Uncovering the user experience with critical experience interviews

User experience (UX) design relies on comprehensive understanding about the experiential aspects of users and their tasks. Gathering the understanding is difficult and there is a need for cost-efficient ways to build the UX knowledge. This paper describes a study where the critical decision-making method (CDM) was adapted to user experience research and tried-out in process industry context. CDM is a retrospective interview strategy, which aims to elicit the insights of decision-making of professionals through a walkthrough of non-routine decision-making events. Our adapted version of the CDM, critical experience interview, utilizes the structure and core logic of CDM but focuses on experiential and emotional factors instead of reasoning and decision making ones. The strengths of the critical experience interview lie in the multiple viewpoints and iterative interview strategy. In the study, the critical experience interview was able to produce useful and rich descriptions of work related experiences of the interviewees.