Applying Experientialism to HCI Methods.

The aim of this thesis is to incorporate the results of Experientialism in the domain ofHuman-Computer Interaction. The purpose is twofold: on the one hand it shows how someconcepts of Experientialism like metaphor, image-schema, stories or conceptual integrationmay be used to explain where some concepts of HCI come from. On the other hand it uses thesame conceptual background to support the design activity: the same concepts ofExperientialism may be employed to build new conceptual artifacts in order to design UserInterfaces and application software in general. One of the most fruitful ideas Experientislimmay offer is conceptual integration as the basis upon which to construct new design solutions.Notwithstanding the pervasive use of metaphor in everyday language and even in HCI texts,there is a considerable amount of criticism regarding the use of metaphor in designing userinterfaces based on the assumption that this practice may be the origin of troubles when usingsuch software products. That is why one of the chapters is aimed at showing that not only theuse of metaphor is pervasive in HCI but even the use of figurative language as well. Not onlyfigurative language is usually employed but it is even one of the main tools for conceptualisingnew ideas and concepts required in the activity of software development.The Thesis proposes a framework aimed at designing User Interfaces based on the conceptsof Experientialism. The proposal integrates two phases (analysis and design) the same way asmost of software development methods do, trying to profit on the broad scope of the cognitiveprocesses such as image-schema, metaphor and conceptual integration. These general conceptsmay be well suited to build conceptual models upon which to elaborate the user interfaces andthe optirnalizy principles proposed to study the suitability of conceptual integration may be alsoused as validity criteria to evaluate such design artifacts.In order to validate such a proposal, the Thesis shows how to use the framework in twodifferent situations: i) to explain why a problem such as the Mac trashcan -used to ejectdiskettes- is not a problem of using metaphors but an unfortunate design decision, and ii) to beapplied in the design of a new User Interface.Other concepts of Experientialism are proposed in capturing user requirements. The conceptof story is the ground on which to build scenarios or use cases, as stories are a more generalcognitive process and a form of telling things at a more general level. That is why the userstories may be mapped to use cases, as both are essentially different type of stories and thecapture of requirements is a way of specifying one type of stories (use cases) based on theoriginal stories (user stories)