People who interact with a product experience more than only its visual design. User experience is a holistic feeling that covers all senses and is dependent on the user's prior experiences and values. User experience determines the user's assessment of a product and his/her demand for its follow up model. A product may provoke flow experiences, it may support users to express their identity or it may give them a feeling of group membership. Often these aspects have much more relevance than a product's efficiency or its learnability.

User Experience is a topic that overcomes barriers between various research domains in its quest to define what constitutes a positive experience. Several researchers have tried to set up a framework of user experience. They found numerous factors, including personality, emotions, expectations, age, requirements, cultural factors, contextual factors such as time and place, trust, enjoyment, and many more. Each of these factors contributes to "user experience". Depending on one's background and ideas, some factors might have more importance than others, some may be easier to analyze, some harder, and some might even not be mentioned here.

A lot of the factors of User Experience can be measured. CURE is constantly developing and improving methods that measure user experience factors. On the other hand CURE looks also at the "why" of user experience, for which an integrative view is required. User experience is more than just the sum of an undefined number of factors. We believe that narrative interviews can be used to assess the meaning that users give to experiences, and can give us an answer to this why-question.