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Designing for experience vs experience design

July 17th, 2008, posted in Conferences, Design, Internal Stuff, Philosophy of Technology, User Experience

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.

Designing experiences for the less than affluent

July 5th, 2008, posted in Design, User Experience

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.

Can all these things be design?

July 1st, 2008, posted in Design, HCI, Philosophy of Technology, User Experience

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

June 14th, 2008, posted in Research, User Experience

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.

Usability in the age of UX (Part 2)

May 26th, 2008, posted in Usability, User Experience

I know it’s been over 2 months since I started part one in this series, but my life has been very busy, but I’ve had many opportunities to think about this and other issues at CHI2008 and in my work.

I’ve been doing some consulting and usability work for medium-sized organization. Part of that work has included some usability work, and I have tried desperately to incorporate some UX ideas and methodologies as well, with very limited success.

What seems to be the theme in all that I do is that usability ends up being post design phase work, and UX MUST be part of the design phase, preferably in the earliest conceptual phases in order for it to really work. As an outside consultant or evaluator it is almost impossible to implement any meaningful UX ideas or methodology no matter what phase of the work you are brought into if the organization is not open to it and/or does not understand the power of it.

Almost everyone has a vague idea of what usability is, and it is generally thought to be positive, although there are a lot of misconceptions about it. It is easy enough to run usability tests at all phases of design and implementation and have significant ROI on it in terms of improvement of the product, bottom line (if applicable), and client satisfaction.

So what is usability in the age of UX? I guess the easy answer for me is that it is that usability is part of 2nd wave HCI, and UX is part of 3rd wave HCI. Those of us working in 3rd wave cannot forget about 2nd wave ideas and methodology, as they are vital, but the promise of 3rd wave is that there is so much more beyond it.

I’ll post more on being a Luddit later (from part 1).

Designing for Experience