Designing for Experience

On August 1 2008 a fun event is happening, the Usability Challenge.  In order to participate all one must do is identify a usability challenge, design a solution and share it with someone who can implement it.  I will in fact be participating as I have several uability problems I am working on for clients and they can and will implement them.

This is a call out to all the other usability people to take on the challenge and make the world more usable.

It’s official.  Apple has sold more macs than ever before in their history, and is making an incredible amount of money doing so.  (But yes they are still evil)

Why?

I believe there are three reasons for this: Macs are beautiful, and there is no reason to choose anymore, and the total experience.

Beautiful

There is a portion of the population who will never care if the things they use or own are beautiful, but for the rest of us, we are tempted by macs, ipods, and now iphones.  I unwrapped my macbook air in front of my mother-in-law and she said “It’s beautiful…. can you say that about a computer?”  YES you can.  The way it looks when you actually use it is beautiful as well.  The backgrounds, the screensavers that ship with it are amazing to look at.  And of course since Apple sells both the hardware and the software there is a tight integration and optimization that happens, making the total package fit together seemlessly and work easily.

No Need to Choose

Yup, with whatever flavor of virtualization your prefer, VMWare, Paralells, or even bootcamp, you still get to have all your Windows apps, should you need or want to.  Of course there is MSOffice for the Mac, so really the only thing that people MUST have windows for these days is almost always a niche program, something their work requires, or something that is just indispensable.

Total Experience

From the amazing sense of place that Apple stores have, to the packaging of the equipment, to the thought that goes into details.  Of course they will charge you for it, both in the premium of the price (although arguable MacPro is dollar for dollar worth it in terms of processing power) and for the necessity of purchasing MobileMe to really enjoy the complete experiece.  Apple understands that the average purchaser of their products is using more than one computer, and has a handheld device or three.  We have an increasing amount of digital stuff that is highly valuable (not just emotionally, but financially as well).  The ability to get at your stuff anywhere, back it up, keep it safe etc will only become more important, and MobileMe is an attempt (no word yet on whether it is truly) to help us do just that.

While I have no idea if Apple has hired ethnographic researchers to help them produce some of these things or not, it is clear they have some understanding of what many of the privileged ones (me being among them of course) want and think we need.

I recently got a nice little email from someone who said they liked the title of the blog.  I want to make sure and blog a few times a week, if not more, so I’m using that as my blogging fodder.

The title of the blog is designing for experience, and I often used to talk about being an experience designer, naively thinking that I could, in fact, design an experience and then a person would in fact have the experience I designed. Then the cognitive dissonance started to come… what about when you have an excellently crafted experience, like say Disney World, and people fail to have the experience that was designed.  I know my wife didn’t exactly love it.  What about the person who’s brother is in the hospital thousands of miles away, but yet they aren’t going home until tomorrow, will they have the same experience as the person without such worries?  What about the person who has never seen a disney movie and then arrives to the wonderful world of Disney?

The last example is unlikely in today’s world admittedly, but still the fundamental issue stands: as designers we cannot control someone’s felt experience.  The notion of experience involves both a person’s external surroundings as well as internal states of all kinds.  McCarthy & Wright talk about the “Threads of Experience” they are the aesthetic, the emotional, the spatio-temporal, and the compositional, and these are but the threads they chose to pick out and explain.  Felt, or lived experience is something that is ultimately constructed by the self.  I freely acknowledge that we socially construct many different aspects of our lives and even our self concepts, but in the end our experience is uniquely our own and dependent on our previous experiences.

All these thoughts ultimately gelled and came together while at CHI this year and was at the SIG on towards a shared definition of user experience.  Throughout the discussion this idea had been developing in my mind.  Yes it’s rather elementary after you lay it out, but before then I hadn’t known it. I finally understood why  Ian McClelland of Phillips Design calls himself an experience architect, not an experience designer.  I was speaking with him after the session and asked him exactly that question, and he looked at me as if I was a little daft. Of course that’s why his title is what it is, because he recognizes that the locus of control is not with him, but rather the person who has the experience.  We construct something that is then to be experienced by someone else (or by ourselves in a different role).

So as a designer I am here to say that while I strive to design for experiences that will inform, transform, delight, and even amuse people, I recognize that each individual will have their own experience with what is designed, and that experience is.  It is reminiscent of Kant’s categorical imperative, not treating other as merely a means to an end, but rather being a member of a kingdom of ends (to paraphrase it as I remember it).

In conclusion I design for experience, a holistic, iterative, people-centered approach where I recognize that ultimately each what people do with what is designed is up to them.  Different uses will emerge, and ultimately what I help co-create in this world is not mine, and never will be.

Sometimes I think that I don’t need to write posts like this because it is an essential part of what I do something I take for granted, but then I’m reminded that not everyone does what I do.

Some people talk about human-centered design, that is what I practice. It is only through a deep understanding of individuals and their needs that we can best design for them.

What does this look like in practice? It means I use real people at all stages of design and use the next best thing (which of course pales in comparison), personas, as well.

How do I involve people, i.e. users or potential users, in the design process?  I take prototypes and put them in front of a person or a group.  What we do from there depends on what stage of the process we are in, and what we are trying to accomplish.  We may just so a semi-structured interview, we talk about aesthetics, emotional response, how this would fit into what they already use, how they would make it better etc.  We may do some usability testing, giving them tasks to accomplish and timing them and seeing where things go well and where things break down.

What is a persona? A persona is a constructed composite of possible or present users.  When I use them I give that person a picture, a name, an age and a backstory. Depending on what is being designed I use 1-3 personas.  Throughout the design or evaluation process, I always ask myself will this work for Miguel or Laura?

I think that for other designers, this is just a “duh” post, but for others who do not really understand what it is I do, this will be helpful.

Questions? Comments? Talk back below.

I finally got Pine & Gilmore’s newer book, Authenticity, which motivated me to actually finish reading their other book, The Experience Economy. I really enjoy the straightforward way they present their material in the Experience Economy. They make the business case VERY clear, people are simply willing to pay more, a lot more for experiences than goods or services. They seem to have some good research to back up their numbers, and honestly my experience says it’s true, people are willing to pay more for experiences.

The first thing that I want to point out is that almost all the examples in the book, Disney, themed restaurants like Rainforest Cafe and others are not exactly cheap places to go to. For many middle-class Americans these kinds of experiences are not something that happens often, for the working class and the working poor, they are but dreams, or one-in-a-lifetime kind of events. Yet the authors continually push their business case, you can charge more for your experiences, they advocate again and again that businesses charge admission (perhaps not much, but something) to even come in, let alone shop or eat or what have you.

The question I have is: what about designing great experiences for the middle and working class? Is there no room for that? Also what do Pine & Gilmore think about the business that must exist to sell those commodities, good, and services? Should they all be sensorialized, and made into experiences?

I guess what I’m saying is that I would love to see a really great experience that doesn’t charge a lot. Is that even economically feasible the way Pine & Gilmore imagine it? I haven’t finished the book yet, but I’ll post again as I continue along.