynamics of space, time, objects, the states of the partici- pants and the context in which the experience occurs. It is something “whose design needs to be grounded in the nature of that experience”[5] (The term User Experience is used henceforth to encompass the phrase Customer Experience as well. The difference is not relevant for the purpose of current discussion). Further, most experiences of using products and applications today have a greater or lesser degree of social dimension. The technology dimen- sions are also changing dramatically, as exempliied in the ubiquitous mobile connectivity. One can surely afirm that User Experience Design is now important enough to attract increased research attention. Further, there is a like- lihood that the research problems would be complex, even “wicked”[6], and socially rooted. Clearly a wide repertoire of research methods is essential in this scenario. Research is understood as an inquiry aimed at contribution to the body of knowledge. However, practitioners are likely to interpret the term Design Research as the process of ac- quisition of knowledge to ground, inform, and inspire the design outcomes. The discussion that follows is carried out with the former perspective. Undoubtedly, it is informative to the practitioners as well. User Experience Research and Qualitative Research Methods Qualitative research methods have a long history, starting from colonial ethnography carried out in the 17 th century [7]. Since then the methods have been used extensively in Grounded Theory: An Effective Method for User Experience Design Research