Do Usability Professionals Think about User Experience in the Same Way as Users and Developers Do?

In this paper, we study how usability professionals’ thinking about system use relates to that of system developers and end users. We conducted 72 repertory-grid interviews to capture how usability professionals, developers, and users describe their system use. The participants in each stakeholder group were from China, Denmark, and India. Our results indicate that usability professionals focus on emotion-related aspects of system use, while users focus more on context in terms of utility and degree of usage. There are no interactions between stakeholder group and nationality, although both stakeholder group and nationality independently influence how participants think about usability and user experience. We recommend that to understand users’ concerns, researchers should study context more.