What is User's Perception of Naturalness? An Exploration of Natural User Experience

Natural User Interfaces (NUI) is now a well-researched topic. The principles of NUI in literature primarily focus on designing the user interfaces to be intuitively easy to use. But is it enough for a software product to just have an intuitive user interface to give a natural experience? Designing for a product imbibing overall naturalness requires encompassing of all the aspects of user experience, which is beyond just an interface design. This study contributes by taking a holistic approach in identifying what users perceive to be natural and what experiences make them feel so. We involved 36 participants with diverse demographics and personalities, giving them a variety of stimuli to elicit their perceptions of naturalness. These were found to be a combination of what they perceived to be natural through visual, cognitive as well as real life past and present experiences. The insights from this research helped us in deriving inferences on designing for what we call as Natural User Experience (NUX). We found that the level of naturalness does not remain same over time for the users; rather it goes through a stage based cycle. We also evolved strategies for improving the naturalness by advancing user's experience across these stages.