Adding Method to Meaning: a Technique for exploring Peoples' Experience with Digital Products

Light, A. (2006) Adding Method to Meaning: a Technique for exploring Peoples' Experience with Digital Products, Behaviour & Information Technology, 25 (2), pp175-187

This paper suggests a method for gathering and interpreting people’s accounts of experiences with technology to inform design. The method combines an interviewing technique that seeks to collect detailed retrospective accounts with discourse analysis as a way of making sense of them. After a description of what each part might contribute, a study looking at what happens when people enter text into websites demonstrates some possibilities of the method. Finally the applicability of the method is discussed.