New book: Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction

Way over a year ago I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in a project initiated by my friend and former colleague Dr Linda Leung from the Institute for Interactive Multimedia, University of Technology, Sydney. Linda is the a Senior Lecturer, course coordinator and one of the founders of the Masters of Interactive Multimedia offered by the Institute and I used to teach with her in the subject Digital Information and Interaction Design. The subject

encourages students to critically engage with interdisciplinary approaches to information and interaction design

and to apply their own interpretation of these theories

to real-world design project in which students work with a client, with advice and input from industry professionals.

Typically the real world project was developed for iTV and that in itself required students to translate the principles of web design and information architecture to the development of interactive television (iTV) interfaces.

I was one of those industry professionals involved with teaching the subject (during the time I was also working at Information Architect for the Institute). One of the challenges Linda identified when teaching aspiring experience designers is (in her own words)…

the awkward rise of a discourse and discipline finding its feet and which still needs to grow with the support from its older cousins. Indeed, the necessity of turning to other design disciplines is acknowledged by Shedroff (2001:2 in Leung, 2008): simultaneously having no history (since it is a discipline only recently defined), and the longest history (since it is the culmination of many ancient disciplines), Experience Design has become newly recognised and named.’

So that is where I came in. I was one of ten industry professionals working in digital media who came from backgrounds diverse as education, feminism, fashion design, architecture, cultural theory, film-making who had moved into experience design. Linda recognised that these backgrounds had significant impact on the approach we as experience designers had towards the work we now did and provide a framework for understanding our discipline in a multidisciplinary way and so she set out to write a co-written book with the nine of us.

My own background is in fine art and although I don’t often make the connection consciously, my early training in fine art (I now recognise) has helped me along the way in understanding users particularly in relation to how they interact with the visual and aesthetic properties of digital media. It’s also helped me understand and work with visual designers. My contribution to the book can be found in chapter ten entitled Art and Articulation: The Finer Points of engaging the User in Abstract Concepts and Lateral Thinking. To give you a taste…

Fine art challenges its audience to engage with abstract concepts that may not be easily articulated and require introspective reflection. The art gallery offers a rich metaphor for conceptualising digital experiences: just as the gallery is the space where the spectator engages with works of art, digital worlds represent the interface between users and content. Furthermore, the art world creates experiences that enable uses to tackle challenging content, and elevates content to the level of the sacred. This can be applied in digital design to contexts where ideas take primacy. However, conceptualising an online environment as a gallery and its content as “art’ can mean contravening web usability principles which assume task-orientated, utilitarian and time-constrained online interactions.

This chapter examines the ways in which art is presented, and the design of experiences of art. The instruments which ‘frame’ an artwork and scaffold the experience for the spectator are discussed in relation to how such techniques can be translated for digital contexts.

I’m excited to announce that tonight Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction (Edited by Linda Leung) is being launched by Dr Elaine Lally, Senior Research Fellow and Assistant Director Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney and  is available from Intellect Books and Amazon.

It’s been an amazingly insightful experience for me to work with Linda and gain some knowledge into what it takes to turn an idea into a book. I have utmost respect for her determination and academic resilience to the writing, editing and review process and thank her immensely for the opportunity it has given me. It’s exciting also that the book will be utilised as the set text for two subjects: Digital Information and Interaction design and Digital Sound and the Moving Image in the Graduate programs for Interactive Multimedia at UTS. I’m dying to read all the chapters as collection and ponder the mulit-disciplinary realm of our practice myself. If you are reading this an happen to go on to the read the book I’d love to know what you think, maybe post a comment here on our blog. In the meantime I’ll leave you with Linda’s summary from the back of the jacket.

Digital Experience Design chronicles the diverse histories and perspectives of people working in the dot.com world, with contributors from a wide range of different backgrounds offering autobiographical accounts of their careers in the digital experience design and interactive media industry. This is a book of ideas about digital experience design expressed through the voices of practitioners and seen through the lenses of the disciplines in which they originally trained. From the perspective of older disciplines such as education, fine art, and cinema, this volume investigates how dot.com practitioners balance the ’science’ of usability with the ‘art’ of experience design and  the more abstract, emotional and atmospheric elements of users’ digital interactions. Digital Experience Design seeks to borrow from alternative fields that have richer traditions and longer histories in experience design to assist current online designers and practitioners. Covering  a range of forms of digital experience design, be it computer games, DVDs, touchscreen kiosks or mobile phones , this edited volume is a valuable resource for industry practitioners and students and teachers of interactive media.

Steve “Doc” Baty,  contributor to many of the comments threads on this blog, has written an interesting article on how he went about the process of analysis for a large intranet project that he has been working on. It’s a good read because it makes concrete a lot of the processes that we go through when we are analysing any data and transforming it into information.

He asks an interesting question at the end of his article, is “reflection” part of the process of analysis. From my perspective I’d say that for a lot of the in depth research we do at News Digital Media, involves a fair amount of reflection. Specifically reflexivity, understanding how your perceptions affect what you are seeing and how that subsequently reflects on what your analysis tells you.

Being more reflexive allows you to unearth and be aware of a range of assumptions that you are making when you are analysing. Ultimatley this give you further opportunities to try and examine your data from different perspectives (using a different set of assumptions).

Interesting post by Bruce Tognazzini about whether Apple’s software product design ethos is too simplistic.

Now (confession time) not being an Apple aficionado I can’t really pass comment, however his general points seem quite valid. One of the founding principles of Interaction Design is to create solutions that are eminently understandable by the novice, but grow as the user become more competent then expert.

So, we aim to make the initial state as simple and as closely aligned to the user’s mental model as possible. Simplicity does not mean lack of functionality (which I think could be the issue with Apple), it means a fast initial learning curve and consideration of the number of concepts a user needs to understand.

However, the product should have a built in path to higher proficiency, facilitating enhanced functionality, high speed interaction and minimal application feedback as the user requires it.

Tognazzini seems to be implying that Apple software products are well suited to ‘Leading the novice’ but fall short on ‘empowering the expert’ . Certainly, in the past, Apple have not really carried out much in the way of design research. Could this be at the heart of some of these issues?

Do any of you Apple users out there think Tog’s argument is justified?

Mark Pollard makes some excellent observations about the design of Sydney’s Ikea store, and their use of the Gruen Transfer:

The Gruen Transfer is a theory that contemplates how to manipulate people into purchase through disorientation. It’s the sort of stuff that casinos do (no clocks, no natural light, maze-like table layout, patterned carpet, etc). Shopping malls and supermarkets too - with their aisles, queues, ambient music, scents, lighting, use of colour.

What’s interesting about this is that we all know what they’re trying to do but still we deliver ourselves unto them. Why?

…I thought I’d share a few thoughts about how [Ikea] game you because they’re pretty good at it

Mark’s main points are:

1. Scarcity that sucks you in
2. One escalator in - there’s no escape!
3. Start in the lounge room
4. Activity I ought to be doing, right?
5. A flow that blocks then opens
6. Social zones to build affinity
7. Crowds make you act funny
8. The Great Hall of Panic

Can focus groups be useful for design research? That is a question I hear a lot (be it in my own head or from actual other people).

A discussion along these lines has played out recently on the AnthroDesign mailing list. I’ve captured the gist of the discussion here. Bridget kicked off with:

…a client wants to conduct focus groups to get people’s reactions to different web sites and web functionality. There will be 8-10 people in the room and the web site projected with the moderator driving. Has anyone had experience conducting a group like this? Are there any tips into making this as successful a session as it can be? I’ve typically conducted usability sessions or concept testing one-on-one.What kind of tasks and questions have built into the discussion guide?

The very smart Steve Portigal replied with (emphasis added by me):

One thing that we find helps us when given these constraints is an individual workbook. We make ‘em with really big text and activities like a Likert scale etc. And at every point of evaluation, have people do the workbook FIRST independently and then discuss it. Then you have an artifact afterwards you can collect. We try to do exercises to help move people along to a meaningful place of evaluation from just “hey you are sitting in a room and here’s something new and do you like it?” to something closer to a realistic personal evaluation. We might try to get people to do something like “build” what they want instead of evaluating the thing we put in front of them. Or we might do an exercise - be it theatrical or other - to help move the group into a bit more relevant context (i.e., break into two groups and one group is the IT department and the other group is managers who then have to present to each other why this is or isn’t a good idea).

I will note that every time we come up with a really interesting and potentially most effective use of the format, it seems like we get shut down by our clients who have engaged us to use this format because they want something safe and familiar, methodologically, and if you spend five minutes building up a role play activity in order to get more context from their evaluation, that means there’s five minutes less to cram full of questions about something else that’s hard to answer in a focus group room.

Although I’ve not actually used this myself, I really like this technique. Preetham has a similar suggestion:

Want to echo Steve’s comment about workbooks where participants give individual feedback. They are extremely helpful to negate the effects of one or two outspoken individuals.

We have had very good success sending a homework workbook that makes people immerse themselves in the context of use. This also allows them to come into the session with a point of view; makes their feedback so much more valuable and actionable. The cost to make one and send it before hand is negligible when compared to output…

There’s a bit of research coming up where the USiT team might be able to employ this technique. Hopefully we can blog about it afterwards.

Care to share your own thoughts or experiences on this technique?

Update: some more useful stuff from AnthroDesign…from Christina:

…One thing I did that worked very well and was very simple was to have blind votes about each design, with each respondent quickly jotting down one MAIN reason for their vote (Repondents’ comments included, “clean design,” “no contact information,” “Not enough info” etc.). I then collected each vote and discussed with the group why they voted how they did (the votes for respondents were not revealed to other respondents).

This helped to not only get something solid for the client in terms of “yes/no” feedback, but also helped to mitigate for the hated “alpha respondent” influencing the meek during groups. It also served as a cross-check to compare the private vote against the public discussion, and allowed everyone to have an equal voice in this area…

Nancy suggests:

This is a situation where I promote the use of design games, to get the players to interact with artifacts and with one another. People are unlikely to tell you anything unexpected in a presentation format. Plus all the critiques of focus groups as a method are likely to be demonstrated, as you’ve obviously anticipated.

In a similar situation (e.g. getting feedback from existing customers to several candidates for a new visual symbol set), we gathered people for “focus groups” and provided each draft symbol set to a different small team, asking them to mark up a webpage with the symbols corresponding to the meaning distinctions intended. Then the small teams presented to one another and commented on what they preferred about their own solution versus another team’s solution (layout, text+symbol vs text alone, size, color, shape, etc.). We got some striking responses, including where a small team was not satisfied with the symbols we provided and they created distinctions on the spot to communicate the meanings we’d requested. Their solution matched one of the other candidate sets of symbols (though of course less polished) which provided additional support for that one. And the client stakeholders were in the room to watch and listen, as observers, during the event.

The UX book club was pretty interesting last night. This idea popped into my head when Penny Hagen started discussing the fact that “great designers” have an inherent awareness and observational skills so they were really always doing user research. This discussing got me thinking, if there were different levels of fidelity in customer research much as there are in sketching and design deliverables.

What’s the relationship between having a sketchy idea of customers, needs, behaviors and wants and the freedom to design. My first thoughts are that the less you know about your customers the more freedom you feel you have to design whatever you want. However, I guess the risks of designing something that is completely wrong or not fit for purpose is proportionality higher.

Don’t get me wrong (those who know me), I still think that the more you know about customers and their context the better your designs will be and the more opportunity you will have to see the whitespaces and unmet needs. But, to what extent does knowing more constrain exploration outside of the context of use, and is that exploration at all useful?

I came across the idea of Rattle’s design Monday’s (via design with intent) just this morning. It strikes me as an interesting way of spending a few hours of team time each week thinking on how to improve customer experience. I particularly like the  focus on designing things that lie outside rattle’s normal design experience.

The videos are pretty interesting and as always it’s always great to watch how different people evolve their thinking and practice design. Can’t wait for number 3.

I thought I’d post this today because the sketch designs they have come up with for the interactions reminded me about the UX bookclub that’s being held in our offices tonight.