Category Archives: User Experience

Designing experiences for the less than affluent

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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?

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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.

Usability in the age of UX (Part 2)

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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).

Usability studies on a book?! YES! from UXmatters

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 From UXMatters

This is an interview from a new publisher who is printing books in the UX and Usability area.  They conducted a Usability study on a book, yes a printed book.  It just goes to show what you think you know about how people use and own things is not usually true.  User studies of all kinds will give you valuable data on all these kinds of things.  Does anyone think Amazon did this with the Kindle? Some maybe, clearly not a lot.