The Fourth Dialogue on Utilitarian User Experience
In this dialogue Practitioner and Scholar compare contemporary models of user experience with Jeremy Bentham’s and John Stuart Mill’s classical utilitarianism. They notice several similarities, of which the most important is the belief that happiness is the single aggregated criterion of good. They admire how well Bentham’s comprehensive analysis of the dimensions of happiness matches today’s user experience design models. Scholar gets an opportunity to speak about wooden boats and sailing.
They discuss the philosophical criticism of utilitarianism, which includes the problems of assessing the value of different types of pleasures, adaptive preference, and Robert Nozick’s “experience machine,” which points out the importance of actually doing things rather than just “experiencing.” They consider this criticism valid for user experience too. They respond to it and redefine user experience. Their definition addresses actual behavior, the embodied and socially reciprocal nature of experience. They consider calling the newly framed idea “user exertion,” because they regard deep immersion in a meaningful activity as the key attribute of an experience.
Before they conclude, they wonder why the user experience community has rejected utilitarianism and “utility” in spite of the obvious similarities. They realize that “utility is a word with opposite interpretations in utilitarianism and the field of human–computer interaction. Practitioner summarizes their discussion by saying that all you need is a good experience, unless you need ethical priorities.
The dialogue begins …
S: Hi.
P: Here I am again.
S: With new questions I believe.
P: Exactly. I was quite surprised by how our last discussion turned out. We made usability look like something quite different.
S: You pushed us, but I agree that it was a good exercise. Maybe it was the start of something.
P: Good that you agree, because encouraged by that I propose we also return to user experience and discuss it a bit more. I’d like to see what kind of justice- and ethics-related dimensions and angles we might find there.
S: I don’t know how much more I can say about it. The design and human–computer interaction communities have been speaking about user experience since the late 1990s. In spite of the ample interest it has attracted, it has remained elusive. Proper theoretical framing and universally accepted strong definitions are still missing. User experience is said to be “a sea of utter confusion” (Lindgaard and Kirakowsky 2013), an idea without distinct meaning that just refers to “something desirable” (Law et al. 2009, emphasis original). User experience scholars acknowledge, in the spirit of possibly sarcastic compromise, that the only thing we can without a doubt agree on is that user experience is difficult to define (ibid.; also McCarthy and Wright 2004).
P: But we have an international standard, ISO 9241-210 (2010: clause 2:15), that defines user experience. According to it user experience is “a person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the use and/or anticipated use of a product, system or service.” The standard further specifies that “user experience includes all the users’ emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviours and accomplishments that occur before, during and after use.” So we do have something.
S: The standard gives user experience a very generic character.1
P: It does, but in design we need to be able to deal with those kinds of concepts as well. I also find it important that ISO 9241-210 (2010: clause 6.4.1) gives user experience a normative role, as another chapter states that “human-centred design aims to achieve a good user experience.”
S: That is true. The standard gives human-centered design a mission—and one mission only. And that is to create good user experiences.
P: I think we should take that seriously.
S: Well …
P: I suggest we take the ISO 9241-210 definition of user experience as the anchor point of the meaning of user experience. That would also be consistent with our previous decisions to stick to the standard in our elaboration of usability.
S: It would. But this decision can be criticized for simplifying the concept of user experience and the lively and wide-ranging discussion about it into a few sentences. We can be criticized for using ISO as a kind of straw man that can be easily criticized for its lack of originality, rather than taking into account the full scope of user experience that pays attention to a range of things that are important in design.
P: Which are those?
S: I mean its emphasis on the positive psychology and the pleasures of use (Jordan 2002; Hassenzahl and Tractinsky 2006); the long-term temporal dimension of use (Hallnäs and Redström 2001; Mäkelä and Fulton-Suri 2001; Forlizzi and Battarbee 2004; Law et al. 2009; Luojus 2010); the social and collaborative aspects of use (Battarbee 2004; McCarthy and Wright 2004; Battarbee and Koskinen 2005); empathy (Mattelmäki and Battarbee 2002; Koskinen, Mattelmäki, and Battarbee 2003; McCarthy and Wright 2004; Battarbee and Koskinen 2005; Wright and McCarthy 2008); and aesthetics and creative design (Kurosu and Kashimura 1995; Tractinsky 1997; Hallnäs and Redström 2001; Lindgaard et al. 2006; Tractinsky and Zmiri 2006; Lindgaard 2007; Lee and Koubek 2010; Tuch et al. 2012).
P: Including all those aspects in user experience makes saying anything about it almost impossible. If we agree with those who think that the difficulty of definition is the only property of user experience that we can agree on (Law et al. 2009), there isn’t much we can say about it. But I think the concept has some sort of meaning. So I suggest that we make ISO 9241-210 our straw man and find out what happens. As an ISO standard, the definition enjoys a status that should make it durable enough to take some criticism.
S: Okay. And it’s our role to keep testing established definitions to see if they stand up to criticism.
P: I agree.
S: Fine, but I suggest that we should supplement the definition by paying more attention to the angle of rewarding subjective experience, by which I mean pleasures, affect, and positive emotions that play an essential role in user experience thinking, but which ISO doesn’t discuss. Paying attention to the positive emotions, affects, or hedonic aspects of interaction has been a very central topic in user experience and something that the user experience angle has pointed out as a reason to criticize usability (Jordan 2002, Hassenzahl and Tractinsky 2006; Hornbæk 2006; Desmet and Hekkert 2007). User experience strongly prioritizes positive experiences. Stimulation to learn and develop oneself, products’ role in communicating the consumer’s desired identity, and products’ roles in evoking nice memories are essential positive hedonic dimensions of user experience.2 The sources of positive emotions have been linked to psychological needs such as autonomy, competence, relatedness, popularity, stimulation, and security.3
P: So we’ll stick to the ISO definition but keep in mind that positive experiences should be given particular attention.
S: How shall we continue? Like I said, I’m not sure how much more I can say about user experience.
P: We spoke a bit about utilitarianism and happiness earlier. Especially now that you underlined that positive feelings are an important aspect of user experience, I started to think that we might find something by returning to utilitarianism. I have a feeling that if we want to say something about user experience and justice, we cannot ignore utilitarianism.
S: That’s a good idea. Both user experience and utilitarianism focus on creating happiness, but user experience scholars haven’t really built on utilitarianism. I suggest we go back to the roots and start with Jeremy Bentham.
P: Who is he?
S: He was a British philosopher born in 1748, died in 1832, who focused on law and especially the principles of fair legislation. He has been regarded as the father of utilitarianism together with John Stuart Mill. This duo laid the foundations for ethics and distributional justice for the industrial era.4
P: And what did they say?
S: Many things, but the short version is that utilitarianism is an ethical stand according to which the moral value of an action needs to be judged based on its consequences, and more particularly on the amount of happiness it creates within the population it has an effect on. The radical equalitarian stand Bentham and Mill presented in the late 1700s and early 1800s was that the happiness of everyone is equally relevant: the peasants and nobles should not be treated any differently.
P: You want to start with Bentham’s version. Isn’t Mill’s more famous?
S: Bentham’s version is, as far as I can see, closer to user experience as defined in ISO 9241-210 and by many others. Well, I’m not sure actually. We have to discuss this, but at least Bentham provides heuristics that might work as design heuristics.
P: How does he define utilitarianism? I mean in his exact words.
S: I have it somewhere, wait … Right, here it is. He (1824/2004: 65) says, “By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness.” I have Mill’s (1871/2004: 278) definition here too. He says, “Utility, the Greatest Happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.”
P: They are quite similar.
S: The definitions are, but they disagree on some essential questions. For Bentham, utility and happiness as its unit of measurement is an all-encompassing principle. It “approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever” and there are no differences between the happiness of A and B if the amount is the same, even if the sources of happiness are different.
“Utility, the Greatest Happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness” (Mill 1871).
P: Happiness is all you need.
S: That might have been a more recent way to put it, and Bentham is strict in allowing no exceptions to this. The source of happiness doesn’t matter, be it gambling, art, or philosophy.
P: What about Mill then?
S: He takes a different stand. He also believes that happiness alone is the guideline for ethics, but he speaks about higher and lower pleasures having different moral values.
P: Does that make a big difference?
S: It might seem like a minor disagreement, but the existence of one single criterion of good is a question that sharply divides ethical theories and frameworks. Critics of utilitarianism say that wellbeing is fundamentally a pluralistic concept consisting of several dimensions that are non-commensurable.5 The non-commensurable dimensions of good include, depending on the theory, a range of different basic needs, primary goods, or capabilities. These deal with health, autonomy, freedoms and rights, economical and other resources, societal positions, and the practical means to strive for one’s conception of good. Non-commensurability means that any of these cannot be compromised for more of something else. But if there is a single criterion of good, anything else is good only insofar as it contributes to that particular criterion.
P: And Bentham thinks that happiness is the single criterion while Mill opens the gate for questioning this.
S: Yes.
P: I see. Bentham is kind of alone with his opinion, it seems.
S: Well, now we come to something that’s potentially quite interesting: namely, that user experience agrees with Bentham. That’s why I wanted to address Bentham’s version. They both say that a single aggregated summary criterion for good exists. The ISO (2010: clause 2:15) standard explicitly states that user experience “includes all the users’ emotions” and then provides an exclusive list of mental and behavioral perceptions and responses, and what is important is that the standard designates “good user experience” as the only objective for human-centered design.
P: This cannot mean that we should believe user experience is the only thing that matters.
S: The standard definitely takes a strong stand that it’s the only goal we have in human-centered design.
P: What about other opinions apart from the standard?
S: There are many indeed. For example, Pieter Desmet and Paul Hekkert’s (2007) product experience refers “to all possible affective experiences involved in human–product interaction.” That is close to the standard. Marc Hassenzahl (Hassenzahl and Tracktinsky 2006) says that only pleasure matters, not pain: “the main objective in the future is to contribute to our quality of life by designing for pleasure rather than for absence of pain. User experience is all about this idea.” The most inclusive and ubiquitous take on user experience is perhaps John McCarthy and Peter Wright’s (2004: 54) approach. For them, experience is the “irreducible totality of people acting, sensing, thinking, feeling, and making meaning in a setting, including their perception and sensation of their own actions.” Experience is aesthetic and ethical. It deals with the individual’s self in the social world and with his or her friends and peers and how we change. In their approach the subjectivity of experience is distributed in the social world. The emotions involved in experience cannot be separated from cognition and behavior. They use categories such as phases and threads to address the experience, but they stress that any of these discussion tools must not be used to split an experience into elements. Experience is the lived life, all of it.
P: I find that difficult to handle.
S: Anything else requires us to reduce the experience, or in other words take a stand that alienates us from what an experience actually is as an individual lives it. But I agree with you.
P: We probably want to be practical rather than pragmatic.
S: Maybe. But it seems to me that user experience scholars don’t really want to accept that there would be anything else that might make a person happy about a product apart from user experience. Bentham says that thing is utility. Bentham and user experience agree in trusting a single aggregated criterion of good.
Bentham and user experience agree in trusting a single aggregated criterion of good.
P: They must have a reason to disagree with the pluralistic views.
S: The advantage they have is that the merits of any two actions can be compared, as they all have a utility value, or user experience value, that includes all the aspects of good. There is a one-dimensional scale. Bentham needed one as the basis for legislation to decide on punishments to ensure their fairness and rational relationship to the offence. For us, knowing which product creates, or enables, better user experience would be a foundational piece of information that would ensure that our design solutions contribute to the development of a just society.
P: Does that make user experience different from other conceptions of the quality of use?
S: Yes it does. Think about usability.
P: It’s fresh in our memories thanks to our previous discussion.
S: Don’t you agree that usability takes a different stand?
P: I don’t know.
S: It includes three dimensions.
P: Efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction. Which we wanted to adjust.
S: Yes. The standard is somewhat ambiguous about their mutual relationships, but I interpret them as being non-commensurable.
P: What does that mean in practice?
S: Think about products, for example two heart rate monitors, X and Y, which you usability test in comparable circumstances. X scoring higher wouldn’t mean that it’s superior—actually I mean that it’s impossible to say that it scores higher. It might excel in efficiency and satisfaction, but if the tasks cannot be completed without errors, or with an acceptable number of non-critical errors, as set out in the criterion of effectiveness, it wouldn’t be the winner. User experience, on the contrary, is formulated so that if the user experience of monitor X is measured to be higher than Y …
P: … in a manner agreed to be sufficiently relevant by all the well-informed experts and stakeholders.
S: Yes. We need to add that. But if that is the case, then there is no further doubt about its superiority. And because ISO gives us a single mission, to design for good experience, the nature of user experience becomes a major principle.
P: I see. But I believe Bentham didn’t define the concept of utility to compare products. I believe there should be some sort of similarity of interests between utility and user experience before we really can link the ideas.
S: I already mentioned his interest in the just fundamentals of legislation. He didn’t write about the design of products, but about the design of principles and procedures. He outlined the principles of utility for righteous governance, the redefinition and fair interpretation of law, and the wellbeing of the community (Ryan 2004). His philosophy had a practical end that deals with the design and use of artifacts. In his case, the artifacts were laws, acts, bylaws, and other immaterial artifacts defining the righteous rules and conditions of our behavior, especially from the point of view of jurisprudence.6 The practical reason for a standard on user experience is also to influence designers’ decisions concerning artifacts that are immaterial and material, and to create designs that “enhance effectiveness, and efficiency, improve human well-being, user satisfaction, accessibility and sustainability, and counteract possible adverse effects of use on human health, safety and performance” (ISO 2010: vi). That is what human-centered design does by creating good user experiences. It seems very utilitarian. Thus it wouldn’t be misguided to interpret Bentham’s advice as guidelines for the design for user experience. He would definitely be in favor of healthcare being utilitarian, traffic solutions being utilitarian, and so on. Utility and user experience take similar positions as normative concepts that those of us who develop the society, the wellbeing of citizens, and the common good should pay attention to. Both of them are based on what people subjectively perceive. And both of them are built on the belief that there is a single aggregated criterion of good.
P: Why exactly should utility, and happiness with it, or user experience be the concepts to be optimized? I mean, happiness is nice and experiences are nice too, at least if we focus on good experiences. But why should this be an ethical foundation for our behavior?
S: Good question.
P: Thanks.
S: ISO doesn’t give any rationale for choosing user experience as the goal. The psychological approaches we discussed claim that emotions are more fundamental than behavior and achievements. Bentham also struggles with the question. Maybe he assumed everyone would agree with him without any doubts. He didn’t justify the use of utility and happiness directly, but he tried to show that the alternative conceptions are impossible, because he thought they would be based only on caprice. He considered asceticism, and sympathy and antipathy as the alternatives. Asceticism in his thinking is the polar opposite to happiness.
P: I wouldn’t see it that way. I think asceticism is moderation taken further than usual.
S: Well, he disagrees and says that even though asceticism might be admirable, rejecting happiness as the aim of societal development and embracing the opposite instead wouldn’t work as a universal principle. Any attempt to use asceticism successfully as such turns out to be utilitarianism misunderstood. Sympathy and antipathy are, in his logic, subjective case-dependent structures of the decision-maker and thus don’t satisfy the criteria for serving as the guiding principles that he was looking for.
P: We’re more concerned about the rights of cute animals than ugly ones.
S: You see the point.
P: Do I remember correctly that Rawls’ reflective equilibrium combines the two?
S: True, but Bentham wants to have a stronger foundation for the justice of legislation. Or actually, he didn’t demand that legislators should blindly follow the principle of utility but instead keep utility in mind when deliberating on cases. But the foundational principle needs to be clear.
P: Did Mill justify the use of happiness?
S: He didn’t succeed much better. He (1871/2004: 307) simply said “the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it” and that “no reason can be why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his happiness.” This reasoning is circular and not logically adequate, but merely links happiness to empirical evidence that one might be capable of collecting to support the claim.
P: If we look at user experience, the idea of sympathy and empathy that Bentham explicitly rejected has a central role.
S: Bentham would say that sympathy leads to caprice and the collapse of reason.
P: He wouldn’t have liked empathic design.
S: He has a good point. It’s so much easier to be empathetic towards people who are nice than those who are nasty, and animals that are cute rather than ugly ones, but the latter also need justice. And ISO agrees. The standard doesn’t mention, require, or trust empathy or sympathy. Design needs to be based on rational grounds. These are the users’ perceptions and responses—not the designers’ sympathy.
P: There’s no room for empathy in a standard.
S: That seems to be the case.
P: The question now is how to measure the amount of pleasure and pain. How does Bentham suggest we measure happiness?
S: When a legislator in Bentham’s text—or a designer, as we take a stand that they share a responsibility for creating the good for a community—maximizes happiness she considers two instruments. They are pleasure and pain. We tend to understand “pain” as physical pain, but Bentham used the word to refer to what we might perhaps call harm or experienced harm. Bentham (1824/2004: 65) says they are “the sovereign masters” and it is “for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.” In a way they are like motives and fundamental needs in one packet, inseparable from one another. These two masters are the things that individuals perceive and Bentham (ibid.: 90) calls them “interesting perceptions.” Today we would probably refer to them as “relevant perceptions.”
P: User experience refers to perceptions too.
S: They have chosen the same word.
P: But the question remains: how should we measure those?
S: Bentham doesn’t suggest that pleasures and pains should be exactly measured and literally calculated, but it’s important that legislators keep them clearly in mind and deliberate on them when dealing with essential dictates (Ryan 2004).
P: That’s not much to go on.
S: Maybe, but Bentham has defined them in a way that they can be measured, at least in principle, and the measurements can be used as variables to calculate a summary function.
P: In spite of many attempts, measuring user experience, especially quantitatively, has been a challenge.
S: Yes, and that’s why it’s fascinating to think that Bentham’s utilitarianism could give some insight into our problems with quantifying user experience. His ideas are, unsurprisingly after two centuries, not exactly novel anymore, but they are still considered to be applicable in microeconomics and I think they have the potential to provide a structure to our attempts to quantify user experience. At least they help us in creating an evaluation space of happiness.
P: I see.
S: Bentham (1824/2004: 86–9) says that the amount of pleasure or pain depends on seven factors, which are intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, purity, and extent. He doesn’t give detailed descriptions of these “circumstances” as he calls them. However, I can make a couple of comments. First, as the intensity of the perception may vary over time, some sort of integration over the period of its duration needs to be calculated.
P: Sounds complicated. The duration of an experience might be a lifetime or close to that. And in order for information about the experience to be useful for designers, they need it before the experience takes place.
S: It’s not simple. But some kinds of estimations can be done.7 Second, Bentham realizes that the perception of pleasure and pain resulting from the solutions of today need to be interpreted as the probabilities of tomorrow, and likely experiences need to be given a higher weight than unlikely experiences. Neither the ISO standard on user experience nor the broader discussion on user experience pays serious attention to quantifying the probabilities of forthcoming experiences even though it’s widely agreed that we cannot design experience but only create more or less favourable circumstances for good ones to occur. Third, propinquity …
P: What is that?
S: “Proximity” is a synonym.
P: Okay.
S: So the propinquity of pleasure or pain becomes an understandable variable when we think that Bentham’s pleasures and pains are not only physical and related immediately to an individual, but also include social pleasures and harm, for example. For instance, the impacts of punishments on our nearest and dearest are more substantial than those affecting people we don’t know personally. Fourth, fecundity and purity refer to the secondary consequences of pleasures and pains. Fecundity, or fertility, refers to pleasures capable of giving birth to new pleasures, and purity to pleasures causing pain as their consequence, and vice versa. In a formula for happiness, these are coefficients that may multiply several times, whatever the immediate pleasure or pain has been. It might be nice to give someone a phone call and the user experience with the phone might be pleasurable in itself, but if the call leads to a friendship, love, marriage, and family, the happiness has multiplied by a coefficient of a million or more. Fifth, “extent” refers to the number of persons whose pleasure or pain the solution affects.
P: That doesn’t solve the problem of measuring happiness or experiences yet. Collecting all that data would be impossible.
S: Yes, but they help, and even though these variables don’t solve the problem of actually measuring user experience, I think they’re equally relevant as thinking tools when it comes to designing interaction, as they are when we deal with the justice of law. Actually they very much look like they could’ve been directly and explicitly outlined for use in design for user experience.
P: I think that these circumstances sound very analytical. The subjective pleasure of the person remains in the background. Pleasure becomes a calculated property of an experience.
S: Or deliberated. There’s also another more practical approach.
P: What’s that?
S: The utilitarians of the twentieth century accepted “revealed preference”—which means the choice of goods, or any options—as a proxy for utility (Stigler 1950a, 1950b; Mulgan 2007: 71–5) for the practical reason that a choice is easier to observe and measure than happiness. The assumption has been that rational consumers choose the options that maximize their utility and that preference and happiness would correlate. Also ISO accepts the revealed preference as an indication of happiness, as preferences and physical responses are included among the several indicators of user experience.
P: This is not necessarily the case. We don’t really know what makes us happy at the point of purchase—or any decision.
S: True. Bentham realized and others have convincingly confirmed that people are not good at estimating their happiness, especially when they need to compare immediate gratification and long-term accumulated happiness (Kahneman, Wakker, and Sarin 1997, Frank 1999, Layard 2005). Immediate gains are given more weight than what an impartial academic observer or philosopher might think they deserve in a universe where distant future happiness is no different from the immediate. Bentham pays attention to the longer-term happiness and proposes a decision-making process in which the consequences of immediate pleasures are reflected in the later perceptions of pleasure and pain. He suggests that legislators should critically deliberate on the impacts and secondary impacts of different choices on happiness. The ISO standard trusts that the iterative dialogue between users and designers will overcome the problems with ill-informed preferences.
P: In addition to circumstances, does he propose anything else to further support the deliberation process?
S: I think his circumstances go much beyond most user experience approaches by paying attention to probabilities, consequences, and secondary effects, and to the scope of the impact. But he (1824/2004: 89–96) also presents a list of pleasures and pains. Or actually he lists elementary pleasures and pains which “cannot any one of them be resolved into more” (ibid.: 90). Many of the pleasures and pains in real life are combinations of these and Bentham calls those complex. His list of pleasures includes the following 14 pleasures:
First, the pleasures of sense, which include, apart from the five senses and the pleasures they deliver immediately without reflection, the pleasures of intoxication, sex, the feeling of being healthy, and the novelty of an experience.
Second, the pleasures of wealth include acquisition and possession of articles of enjoyment or security.
Third, the pleasure of skill is related to mastering the use of instruments.
P: That sounds like user experience.
S: I think many of his pleasures deal with user experience.
Fourth, the pleasure of amity refers to us being on good and friendly terms with people.
Fifth, the pleasure of a good name is like amity, as both deal with social relationships and affiliations, but it’s more about reputation and honor while amity addresses friendship.
Sixth, the pleasures of power refer to a person’s capability of influencing others and getting services from them.
Seventh, the pleasures of piety deal with religious pleasures and one’s relationship with the Supreme Being.
Eighth, the pleasures of benevolence, or goodwill, refer to our pleasures of sympathizing and doing good things for other living creatures, including other species.
Ninth, the pleasures of malevolence, or bad will, refer to the satisfaction we get from antipathy and causing pain to others …
P: That’s a surprising one.
S: Well, if you observe how some people act towards each other, it’s a reasonable addition. Or perhaps he’d just read the Marquis de Sade’s novels before writing his list.
P: I guess so. Explaining all the bad things people do to each other without accounting for sadistic pleasure might be untrue.
S: The problem of malevolence is that in Bentham’s utilitarianism, increasing the amount of pleasures independent of their kind is morally good. I can accept malevolence as a pleasure, but it’s not easy to accept as a desirable goal of a social arrangement. But let’s not get stuck on this issue.
The tenth pleasure is the pleasures of memory, which deals with things we’ve experienced and recall exactly like we experienced them and enjoy the memory.
Eleventh, the pleasures of imagination deal with experiences we construct based on what we have experienced, but also what we wish we would experience.
Twelfth, the pleasures of expectation are similar to the previous one, but Bentham recognizes the pleasure of contemplating something particular as a distinct dimension.
Thirteenth, the pleasures of association are different from the first dozen, which are perceived to be gratifying as such, while the pleasures of association refer to the instrumental role of pleasures standing as proxies, or representations of another kind for the final source of pleasure. Some might be happy to actually meet Santa Claus, but for others he might represent the probability of getting presents.
Finally, fourteenth, the pleasures of relief refer to the pleasure of pain coming to an end.
Bentham also lists 14 pains.
P: Which are those?
S: They mostly mirror the pleasures, with some exceptions when there is no direct correspondence between pain and pleasure.8
P: Okay. Maybe we don’t need to list those. I think that the list of pleasures is a good one for user experience designers. It includes items that are well known and that we constantly keep in our minds, but also some that we tend to avoid. The pleasure of malevolence, especially, is something that we ignore, but which I assume if handled with care and used to provide a contrast to more empathetic pleasures could also belong to the designers’ repertoire (Benford et al. 2013).
S: I agree. And now as we remember his list we can compare it to the taxonomies of experiences, emotions, or pleasures that have been suggested for categorizing user experiences.
P: That would help us to decide if Bentham’s utility and our talk about user experience address the same thing.
S: That’s what I was thinking too.
P: But the ISO standard doesn’t mention pleasures.
S: We agreed to include pleasures to complement the ISO take on user experience.
P: I hope we don’t step on someone’s toes.
S: We’ve done that already in our previous discussions.
P: True.
S: But do you remember any taxonomies of pleasures in user experience discussions?
P: There must be several, but I recall Patrick Jordan’s (2002)9 and Donald Norman’s (2004).
S: They have attracted a lot of attention. We could also look at psychological needs that Sheldon and Hassenzahl (Sheldon et al. 2001; Hassenzahl et al. 2013) with their colleagues have considered fundamental for a positive user experience. Let’s start with Jordan.
P: Fine. He states that there are four sources of product pleasure. Physio-pleasure deals with products’ looks, how the products feel, sound, and smell. It’s about immediate sensual responses. Psycho-pleasure is about mastering a product, achieving goals and overcoming challenges with it. Socio-pleasure deals with products as linked to social interaction, as practical tools to communicate and share, but also as shared interests and symbols of belonging. Ideo-pleasure is about a product responding to the value structures of the user. Shall I continue with Norman?
S: Please.
P: Norman categorizes three types of responses to designed products and experiences. Visceral experience deals with sensual, immediate, and unconscious perception of a product, its materials and styling. Behavioral experience includes the usability of the product, ergonomics, and interaction design. It is conscious and analytical. Reflective experience links the product to individuals’ values and personal meanings, which aren’t necessarily within the scope of designers’ control. Reflective experiences can be constructed and narrated.
S: Would you like to compare these with Bentham’s?
P: You’re asking me?
S: Yes.
P: Well, it seems very obvious that Bentham’s pleasures of sense, Jordan’s physio-pleasure, and Norman’s visceral experience are comparable. They all clearly refer to immediate non-reflective elementary feelings sparked by sensual stimuli. Bentham, however, had some more unusual additions. I wouldn’t, for instance, consider sex a simple pleasure, but a pleasure where the pleasures of the senses, the social aspects of the pleasures, and imagination all have their roles. But apart from that, and perhaps some other details, the categories seem to correspond well. I think the same seems to be true of pleasures of skill, psycho-pleasure, and behavioral experience. They all refer to achievements with products, and even Bentham linked achievement to the skilfull operation of an instrument. That’s surprising, as he didn’t write about interaction design.
S: I agree. He must’ve foreseen that one day, in the distant future, people would design for user experiences. The pleasures of skill, psycho-pleasure, and behavioral experience are overlapping categories, as you said.
P: When it comes to Jordan’s social and ideo-pleasures and Norman’s reflective experience, there is no one-to-one correspondence to Bentham’s pleasures.
S: I think Bentham listed much of what these categories include, but with much finer granularity.
P: You refer to his pleasure categories of amity, good name, power, piety, and goodwill.
S: Yes.
P: Bentham’s last five categories are such that they position the pleasures at different points of time, apart from temporarily immediate pleasure. Neither Jordan nor Norman considered these as distinct experiences or pleasures. The number of pleasures can be reduced and the model streamlined by saying that the pleasures can be expected, experienced, or recollected in the manner framed by the user experience models. But then I think that claiming that anticipated and recalled pleasures are essentially different from the momentary experience, as Bentham does, makes a lot of sense. They aren’t the same experiences felt earlier or later. The memory of a nice experience isn’t the same experience revisited, but something different. The memory is different from the immediate experience, and recalling memories is a different activity from doing and being. A memory of a good meal doesn’t stop you from being hungry; in fact, the opposite may be true. You might recall how the food looked and tasted, but that’s different from eating. The same applies to many things: exercise, sex, anything that is strongly physical and embodied.
S: What, then, about Sheldon’s psychological needs?10 Do you remember them?
P: Isn’t it your turn?
S: Okay, I’ll try. Autonomy refers to a person’s feeling of being in control and the initiator of one’s own actions. Bentham doesn’t have anything exactly like this, but I believe it’s close to Bentham’s pleasures of power, although he probably was thinking mainly about the enjoyment of imposing one’s will on others. But how could we be in control of others if we cannot be in control of ourselves? Next, the need for a feeling of competence means that we should be capable in our operations and manage to complete challenging tasks. Bentham’s pleasure of skill is not far removed from competence, although Bentham explicitly mentions objects and instruments. Those, I think, can be abstracted to refer to mastery of the means of completing tasks in general. We were perhaps a bit too literal in our interpretation of this a while ago. Then we have relatedness, which is the need for intimate meaningful contacts with people who care about you and who you care about. Bentham’s pleasure of amity refers to the same. Having the need for popularity and influence satisfied means that we are liked and respected, and can have an influence on others. Bentham’s pleasures of a good name and power seem very similar to popularity and influence. Pleasure and stimulation refers to positive arousal and physical pleasures. Somehow I find this kind of surprising because the stimulation could be an attribute of any of the other needs. However, it corresponds to Bentham’s pleasures of sense, which also includes surprise as one of its elements and likewise seems to cover what Sheldon’s team means by physical thriving, as that refers to a need for exercise and wellbeing. Money and luxury refer to our need for possessions and seem to equate to Bentham’s pleasures of wealth. The need for security and Bentham’s pleasure of wealth also overlap, although Bentham’s 14 pleasures don’t seem to address personal safety directly. However, circumstances and especially the probability of the pleasures existing in the future address the idea of safety without having to mention that separately.
P: There are plenty of similarities between Bentham’s pleasures and the things experiences are made of. I think we can assume they deal with one single idea.
S: We have some support for that conclusion. Bentham describes his pleasures very briefly and can be criticized for vagueness. And our analysis—well, this was not an analysis—our hunch is based on a superficial view on the similarity. However, I agree that from the point of view of recent academic discussion on user experience, Bentham’s pleasures don’t seem to ignore much of anything essential. On the contrary, Bentham is more particular in terms of the essential aspects of the temporal and reflective dimensions of pleasure, perception, and experience than much of the recent user experience discussion. I think that we can conclude …
S: …—of course—we can conclude that when he speaks about pleasures, he speaks about entities that are the same or closely linked and which correspond to what designers seek to create when they’re designing for user experience.
P: We seem to be interested in similar things. But we could still do a quick thought experiment.
S: What do you suggest?
P: I remember that you’re a wooden boat enthusiast. Perhaps you could use boating to illustrate Bentham’s pleasures
S: Sure. I love to talk about boating.
P: I’m listening.
S: Fine. Taking care of an old wooden boat is a pleasure to the senses, almost all of them. Such boats are beautiful objects that people love to admire and their owners are really particular about ensuring that the details are in harmony with the spirit of the boat. The boats are masterpieces of craftsmanship. But their appeal isn’t only visual. There’s also the pleasurable smell of the dust when you sand the boat, the scent of varnish and oil you use to impregnate the wood. When you go out to sea, the environment envelops your senses. There’s the wind, the spray, the movement of the boat, and the sound of waves hitting the hull, which sometimes amplifies the sounds like a musical instrument. All of these provide sensual pleasure. Or perhaps we should say that the perception of pleasure is strong, impressive, and multidimensional. A boat provides the pleasure of wealth, too. The owner of an expensive boat may be proud of it, as a symbol of wealth, but a small old boat provides a different kind of feeling of pleasure from possession, which is more related to your identity and self-esteem. If you want to belong to the community of boat owners, owning one is essential for your happiness. The pleasures of skill are an obvious dimension of boating, as are the pleasures of senses. Both maintenance and sailing are skills where the potential for self-improvement is virtually unlimited. You can always develop yourself and enjoy the pleasure of being able to do something and accomplish a renovation project or a challenging manoeuvre at sea—and also realize your shortcomings and challenge yourself to do better the next time. The pleasures of skill involved in boating, unlike many skills that you need at work, are rather non-instrumental. The capability of maintaining a boat isn’t instrumental for another purpose. Well, someone might say that it’s necessary for you to keep the boat in good shape, but you can also hire someone to do that for you. And the fact that your boat is in good shape isn’t necessarily any more important than the activities you engage in to keep it in shape. In a way, the boat is just an excuse for the maintenance activity. You don’t hire anyone to do it for you, because you want to be able to do it yourself because you enjoy it. The pleasures of amity and good name come with the social dimension of boating. One makes friends among other boating enthusiasts, especially during the maintenance season in the springtime. You spend long weekends in the boathouse and the dockyard, and you have to take plenty of breaks while you’re waiting for the varnish to dry before applying the next layer, or rest your aching arms after sanding the hull while bent into weird postures. It’s easy to make friends with like-minded people who share the same interests. In addition to friendship, there’s the dimension of a good name. You can earn a good name by doing favors for other boat owners, demonstrating excellence in maintenance, and exhibiting sailing skills that improve the reputation of your club. You might enjoy being an admired member of the club. But instead of admiration, I think that what people probably look forward to and enjoy more is being a trusted member of the community. Being trusted and having a good name are related, and I think they’re also related to the pleasures of power. Every now and then you need help with this and that. You cannot raise a mast on your own, but when you’re a trusted member of the community, you can enjoy the pleasure of power when you ask others to help you. This is, of course, a reciprocal power, but I don’t think that makes it any less enjoyable. The others have the same power over you. The pleasure of piety is probably a category that was more necessary to mention in the eighteenth century than in our present secular world, and it might not be a meaningful aspect of boating for non-believers. However, people often link religious experience with nature experiences and the might of natural elements. When you’re sailing on a small boat in rough seas, you experience great contrasts of power that make you humble and maybe grateful—it’s an environment and activity where it’s easy to feel the presence of supreme powers. We didn’t discuss this earlier, but perhaps the pleasure of piety can be interpreted more broadly as the pleasure that one derives from being in harmony with things and values that one believes in, apart from those that are religious. At least I enjoy boating partly because I believe in maintaining our historical heritage. Wooden boats are no longer built—well some are, but you cannot build new old boats, if you see what I mean. Stuck in a museum, an old wooden boat is lifeless. The only way to keep the design heritage alive is to maintain these boats in sailing condition and take them to the waves. Sailing is also a sustainable, non-polluting mode of transportation, which adds the ideological pleasure dimension. The pleasures of benevolence are related to the social nature of boating. As I mentioned, you can ask for help and get it. But equally as essential as the pleasures you get from these aspects is the pleasure of being able to share your knowledge and give boat maintenance advice to others. People are mainly in charge of their own boats and do the work themselves, but maintenance expertise is a common good, and the ones who have it take pleasure in sharing it. Admitting to enjoying malevolence is a sensitive issue. An obvious case, perhaps mixed with other pleasures like that of skill, is the pleasure you might take from making others jealous, and that might be part of your motivation to upgrade your boat and outperform others at sea. The pleasures of memory and imagination go hand in hand. Memorizing the trips you’ve taken, sharing the memories with others, spicing them up with imaginative and exaggerated touches makes the winter season when the boats are docked tolerable and inspires you to look forward to the next sailing season, planning trips and small or big alterations, purchases, and renovations that you should or could do. There’s always work to be done on a wooden boat, but you should never do it too soon because then you lose the pleasure of imagining and looking forward to doing something new.
P: Convincing.
S: I spoke mostly about boating and less about the boat.
P: That’s fine. We’re interested in use, not the product. Use is what gives pleasures and experiences. And the social dimension is an aspect of use.
S: True.
P: So what do you think about Bentham’s pleasures and boating? At least I don’t know if he missed something essential about what makes your boat and hobby so dear to you, but you managed to very nicely link the things he included to boating, including the social and reflective dimension of maintenance and sailing.
S: His merit, not mine.
P: Is there anything else you think is important in making the hobby rewarding for you?
S: No.
P: He knew it all.
S: Yes.
P: Bentham has been criticized.
S: Yes, a lot.
P: If his utilitarianism is similar to or overlaps in many respects with our present discussion on user experience, then the criticism of utilitarianism should also provide angles for critically addressing user experience.
S: That’s the case if we criticize user experience from the point of view of its ethical merits. That isn’t necessarily the way we typically address user experience.
P: Sure.
S: You’re interested in the criticism of utilitarianism?
P: Well …
S: Okay. I see. We’re approaching the heart of the matter. I already mentioned Mill’s criticism. The main difference between Bentham and Mill is that for Bentham all pleasures are equally valuable. If the amount of pleasure is perceived to be equal, then the moral value is equal. The way in which you achieve the pleasure doesn’t make any difference. Playing a game and helping a neighbor in need would be equally valuable activities if they create the same amount of pleasure.
P: For you, your neighbors, and the players.
S: Yes. The same applies to entertainment and sophisticated culture. Mill doesn’t share Bentham’s view. He (1871/2004: 279) says, “Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.” So there is a hierarchy of pleasures that depends on the judgment of those who know the alternative pleasures well. Mill’s own view of the highest pleasures includes safety, freedom, and justice.
P: We don’t think they are pleasures.
S: But Mill does. And, if I had to choose, I would also rather have those things than good shopping opportunities and free online entertainment. They lay the foundation for all the rest, since without safety, freedom, and justice no one can count on anything good in life to be more than a passing moment of happiness.
P: Bentham might reply that his requirement for fecundity actually leads in practice to a similar hierarchy, because safety and justice multiply the pleasure without us having to categorize pleasures a priori, and justice in jurisprudence was his motivation to outline the principles of utility.
S: Yes. More recently, economist Richard Layard (2005: 62–70)11 came to the support of Bentham, suggesting that there are a few factors that have the greatest influence on happiness. These are family relationships, with marriage improving happiness more than any other single factor; a stable financial situation; employment with a good work–life balance, involving friends and the capability to trust people; health; personal freedom and fair and democratic governance; and personal values such as religion. These are the qualities of life that people consider make them happy. They seem to fall into the category of fecund pleasures. Affiliation, self-respect, safety, and freedom are things that are at the top of the list if we ask people, without philosophers having to place them there for the rest of us. However, a recurring criticism of Bentham is the argument that wellbeing is non-commensurable. There are things closely related to basic human needs, worth, and dignity, such as a system of basic freedoms or bodily health and integrity and others, which cannot be replaced by something else. People agreeing, statistically, about their impact on the quality of life and happiness doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have a special status in the system of distributive justice.
P: The ISO definition of user experience doesn’t suggest any hierarchies among experiences.
S: Yes. It’s a Bentham-style document that gives the designers freedom to create experiences in any manner they prefer, and users the freedom to enjoy any aspect of use and any manner of using. It underlines the users’ subjective interpretations, allowing them to derive pleasure where and how they please. Doing things that are worthwhile and valuable isn’t given any priority over entertainment, for instance. That has also had an influence on how user experience has become understood, and the design for user experience has been criticized for “Disneyism” and focusing on things that merely create fun instead of sustainable worth (Cockton 2006).
P: But there’s nothing in the standard that says entertainment is what the design should focus on, either.
S: True. User experience advocates can claim that an enduring experience needs to be meaningful, and by being enduring it ends up being better than fleeting pleasure. But then, like Bentham, user experience doesn’t distance itself from questionable or worthless pleasures. For instance, think about the design of interactive games and social media. These enjoyable, often useful, and mostly harmless pastimes are not free of problems, not least because of their addictiveness. Protection from harm and, seen from another perspective, freedom from addiction should be given priority over other kinds of pleasures.
P: Or proper deliberation, at least.
S: Yes. Another problem that isn’t very different from the hierarchy of pleasures is the question of whether hedonic pleasure is always good. For Bentham it is. Mill again disagrees with Bentham and says that the value of lower pleasures is limited and that suffering, or more moderately dissatisfaction, would be the preferred choice under some circumstances. His (1871/2004: 281) famous quote is “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”
P: If you happen to be a human being and philosopher such as Mill.
S: I don’t know if Mill ever thought he could’ve been born a pig or a fool. Mill doesn’t pay too much attention to the pleasures of fools. For higher creatures, as Mill sees it, the standard of happiness is different and the same pleasures don’t create satisfaction for them as they do for the lower creatures. Another famous, much later criticism and metaphor illustrating the relationship between good life, pleasures, and happiness is Robert Nozick’s experience machine.
P: Experience machine?
S: Yes. It’s a system where “superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain” (Nozick 1974: 42–3). Commercial companies would provide you with a smorgasbord of experiences to choose from to entertain you over the next few years, if novel writing was not your choice. There would be no harmful side effects and when you float you think you’re living a real life. You would feel like you’re maintaining your social contacts, too. Would you plug yourself in?
P: It seems that Bentham might have recommended that.
S: His strict principle of happiness seems to suggest that plugging yourself in would be the rational choice.
P: He couldn’t have foreseen the developments in neuroscience or virtual reality or chemical experience machines.
S: Yes. The world was a real place for him. But I’m sure he wouldn’t have recommended plugging in. I assume he would’ve said that if you plug yourself in, you cannot make others happy and thus your only contribution to the aggregated happiness of the community would be maximizing your own.
P: What does Nozick think we should do?
S: His stand is that plugging in is suicide. The worth of our life is not in happiness, satisfaction, and experience; these things only matter if we also really do things and are someone.
P: Virtual reality and immersive environments were only science fiction in the early 1970s.
S: But chemically stimulated alternative realities were popular.
P: Right. But now interactive technologies are creating artificial experiences that aren’t too far removed from the experience machine—and people do plug in.
S: Do you think that’s suicide?
P: I don’t know. I mean that I don’t know enough about people who live in artificial online realities. But I am sure there are many things that people like which it would be better—for everyone—to enjoy in an experience machine than in reality. I’m thinking about monster truck madness and other pleasurable experiences that are even more destructive. But what does ISO say about philosophers and fools and the experience machine?
S: The standard manages to avoid elitism and doesn’t consider a philosopher a better customer than a fool: both are served equally. I believe the designers of the experience machine would probably have to lean on ISO to pass their quality audits.
P: But the definition (ISO 2010: clause 2:15) includes the word “accomplishment” among the longish list of “perceptions and responses” that saves the standard from taking a normative stand for plugging in. It seems to suggest that user experience isn’t only about experiencing, but also involves being and doing. It (ibid.) also says that “usability criteria can be used to assess aspects of user experience.” The achievements link user experience to doing things and being someone.
S: You’re right. The word is there. This is the case even though its achievement orientation has been the main criticism against usability from the user experience camp. However, the standard doesn’t really discuss or even mention—it’s not the mission of standards to discuss such issues—the role of accomplishment among the hedonic criteria. ISO is not explicit in articulating the relationship between achievement-oriented usability and user experience.
S: That’s something to discuss.
P: What about other problems with Bentham’s utilitarianism? Are there any other grounds for criticism?
S: There are. Bentham’s theory aims at promoting legislation that maximizes the happiness of the community and he uses the human body as a metaphor for a community. Individuals are its members. He (1824/2004: 66) writes that “The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is, what is it?—the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.” This opened Bentham’s ethics to plenty of criticism. For maximal happiness and minimal pain, it’s reasonable and ethical for you to sacrifice a member of your body to save other members and for the body to survive. Breast cancer requires removal of breast tissue. Many other conditions are similar. Taking the metaphor less literally, it’s very obvious that we often sacrifice our happiness to achieve something that makes us happier later on. Good health requires exercise and a moderate level of asceticism in your lifestyle choices, which aren’t always experienced as pleasures. To sustain a happy marriage, one needs to refuse certain pleasures. A member is sacrificed for the good of the community and the immediate pleasure for a more sustained happiness.
P: But can one individual be sacrificed for the pleasure of others, if the sum of that is higher than the individual’s pain?
S: That’s a critical question. Bentham’s or Mill’s intention wasn’t to suggest that a few unfortunates would be sacrificed for the many, but the very opposite. Their idea was that a few fortunate individuals’ happiness shouldn’t compromise that of the far more numerous who are worse off (Mulgan 2007: 11). However, since Bentham defined the goal of governance as the maximization of happiness in the community, the question of sacrifice cannot be ignored. Think of a sheriff who has a murder suspect in his custody (ibid.). The sheriff knows the man is innocent, but there’s a mob outside his office threatening the town with a riot that would cause havoc and plenty of casualties if the suspect is not punished. Should the sheriff let them lynch the innocent man to avoid great havoc?
P: No way.
S: That is the way we think.
P: … and it’s a problem from the point of view of Bentham’s stand. I see.
S: The problem with his and also Mill’s thinking is that they don’t recognize individuals’ separateness. Each person has her rights, needs, worth, and dignity, and those are things that cannot be sacrificed for others’ benefit based on a simple calculus.
P: But we do sacrifice people for others’ benefit.
S: Sacrifices might be unavoidable in some situations. That said, sensitivity, deliberation, fair and well-informed decisions, and individual autonomy are always necessary. Firefighters risk their lives for the benefit of society, but we don’t think their work represents a sacrifice in the same sense as an innocent suspect handed over to a mob. Later philosophers have considered Immanuel Kant’s stand of always regarding individuals as ends and never only as means as a more sustainable principle. Sacrificing someone for the benefit of others would be using that person as a means.
P: I assume Bentham would defend his opinion somehow.
S: Bentham’s stand would probably be that the killing of an innocent person would corrupt the morals of the society and citizens’ trust in the law, which would lead to more pain over time than what can possibly be compensated for by the mob’s short-term pleasure of revenge. Mill would probably say that the pleasure of justice is so much higher than the pleasure of unfair revenge that they cannot even be compared.
P: Designers seldom face dilemmas as dramatic as the sheriff.
S: We are super-privileged indeed in that we don’t have to dirty our hands. However, more often than not design deals with excluding people from the set of satisfied users. People and situations are different and as there are practical limits to how much variation and customization can be implemented, the designs unavoidably serve some users better than others and some not at all.
P: Scissors for the right-handed.
S: Exactly. And as we discussed, we keep on ignoring the neighbor.
P: ISO’s take on user experience doesn’t say anything about sacrificing the experiences of some for the benefit of others. It doesn’t define priorities.
S: That seems to be the case. The standard is ambiguous when it comes to specifying the “user” and it’s not clear whether a user is considered as an aggregation, as in the case of Bentham and Mill, or more strictly as an individual in the style of Kant and Sen. The standard’s definitions have no logic in choosing between singular and plural when it speaks about the user or users. It (ISO 2010: clause 2:14) defines a user as an individual, “the person who interacts with the product.” Another statement referring to an individualistic conception of a user is a note saying that “In safety-critical and mission-critical systems, it might be more important to ensure the effectiveness or efficiency of the system than to satisfy user preferences” (ibid.: clause 4:6).
P: I don’t follow.
S: Think about a bus driver. According to the standard, his or her personal preferences are secondary to error-free driving. That wouldn’t be a necessary comment if the user were to be seen as a body of commuters, the people serving them, and the others on the road.
P: Right. The commuters’ overall preference is a safe, accident-free ride.
S: But the standard speaks about a body of multiple users and says user experience “includes all the users’ emotions,” leaving open the option for communal experience of good. It refers to accessibility but the requirement to consider everybody is not extended to cover user experience, only usability.
P: The standard seems to leave a similar loophole as Bentham, probably unintentionally, allowing us to sacrifice the experience of the left-handed for the right-handed. But it’s still good that the few don’t dominate.
S: Actually the suffering minority can grow large and ultimately the ones who are sacrificed might become the majority, apart from one single “utility monster” (Nozick 1974: 41) whose experience is so magnificent that all the rest need to tolerate their suffering for the maximized good.
P: Really?
S: Well, think of the disturbing use of products. I think designers serve a utility monster quite often. For instance, the noise one monster creates in the pursuit of his happiness with a jet ski is disturbing to many of those around him, not to speak about his behavior, which jeopardizes the safety of many.
P: I see.
S: One more thing needs to be said about the criticism. Utilitarianism can be criticized for being an unrealistically demanding idea for an individual.
P: Why?
S: Because it aims at maximizing the aggregated happiness.
P: I know that already.
S: Be patient. Because the marginal utility of resources tends to decrease as the amounts increase, the wealthier person giving a cent to someone poorer always increases total happiness. That is why, according to the principle of utility, the wealthy should keep giving until they are no richer than the poor. Can we impose that as a requirement?
P: That’s taking it too far. The richer should be generous, but within reasonable limits, and there’s no need to give the poor more than they need in order to be alright, even though they still remain poorer than the rich.
S: That’s what our intuition says. Many other approaches to distributional justice ignore the requirement of maximizing and build their frameworks on some sort of sufficientarianism. They say it’s enough that everyone is alright, that the needs which make it possible to live a normal life are satisfied (Doyal and Goagh 1991; Reader 2007), that a person is capable of doing and being enough to satisfy the requirements for a decent life and human dignity (Sen 2009; Nussbaum 2011). Thus Mill has been criticized together with Bentham for their demanding principle of calling for the maximization of aggregated happiness.
P: When everyone is alright, the moral obligation to increase happiness ceases to exist. I don’t remember the definition of user experience saying much about this. ISO says only that we should design to achieve “good experiences”—but what does that really mean? Does “good” mean “good enough” or “as good as possible”?
S: The standard doesn’t specify it.
P: Again, too bad.
S: Maybe we can think along the lines of Herbert Simon (1996: 120) and simply say that in any human planning, whether legislation or design, it’s logically impossible to engage in maximization, which he refers to as optimization. The reason is that the generation of all the alternatives, which is a prerequisite for optimization, is impossible. The only choice we have is to be satisfied with or settle on solutions that are sufficiently good.
P: True, but if we’re more practical and accept that the alternatives we’ve been able to identify are a working proxy for all the possible reasonable alternatives within the practical limits set by the circumstances, then maximizing happiness is a choice.
S: ISO doesn’t require us to aim for that, but doesn’t take an explicit sufficientarianistic stand either. It really doesn’t pay too much attention to justice.
P: Should we provide our contribution?
S: To make user experience more just?
P: Yes. Last time, we were bold enough to modify the definition of usability to make it capability sensitive. Do you think we could also summarize some of our ideas about user experience and justice by elaborating another version of the definition? I think we learned something from the criticism of utilitarianism.
S: We already presented one new version of user experience when we discussed the standpoints.
P: We said that user experience is an inverse concept of usability. We can sketch another one.
S: Sure we can. There’s always room for one more.
P: How should we start?
S: Well, there are a couple of issues that we’ve now noticed. First, the experience machine criticism bothers me a lot. The ISO standard speaks about responses and accomplishments, which kind of recognize the role played by a lived life, but its stand is not strong enough. And the same emphasis disturbs me about many other definitions of user experience. Imagine someone who has been floating in Nozick’s tank for the last five years or so. Then we unplug him. What would he say?
P: “Who are you guys? Why am I in this tub? What happened to me? Whose body is this disgusting bag of fat? I want my life back!”
S: Most likely. And if we ask whether he liked what he experienced?
P: He would say “Yes.”
S: And that’s already a behavioral response: a word expressing the preference for being plugged in. But this response isn’t enough to make the experience one where the person is someone and does something.
P: Perhaps the rationale behind the standard is to allow easy measurement of user experiences.
S: Probably. But ethically the actually lived bodily experience and the real-world impact on others and others’ perception of that should be more explicitly described. I’m not suggesting that my experience should be defined by a poll, but I think that real-world experience requires some sort of reciprocal dimension with the environment—especially other people.
P: We already criticized usability and user experience for excessive individualism when we created the standpoint of a neighbor. But what are you suggesting? Should we add perhaps the words “embodied” and “reciprocal” to the definition?
S: They would solve the experience machine problem. They would also help in solving the problem with adaptive preference by including what actually happens to your physical body as well as the problem of Socrates and the fool. Reciprocity adds a dimension that deals with the value of pleasures in the social context. It would also help in fighting the atomism and individualism of user experience.
P: What should we do with the sheriff’s problem?
S: There are actually two related problems that deal with the nature of the user, or probably more, but two that I think we can address now. The separateness of individuals and the problems that come with aggregations are one. The second is the inclusivity of user experience. I have a hunch that we would be on the safer side if we don’t think of the community as an aggregated individual, depart from utilitarianism, and share Kant’s, Sen’s and others’ stand and define user experience consistently as an individual’s experience, which, however, is put into a socially reciprocal context in ethical scrutiny.
P: It wouldn’t be a utilitarian definition any more.
S: Not really faithful to Bentham, for sure. Then we should say something about who are the individuals that we consider. We should figure out a way to make it inclusive.
P: We could say that user experience should deal with the experience of individuals with the widest range of interests.
S: We could. That’s a clever formulation. If usability addresses abilities to achieve something, user experience focuses on the conditions of appreciation, and the individual’s interests lay the foundation for that. That would mirror the accessibility structure that we employed for usability very nicely: not the widest range of abilities but interests. We would need to cater for as many kinds of wishes and wants as possible.
P: So, the unpolished new version of a just user experience would be: perceptions and embodied reciprocal responses of individuals with the widest range of interests that result from the use and/or anticipated use of a product, system, or service.
S: And now that we’ve started to revise it, I’d like to delete the last part of the definition, which I think is simply clumsy. Also “reciprocal response” is tautological. And one more thing: perceptions could be supplemented by saying perceptions of what. For that we have a good answer from Bentham.
S: Yes.
Perception and embodied interchange of pleasure and lack of harm that are associated with the use of an artifact by individuals with the widest range of interests.
P: So the second iteration might be something like this: Perception and embodied interchange of pleasure and lack of harm that are associated with the use of an artifact by individuals with the widest range of interests. “Associated” is better than “resulting from.” It covers the different kinds of perceptions that Bentham listed, including expectations, memories, and imagination.
S: That clearly includes the subjective stand by mentioning perceptions, and embodied interchange explicates that what one actually does, and which others respond to, is an element of experience. Experience becomes reciprocal and in addition to being a mental state is also a quality of behavior.
P: Making love in Nozick’s experience machine is less of an experience than in real life.
We create agents of pleasure instead of passive recipients.
S: Making love, creating pleasure, or helping others in any manner: now we’re creating agents of pleasure instead of passive recipients. This makes design for user experience a more ethically relevant objective than design for hedonic pleasures.
P: Do you think we should still call this user experience?
S: On the one hand, it’s still an all-encompassing, subjectively perceived construct that’s similar to the standard definition in many respects. On the other hand, our formulation puts more emphasis on actual being and doing.
P: You’re using capability vocabulary.
S: I guess I am. We get closer to Sen’s ideas. Bentham and Mill wouldn’t call it utility any more—or you never know. It’s also compatible with our earlier take on user experience that addressed the time, sweat, and money spent on use. With both of our modifications we take a step away from design for user experience towards design for user exertion, the celebration of rewarding effort.
P: We were ready to replace usability with applicability. Should we do the same with user experience and give our new formulations a new name?
S: The user experience community might be more willing to listen to us if we leave user experience in peace. So what about “user exertion”?
P: It sounds quite negative.
S: We want to see the activity and active life in a positive light.
P: Well, yes … I guess “exertion” is used in some other comparable context?
S: Perceived exertion is a measurement used in medical care and rehabilitation as a proxy for exercise intensity (Borg 1982; Chen, Fan, and Moe 2002). It tells how hard the body works. In a way we’re looking for something similar, aren’t we? For us, the user experience is a measurement of engagement, involvement, and perceived intensity of use. I’d say that playing rugby yields more of an experience than watching others play.
P: Hmmm …
S: The body needs exertion and so does the mind. In our earlier definition, effort was even more clearly explicated.
P: We didn’t really specify that.
S: You’re right.
P: How about this: user experience is the effort of use divided by incentives and the individuals’ perception of the worth of the ratio. Then we need to add the inclusivity clause saying that we refer to individuals with the widest range of interests.
User experience is the effort of use divided by incentives and the individuals’ perception of the worth of the ratio.
S: Good.
P: We have some kind of rationale for justifying both, but are they two different things or two wordings of the same?
S: They represent different angles. The first aims at understanding and the second at quantifying. We could perhaps synchronize them better, but if we do that I think we lose whatever edge they have.
P: As they say, user experience is difficult to define.
S: Indeed. But we did it.
P: Twice.
S: And we agree on both definitions.
P: May I still return to the idea of user experience being a utilitarian concept?
S: We didn’t leave it behind.
P: Sure. But we’ve already kind of compromised our stand on that by making our version less utilitarian. Still, our claim and starting point that user experience and the principle of utility are very similar is an intriguing one.
S: Yes.
P: If Bentham’s utility and the ISO definition are as similar and overlapping as we agreed, why haven’t we, I mean the whole gang of user experience people, noticed what now seems obvious to us? Or to put it another way, why don’t we call user experience utility? Have we or everyone else missed something essential?
S: We.
P: Let’s pretend it was they.
S: You’re kind of pushing it.
P: Sorry.
S: No problem. Bentham’s theory was written more than two centuries ago. It’s been forgotten.
P: But you said it hasn’t been forgotten by other disciplines.
S: That’s true. The ideas of satisfaction and experience within microeconomics and the idea of happiness in welfare economics have revived Bentham. Maybe the reason for not noticing the similarities has been that computer scientists and behavioral scientists, who form the core of human–computer interaction and have a strong influence on human-centered design, haven’t been keen on studying and importing ideas from ethics, economics, and justice. And that applies to us designers equally. They’ve ignored other cornerstones of microeconomics with obvious relevance for their work, including Icek Ajzen (1988) and David Kahnemann (Kahneman et al. 1997), so it’s only consistent that Bentham has suffered the same fate.
P: And consistency is appreciated in human–computer interaction.
S: Sarcasm aside, maybe a reason for not building on Bentham is the fact that he has been heavily criticized from both the left and right. The single aggregated indicator of wellbeing, in particular, has led many philosophers and economists to distance themselves from utilitarianism.
P: That cannot be the reason, because if it were, the user experience standard wouldn’t have been written in a manner so similar to the example set by Bentham.
S: Maybe.
P: What’s the reason then?
S: Maybe it’s just the word.
P: Word?
S: In user-centered design, “utility” has had a meaning that is very different from that of Bentham’s and Mill’s. We can return to two influential definitions of the main interaction concepts, including “utility,” which take us to the early 1990s before ISO took over as the dominant definition of usability.
P: Okay.
S: Brian Shackel (1991) outlined a conceptual hierarchy where acceptance is the highest-level criterion. It’s influenced by perceived utility, usability, likeability, and costs. Utility refers to the match between user needs and product functionality, while usability means users’ ability to utilize the functionality in practice. Likeability refers to affective evaluations, and costs include financial costs and social and organizational consequences. Also, Jacob Nielsen (1993) wrote that utility means the match between task requirements and product functionality. It’s the ability of the system to help the user carry out a set of tasks. Usability and utility together form the usefulness of a system: “Utility is the question of whether the functionality of the system in principle can do what is needed, and usability is the question of how well users can use that functionality.” Thus, “utility” has referred to the hardest technical facts. It has been understood as the appropriateness of the feature set separated from users’ capability to get anything done with it, not to mention their subjective pleasures, excitement, engagement, immersion, or happiness with the software. When user experience appeared to challenge usability, it did it exactly from the opposite position to that of utility. It took the subjectivity of usability and added more pleasures, perceptions, and happiness. Utility came to be considered as technical, secondary, and trivial when we were dealing with human experience with products. Or perhaps it remained essential in design practice, but from the point of view of conceptualizing interaction it became considered a completed piece of work. It became the practical trivial core having only an instrumental role in the experience.
P: As we established distance from Shackel’s and Nielsen’s utility, we didn’t notice that we were getting closer to Bentham’s and Mill’s concept of utility.
As we established distance from Shackel’s and Nielsen’s utility, we didn’t notice that we were getting closer to Bentham’s and Mill’s concept of utility.
S: Yes.
P: Sometimes words have two meanings … Should we try to summarize what we have?
S: Would you like to try?
P: I can try. We have compared Bentham’s conception of utility and definitions of user experience. We have noticed similarities in several essential respects. These include the normative stands of utility and user experience that set requirements for those of us who design societal arrangements, be they laws or other artifacts; the idea of a single aggregated criterion of a good life, or wellbeing, that both share; the subjective perceived nature of that criterion; and the relevance of Bentham’s elaboration of the utility concept for a workable evaluative framework of user experience. We also discussed the criticism of utility and tried to see how that applies to user experience.
S: It’s tempting to summarize that user experience is in many essential respects a utilitarian approach to design, which is faithful to Bentham’s ideas.
P: A utilitarian would now ask whether our result is useful.
S: I don’t know how much happier it makes us, but I think that giving Bentham credit for his work is something that someone in the user experience community should’ve done and that in itself was a good reason to have our discussion. That’s probably a more Kantian comment though.
P: Our apologies, Jeremy.
S: I also think that using Bentham’s principles, originally written for legislators, in design for user experience seems valid. Most importantly, considering the critique of Bentham’s utilitarianism as criticism of user experience from an ethical angle wouldn’t be a waste of time. It already helped us to consider alternative and maybe even enhanced formulations of user experience. It helped us to see the value of actually doing and being, which often remains in the shadows when we focus on emotions.
Considering the critique of utilitarianism as criticism of user experience helped us to see the value of actually doing and being, which remains in the shadows when we focus on emotions.
P: Why don’t we say that the only reason that user experience is not called utility is the confusion caused by Shackel’s and Nielsen’s non-utilitarian use of “utility.”
S: A more moderate conclusion would be to suggest further scrutiny of utilitarianism as a philosophical foundation for user experience. Thus far, user experience has been primarily empirically and practically motivated without ethical or philosophical foundations. The notable exceptions are John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and especially aesthetic experience, which McCarthy and Wright (McCarthy and Wright 2004) and followers have applied. Compared to those, Bentham’s utilitarianism is a straightforward and somewhat shallow approach, but it forces us more directly to take ethical stands. But I’ve been talking too much, once again. Do you think you can crystallize the discussion as well as you did with the previous ones?
P: This has been a more difficult one. We learned that user experience has its roots in 1700s utilitarian philosophy, even though no one has drawn this connection, and then we learned about its problems. User experience and utility are similar concepts, but that doesn’t mean much yet. If A is B, but A and B don’t have any relevant meanings for us, the new information is useless.
S: True.
P: Maybe the core issue is that user experience, which is in essential respects similar to happiness, pleasure, and lack of pain, is an all-encompassing criterion of good design. By understanding a little bit more about utility, we realized that all-encompassing criteria, although they motivate much and justify much and can be developed to be more sensitive to justice, are nevertheless still powerless, unfeasible, and in some cases even misleading when it comes to deciding about priorities between conflicting ethical values. It’s difficult to show that the pain of the left-handed minority should be given greater consideration than the pleasure of the right-handed majority from the point of view of justice. The cases of our friend living a virtual life in Nozick’s tank, the sheriff, and the rich man also nicely illustrate the problems.
S: I agree. But being happy is a good goal.
P: It is. So I would say …
S: Yes?
P: Experience is all you need unless you need ethical priorities.
Experience is all you need unless you need ethical priorities.
1ISO 9241-210 is not exceptional among the definitions or characterizations of user experience in this respect. See, e.g., McCarthy and Wright (2004), Hassenzahl (2005), and Desmet and Hekkert (2007) for corresponding interpretations.
2Marc Hassenzahl’s (2005, 2008) and his colleagues’ (Hassenzahl and Tracktinsky 2006) stand is that positive emotions and hedonic attributes have a direct influence on an individual’s psychological wellbeing, while the pragmatic attributes are instrumental and thus secondary from the individual’s wellbeing point of view. Hedonic qualities enable people to achieve states of being, “be-goals,” that are relevant for them and that are more persistent over situational variation than goals related to practical achievements that tend to change from situation to situation.
3The list of psychological needs is based on Sheldon and colleagues’ listing with some exclusions (Sheldon and Elliot 1999; Sheldon et al. 2001; Hassenzahl 2008; Hassenzahl et al. 2013).
4Bentham’s (1824/2004) version of utilitarianism was published for the first time in the essay An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation in 1789. J. S. Mill (1871/2004) criticized and moderated his principles in several texts and Mill’s Utilitarianism, in particular, became an even more famous text about utilitarianism than Bentham’s earlier work. Here the reference is to the version of Utilitarianism originally published in 1824.
5John Rawls’ (1971) idea of justice as fairness, Len Doyal’s and Ian Gough’s (1991) concept of fundamental needs, and Amartya Sen’s (1985, 1993, 2000, 2010a) and Martha Nussbaum’s (2000, 2011) capability approach.
6Bentham extended his design interests and concepts from legislation to utilitarian solutions for penalty implementations. In design discussions, his prison design, the “panopticon,” has attracted more attention than his philosophy. His panopticon is a prison concept in which the guards can see into all the cells from the central point of a circular structure, which is a very cost-efficient manner of keeping an eye on the prisoners. That has also been applied as a metaphor for user interfaces that give a good visibility to data (Jespersen et al. 2007; Kramer, Reponen, and Obrist 2008; Daly 2010).
7It can be done, for instance, by applying the formalizations of psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues (Kahneman, Wakker, and Sarin 1997; also Sun, Fang, and Hsieh 2014).
8Pains of desire, pains of disappointment, pains of regret, pains of senses, pains of awkwardness, pains of enmity, pains of an ill name, pains of piety, pains of benevolence, pains of malevolence, pains of memory, pains of imagination, pains of expectation, and pains of association.
9Jordan’s model of four pleasures is based on anthropologist Lionel Tiger’s (1992/2008) earlier work and was an early and influential contribution to establishing distance from task-oriented usability and building a framework for the design of user experience.
10Sheldon and colleagues’ list included ten needs, and Hassenzahl has chosen to keep the six he considered the most relevant (Sheldon et al. 2001, Hassenzahl et al. 2013).
11Layard refers to empirical evidence by Di Tella, MacCulloch, and Oswald (2003) and Helliwell 2003.