14 SMART ThIngS: UBIqUITOUS COMPUTIng USER ExPERIEnCE DESIgn This chapter attempts to provide a definition of user experience and to iden- tify the design disciplines involved in creating a ubiquitous computing user experience. 2.1 A definition of user experience no universal definition of the user experience exists. Definitions from research- ers and practitioners extend all the way from examining neurological phenom- ena (norretranders, 1991) to macroeconomic behaviors. Somewhere between counting the firings of neurons and calculating profit and loss statements is a practical set of boundaries that defines what to consider in a design process. Usability, for example, is the practice of making things easy to use. It is often equated with user experience, but while bad usability can break a good product, good usability is insufficient to create a good experience. An experience can be usable without being useful or valuable to enough people to justify the expense of creating it. For example, Lovegety, an early mobile social dating device (Cnn, 1998), had a simple, highly usable interface: a device owner set a switch to the kind of social interaction they were interested in and the gender of the person