UX Design and Evaluation: Holism versus Reductionism Approaches - Which is Better?

A literature content analysis strategy was used to synthesize extant literature sources to comprehend and capture the approaches to the design, evaluation and modeling of user experience. From the analysis, two main methods were identified for the UX research. These paradigms are holism and reductionism. The holist approach stresses on sense making and interpretative approaches to user experience, leading to construction and reconstruction of users’ quality perceptions about their experiences with technological artifacts. This paradigm is design based. Conversely, the reductionism approach is concerned with the deconstruction of users’ experiences. This approach conceives experiences as a model that can be broken down into aspects and dimensions that facilitates understanding of user experience. The debate among researchers on these differing viewpoints conceived and drove this study. The findings of the research show that the two paradigms are insightful, rich and unique and can be independently used in UX research, nevertheless, as both approaches a limited and address the peculiar concerns of the two respective paradigms, this paper advocates and endorses the use of a mixed paradigm especially in longitudinal studies to amalgamate the rich components of both varying approaches, thus implying the interdependent use of the two paradigms in UX research.