The Landscape of Experience

Three days of conference notes from Living Surfaces 2001 in Chicago, November 2001, an AIGA conference on experience design, interactive media and the design practice emerging around them. Written as a trip report for UK colleagues in the days after returning to London. Speakers included Mohan Sawhney, Nick Durrant, Michael Schrage, Tim Parsey of Motorola, Hugh Dubberly, Don Norman, Idit Harel of MamaMedia and Julie Pokorny of Lante, among others. At the time, “experience design” was a new enough term that the conference was partly an exercise in defining it. The notes are preserved as written in November 2001, lightly tidied but otherwise intact.

Speakers were reasonably diverse, with no overall design, HCI or usability focus, definitely attempting to be inclusive under the term “experience design”. I have a clearer overview of the state of the US design landscape, and the kind of work that intelligent agencies and individuals are undertaking. There were a number of very sharp individuals presenting.

Experience design is a widely accepted term, widely understood as a process, and validated by the client and market reaction. There is a vacuum waiting to be filled after years of new-media mishap and recent financial failure. Experience design is less about interface and HCI research. It is a more physical and humane practice, dealing with ideas of pervasive media and multiple channels. Almost everybody talked about users, about scenarios, storyboards, storytelling, play and context. The focus was working at a higher level, integrating channels rather than testing response times or classifying information.

Highs

Mohan Sawhney summed up the overall ideology that emerged, by discussing methods and tools for crossing boundaries. He used great examples, discussing the ‘black and whiteness’ of ‘old and new’ economy thinking, and offered nine ways to transcend these boundaries and conceive products and services that meet more fundamental needs.

Nick Durrant presented a very engaging idea dealing in real, human terms, that related to technology in subtle and significant ways. He talked about real human perceptions of technology, and the effect the network has on those perceptions and on society.

Lows

Tim Parsey of Motorola presented technology and expectation timelines for the future. The research and ‘blue sky thinking’ was interesting (see below) but the disparity between research and practice seems huge: where did these visions become Motorola’s appalling product designs?

“Evolving the e-business Landscape. Lessons from Fashion” was a confusing and jargon-ridden presentation that said nothing I hadn’t heard before. There is clearly a similarity between fashion and technology life-cycle curves, but this didn’t make for a good presentation.

Friday 9th November

Introduction. Shelley Evenson (Scient) and Bill Hill (Metadesign)

Landscape of Experience has developed from being heavily interface-led into being led mostly but not exclusively by multimedia. We are seeing combinations, pervasive media, business, technology, and experience.

Michael Schrage, MIT Media Lab

[email protected]

We shape our models, then our models shape us.

How do people behave around models, prototypes and simulations? We should encourage designers to rethink the creation of value. We need a new innovation-investment infrastructure for design management.

The marginal costs of iterative prototyping are collapsing. We are seeing the ‘spreadsheetification’ of design. The cost per iteration (CPI) is headed for free.

Iterative modelling (once a model has been designed) will become free, transforming the landscape of modelling, prototyping and simulation. With this power we will have much more choice as to what we want to do; design will be a very powerful force. However, the more choice you have, the more your values matter in making the right decisions.

Designers will end up having greater ‘iterative capital’. The constraint is no longer the number of dev cycles or iterations we can use on a product, we can throw iterative capital at problems. But how do we productively waste it? BMW has developed excellent crash-test software, which has resulted in innovative designs such as the C1 motorcycle.

We are developing dynamic prototypes, using parallel development, so we can test out multiple solutions at once. A company’s innovation profile goes up when it has high iterative capital.

We must create new ways of simulating things, so we can create radical products. Should we co-invest our iterative capital with key customers and suppliers?

What about generative or evolutionary design algorithms? These will work very well with new iterative-friendly models. See John Holland, evolutionary design.

Saturday 10th November

Mohan Sawhney, Northwestern University

[email protected]

Childhood is when we learn the most. Learning is all about setting up boundaries and putting boxes around things. In this way we reduce our daily mental load by recognising groups of objects, not having to rely on our perception and cognition to interpret everything around us. Boundaries are defining and limiting tools to classify and structure scaffolds on the world, to construct mental models.

The pendulum always swings in binary oppositions:

We should look at the grey rather than the black and white. Synthesis as opposed to analysis.

How to break free from established boundaries that hinder our creative thinking:

Always ask why, well, we do this already.

Questioning:

Bridging:

Transcending:

It’s almost never either/or. It’s and.

Brick-and-mortar versus pure-play companies is an empty debate, because they are simply different ways to serve customers in a hybrid world.

ASPs, bollocks. They need to be providing business solutions, not applications. Who in the end cares what software they are using, as long as they get things done?

Spin-offs, bollocks. Why not integrate new technological solutions into your existing model? Why did BankOne spin off its ‘ebank’ as a separate service? They subsequently had far more people signing up for e-access to their existing accounts, and scrapped the ‘ebank’.

A little Zen poem:

First, there is no mountain.
Then, there is a mountain.
Then, there is no mountain.

This describes how we use language to define the things around us, but also how things around us don’t necessarily need to be classified.

When you frame the existing customer experience, you realise how many stupid boundaries have been set up from different viewpoints.

Evolving the ebusiness Landscape. Lessons from Fashion

The technology lifecycle curve:

There are four forces that shape evolution of products:

There are three approaches to filter these forces to make better products:

Tim Parsey, Motorola

What are products?

Industrial design has a tradition of integration. It’s not one thing that makes a product, it’s the integration of things. An industrial designer won’t claim to design cars, they will claim to be a part of a process which makes the whole. The door slam on a Mercedes might be the one reason it is a good product to someone.

Over the next few years our experience of products will broaden.

New tangible spaces will emerge; boundaries blur, boundaries broaden. Intimate conjunction of fashion and technology. New levels of technological invasiveness on our lives. Holistic system challenges. Enhanced reality via technologies such as object locators.

Design challenges emerge as time becomes an essential part of the dimension of design. We have to design a relationship over time, not just a one-off experience. How can we master designing these ever more complex experiences?

Humanism and resonance. We must navigate the extended possibilities with humanism and resonance libraries. There is a level of humanism that we are missing right now in digital product design:

We can sort these resonance libraries in clusters that can then form product groups.

The segmentation for future products at Motorola is as follows:

The segmentation strategy can be driven by market demographics, but then uses a deeper level of understanding users by looking at the social and cultural resonances, using the humanistic library as a map.

A good brand is the non-arrogant use of design language. Companies usually try to tell you that you need something, which can seem a very arrogant standpoint. But products which allow for new experiences don’t have to be sold in traditional ways, and can allow for a new level of brand consistency.

We are starting to see products designed around the total experience, planning the full cycle from marketing through to buying, through to a long-term usage cycle. How do we evolve the overall context as we develop ideas? We use partners and channels to develop the overall infrastructure to meet new experience requirements.

Gluing the clouds to the ground. Motorola uses timelines to map the future and the current development of products in a wider context. There are four timelines:

Examples:

Using models to improve the design process

Hugh Dubberly

Concept mapping. The problem with mental models is that they are hidden. What we need to do is take them and make them visible.

What would you do if:

There has to be a way of developing a language to bring the ideas out onto the table and creating a place to start. A model is a description of a system. They can be written or drawn. Designers face many problems; we need new tools to model these problems.

Complex ↔ simple. Analysis ↔ synthesis.

We have many tools for modelling the lower-right hand corner of the chart, but not so many for the top left, where we may find very interesting results. We also need tools to map systems of systems, and algorithmic systems which may not adhere to static display.

Simple tasks can be modelled like this:

People ask questions of a source to get answers, require information, enabling actions to achieve goals.

For more information on concept mapping, see How We Learn by Gowin and Novak.

Quality grows out of the design process.

Roundup

Approach the total user experience, the end-to-end relationship, from selling to long-term use. Marketing and product design should converge. But marketing comes from the discipline of war, ‘strategy’.

A good design approach is to pull back and look at the bigger picture, then to look at the problem from another perspective, people, humanistic, or user.

A company is reflected directly in its products. A company is its products. Design language should be discussed by everybody.

There is a slippery slope from a small company, which has domain experts and serves its customers in a personalised way, to a large company, which just serves its own bottom line. In the next five years we may see companies going un-public, hiding for a while, then re-emerging with new values.

You create your own reality. You define your competitors and collaborators. Do not blame Wall Street or other ‘systems’ that you may feel hinder your values. There is always room to push.

At the Kellogg business school they have a game where there are very simple rules, basically nothing that gets in the way of the players defining how the game progresses. All students come out of the game complaining that it was unfair, that the other person cheated, or that the boundaries were unrealistic. But they then get shown the equations and realise that they created the adversarial relationship, and they had defined the whole scenario through their own preconceptions. Sawhney says he instils values into children, not limitations, then lets them run free with the temptations of the world.

Whenever you present an idea, present what you might also do next. This is a way of getting larger ideas realised and educating clients or colleagues.

Motorola is partnering with carriers to provide the complete experience.

Why does business have to define the ‘total life experience’? Will everything in the future be monetised?

Memory and Imagination. Aura Oslapas (formerly MD at IDEO)

Pina Bausch, choreographing experience.

Studies of people in New York, Paley Park off 56th Street.

Physical, temporal, sensory, and communal experiences. 360-degree experiences.

Customer journey planning, mapping where, when, how, why, for how long.

Case study with Amtrak shows there are ten key points in the travelling experience before you reach the train.

IDEO uses scenarios and illustrations to form the design process. They prototype the experience as far as possible, experimenting with different forms of communication to find a solution most likely to produce the best experience.

The four areas her new company undertakes are vision, communication, culture change, and experience.

For Hewlett-Packard they recommended the company split into infrastructure, appliances, and services, to allow the brand to be experienced in a better way by their different clients.

Information Art. Lisa Strausfeld (formerly at Quokka Sports and MIT)

Influenced by the huge Nasdaq wall in Times Square, Strausfeld became interested in the idea of the ambient display of information in public or private spaces. There is an increasing amount of ‘always on’ information which is important to us.

At MIT Lisa studied under Muriel Cooper at the Visible Language Workshop, using information objects and putting them in new and unstudied places.

Quokka Sports used information as entertainment, looking at the ways information graphics could become fun in themselves when combined with media, and presented in an engaging way.

For New York’s Penn Station, Lisa is designing the ambient media wall. Pentagram is designing the building.

Designing the Multi-Channeled User Experience. Chris Edwards, Yale

Single-channel interfaces are turning into multi-channel interfaces.

We see a need for functionality across these channels, with a context-sensitive nature so we can engage with these products in the most effective way.

United Airlines has seven channels: web, email, phone, Palm, pager, fax, and letter. The flight paging service is a pull application in a browser, where you set preferences and input your own details. The flight paging service then reduces the stress of travel by reducing the need for activity, it puts the interface in the background and allows for interaction only in the case of delays or problems. Usually a traveller will phone in to check the flight isn’t delayed or cancelled; now they can rely on the fact that it is all fine, unless there is a problem.

The problem with United Airlines is that the whole system is not a cohesive experience. For instance, the telephone operators cannot send you a confirmation email, they do not have your details. There is little cross-department knowledge of individual users.

With the flight paging service, there are multiple logins for different parts of the site, and passwords of up to 11 characters long, which are different from your main user login and password. There is little channel transparency, your knowledge is not shared effectively across internal departments, and there are different ticketing agencies which have no access to your details.

How can we conceptualise and imagine new multi-channel customer experiences?

Students at Yale came up with ideas in brainstorming sessions:

Human-centred design:

Bill Mitchell has a section in e-topia about the economy of presence, that users give their time to a system and thus are investors in that system.

User scenarios are key to explaining the multi-channel experience. They are ways to tell stories about the new ways we interact. We can then quickly evaluate feature ideas in context.

Roundup, the customer experience

eBay is incredibly dynamic; it’s more than the sum of its planning.

There are perhaps four user paths that can be identified, especially when designing museum exhibits:

Ambient information displays are becoming quite common, the Sony Civa picture frame.

There is a broad continuum between relying on research and using an intuitive ‘if it works for me’ approach.

There should be investment in long-term design, in producing dynamic environments that can respond to changes. Identity that destructs itself. Logo half-life. Expiration dates for signage.

Privacy. An issue that needs to be discussed within the user experience. There needs to be a general knowledge and acceptance that ‘this is what you are giving up’ and ‘this is what you are getting’.

Refer to Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

Saturday

Don Norman, Unext Learning Systems

Memory, perception, cognition.

The world is filled with information. Our knowledge is in the world.

Web applications can develop themes, plots, and characters, along the lines of theatre. A web application allows us to develop products that really engage people in the long term.

A product needs to be supported equally by all disciplines and teams, design, engineering, marketing, and manufacturing.

None of the design schools at present deal with products that approach the complexity of the real world.

Norman talked extensively about his digital watch, his Palm V, and the digital projector in the auditorium. He tried to explain the shortfalls and the affordances these products have. It was pretty ineffective as a presentation, and did not address the complexity he had previously referred to.

Idit Harel, MamaMedia

mamamedia.com

MamaMedia creates online play experiences, experiences that can get young children connected.

What is engaging and motivating kids today? Usability from a kid’s perspective is very different from usability from a traditional software-development perspective.

There are three generations currently using media:

We are moving towards greater control and participation in the media experience. The medium is not the message, it’s what you do with it that counts.

We are not dealing with information technology, but construction, design, imagination, communication, reflection, representation, personalisation technology.

MamaMedia aims to create experiences with play objects, non-linear open-ended play spaces with customisation, personalisation, and self-expression.

What do kids do?

13-year-olds are naturally non-linear multi-taskers. They only get to focus if they have multiple tasks. They love mixed media. They are technology-fluent. They do not care what technology is used, just what they can get done with it. They are looking for ‘hard fun’ with levels and learning curves, things that get harder as you get better. They are learning all the time. They value diversity, don’t watch the same TV shows as each other, like to swap individual experiences with each other. They value individuality, they want tools, not answers, and they want to customise.

Kids don’t want to organise information, they want to play.

Later teens use the telephone and instant messaging. They integrate mixed media in their communication with each other.

Wonder comes from expression, exploration, and exchange.

Programming for kids to program for themselves.

Eric Lunt, Spyonit

[email protected]

Navigating the landscape together, coders and designers. Lunt is a coder. We need to integrate design with experience with technology.

How do developers and designers talk?

Designer: 2 weeks ethnographic research + 2 weeks product design + 2 weeks interaction design + 1 week integration + 1 week quality assurance.

Developer: 1 week design + 8 weeks code + 1 week quality assurance.

There is an obvious discrepancy in expectations.

Designers need to specify all the branch conditions and states, to specify as many possibilities as possible to the coders. Give the design language to the developers, they will love it.

Trends in technical architecture:

Separating out all the different things that get things done:

Separation of interface from implementation. There are many methods for doing this:

So what does work?

Moving to component-based architecture, component-based JSPs and custom tag libraries. This invents a new role, the JSP bean developer.

application → JSP bean → user interface.

This creates the Struts application framework, where the coder can say to the UI designer: “here are all the objects available, use them as you wish.”

XHTML and XML are great new languages for coders, but designers need not know about them. XHTML is a cleaner form of HTML that redefines the baseline from which all UI needs to be developed. It moves on from HTML 4, which was an ugly beast.

XSL and XSLT allow the coder to transfer between XML files, but this is a programming translation language and should not have to be used by the UI designer.

Creating Experience Compounds. Julie Pokorny, Lante

[email protected]

There is a computing shift from desktop → integrated → pervasive.

Pervasive computing sits in the realm of the physical world, and has little to do with the traditional models of desktop computing.

The user experience needs to be consistent, needs to link diverse elements, compound elements.

Services must not compete with user energy. They must be sensitive to things like who can reach me at what time of day.

Experience with ‘Mall Pilot’: the real world is very synchronous. Putting interactions across parties, across people, in an individual linear path creates tremendous problems.

Users need to complete transactions within the domain they started in. They find it very difficult to transfer to another medium to complete the process.

The desktop equals the ‘homebase’ for the user, for control, configuration, and confirmation. The desktop is ideal for configured services.

The physical world represents challenges beyond interface. The challenges are:

Roundup

Interaction, being and empathy. Designing experiences starts by understanding. The user is most important, it’s not about you, it’s about them.

Tom Hobbs, MetaDesign

Facilitating human-human interaction rather than human-information interaction.

Great piece of work from a hospital, where they were commissioned to produce a piece of information design for a poster on the subject of the hospital pharmacy. They could not find a suitable way to represent it because every pharmacy worker has a different story to tell. So they created an installation in the pharmacy waiting room, which videos the customers as they walk in, which in turn makes the customers ask the counter staff about the installation. This led to conversation which allowed every customer a way into the background information on the pharmacy.

Colors magazine, a good approach to the medium, not trying to recreate the highly photographic nature of the printed magazine.

Fabrica.it, an unusable interface to a gallery of multimedia work.

Sony VAIO.net, bad representation of community.

The web design work didn’t live up to the earlier work.

David Small, Small Design. Lessons from the Visible Language Workshop. Information landscapes have qualities of scale and location, focus and navigation. He showed the Human Genome as a landscape of information, very nicely navigated and delineated by space and focus, all in real time from his presentation computer.

Sunday

Nick Durrant, Icon Medialab

The hand is a powerful agent of play. We play tag, and a ‘magic’ power is transferred.

Kids are saturated by their own media. “I dare U”, love hearts. Kids are paying more money for pre-pay mobiles than they spend on sweets.

What is in between?

Place names are incredibly important, boroughs, districts.

You only believe in memes and higher-order things through trust at the lower levels.

Network phenomena happen socially. Interaction of private and public space accommodates changing rules, regular, new, social.

Personal-computer paradigm: one person, one box. Groupware has to deal with inter-subjectivity.

information → communication → transaction → ???

Public information architectures will mutate into something completely different when they become private.

Desire is the fourth dimension. We get the user requirements, we don’t get the user desire requirements.

Time types: work, chore, pottering, quality.

People are subjective and very active in interacting with one another. People are creative rather than passive.

“All I know is how I feel.” Empathy is so important.

Think of URLs as a material rather than a structured address space.

Bluetooth meets feng shui. WAP meets zip codes. Beyond this there is stuff we don’t understand.

New kind of architectural zones, is my device working here? Rabbit phones?

Telcos are interesting, they sell bandwidth and time.

G. Debord, The Naked City.

Games mapped onto city space. Nokia Flirt Cat in Helsinki.

Poetic mapping of the city.

New interfaces become invisible and thus become interesting.

Conference Roundup. Jeff Wert (Wert & Co.)

Boundaries between the virtual and the real. Shift of focus from computers to networked media. Every day activities are rising to the foreground.