An Investigation On The Relation Between User Experience Practice And Industrial Designers In Turkey

Tez (Yüksek Lisans) -- İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2014Thesis (M.Sc.) -- İstanbul Technical University, Instıtute of Science and Technology, 2014Ülkemizde özellikle bilgi ve iletişim teknolojileri (BİT) gömülü cihazlar üzerinden internet tabanlı sunulan ürün ve hizmetlerin gün geçtikçe yaygınlaştığı ve günlük hayatımızda daha çok yer kapladığı aşikârdır. Bu süreçte giderek sadeleşmesine rağmen içerdiği çok sayıdaki işlev nedeniyle aynı oranda karmaşık bir hale gelen ve gelmeye de devam eden ürünlerin kullanıcılar tarafından etkili, verimli ve memnun edici bir şekilde kullanılması üzerine yoğunlaşan “kullanıcı deneyimi” alanındaki çalışmalar gerek özel sektörün gerekse kamunun bu alanda yapmış olduğu yatırımların ve bugüne kadar kat edilmiş yolun boşa gitmemesi için önem arz etmektedir. Bu tez çalışması ise ülkemizde kullanıcı deneyimi pratiğinin endüstriyel tasarım disiplini ile ilişkisini alanda çalışan endüstriyel tasarımcılar üzerinden ele almaktadır. Bu tezde temel olarak kullanıcı deneyimi alanının Türkiye’deki doğuşu ve bugüne kadar olan süreçte geçirmiş olduğu evrimi ile birlikte endüstri ürünleri tasarımı disipliniyle olan ilişkisine odaklanılmıştır. Bu bağlamda kullanıcı deneyimi çalışmalarının günümüze kadar geçirdiği değişimin kuramsal çerçevede ele alınması; kullanıcı deneyimi pratiğinin Türkiye’deki oluşum ve gelişim süreciyle birlikte endüstriyel tasarım disiplini ile ilişkisinin ortaya konulması; günümüzde sunulan kullanıcı deneyimi tasarım ve danışmanlık hizmetinin UTRLAB örneği üzerinden ele alınarak endüstri ürünleri tasarımı disiplini açısından değerlendirilmesi amaçlanmıştır. Bu çalışma kapsamında konunun çok disiplinli (multidisiplinler) karakterinden dolayı öncelikle farklı disiplinleri içeren geniş çaplı bir literatür taraması ile birlikte bir dizi derinlemesine mülakat, bir önceliklendirme çalışması ve bir örnek olay incelemesi yapılmıştır. Mülakatlar iki tur olarak gerçekleştirilmiş olup ilk turda bir ayrım gözetilmeksizin bu alanda kayda değer çalışmaları bulunan ve ulaşılabilen tüm katılımcılarla gerçekleştirilerek ikinci tur mülakatlar için hem bir örneklem oluşturulmuş hem de sorular şekillendirilmiştir. İkinci tur mülakatlar ise belirlenen örneklem dâhilindeki firmaların kurucu ve/veya yönetici vasfı olan kişilerle ve ayrıca bu firmalardan ikisinin personeli olan kişilerin bir kısmı ile gerçekleştirilmiştir. Önceliklendirme çalışması ise ikinci tur mülakatlarda görüşülen kişilerle gerçekleştirilmiş olup bu alanda çalışan kişilerin bakış açıları ile endüstriyel tasarım disiplinine, bu alanı oluşturan disiplinler arasında nasıl bir önem atfedildiği irdelenmeye çalışılmıştır. UTRLAB örneği üzerinden yapılan çalışmada ise firmanın gerçekleştirmiş olduğu projelerden bir tanesi üzerinden çıkarımlar elde edilmeye odaklanılmıştır. Araştırma ve analiz için kullanılan yöntem ve teknikler ilgili bölümlerde tercih sebepleri ile birlikte ifade edilmiş olup elde edilen bulgular ilgili başlıklarla tasnif edilerek sunulmuştur. Çalışmanın sonucunda ise alanın Türkiye’de doğuşu ve gelişimine dair sonuçlar ile alanın endüstriyel tasarım disipliniyle ilişkisine dair sonuçlar ayrı ayrı ele alınmıştır.It is clear that day after day internet based products and services being presented via information and communication technologies (ICT) embedded devices are becoming widespread in our country and occupying more and more space in our daily lives. Studies in the field of “user experience” focuses on effectively, efficiently and satisfactorily using of products being much more complex because of containing a great number of functions although gradually being simplified in this process have importance for not only saving investments of government and private sectors but also saving distance covered so far. This thesis, as well, discusses the relation between the user experience practice and industrial design discipline in Turkey via the industrial designers working in this field. In this thesis, it is basically focused on the birth and development of the field of user experience and the relation between user experience discipline and industrial design discipline in Turkey. In this context, it is aimed at discussing the beginning and changing of the user experience studies in Turkey so far in a theoretical framework, revealing the relationship between user experience practice and industrial design discipline in this process, and evaluating the current user experience design and consultancy services via the case of UTRLAB in the aspects of industrial design discipline. There are many disciplines that constitute the field of user experience such as Interaction Design, Communication Design, Information Architecture, Industrial Design, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Social Sciences, Human Factors & Ergonomics, and Marketing etc. Because of this multidisciplinary character of the research area an extended literature review was done within this study. The literature review based upon secondary sources was firstly started with scanning academic articles but the information obtained from these articles was found insufficient. Because of this, it was tried to reach much more sources related to the research topic. In this process, the most-used method to reach not only original but also related sources was to scan the reference lists of the books, articles and especially thesis written in this field. However, the sources that could be considered as not directly related with the research subject but indirectly contribute it were scanned as well because of the lack of sources specific to Turkey. In parallel with the literature review, a series of in-depth interviews, a prioritisation study and a case study are conducted. As there was an obvious need for a more detailed, comprehensive and in-depth information because of that the research area could be considered as at the beginning of its emerging and development process in Turkey, it was decided to conduct semi-structured face-to-face interviews in the first round and structured face-to-face interviews in the second round. The purposes of the first-round interviews were to specify examples and to build a base to structure the second-round interviews by collecting general information about the field. In Turkey, there have been a few numbers of actors being active in the area such as academics, usability laboratories, and design and consultancy firms. Because of this, the first-round interviews were planned to conduct with all accessible people from both academia and sector having significant contributions to this area. Hence, firstly, it was contacted to the ones known to have studies on user experience before. After that, the scope of the interviews were extended by both the names advised by the contacted interviewees and the names from other resources. The first-round interviews were made with 10 participants accepted the interview request and all the interviews were made at the participants’ work environment and recorded with a voice recorder. In the first-round interviews, open-ended questions about emergence and development of the field, internal structure and functioning of UX (user experience) firms or laboratories, the characteristics of the firms receiving services, and regulations on activities were asked to the participants. In the light of the answers gathered in the first round, it was found that there were three main structuring as a legal entity. These are; - units running in universities (usability laboratories) - in-house units of enterprises in different sectors - private firms offering the user experience design and consultancy services to enterprises in different sectors Among these, the private firms offering the user experience design and consultancy services to the enterprises being active in different sectors were selected as the sample of the second-round because of the reasons presented in the related chapter. The questions of the second-round interviews prepared under two titles as ‘Manager Interview Questions’ and ‘Personal Interview Questions’, of which the former group were planned to asked to the selected company founders and/or managers and the latter group were planned to asked to the other accessible personals in the companies. With the questions of ‘Manager Interview’, it was aimed at deducing about the employment of industrial designers in the firm from past to present and the role of those in the user experience practices of the firm from a manager’s perspective. The questions also try to find out the factors affecting the functioning of the firms in this process. Moreover, ‘Personal Interview’ questions were designed to figure out the experiences of the personals about being acquainted with the field of UX and how the personals’ educational backgrounds contributed to their UX studies. In the process of preparation of the second-round questions, the managers and employees of the UTRLAB provided great help on making the questions more understandable and more focusing on the aimed information. Prepared questions were first tested on the managers and employee of this company and after that necessary corrections were made to finalize the questions. Both first- and second-round interviews recorded by the help of voice recorder were written down word by word. These documents were evaluated by content analysis method. Although the method is known as a method for getting quantitative results, it allows for getting qualitative inferences as well. Since this thesis does not aim to get quantitative results, qualitative inferences techniques of the method were used instead of the quantitative techniques of the method. In addition to the second-round interviews, a prioritisation study was done by gaining inspiration from card sorting study that is generally used to discover the latent structure in an unsorted list of statements or ideas and by this way frequently used to create site maps of websites by focusing on grouping and naming of listed data. In this prioritisation study, the names of the 11 disciplines corresponding in Turkey among the disciplines of user experience design were written on cards and participants were expected to sort these cards considering the amount of contributions of each discipline on this field by their personal perceptions. While doing sorting participants were asked to think loudly. At the end of the study, the layout of the cards and voice records were analyzed to examine the rank of industrial design discipline in terms of the contributions to the field. The prioritisation study was made in the second round interviews with the interviewed people. UTRLAB Company were taken as a case study because of being not only the first established private and independent user research center in Turkey but also almost all the employees of it have an industrial design background. To make inspections and observations, respectively four and two weeks were spent in UTRLAB Company. However, because of the reasons that the user experience design projects are long-termed projects and time spent in UTRLAB Company was limited, full observation on any project run by the firm could not be possible. In order to overcome this deficiency, employees of the company helped the researcher’s investigation by presenting some previous examples of fully reported projects in the context of project flow and gained experiences during the project process. The focused subject of the case study can be summarized as observing whether or not there are some differences in the process of user experience design in a UX design and consultancy firm that almost all members of its UX team are industrial designers and whether or not industrial designers contributes this process in terms of their roles. The study was concluded by presenting gathered results about the emergence and development of the field in Turkey and the relationship between the field and industrial design discipline, which were presented with same titles at the end of the thesis. As a future work, in order to obtain a total picture, it is thought to be beneficial to take advantage of qualitative and quantitative researches being structured by different methods. Moreover, because of that it was often mentioned during the interviews that consciousness and awareness level among customer companies about UX studies is not enough, primarily, a study should be made to designate the maturity levels of the companies buying UX services.Yüksek LisansM.Sc