While last week’s installment showed examples of designers using video as a tool for prototyping new products and services, this installment will begin to look at the way designers are using video to tell stories. The examples below will show designers using the most basic video production tools with a little creativity to create compelling scenarios. We will also look at how larger companies are using professionally made video to tell stories about their own concepts.

Aurora

Aurora is a concept video created by Adaptive Path for Mozilla Labs that sets out to “define a plausible vision of how technology, the browser, and the Web might evolve inthe future by depicting that experience in a variety of real-world contexts.” This video succeeds at both dazzling you with new interface concepts and giving you believable scenarios about how people will actually use it. While the detailed interfaces and the well thought out storytelling give it a more professional feel than any of the video prototypes we saw, the production is still low budget and not beyond the skills or tools of most digital designers.

Nokia Morph

While the Aurora concept video focuses more on context than it does on glossy production, many go the route of this Nokia video. They place a large emphasis on technology and product features but are thin on storytelling and context. They also spend a lot of money and effort ensuring the final video (or animation in this case) is of superior quality. In Nokia Morph, we see a super advanced mobile device built with nanotechnology, but the best thing it can do is…. clean itself?

Participatory Sensing

This video was created by the Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS), a group very much focused on technology, but they do an excellent job exploring the benefits of such technology by using video as a storytelling tool. Admittedly, the opening dialogue and the voiceover throughout give the whole thing a sort of infomercial vibe.

Apple Knowledge Navigator

Knowledge Navigator by Apple is a classic and probably has the highest production quality of all the videos we have seen so far. It’s great to see older examples like this because they make you consider what is the point of these videos… are they discussions points for the here and now? Attempts to predict the future? Marketing gimmicks? Should they be like classic movies that tell universal stories or are they destined to become outdated and irrelevant?

GreenHouse CPH

Green House CPH, another student project at CIID, is an example of how designers can exploit different filmmaking techniques. Because this video has to be done fast, had to tell a story, and had to demonstrate a service with all its’ touch points, the students decided to do it documentary style and they found several benefits for doing it this way. They could be forgiven for having a video that was technically rough around the edges (shaky camera, lots of cuts, etc.) because that’s how documentaries often are. And since since the designers themselves were acting in their own video, it was easy to stand in front of a camera and explain how it works. Finally, by setting it in the future when they service had already been launched, they could demonstrate how the service works in a more believable context. In the end, they presented it as a “mock user-research study” which made sense to their audience of designers.

In 2009 we are in the midst of an interesting era for data visualization, particularly as it becomes coupled with the social web. Increasing processing speed, bandwidth and storage capacity are making it relatively simple to render and access visual representations of data. Developers have released libraries of code so we can easily create our own visualizations; and access to all kinds of data is becoming incredibly standardized, particularly through the use of APIs. So as visualization becomes much more straightforward to integrate into online environments, it makes sense to rethink how it can best be used in this setting.

You will have possibly already come across social networks about visualizations if you’ve ever used IBM’s Many Eyes or Swivel. Now is a great time to expand on the work of these pioneers in the field, considering that there is a great need for data visualization as a way of addressing the problems of information overload and the technology to support it is now falling into place.

Support storytelling

After some extensive research into the area, our take on visualization within a social space is that it should support a shared storytelling process around a data set. By calling it a shared storytelling process, we mean that the process of data visualization starts with an individual with an idea (or intent to tell a story) and ends with a community who share the story and adapt it. An individual who wants to tell a story needs to know how to do it. But then they need to be able to tell the community about it in a way which lets everyone understand what is going on. Communities like to be able to pass stories around to be able to entertain and educate, but without forgetting what the story was originally about.

…our take on visualization within a social space is that it should support a shared storytelling process around a data set.

visualization

This shared storytelling process can be supported by designing an appropriate web-based interface. In this article we’ll be talking about some ‘big picture’ ideas that have become design implications in our process of conceptualizing this interface. In subsequent articles we’ll be delving into these ideas in more detail and presenting excerpts from the interaction design patterns we have collected to construct the experience of using visualization within a social environment.

Rather than a medium for storytelling, visualization has traditionally been a tool for the analysis of data, and the aforementioned Many Eyes and Swivel have extended its use to the social web in different ways: Many Eyes has focused its attention on supporting the analysis of data through the visualization in a collaborative environment. The site achieves this by using an interface that supports transforming the data to change the look of the visualization, annotation that keeps to the style being used and the ability to save any view being worked on and add a comment to it.

Rather than a medium for storytelling, data visualization has traditionally been a tool for the analysis of data

bringing it to life with Flickr photos

Swivel takes a different tact and prioritizes the idea of using visual communication to express the meaning of the data. It achieves this by using the assigned title of the data set to query Flickr and this produces a set of images that should visually define what the data set is about. This potentially helps to create a wider understanding of what the data is, and how it might interest people within the Swivel community who are looking to contribute. But Swivel doesn’t support much community based analysis of data. Visualizations are presented in a very standard manner (using bar charts, pie charts and scatter plots) and can be commented on but not annotated or manipulated.

Support an holistic process

What we’re looking to do is extend some of the functionality of these sites to support a more holistic process that better supports social activities like collective intelligence and sensemaking as a visualisation is created and reiterated.  We’ve conceptualised this as a three stage process that begins with creation, extends to interpretation and ends with capturing and reintegrating these interpretations back into the conversation.

• The creation process is an individual process;
• Interpretation is one that belongs to the community;
• Capturing saves the process for posterity and allows it to iterate.

For now we’re going to talk about the theory of object centered sociality and how it holds these three different processes together. In subsequent articles we’ll talk more about the importance of the individual processes and how interaction designers can use them when they want to get the most out visualization in a social web setting.

The basis of capturing this shared storytelling experience through visualization is creating an object-centered social network in a similar style to Flickr, where interactions occur around the photos that users share (as opposed to an ego-centric one such as Twitter where users ‘follow’ other users and receive their updates) that enables it. To do this the visualization needs to become a social object within the network. This essentially means that the interface elements used to represent a visualization will afford discussion, or contain things for people to talk about. We can create a visualization as a social object by giving it an identity and making it interactive. We’ll talk about why identity is important in a moment, and come back to interactivity after that.

The basis of capturing this shared storytelling experience through visualization is creating an object that affords discussion

Social begins

Before identity comes into play, the visualisation needs to be created. This is more imperative within a social network because the creator of the visualization needs to understand their own data, and other people need to understand it as well. So we need to understand how data is best visualised. This can be difficult to understand at the best of times, but focusing on the communication goals and intended audience is often the best way to start. This prevents users from needing intricate knowledge of various visualization techniques such as the different properties of a box plot and a scattergraph. Foregrounding these aspects of the process we refer to as MAPPING in the diagram above helps people to focus on the answer they are seeking from the data rather than being bogged down in the process of presenting the visualization correctly.  Once this is achieved then social processes around the visualisation can begin.

But objects can’t exist on their own within the social network and need to have identities built around them. Identity of an object can be implemented just like identity of a person within an ego-centred social network. You can see in the image above that the visualisation on Swivel has an image, a source, categories and it could have tags. These all work together to provide an sense of identity and give people within the social network some chance of being able to work out what the visualisation is about. Along with identity comes reputation and history. As different users interact with the visualisation and make contributions to it, its identity remains unchanged. Adding an avatar provides visual clues about the identity of the visualisation that may not be communicated through the text associated with it.

Back to interactivity

Now we come back to interactivity. In order for social processes within the network to have any real value, then the visualisation should be one that can be manipulated. This allows for further insights to be drawn out of the data that may have been missed when the original user chose to visualise it. So it is not enough to be able to leave comments on the visualisation, which is the standard way that content is treated within most social networks. Users need to be able to tweak a visualization, from switching axes on a line graph, to filtering or bringing in new data, or even changing the type of visualization used.

Capture the process

This process also needs to be captured. Users should be able to highlight parts of the visualization that represent interesting insights into the underlying data set. They should then be able to store these as an attachment on the original visualization that doesn’t in any way detract from what the original visualization represented. In this way the shared storytelling process we talked about earlier is at play. If the visualization is the story, then as it is passed from person to person they choose to promote different parts of the story and neglect others.

Capture insights

Because the visualization has an identity, its original form is recognizable through this process and the subsequent retellings of it become versions of this original that make up a bigger narrative about the issue, or in this case the original data set. This process would probably occur without the interface in place to support it – everyone sees things differently, and everyone expresses the way they see things differently. But with an interface in place to support the processes of an object-centered social network, we can capture the insight that the storytelling process brings to visualization and store it as an artifact that creates greater knowledge about the original subject.

The power of data

Considering that sites like data.gov are launching soon, and technology guru Tim O’Reilly has been saying for a number of years that data will be the ‘Intel inside’ for the web operating system the amount of data that is available for people to manipulate is going to increase exponentially. Visualization has always been a good way of gaining insight into data, and creating a storytelling experience around it feeds into human needs to ask questions and tell stories. So for interaction designers, implementing this type of experience within the data-driven websites of the future has a number of benefits. One of these is that the particular website becomes more engaging for users, and drives take-up. Another that springs to mind is that by making this an interesting and engaging experience, much insight can be drawn out of the data which can be of benefit to the community (in a similar way to Wikipedia in its collation of vast amounts of information) and to the owners of the data, who may discover things about their data they’d never thought of before. So watch out for more articles from us in the future, as we go into further detail about how to implement this experience.

Background

In 2008 the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID) partnered with Deloitte Digital to research applications of data visualization, through the Loupe Project. Deloitte Digital was preparing its accounting firm in Australia for the introduction of XBRL (eXstensible Business Reporting Language) which would see a significant change in the way business reporting was conducted. Rather than sending multiple reports to different agencies, XBRL would produce one set of data that agencies could draw upon for their own purposes as needed. As part of this change, Deloitte has released an online accounting platform and aims to change the relationship between accountant and client to become an ongoing conversation online. This process needs visualization to make complex business data more easy to understand for the client, and an interface to make this process a better user experience. The Social Life of Visualization is one outcome of our research into this solution with Deloitte.

From now on we’ll be sharing with you some of the videos we’re collecting on Johnny TV. For this first time we would like to show you Don Norman’s lecture from the Stanford’s HCI Seminar lecture series. In it he talks about some of the things that he covers in his book, ‘The Design of Future Things’.

Norman talks about the fact that ‘intelligence’ is increasingly being built into our cars, our appliances, and many other things that we interact with. But he points out that this ‘intelligence’ is not very good at handling the unexpected. As designers, we try to anticipate every possible eventuality, but we can’t anticipate everything. The result is that the very behaviors that are designed to save us from ourselves lull us into a usually-true-but-sometimes-false sense of security. Things go wrong less often, but when they do, neither the system nor the user is prepared to handle it.

I greatly enjoyed this lecture and got a lot out of it. Norman is an entertaining speaker who illustrates his ideas with lots of compelling examples. He doesn’t offer any hard-and-fast rules for when automation should be used and when it should be avoided, and rightly so, in my opinion. These matters are far too complex for simple rules.

The most important thing I took away from the lecture was this: automation is great when it is self-contained (think Roomba). But when control is shared between the user and the system, we must be very careful, and think about appropriate levels of automation and feedback (as well as the apparent precision of the information that the system provides).

Johnny TV

This and many other UX videos are posted on Johnny TV. Should you come across a video that you think should be there, please contact us via mail or Tweet me @martinpolley.

Over the last years I have noticed that many books and articles talk about the usefulness (or not) of personas, delving a little into the actual production and design of the persona as well as defending it’s usage. Very few explicitly define some of the activities that occur within the design research phase. It was Jared Spool that mentioned the real value of personas being the actual process of engaging with users and developing empathy towards their circumstances and experience interacting with a product.1 The following article grew out of a conversation with Nathan Curtis of Eight Shapes (author of “Modular Web Design“) when I offered to contribute what I called a “Mood Map” to the Unify Documentation System. Let’s start.

Personas are to Persona Descriptions as Vacations are to Souvenir Picture Albums.

While people who didn’t go on the vacation can look through the album and think, “Boy, that must’ve been fun,” they’ll never get the full experience of what the actual vacation experience was. The album is just a remnant.
JM Spool, Personas are NOT a Document

The purpose of a Mood Map is to document and map the emotional states of a user [over time] so that it can guide the creation and communication of personas to stakeholders whilst also informing the design process itself. I’m not one for UX deliverables for their own sake, but this is one that carries a lot of weight with clients and also goes a ways towards offering ‘traceability’ for your personas.

This article will begin with a brief overview of design research, an overview of Mood Maps, when to use them, as well as when not. I will not address interpretive, phenomenological, or constructivist paradigms and how those may shape our views on design research or the particular tactics used to uncover user emotive states.

Design Ethnography

Design Ethnography is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target market in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand in the context of a complex dynamic ecosystem that borders on chaos. In addition, ethnographic research seeks to reveal insights into how the target market shares information about their problem space and potential solutions with their immediate social cohort.

Design ethnography takes the position than human behavior and the ways in which people construct and make meaning of their worlds and their lives are highly variable, locally specific as well as intersubjectively reflexive. One primary difference between ethnography and other methods of user research is that ethnography assumes that we must first discover what people actually do, the reasons they give for doing it, and just as importantly, how they feel while doing it, before we can assign to their actions and behaviors interpretations drawn from our own experiences.

Hassenzahl and Tractinsky, in User Experience – a Research Agenda state that “It has become obvious that the design for user experience needs to aim to satisfy human needs beyond the merely instrumental, and to focus on how to create positive experiences rather than just prevent usability problems.”2 In other words, the aim of experience design is not only to serve our practical needs and to help us reach practical goals, but also to give meaning and to contribute to the quality of our life.3

Besides taking into account the human needs, we must consider the affective and emotional aspects of the interaction, and the full nature of experience must be understood to capture the essence of user experience before we can undertake the task of designing a better, more emotionally positive experience.4

Findings from a design ethnography project will influence both near-term problem setting and experience design activities, as well as longer-term dynamic mediated social-systems development. During such study I seek to uncover pertinent insights about the target market’s experience enframing their goals, objectives, and perspectives as it directly relates to the client’s brand; and the role that these activities play with regards to interactions with their environment including context, family, friends, group, community and society.

Design Research & Mood Maps

By Design Research, I specifically mean in-situ interviews and observation sessions which are conducted to probe deeply into the lives, habits, and emotions of target consumers as it relates to a specific product or service. A cross-section of participants of a robust enough sample size must take part in the various activities to gain deeper understanding and to move beyond ‘design-by-anecdote;’ to elicit key joy and pain points that occur whilst these activities take place in context experiencing the brand in solving real life problems.

While there are a number of tactical activities a design researcher can engage in including interviews, journals, usability testing, focus groups, and task analysis (‘Doc’ Baty’s article in UX Matters is excellent: “User Research for Personas and Other Audience Models“) – one that is particularly good at gaining insight into the emotive aspects of a user’s experience is the Mood Map. It is important to remember that Mood Maps are an intermediate deliverable meant to provide meaningful insight for the creation of personas, not a final artifact. You may also choose to never show these to key stakeholders, but only include them in the appendix of a findings document after the research phase is done.

Another important point is that Mood Maps are best used for larger, more complicated user engagements or scenarios, not small directed tasks – logging into an application would not be an appropriate use of Mood Maps.

Phases and Emotions

The diagram above describes the emotional ups and downs identified by study participants as part of the design exercise conducted during in-home visits with participants. Note that the location of the study is less relevant than the importance of observing the participants in the most likely context in which they will engage in their experience with the brand’s product or service. During the exercise, participants are asked to name each of the phases they went through from framing their problem through exploration and finally (hopefully) problem solving, and to then assign a corresponding emotion to each phase.

The diagram represents an average of participant responses. The exercise tends to uncover some important variations based on a number of factors, including each participant’s individual personality, profile, as well as emotional relationship with the brand – or a competitor’s. These variations are described in the “participants’ emotions” section for each phase which the researcher is encouraged to heavily document, photograph, and take notes.

Cycle of Exploration

Exploration is not a linear state, but rather a cycle of activities such as “imagine,” “research,” or “try-on,” each with a particular cognitive posture (I encourage you to identify more, for instance “ask,” “validation seeking,” as potential social postures a user could engage in).

It is important to reflect upon each of the phases of the user engagement and attempt to identify the dominant activity. During a study of this type people instinctively begin to combat the uncertainty of indecision by considering the circumstances of their goal and limiting their options based on various contextual constraints – the term ‘satisficing‘ is used to describe this. If it is possible to have the participants verbalize their thought process, it will aid in providing you with a richer understanding of their emotional reaction to a particular phase. These verbalizations should be captured and presented with Mood Maps made for each participant, some of which may end up in the personas as guiding insights for design consideration.

In presenting the findings, it is important to tell a complete narrative based on an aggregation of the findings before delving into particular anecdotes about any specific participant. An aggregate view uncovers both the joyous as well as the frustrating aspects of the interactions, which may highlight unknown, or at the very least, un-discovered, weaknesses in the user experience which can be marked for further exploration.

Addendum

By way of my friend ‘Doc’ Baty, I stumbled upon a blog post by Bruce Timkin which shows another way to visualize the aggregated Mood Maps: an Experience Wheel, like the one he found at Lego. Although it is unclear what research, activities, or methods are used to arrive at the Experience Wheel it’s still an interesting way to visualize the total user experience in phases.

Resources

1. Chapman, J. Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and Empathy. Earthscan Ltd, UK, 2005.

2. Hassenzahl, M. and Tractinsky, N.. User Experience – a Research Agenda”. Behaviour and Information Technology 25, 2, 91-97, (2006).

3. Hassenzahl, M. and Roto, V. Being and doing: A perspective on User Experience and its measurement. Interfaces, 72, 10-12, (2007).

4. Desmet, P.M.A. Designing Emotions (PhD dissertation) Delft: Delft University of Technology, 2002.

• Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research
  By Mike Kuniavsky
• Design Research: Methods and Perspectives
  by Brenda Laurel (Editor), Peter Lunenfeld (Preface)
• Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research (Ethnographer’s Toolkit , Vol 1)
  by Margaret Diane LeCompte
• LEGO’s Building Block For Good Experiences
  post by Bruce Temkin

Pop some popcorn, recline in your favorite recliner and rest your laptop. In five articles I will share with you some of the more interesting user experience videos on the web. They represent the importance of video as a tool for any designer working with new behaviors, emerging technologies and complex systems that unfold over time. From low-res, techfree prototypes to science-fiction-like future scenarios, this collection of videos will survey the various ways that designers are using this linear medium to explore possible functions, experiences, contexts and values afforded by new technology driven products and services. And we begin with: prototyping.

Video Prototypes

Video prototypes are used for the same reasons any prototypes are – testing, evaluating, iterating, communicating, etc. But video is an especially useful tool for designers who have to quickly represent design concepts that often involve complex relationships or require a high level of technology. It’s fast, cheap, easy to share and allows lots of space for faking it.

The Economizer

The Economizer is a three part video scenario created by Cooper, a design consulting firm in the US. This series is a great example of low-fi prototyping with video. In fact, it’s not even video, it’s still frames with a voice over. You have to love the hand drawn interfaces.

KeyLess

At the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, one of the fist workshops the students take is on the subject of video prototyping. Over the course of a week, students had to represent a concept as a low fidelity, low resolution prototype and then represent the same concept as a high fidelity, high resolution prototype in an empathetic scenario. Each student was given the concept for a service called KeyLess which would replace lost keys anywhere in the city in under 30 minutes. You can watch all the videos here.

Sketch-a-move

Sketch-a-move is the concepts for a toy car by Anab Jain and Louise Klinker. While the concept for the car is technically feasible, this video prototype allowed the designers to answer the most important question – is it fun? – without having to worry about building a functional prototype. This prototype is a great example of how video opens up new possibilities for smoke-and-mirrors techniques. In this case, one can presume, someone behind the camera is controlling the cars with a remote control.

The RaMo System

The RaMo System is a network of portable devices for elderly homes. This video prototype, also made at CIID, explores the interface of these devices, how they work together, and how they work in the context of elderly homes. It even goes as far to explore how it can be a tool to involve family in the everyday lives of elderly people in the home. For a course about GUI, it was a great decision to use video and capture everything happening around the devices.

Next time: concepting

Through the designs we create, we have the ability to directly influence another person’s behavior. The ethical implications of this are important and not easily definable. I was interested in ethics before I ever considered becoming a designer, but the lessons I learned while studying philosophy impacts the way I view my designs. In nature, our goal is a good one. We strive to help others by improving the interactions that define their life. This drives us to create and innovate new ways of interacting with old concepts. The question remains, do we have the right to influence another person? Further, are there guiding principles we can follow that can keep us on the moral path? The answers to these questions rests on the shoulders of the whole community, not a single person or group.

History Lesson

Christopher Fahey’s blog post ‘Who Watches the Watchmen?‘ was the catalyst that lead me to exploring this topic. What struck me the most about Chris’ post was how the design of the watchclock dehumanized the role of the guard. It turned the guard into just a part of a system by requiring them to visit key locations during their patrol in a set, unchanging, order. Immanuel Kant wrote ‘it is always wrong to treat other human beings as mere phenomena, as objects of your own pleasure or pain. Rather, human beings must always be treated as of infinite worth…’, which speaks to the heart of this issue. It is up to us as designers to ensure that people don’t simply become actors of a system, but real people that have desires, needs, and goals. My response to Chris’ post started on my blog, and eventually moved on to the IxDA Discussion List.

Dangers of Puppet Masters

User Experience, and all of its various children, come from an age when programmers and engineers just built things. These manufactured interactions provided little meaning to end users and caused much pain and frustration. It’s easy as designers to fall into a similar trap of just designing for design sake. Software and hardware become more like art, being an expression of the designer rather than a tool for people. Only these pieces of art can lead people down undesirable paths they neither want or need. This is the real danger of being a Puppet Master.

Unavoidable

Cell phones today are measured by the level of interactivity, not by its ability to make phone calls.

The watchclock, which inspired this investigation, is a system that has direct influence on a person’s behavior. It was built to ensure that security guards were doing their job. What was missing from the design was a consideration for the behavioral need of the security guard to mix things up. The design of an interactive product is an exercise in evaluating current behavior, and putting something in place that supports that behavior or alters it in a more meaningful way.

But, how do we know if what we are designing is ‘good’? Regulations like the US Section 508, a set of policies that any U.S. government website must follow to accommodate web users with disabilities, provides some guidance for web designers. Policies like this have a direct influence on designing interactions for the web, and provide a guiding light for those not sure if they are doing the right thing in terms of accessibility. One unavoidable aspect of interactive products is the simple fact that people do interact with them. By focusing on all the possible good things an interactive product can be capable of, the chances of designing something ‘bad’ can easily be avoided.

Designer Point of View

Only a designer can go into great detail why machines like this are horrible.

Designers are gifted with a certain perspective of the world that can cause much frustration and wonderment. The average person doesn’t have the filters in place to see when they have been ignored by the product they are using. Occasionally, people can tell when something wasn’t designed, but they normally deal with the damages done physically, mentally, and socially. In an attempt to stop the pain, designers create interactions that look to discourage undesirable behavior and promote desirable behavior.

Using our unique perspective, we can learn a lot about what makes a group of people tick. The lessons we learn from them gives us insight into what types of interactions they are really looking for, and how their lives might be improved. Though people have a hard time knowing when they have been ignored by a company, there is instant recognition when they know their voice has been heard. You begin to hear statements like “I love this …” or “I will never use one of those old …. again.” Getting people engaged at this emotional level, and harboring trust between the business and the consumer is a powerful persuasion tool to break undiscovered territory.

Understanding the importance of choice is an attribute of being a great designer. In order to do ‘right’ by the people interacting with our work, they need to know what their choices are, and how those choices will impact them. Making an interaction a success means providing people with the choices for their situations. Providing transparency on what options are available, we allow a person to be free to make up their own mind. People don’t want their choices to be made for them, as this makes them feel powerless and dehumanized.

Influence

An argument can be made that Interaction Design should be called Influence Design. The risk with having lots of influence over an interaction though is it can easily lead to control. We may try to trick the user here and there, but in the end we have to leave the choice in their hands. In a good design, these choices are invisible to the user, but still easily understood. They are road signs we place as someone becomes engaged with the interaction. Clearly defined ‘Exit’ signs are key to giving people the freedom to interact, but not fall under the control of the user.

José Antonio Martínez-Salmerón of frog describes it best in his article ‘The Power of Persuasion’. “No matter how many choices a consumer is faced with, a product that’s relevant, safe, and personally fulfilling will always stand out.” The number of choices available to people are greater than ever today. The challenge is making those choices meaningful and relevant for their life. In the end, a person has to be free to go against what we have laid out for them, even if it means they will use a different product. We are not their keepers, but merely stewards that look to improve the human situation.

We are not their keepers, but merely stewards that look to improve the human situation.

In order to find some ethical guidance around the amount and type of influence designers have, we need only look to the Poka Yoke Principle. We attempt to steer people away from possible accidents, or damage, and lead them towards meaningful experiences. This is a great way to build trust in the people you serve, and trust is the best type of loyalty you can have with a customer because they know you are looking out for them. Having built up this trust, people are more inclined to abandon their bad behaviors, and take up new ones.

Conclusion

It appears that we have painted ourselves into a corner. Having direct control over another person’s behavior is wrong, as they did with the watchclock. But, we can’t help influencing a person’s behavior with the interactions we design. Reviews of the interactions we create should ensure that choices are not limited or completely taken out of the hands of people. Being a designer is a true calling, one which drives us to make the world a better place, a more user friendly place. We can’t become overprotective, but rather acknowledge the importance of someone making a mistake, or even completely failing. People learn from their failures, and if we are watching closely we can learn from them too. These lessons help us create and innovate to fix problems of yesterday, and possibly help expose the problems of tomorrow.

‘Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity’ is a book about creativity. It contains a collection of 40 tips on how to be creative. The book is an extension to the ‘How to be creative’ manifesto which the writer (Hugh MacLeod) published a few years ago, so a lot of content has already been available… but it’s still an inspiring book.

The way Hugh MacLeod describes creativity in his book is not in the sense of ‘talent’, but more in the sense of “how to do it”. The book assumes you already have what it takes to be creative (so if you don’t… you’re not going to learn it here). The 40 tips all revolve around getting into the mindset to create something which you believe is everything the world needs. You’ll read it in one evening and when you believe in this enlightening “holy shit” you’ll find a lot of inspiration and good thoughts.

Some advice

“Ignore Everybody” is the first, and perhaps the most important, piece of advice Hugh has to offer. When starting out on something new you, and only you, are responsible for getting things done. This also means taking responsibility for the idea that you’re trying to get out into this world. You need to trust your gut and not place too much value in what people are telling you what you should be doing.

“The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to tell you” – Hugh MacLeod

When starting out on something which has never been done before, the chances are that nobody will understand.

“Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships. That is why good ideas are always initially resisted” – Hugh MacLeod

Hugh reminds us to be on the lookout for “The Innovators Dilemma“.

One of his new tips is: “Savor obscurity while it lasts” the moment you make it. The moment you go from unknown schmuck to hot shit, the world will come knocking, demanding a piece of the action and there is no way to go back to obscurity. Once ‘fame’ happens you will have a whole lot of other responsibilities you have to deal with other then sustaining whatever you did to get you there in the first place. Responsibilities only slow you down when you’re trying to produce. Thats why a lot of famous people did their best work when they were relatively unknown.

Once you ‘make it’, your work is never the same.

The verdict

I liked it. Though the advice in the book is not exactly ‘new’, (his list on ‘How to be creative‘ has been around for some time now. The book is basically that list + 10 new insights.. but even so: the no-nonsense attitude and cartoons are great fun.

So why buy the book? Well I for one am a sucker for paper. It reads much better in a lazy chair in the sun then baggy eyed behind a screen. And if you’re new to MacLeod’s world then this will get you right into the good stuff. It’s also short, light, direct, funny and refreshingly practical.

A good read but nothing new.

Book details
Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
author: Hugh MacLeod
publisher: Portfolio, 2009
details: 176 pages, hardcover

Stop coming up with solutions. Put down your pen, mouse and sketchbook… step away from the computer, pick up your camera and go out on the street. There lies a world of insights and inspiration, just by observing and exploring.

Some time ago I came across a video I immediately fell in love with (although I don’t know where to find it anymore *sigh*). In the video people got the assignment to show how they would put the light on and off without touching it. This resulted in a very inspirational video where you saw what kinds of gestures people would use. What this video mainly proved to me was the power of observation. By giving people this open assignment you saw the many different solutions people came up with (blowing, waving, clapping, etc), but at the same time the overlap and whether or not the gesture looked natural.

Observing is a great way to easily gather data and insights. It’s a way to jump into the world of your target audience and try to understand them. And… it forces you away from immediately thinking in solutions.

In line with this I came across this video from Nokia, where they explore mobile gestures out on the street:

One of my heroes in the field of observing is Jan Chipchase, who works for Nokia. He travels around the world observing how people, society and mobile technology interact. His blog Future Perfect is an absolute tip.

This post is about social interaction design. I’ve been gestating around the concept of “frames” for the past couple weeks. Frames of meaning, frames of experience, and frames as a concept for a user-centric description of social interactions.

I like frames because they can accommodate our need for a visual metaphor, a temporal metaphor, and a metaphor for meaning. Metaphors are generally a bad idea in theory, in that they communicate (descriptively) but do not explain. But structural and visual metaphors, spatial metaphors, and value/utility metaphors don’t work for me (or for social interactions, IMHO).

• Concepts based on containers can lead us to think in and with boxes — good for presentation but inadequate to the actions that occur around them;
• Concepts based on place, space, and location can lead us to think in terms of structure and stability — good for a sense of design control but inadequate to the durations, episodes, and temporal experience of social interactions;
• Concepts based on structure, which can include containers as well as spaces, lead us to think architecturally — good for building and designing, but inadequate to the system dynamics of social media;
• Concepts based on value and utility can lead us to anticipate user needs and objectives — good for designing for success and usability but inadequate to the psychological dimensions of interactions, communication, and human relationships;
• Concepts based on writing, posting, and messaging can lead us to think in terms of communication — good for the medium’s shift from information to communication, but inadequate to the speech, performance, and social interaction dynamics of social media;
• Concepts based on conversation can lead us to think about the emerging flow- and talk-based trend away from pages and publishing to talk and relationships — but inadequate to the fragmentation and disaggregation of the “conversation” space.

I’m borrowing from Erving Goffman‘s Frame Analysis, a remarkable study of social encounters, and a work rich in concepts of social interactionism. Notably “keying” and “footing,” both of which cover the nuanced means by which we can reference social convention and indicate personal disposition and meaning to coordinate interactions.

Of course Goffman was a master of face to face interactions, and his observations and explanations hold for social media only to limited and clipped degree.

The challenge for social interaction design today, and my interest in the use of frames, is that it seems as if the conversational trend in social media may be running away from us. Namely, that both forms of online talk, and the proliferation of system messages and activity updates increasingly interconnected (think Facebook connect), have resulted two significantly (unintended) consequences.

1. The interconnectedness of separate social media sites, services, desinations, and applications increases the number of arbitrary connections. Arbitrariness is increased when two separate nodes are coupled, when a connection is established, a message distributed, fed, published (etc) to a new context. What was contextually relevant in its original context (eg favoriting a video on Youtube) is more arbitrary when it appears on Friendfeed. Connectedness may serve the Friendfeed account holder, or his/her Friendfeed followers also. But the message itself is more arbitrary, or its meaning as an action is more arbitrary in distributed contexts than it is in its original context (where favoriting videos serves to rank videos).
2. The proliferation of talk in social media, or shift from the page to flow, stream, and conversation, increases the ambiguity of communicative intent. Again, interconnectedness means that messages are viewed, fed, delivered, or otherwise included in a greater number of contexts. Facebook status updates in Seesmic, with the ability to comment from outside of Facebook. Aggregation of updates in Friendfeed, widget distribution of tweets, disaggregated listening on last.fm et al to blogs, Facebook, etc. The interconnectedness of communication platforms raises the degree of ambiguity in message and action intent: in what’s being said, why, to whom, and even about what.

• The arbitrariness of connection can create discovery and serendipity, but also confuse and destabilize the very practice of communication itself. Where does one comment back? Where else will a comment appear? What value is captured by which other site or service if I share, rate, digg, forward, retweet etc an action, a system message, or a user’s message?
• The ambiguity of intent can lead to a greater number of possible responses and reactions to an action, but increases the likelihood of misunderstanding, misinterpretation, our failure (from the perspective of communication).

Social media are social systems. Conceptually and theoretically, social systems have structure but also have actions and communication: thus a better model than architectures, places, utilities, and communication alone. Social media are reproduced constantly out of the information and communication they produce, and which they made available. In addition to making information visible and available, they permit actions that in turn create more communication and enable more actions. Some of these are system messages (user has done X, Y, or Z); some are human communication (status updates, tweets, comments, posts… ). Systems in other words report on their own use as well as facilitate use: and so they continue, ever producing and reproducing information and communication in the form of news that’s meaningful within the social system, actions which select information, and views of those actions which filter, sort, rank, and otherwise apply social evaluations.

As systems interconnect, sharing system messages and distributing user communications among one another, noise levels increase, connections increase, actions (possible and required) increase, and so on.

If social media become too interconnected and if they produce more activity and communication than each can filter/sort and allow users to manage, might they implode or collapse in on their own excess of activity and communication? This is strictly a system question — not a personal concern (yet).

And here’s where frames re-enter the picture. User centric design ought to be oriented to the framing of experience, and in social media particularly, common and shared frames of experience. Also common frames of reference, frames of communication, recognizable frames of action (games, rituals, pastimes etc), and temporal frames (routines and episodes).

Are we losing our frames? In terms of the user experience, is his or her experience running away from us? Can we no longer anticipate the user’s experience, due in part to the level of interconnectedness among social media? Can we no longer assess the user’s experience, due in part to the increased ambiguity surrounding his or her use of (our) applications and services? Can we no longer manage the user experience, insofar as there is now a high level of arbitrariness in the information selected, actions acted, communications created and sent, among users of social media?

If the user experience escapes us, if it is not possible to anticipate uses, to design and forward use cases, to define and order user interests, goals, and use benefits — what can we know of how social media will be used? Not knowing how they will be used, how can we anticipate consequences well enough to design for them?

This is where I am at the moment on this. Frames are still, I think, offer a strong conceptual “framework” for social interaction design. But it is possible that, as personas do more for the designer than they do incapturingtruths aboutthe user, frames will offer more to the designer than they will capture truths of social interactions.

There is one possible solution, but I can only suggest it for the moment. If workable, it strikes me it may change the design paradigm (conceptually at least). It’s a double accounting system. Akin and reminiscent of the double-entry book-keeping that revolutionized finance hundreds of years ago. I sense, and I’ve not yet worked this out, I sense that our action system is unilateral. One-sided. As communication is doubly contingent (two subjects, not one, thus two interpretations of meaning to be coordinated through inter-action), the correct framework for social interaction design probably needs to be a double accounting model. Action intended by user : action perceived and interpreted by user. One might then proceed with all design framing by accounting for user actions (by self) as well as views of user actions(by others). Each “side” has actions and an action system (grammar, language, etc). Or if one prefers, action : response.

I have to consider this further. System complexity may simply overwhelm the possibility of a durable design theoretical framework for social media. Or I may simply be lazy.

Finally… the results are in. After a few months the Mozilla Design Challenge Summer 09 has come to an end. A total of 128 concepts were send in, which we (Mozilla, IxDA and Johnny) judged on four different categories: innovation, execution, interaction and producible. Let’s see what concepts won.

The judging of the concepts was done in two steps. First the entire team of judges went through a selection of the concepts (33% per person). Everybody rated the concepts individually on the four different categories. After this the (+-) top 10 concepts of each category was picked out. Each judge had to rate them from 1 to 10, related to the category that the concept was in. This resulted in the winners below, best of their own category (eg: so the best producable isn’t necessarily very innovative). But I must say that there are more good concepts beside these winners, so you must definitely also check the honorable mentions on the Mozilla Labs Challenge site.

Best in class: innovation

TabViz by Liz Blankenship, Jakob Hilden & Kerry Kao

Best in Class: Execution

Collapsible Tab Groups by Martin Polley

Best in Class: Interaction

Wave Concept by Darby Thomas, Danielle Kanastab & Alex Mattice

Best in class: producible

Favitabs by by Grady Kelly

People’s choice award

Cubezilla by Grady Kelly