User Experience: Is Quantitative research going to be ignored?

I recently returned from a great conference in Dublin, iHCI 2010. I have to say I was really impressed by the talks but disappointed at the same time at the reaction to my comments about quantitative research needing to be included in the UX mix of research tools.


It seemed from the presentations and comments that there was a negative feeling to wards quantitative research being applied in this domain (similar to the sometimes derogatory comments qualitative research methods get in psychology). The enthusiasm for gathering the whole view of the experience in one piece of research is in danger of making UX quite weak methodologically with the focus on interviews and comment analysis.

It is a shame that no one in the HCI community wishes to see what we have in usability research methodologies and delve into the decades worth of research into human emotions to identify ways of measuring these flippantly termed "fuzzy concepts". In particular, emotions have been studied effectively using experimental methods and this must not be forgotten. If we are to build as a subject area (indeed as a science) we must be able to gain scientifically meaningful results which are rigorously collected and analysed to form a base of "givens" or truths about interactions in specific contexts. Experiment based knowledge should be low on confounds, leading to high causal inference. The limitations of studies with these methods are also clearer than the fuzzy methods of interviews and ethnographic research where inference is left to the experimenter and is based on few participants. Although qualitative research can help, it needs to be the base for further quantitative experimentation. Controlled experiments have been used to measure emotions, feelings and motivations already so there is no need to naval gaze to the extent to which is occurring with the development of user experience in finding adequate methodologies.