Taking the Longer View

The field of user experience research is sufficiently new that there are not many established techniques that allow you to study the change in people's experiences over time. Most research focuses on the initial experience or the typical experience, not on how that experience changes over time. That's unfortunate since it flattens out a complex terrain of user abilities and perspectives. It's important to know how products change and how people's relationships to them shift as time goes on so that the products can be designed to grow with the knowledge and needs of its users.