Category Archives: Research

Facebook gets groups, when will twitter?

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It wasn’t part of the new facebook, but recently facebook enabled you to group your friends into different lists.  This is a natural part of someone with a growing list of friends that they may want to keep track of.

Now I don’t even have that many people I follow on twitter just 150 (nice round number, shame to have to add more) but still I wouldn’t mind being able to sort them, and in theory I may want to just message some of them about some events, say some local stuff that is happening here in Bloomington.

This is a natural progression and something that users are expecting, but how does one implement this given the complete fragmentation of the user experience given the tremendous number of clients that have sprung up around the great open API that Twitter has supported from Day 1? This presents a very different set of problems than a more closed network.  I suppose though that in the larger scheme of things as featuers are added to the service and API that because of the huge numer of developers and clients that good uses will catch on quickly as they have in the past.

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Usability Challenge 2008 Solution

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It’s true, today is the Usability Challenge 2008.  I have chosen this page:

Higher Education Resources

This is part of an ongoing project I am working on with the Lumina Foundation for education.  This page is a new way of visualizing and finding a large amount of information.

Lumina has amassed a large amount of publications over the last several years that all are related to their mission which is helping people achieve their potential though education.  People who work in this area directly with youth and adults who want to go back to college are called college access professionals, and my hat is off to these hard working people.  Of course there are plenty of researchers who also work in this are, usually in education departments.  I have met many in both groups.  What all these people including Lumina’s staff members rely on is high quality resources like the ones that have been gathered, but how does one search through these?

Instead of search all of the resources have been tagged (with multiple tags for each item, usually including the year of publication).  These tags have been presented in a tag cloud, where larger text means more things with that tag.  The really new thing is that if you click on one item, it shows you how many things are in that tag, and you may keep on clicking on tags to narrow your results.  The total number is shown at the top on view results tab.  When you are ready you can click on that tab and see all the items.  It is a very cool way of browsing, and the reaction of people once they understand how to use it is very positive.  The problem here is that it is a new convention, with very few affordances.  There is a “view demo” but most users don’t see it, and many users often have the volume down on their computer even when the video comes up.

The solution I am proposing for this particular page is a short lightbox popup that shows the user to click on a tag, then a second and then click view results, showing it graphically, textually and then quickly fading to a point on the screen with a question mark on it.  Clicking on the question mark will replay it slower and have the option for sound as well as givign a link for an even lengthier explanation (which would be around the length of the current demo).

It will be important to use cookies so that once a user has successfully clicked on the view results tab the lightboxed pop-up will no longer show, and that the whole strategy be evaluated regularly to see if it can be improved and when people understand it well enough we can eliminate the lightbox, but keep a pulsing question mark or something like that.

I am also emailing the results of this to Lumina so that it can be implemented. Usability Challenge 2008 is in the can.

Designing for experience vs experience design

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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.

Can all these things be design?

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I am part-way through Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experience, and I’ve read part of the Experience Economy, and of course my course last year on Experience Design.  Add to that the UK’s Design Council finding that businesses that use design thinking and methods are more successful than their counterparts.  Of course I am totally fascinated by what is happening with NextD, and using design to inquire and innovate.

Certainly F@astCompany and BusinessWeek have both picked up on the idea of design, but I’m surprised that this isn’t more widely talked about.

Now add to the mix some of the papers that have come out of the HCI community of practice about research through design and I start wonder. It seems like design is being used in all kinds of disparate contexts, so disparate I wonder if there is any unifying thread to what is being called design?

I of course turn to Nelson & Stolterman‘s The Design Way for answers.  They want the book to explain what design is, to instill design culture and design thinking, and I hope to find at least a preliminary answer to my question in this rereading of the question.

If I can answer more simply what design is in all these contexts, I would like to answer the question that has been riddling me for months now: what is the philosophical basis of design (if indeed it has one)? What can research by design rightly say?

All this come back to my original start point, how does design methodology and thinking really impact business? What is it that moves forward like so many think it does?  I think it has something to do with what design is, and where it comes from theoretically.

Capstone: coming soon

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I am amazed at how much my research interests have changed over the course of the last year. I was dead set on serious games as the area of my research. I wanted to study them and design them, understand the philosophy behind them, and create and test design principles of them. I guess though, in some ways they have not changed that much, what I am still interested in is critical thinking about technology, and its design.

I am interested not just in the technologies themselves, but how people use them, where they use them, and what the experience of using them means to those people. We could talk about it in terms of the User Experience (UX) of technology.

So I’m moving forward with my capstone on the UX of so-called casual games.

Where will I go from there? I don’t know, but I need to write a thesis proposal for applications to PhD programs in Europe, and I’m torn on which direction to head. I still have energy around writing a philosophical perspective on the community of practice that centers around SIGCHI, but have not as of yet found a supervisor for such research, let alone open positions. So the search goes on.