User Experience Design Patterns for Web 2.0 Applications

The goal of the research presented in this thesis is to identify user experience patterns based on two user studies of a web-based application for collaborative story-writing. These patterns might be useful for reusing knowledge on future projects with similar goals. Although several pattern collections already exist within HCI, these collections are primarily focused on usability-related issues. The present research attempts to address a broader class of human-technology interaction aspects, including aspects related to fun, emotion, motivation and sociability. This research is part of the Citizen Media project, which aims to make it easier for all users regardless of experience to create and share content through social network applications. The main contribution of this work is a set of user experience patterns which are based on findings from two user evaluation studies. The first study was conducted in June 2008 with 12 adults as participants. The second study was conducted in January 2009 with 35 eight year old children as participants. In order to determine the uniqueness of the patterns identified in this research, 3 commonly available pattern collections were selected and compared with the present set of patterns. The results show that almost half of the patterns overlap to a greater or lesser extent with already existing patterns, indicating that they are supported by findings from other contexts as well