As an Interaction Designer, I’m perpetually impressed with the continual design success inherent in most video games. We are taught to know our users by understanding their goals, leveraging mental models, and taking ourselves out of the equation in order to design useful and appropriate interfaces. And although a user-centered design approach is invaluable, I can’t help but wonder how game designers just seem to nail it time and again for what are large and diverse audiences.

Now, I have to confess that I’m not a hard-core gamer. I dabble on occasion, but mostly prefer to watch others play, as well as keep abreast of the industry. What is clear to me, is that the experiences are immersive, the storylines compelling, and the business itself, well, huge! So, just what is it about the domain-formerly-known-as interactive entertainment that makes it so engaging?

First, Knowing What We’re Up Against

Let’s be honest, doing your taxes using software as a service or completing a registration form isn’t exactly as enjoyable as a Halo LAN Party or rocking out in Guitar Hero. Gaming has a clear advantage here. This focus on the act of gaming is also very different than using traditional software, where the completion of a task leads one closer to a desired outcome or goal. Software is really just a means to an end; nothing more than a tool for most.

The game play journey on the other hand, can be as important to the user as achieving their goal of completing the game. A good experience needs to be rooted in an emotional dialog with a good story. One could even argue that the interactive component introduces another dimension altogether, thereby perhaps even making it more emotional as compared to a passive experience like watching a film or reading a book.

The sheer amount of time users invest in playing is also a major difference. Gamers can spend tens of hours practicing and honing their skills. That said, it also means that early stages are especially important because users won’t continue playing unless the experience is perceived as worthwhile.

New Media Culture, Meet Everyone Else

In the last few years, gaming has become much more widespread, having made tremendous inroads into Mainstreamville. You’d be hard-pressed not to find a console as the living room entertainment hub and the incredible success of the Nintendo Wii has contributed greatly.

The generation that grew up playing early video games is now also leading the way in designing experiences and their backgrounds have unmistakably influenced their work in the way of incorporating traditional gaming mechanisms. The gap between previously sovereign digital platforms has indeed converged, and they are now inextricably intertwined.

What that means, is that everyday users are now bringing mental models from what used to be segregated digital arenas to the interfaces we design. As Interaction Designers, it is our responsibility to understand that, so as to then be able to imagine and create designs users can intuit more easily. (I’d even go so far as to state that embracing this convergence actually makes our jobs that much more interesting, but more on that later).

OK, so gaming is popular and some really smart folks have begun to take the field seriously. Why should we care and what does all this mean? Well, there are interactions we can leverage (a kind of gamesmanship, if you will) in our day-to-day design work. Although we’ll need to set aside some of the advantages discussed earlier, there are still general principles we can learn from and borrow.

Everyday users are now bringing mental models from what used to be segregated digital arenas to the interfaces we design. As Interaction Designers, it is our responsibility to understand that.

Useful Game Design Techniques

In assessing some of the research out there and coupling it with my own experience, I’ve tried to corral some of the themes that emerged. Here is a collection of nine techniques with examples of how they might be applied.

The Edge and Back: Taking users to the very edge of their perceived comfort zones can have amazing affects. (Actually, this technique applies in all walks of life, but I digress). Video games tend to get harder as a user makes progress, meaning they’re also always getting better.

This technique can arguably be interpreted as being similar to what’s known within the user experience field as Progressive Disclosure. Exposing users to increasingly complex or advanced features as they gain familiarity with an application is powerful stuff.

Degree of Difficulty: Most games allow you to choose how challenging you want the experience to be. Some games even allow for practice tutorials and playable demos.

Complex systems that require a degree of mastery come to mind here; things like software for architects, which can do everything from actual 3D modeling, to budgeting for building materials. An embedded example project – much like the examples included within Adobe’s design products – also help users get started. (Can you imagine software that allows users to first choose their ability level; perhaps even incrementally increasing the level of complexity as they gain confidence?)

Power to the User: We all like to be in control and video games are empowering. As protagonists, gamers feel like they’re in command of their virtual world. This is actually pretty remarkable considering that most games are designed with a pre-determined outcome – albeit some more loosely than others. It’s that perception of being in control that is the real magic here.

On the web, examples can include giving users the freedom to come back to a registration process when they don’t have a specific piece of data available at that particular moment; or, allowing for partial completion of a profile (e.g., LinkedIn), potentially providing incentives to complete the process later.

You Are Here: Giving users constant status updates as to where they stand in their virtual world is something games do incredibly well. For example, being able to instantly access a level map at any time is very reassuring.

Translating this to web design can be as simple as using breadcrumb trails and status indicators during registrations or checkout flows. Bigger picture stuff can perhaps include encouraging exploration by showing users what percentage of an application’s features they have encountered up to that point (i.e., “Oh, I see that I’ve only been using this percent of the app; I wonder what else it can do?”)

“Tell Me What I Need to Know When I Really Need to Know It”: Providing users with information at the moment they need it most is something video games do a great job of. Games offer up useful tips that the user can dismiss or opt-out of entirely.

Having users learn through actual usage is key and inline links to contextual information/ help content is probably the most common application here. (see als: The iPhone is Not Easy to Use, by Fred Beecher)

Task Accomplishment and a Sense of Accomplishment: Traditional usability testing generally involves capturing metrics like: “Did the user accomplish Task A: Yes or No?” and the paths taken. However, when game developers test their wares, they also try to gauge the overall experience (i.e., Was it fun? Was it hard? Was it easy? Was it too easy? Would the user play again? Why or why not?) This focus on the large canvas logic – in addition to the usability of game play mechanics, of course – provides incredibly rich data that can be the difference between success and failure.

The takeaway here is to make sure stakeholders don’t become mired in the details around the success or failure of specific tasks and loose sight of whether the larger concept makes strategic sense.

Shared Experience: Capturing and then presenting issues that users encountered can be a wonderful way of educating the ones that come thereafter. The MMORPG EverQuest has a great deal of support available, but the game is designed to encourage “soloing” early on – meaning a user goes off to explore by themselves to gain experience. As the levels become more challenging however, “grouping” is encouraged so they can learn from one another in increasingly complex environments.

An interesting example of leveraging collective knowledge can be found within TurboTax, which uses their “Live Community” feature to bubble-up the most common questions during specific tax preparation steps. Answers from previous users and tax experts are displayed to the right of where users are working.

Sensory OptimumLoad: (Versus, of course, sensory overload, which is not a good thing). The highly interactive nature of gaming and the engagement of the senses is part of its allure. However, well-crafted games unfold their stimuli gracefully, allowing for a gradual period of acclimatization. Consistency is also a critical component because these interactions ultimately become a language the user relies upon. System feedback – in the way of visuals, sounds, and haptic controller vibrations – are an ongoing dialog.

As mentioned earlier, when users first encounter an interface, they bring their “baggage” in the way of existing knowledge from previous experience and conventions. They either expect things to behave a certain way; or, have to draw upon related experiences to try and make sense of them. This speaks to a need for standardization within a product, which hopefully also leverages established domain conventions.

FunNess: And lastly, having some fun is always good. Doing something that’s fun means it’s engaging, which in turn makes learning about it easier. Understandably, not every interaction can be a barrel of laughs, but there are plenty of ways to inject some creativity here and there.

Language and tone-of-voice is a simple way to make things a little more interesting. I recently encountered a mundane Terms & Conditions checkbox interaction that playfully stated: “Our lawyers make us do it.” That one sentence put a smile on my face and made me think a bit differently about the company. (see also JohnnyTV: Designing Humanity Into Your Products, by Bill DeRouchey)

Epilogue

As we have seen, convergence among what have historically been very siloed experiences has now expanded the universe of options Interaction Designers have to choose from. The challenge of course, is that the next-generation of experiences will not only need to be both useful and appropriate, they’ll also need to engage users more than ever before. My final words of advice in that case: choose wisely, be creative, and don’t be afraid to inject some fun. All in all, I’d say things just got a lot more interesting.

Top image: Wii promo photo

Canberra was again host to power hungry … laptops with day two of UXAustralia. The final day of the conference proved as thought provoking and varied as the first, with topics ranging from UX strategy (twice!) to multi-platform and multi-touch.

The Power Hungry, UX style. Photo from Daniel Szuc

Aynne Valencia and Guilermo Torres – “In Context – Designing for Multi-targeted experiences”

One fascinating presentation was Aynne Valencia and Guilermo Torres’s “In Context – Designing for Multi-targeted experiences”. They analysed a number of multi-platform campaigns and suggested a number of terms including:

• “hub model” (one main site with various syndications, for example their Olympics Visa Go World campaign or more generally the Obama campaign)
• “cloned model” (all is the same everywhere, as with Twitter)
• “distributed model” (more difficult to maintain but not as necessary to be consistent, an example being their Lost Ring project)

And from this proposed the idea of hyper-wireframes to define common elements across platforms, and standards with a taxonomy of workflows>patterns>components to drill down to elements that can differ across platforms. For more on the project, look at http://www.multitargetedexperience.com

Guido Parlato – “Itsme: Beyond the Desktop Metaphor”

Arguably the most ambitious presentation of the conference was the “Itsme project” by Guido Parlato. The Itsme platform aims to do nothing less than revolutionise the form of and implementation metaphor of the computer OS. The system Parlato proposed uses spatial and time-based metaphors (time, venue, story) to organise information. The system is still in early prototyping stage, but apparently has had a lot of success in early testing.

Lisa Herrod – “Flying High – User Experiences on the Qantas A380”

If Parlato’s talk was ambitious, Lisa Herrod’s on “UX on the Qantas A380” was brutally honest about some of the difficulties UX practitioners can encounter. A project was begun in 2005, Herrod among other things evaluated the A380 first class suite control unit without ever seeing the aircraft or being able to contact users (Qantas has a no contact policy for first class passengers). The inflight entertainment system (IFE) also shows its age of design pre-multitouch (see video below).

Will Evans – “Social interaction design of social media with RIA case studies” (aka Social Interaction Design)

Other speakers presented frameworks. Will Evans, suggested in his talk on “Social Interaction Design” (based off his work with gather.com and his mistakes before that with kayak.com) that there were 12 principles to designing social interaction design, including:

• Provide an articulated context (Facebook is the opposite, context has collapsed)
• Design of a rich profile; groups Security (filter appropriately)
• Labels matter (e.g. The concept of “friending” pulls a lot from the word)
• Surface conversations and nailing deep linking
• Presence (something Twitter is bad at – hence why people tweet “good morning or good night”
• Allowing symbolic exchanges
• Community monitoring – on gather.com, there are 5 different options of flagging inappropriate.

(As an aside, he also mentioned that he believed that everyhing he know about social experience design he’d learned from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons!)

Shane Morris – “Designing for Multitouch, and multiple touchpoints”

Finally, the award for dedication to brand in the face of danger had to go to Microsoft evangelist Shane “Google it on Bing” Morris. That aside, his closing presentation “Designing for Multitouch, and multiple touchpoints” a case study of the Lonely planet concept retail installation with Microsoft Surface, was an interesting look into the potential of UX with Surface. (For more on the presentation, look at his MIX presentation slidedeck below, or check out his blog.)

All of the presentations deserve a mention (see the programme for the full list or the tweets from the day).

Discussions are now underway for Melbourne UX Australia 2010 – watch this space.

Top image by stage 88

Set at the modern Hotel Realm in Australia’s capital city, UX Australia kicked off with nearly 180 UX professionals ranging from game design to usability in attendence. Here is our report of day 1.

Befitting a UX (rather than IA or IxD) conference, the talks balanced practicality and detail with a sense of the overall picture – a recurring theme in talks was the need to recognise different stakeholders, and communicate the values of user experience.

Hotel Fail (Source: @viorol via Twitpic)

UXers also put their money where their mouths were about about UX in the real world as attendees duly noted experience design fails in the otherwise stunning venue the Hotel Realm. People also happily swapped UX role cards as provided in the swag bag by Symplicit.

Alex Wright – Meet Your Ancestors

After a mind-bending and inspiring keynote from New York Times UX Director and author Alex Wright, the day split into dual streams of talks.

Keynote: “Meet Your Ancestors” by Alex Wright was a 1 1/2 hour gallop through the history of user experience via ancient taxonomies, 16th century memory theatre, and precursors to the internet. The sheer breadth and depth of information presented was a head-spin for the audience, most of whom will now be searching out his book Glut.

Chris Khalil – The New Digital Ethnographer’s Toolkit

This was a detailed and pragmatic guide to using digital tools such as Twitter and blogging. Using a case study of research for Moshtix, Kahlil stepped through the process an ethnography-lite technique of “cultural probes” with digital tools: getting users (he suggested using Ethnio), setting them up for a weeks’ worth of testing (using tumblr as a tool for tracking their digital footprint), and then post-probe interviews. Tips included setting up the tools with the user so that they can immediately start, and most importantly talking through their digital footprint in the end interview. Also worth noting was the post-probe analysis – for the case study Khalil produced a 3m wide mental model! For that process he suggested grounded theory and using a tool such as MaxQDA.

Ben Kraal – Visualisations of Video: Nursing Activity and Expertise

As well as giving “more information about leg ulcers than you’ll ever need to know”, Kraal stepped through how visualising video data can provide an easy way to access and make sense of otherwise dense data.

Example of visualising time as a diagram

His examples of nurses bandaging leg ulcers also showed a way to externalise tacit knowledge in a way that participants are able to understand and comment on (nurses were excited to be able to see the processes of how they work at a glance). For more on the project, check out Krall’s blog or look at the OZCHI paper.

Steve Baty – Deconstructing Analysis Techniques

“Our” Steve gave a presentation on his article of the same name. Baty suggested a that analysis techniques can be broken down into deconstructing, manipulating, transformation, summarisation, aggregation, generalisation, abstracting, interpretation, synthesis, reflection and visualisation.

Rob Sherer’s – Data Driven Design Decisions

Sherer started wtih Joshua Porter’s quote that “while aesthetics are subjective, behaviour is not”, and then showed how the seek.com.au website had used analytics and testing to make design decisions. In the process of changing an email icon, making it a button dropped sign in by 40%, changing it to an email icon increased it by 47%, and adding “64 pixels of pink” on the top increased signup again by 27%! (Very Amazon million-dollar button).

Gary Barber – The Ultimate UX Tool

Barber provided a hilarious mocku-mercial of “the ultimate UX tool”, including extras such as “reusable plastic personas”, “perfect test participants”, and “wireframing pliers and wire” – “all for 99c!” (The “Ultimate UX Tool”? A pencil.)

Joel Flom – Ka-Chunk! When Customer Experience Design Fails and How To Avoid It

Flom emphasised the need to understand business as well as the customer and implementation in UX in a fast paced talk. Pointing out Jared Spool’s Maturity Model, he reminded the audience of Eric Weiss’s point that “we don’t want interaction. We want to minimise our interactions”, and that in some cases, customers aren’t on a journey (They don’t view it as an eco-system, Often only view it as a means to an end, They are not speaking meaning)

Penny Hagen and Michelle Gilmore – Emerging a User Experience Strategy: people, pencils and post-its

In this presentation Hagen and Gilmore used beautiful hand drawn diagrams to present a case study of working with the University of New South Wales. Key terms they used were shaping a project: (helping the client to say “We are changing our objective as we understand what it means for the user”), creating user stories, creating user pathways and finally scenarios to aid with decision making. Read more about their subject in their User Stories article.

Fred Randell – Experience Visions: A Case Study

Fred Randell talked about his work with Telstra Transformation and the challenges of creating a 5 year experience strategy: their strategies have included creating configurable modules and using scenarios early on. (His presentation is also worth mining for all best movie quotes you can relate to UX).

All up, it was a great day with a range of topics and discussion. Report back on day two tomorrow.

Want to stay up to date? See the #uxaustralia tweets

Top image by stage 88

“We work in a young field and don’t have a sense of lineage … But we have one”. Keynote speaker Alex Wright kicked off the UX Australia conference with a mind-bending presentation tracing information architecture from ancient pre-written culture to the present day, via Bablylonian libraries and 19th century predictions of technology.

Living folk taxonomies

Wright began with prehistoric man, showing that oral traditions are far more sophisticated than we may give it credit for. Even without a written language, people across all cultures have a fundamental  need and capacity to categorise the world around them to levels 5-7 layers deep, and usually with geneological-like terms (father-child etc). Known as folk taxonomies (Wright is clear to point out that they are not folksonomies), these are even manifested as  ‘living folk taxonomies’ such as villages being arranged by elemental or animal relationships.

Symbolic technology

He also suggested that objects such as jewellery, which emerged in the ice age, are “symbolic information technology” to meet the needs of a new “threshold of social proximity”. These objects help provide status information at a glance.  Similarly, written language came about to allow financial transactions to become more sophisticated. This correlation of money and language would continue through history with the powerhouses of the world (Alexandria, Babylon), also having the largest libraries.

Memory

Wright also took an interesting diversion through memory, highlighting a fascinating spatial memory practice by 16th century monks known as the Art of Memory. Disciples would spend years learning how to remember using spatial relationships, the result being that they could recall astounding amounts of information. This correlation between place and memory would be shown in a “mechanical web browser” known as the Memory Theatre, but generally disappear into artefacts themselves as objects such as the codex began to include indexes (something Wright refers to as physical RAM). This collective ‘memory’ would also become more shared as printing presses began to democratise knowledge.

The Internet

Perhaps the most sobering discussion was Wright’s of various luminaries that forsaw parts of what we now know as the internet. These included Charles Cutter, who in 1883 predicted that the library of 1983 would have such things as “desks, keyboards, wire ….”. H.G Wells’ suggestion in 1938 in the “World Brain” that “all of human memory might be networked” and Paul Otlet’s eerily similar vision to today of “the social space of books”.

Eugene Garfield’s system of “weighting ranking of links” also formed the Citation Index, and served as an inspiration for Google, and many of the inventions in the 1960s by Doug Engelbart and later Xerox Parc (their mission: “The Architecture of Information”) such as the GUI interface and computer mouse have gone virtually unchanged in 40 years.

Two people Wright also highlighted for having visions with a misunderstood legacy were Vanjeoly (?), creator of the Memex concept, and Ted Nelson. Vannevar Bush’s Memex was an inspiration to many in the HCI field. However, its three concepts (Selection by association rather than indexing, Two way links,Visible pairings) are not in the internet we have today. Similarly, while Ted Nelson invented the term “hypertext” (along with many other Nelson-isms such as “transclusion”, his words are used in a very different sense today.

However, the most interesting part of this history was its relation to today. Wright suggests that social media is bringing back oral culture into the electronic written medium – Facebook shows social relations and symbolic encoding, Wikipedia the parallel worlds of written authority and oral discussion, and Amazon the way of gauging financial bartering with ratings.

Wright’s talk was a gallop through the ages with a unexpected sense of circularity at the end. Those interested in more on Wright and IA should check out his book Glut.

Top image by stage 88

Incentives are a commonplace to game designers and developers. They are a means of designing activity to support goals and to motivate users. They are not events, which are those things that happen during game play and to which which users must react. We tend to think of incentives as those design elements that draw out, or appeal to a user’s interests, reasons, and motives. Design aspects that the user can anticipate, expect, and organize his or her activities around. We think of incentives as designed into a game, site, or service. But they are really, actually, in the user. They work because they incent (incentivize) the user’s incentives.

This is important, lest we think that incentives exist purely and simply in design. Incentives work by providing a reason that relates or connects to an existing interest and which is motivating to the user.

There are many incentives used in games to make multi-player game play more interesting. In social games, incentives will include both straight-up game play (leveling, collecting, tasking, etc) and social play (using player partnerships, allies and allegiances, teams, roles, for collaboration, competition, involving trust, betrayal, loyalty, etc).

Are incentives used in social media the same as those used in conventional media? Do the same rules and design approaches work in social media as in game design? The answer is probably not.

Frames

An incentive used in a game provides a reason to act: it is a fictional reason or cause of action and behavior that makes sense and is adequate in the frame of game play. It doesn’t work in “reality,” or outside game play. A game-based incentive is a fiction adequate to ground behavior within the game context. Games are a framing of experience outside the stream of real and everyday activity.

In the game-play situation, the player agrees to accept the fiction of the game and the rules that make that acting within that fiction possible. Games are framed “outside of” everyday reality, and often involve persons not belonging to one’s everyday world. Accepting the fiction — its rules, players, activities, events, powers, and time periods — is part of what makes games “fun.”

Rules & relationships

Another reason that games are entertaining is their transformation of relationships. Game rules do this. Rules change not only the nature of the relationship, but the roles or positions held by people involved. Participants or players may now speak and act differently, exercising authority provided them by the rules. And rules not only create and make new kinds of authority possible: they change power dynamics among participants. They give behaviors new reasons (because this is how the game is played): participants can now do new things with (or against) one another.

In social games, the transformative effect of rules on authorized behaviors can lead to compelling interactions, as well as unintended consequences that can be engaging precisely because they confuse game fiction and real-world relationships.

If the effectiveness of game-based incentives in social play is reflected in the power of rules to transform relationships, thus enabling new actions and behaviors, it would seem that game-based or game-like incentives should work well in social media. At the design level, common features and elements would make this transfer quite easy. User interface elements common to games and social media include:

• some kind of direct messaging and some kind of public messaging
• social objects to own, trade, share, pass along, compete for
• gestures for self-expression and communication
• social units built around groups, friends, teams
• personal or player profiles or representation
• technology-specific features, functions, and actions
• and more

Games and social media also share in some experiential aspects: mediated communication, action, competition, status, and social presence, for example, which belong to the social architecture and interaction design of each.

Differences

But in spite of some of these similarities, essential differences exist. Differences not specific to design or architecture, but to the framing of the (user) experience.

The incentives that work in games, work because they are supported by game rules. Those rules structure a fictional reality or transform an everyday reality. Incentives designed for games, in other words, use this fiction as their reason. Things a person might not do in the everyday world can have a reason within a game.

Games frame a stretch of time during which participants interact with each other in ways that create possibilities unavailable in the everyday world. But social media serve purposes of real communication and interaction. Behaviors that might be common in the gaming world such as wagering, collecting, promotion, competition, rank, and winning aren’t exclusive to the domain of games. But the incentives that work in the everyday world do not have to be constructed on game rules. In fact, they rarely refer to any rules whatsoever.

Constructedness

It belongs to the everyday world that its “constructedness” is not a theme; we go along with reality as it is. Any rules, codes, or forms of behavior that one might call organized have at best a tacit or implicit basis. This means that in the case of social media, it doesn’t work to articulate how users are to do things, how they should behave, interact, communicate, compete, and so on.

Social practices emerge as an outcome of participation: they are a sign that certain kinds of trust, commitment, interest, presence, and so on, exist. These things cannot be forced because it is up to each of us, as participants, to reach a level of comfort and routine with mediated interaction and communication. Since experience on social media is neither framed like a game (with a beginning and an end), and since it is purely voluntary, incentives don’t necessarily incentivize on the basis of rules.

Interests

Better than “incentive” is perhaps the term “interest.” Each of us has interests, takes an interest in things or people, and becomes interested. Each of us has self-interest, an interest in others, and interest in social experiences. We satisfy, protect, and share our interests. What’s more, interests, unlike incentives, are used and negotiated by people during normal course of interaction; whereas incentives structure activity towards achieving a goal, and have but one object or value.

Some social media elements depend on the effectiveness of shared interests to organize content and navigation: think simply about tags and the long tail. Common interests are indeed the basis of a great deal of social interaction and content. (If anything, it is more difficult to articulate differences than it is to represent commonalities online.)

Interests are a better concept than incentives when it comes to action, too. We tend to do things online that we want to do. And we assume that this goes for others, also. Being interested, having interests, acting with interest, taking or showing an interest normally suggests personality, character, and taste.

Interest explains individual and social actions and behaviors. It does not explain game behaviors: rules and roles do that.

Because we can often relate to the interests of others others, if not by sharing then by at least recognizing and validating them, interests form the basis of social competencies. Competencies in being interested, having interests, showing or taking an interest — all of these are more likely to serve as a basis for social interaction and engagement than incentives modeled on games or fictions. (The exception of course involves people interested in games!)

And there is another reason that interests, not incentives, play a central role in the social organization of social media. Incentives are reasons that come from the outside. They are not in or of everyday reality, but are supplied by game rules or what have you for the sake of providing other reasons (to act, choose, behave…). Incentives undermine reality: people can do things differently, alongside or even against their personal interests and beliefs, if adequately incentivized.

In social media, encounters with other people include some degree of interest in getting to know the other. This may be ever so small, may be one-sided, or may be mutual. Our behaviors are taken at face value, as signs of who we are, what we are like, what we do, and what makes us potentially interesting (to somebody). In other words, it’s through interests that we relate to one another, and this interest is a common, everyday, and natural incentive that comes from within the social world, and not from outside of it.

Note: This post was inspired and provoked in part by Amy Jo Kim at GoogleTechTalks.

Given just a bit of information, we naturally crave more. Given a puzzle, we have to solve it. So, as interaction designers, how are we using this bit of insight into human behavior?

The hook

My wife is an expert conversationalist and master of “the hook.” By hook, I mean that simple statement, skillfully dropped in a conversation, and so intriguing you cannot help but want to know more. We can be sitting with friends discussing any topic. If the conversation begins to wane, she’ll casually work in some phrase like ”When I worked at a prison, blah blah blah…” When you did what?! And there it is: A hook so captivating you just have to know more!

Great storytellers know exactly how to turn the ordinary—a trip to the grocer—into a suspenseful story by withholding information. In new relationships, flirtation often involves some element of playful teasing, whether through conversation or more sensual revelations. And newsrooms have made a science out of crafting irresistible headlines—“Your PC might be infected!” or “Are you prepared for the tax law changes?”

We are captivated by the unanswered question. To quote JJ Abrams, creator of TV Series Lost, ”mystery demands that you stop and consider—or, at the very least, slow down and discover.”

Curious Marketing

In recent years, Hot Wheels has begun including a “mystery car” in their store shipments. Unlike all the other cars encased in clear plastic, this car is shielded by an opaque black plastic—you have no idea what kind of car is in there:

With two or three dozen hot wheels to choose from, guess which one the kids go after? Given the choice of all these “known” cars, the one that—in my experience—gets attention (and allowances) is the Mystery Car—the one that is “unknown.”

Crazy? Perhaps.  But this same bit of psychology also works on grownups.

Here is a rather interesting promotion from California Pizza Kitchen. At the end of my dinner (along with the bill) I was given the “The ’Don’t Open It’ CPK Thank You Card.”

It’s a coupon, with an interesting twist: You bring this with card you next time you come back to CPK. You’ve already won something, from a free appetizer up to $50 dollars (or more). But you don’t know what you’ve won until your next visit (see where this is going?).  The instructions are pretty clear: Whatever you do, do NOT open this or whatever you’ve won is null and void! A manager has to open this for you when you return. You are guaranteed to get something worthwhile—and this is a critical part or arousing curiosity. Coupons are too explicit—”here is your 20% off.” Scratch offs and lottery tickets are most likely to reveal nothing. Here, the fine print teases you with a list of the possible prizes. Now I’m curious: which prize have I won? This is a mystery that needs closure.

So back to my question: How are we—as interaction designers—leveraging curiosity in our designs?

A Venture into the Unknown

In writing this, I’ve been thinking about two kinds of information: “known” and “unknown” information.

As UX professionals, we excel at making things known. If it’s unknown, it’s unclear and likely to be confusing. A puzzling button label? Make it clear. An unclear process? Make it more familiar. For good reasons, we value things like (user) control, clarity and consistency. We remove uncertainty in interfaces.

But once we’ve removed all the usability potholes from a particular path, how can we reintroduce the simple thrill of driving? How can interactions be made more effective—and fun—by introducing a bit of (controlled) uncertainty?

Let’s go back to our Hot Wheels and CPK examples. Did you notice these things?

1. Some tiny bit of information makes us aware of something that is unknown. Black plastic packaging hides a toy inside, or we are presented with a mysterious card.
2. Context provides some relevance. These are kids, shopping for a toy. I’m found eating at a restaurant I presumably like.
3. Enough clues are given to help us make a judgement about the personal value of that unknown information. Kids who like Hot Wheels can infer that this car will be similar in quality and possibilities as the surrounding options. The fine print on the back of the card explains the range of possible options. Value can come in many forms: the winning lottery ticket; the satisfaction of solving a puzzle; being entertained by a story.

Information can be presented in a manner that is straightforward or curious. If we opt for the latter, we are guaranteed not only attention, but likely higher engagement as well—curiosity demands we know more! What was known information (a simple coupon or another toy car option) that might have been ignored has been converted into something unknown, something mysterious, something that demands resolution.

“Information-Gap Theory”

When we become aware of this missing information- when something changes from being known (or so we thought) to an unknown state—we become curious. This is the explanation of curiosity posed by behavioral economist George Loewenstein in his Information-Gap Theory. Loewenstein says “curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.”

The feeling we get from these information gaps is best described as deprivation, which is critical to understanding why it is we are motivated by curiosity. In order to “eliminate the feeling of deprivation,” we seek out the missing information. This is of course ironic, considering that we routinely seek out puzzles, mystery novels and other curious situations that create this sense of deprivation. However, it’s important to note that many researchers once viewed curiosity as something aversive; a decision-theoretic view suggests we should only want to know something if it helps us make more informed decisions. Why would be attracted to something that offers no extrinsic benefit? Many other debates have surrounded curiosity: Is curiosity internally or externally stimulated? Is curiosity a primary drive, like hunger or fear? Is curiosity a state or trait? And this one: “If people like positive levels of curiosity, why do they attempt to resolve the curiosity?”

In his 1994 publication “The Psychology of Curiosity,” Lowenstein surveys the body of curiosity research, much of which occurred in the early 1960s and 70s. In doing so, he provides and backdrop by which to understand his own research and how it resolves many of the debates surrounding curiosity. Simply stated: I’m curious because there’s a gap between “what I know and what I want to know.” Two notable implications come from this perspective:

1. The intensity of curiosity correlates to the likelihood of certain information to resolve the information-gap. Loewenstein’s own tests confirmed that subjects were more curious when given parts of a greater whole—the need to complete enough of a picture puzzle in order to determine what it was (a picture of an animal) resulted in more interaction than a scenario where each block was a discrete picture.
2. Curiosity correlates with our own understanding of particular domain. The more we know about some topic, the more likely we are to focus on our own information-gaps. If I know 8 of 10 items, I’m more curious about the remaining 2 than if I only know 2 of 10 things.

Business Application?

Given that curiosity reflects a desire to close information gaps, how can we apply this to interaction design?

First, consider some business situations where you might want to motivate people through curiosity.

• You have a great product, but low adoption
• You need to get the attention of the casual visitor—you operate in a crowded space and aren’t perceived as having any differentiated value
• You’re trying to increase the number of registered users
• You have a high bounce rate—visitors aren’t coming back to your site

In each of these cases, no matter how good (or bad) you product is, people aren’t giving it the time of day. You need ways to get people’s attention—and to “nudge” their behaviors. Below are a few examples of companies making effective use of curiosity for just such a purpose:

LinkedIn

Let’s illustrate this “gap” in knowledge with a look at the professional networking site LinkedIn. One of their business goals? Sell paid accounts. Like most businesses, they have a generic description of the benefits you receive with a paid account. Think of this as “general known” information. While this information could certainly be compelling, there’s a population for whom the cost may not be worth the perceived value.

Of course, those customers with paid memberships have access to specific known information:

This is how most businesses run: “Cross the [registration / paid account / personal information ] threshold and you can have all this!” Unfortunately, this generic description of benefits is often not enough for many people.

One (of many!) things LinkedIn has done is to give you a personalized glimpse at what could be known:

Essentially, LinkedIn is teasing us with bits of relevant information: “Someone at this [specific company].” “A [specific role] at x company.” They move us into an unknown state by sharing bits of knowledge that could be fully known, as a paid member. Nothing has been given away for free—I still don’t know who looked at my profile, but I am aware of some partial knowledge that might be worthwhile to know in full. As one friend said, “If I know someone from Apple has been looking at my profile, you can bet I want to know who!”

If this partial information proves relevant and valuable, you’ll want to know more, right? In essence, they’ve created a zone of curiosity between two previously known states.

Quantcast

Quantcast does something similar, only they’ve created a much larger “zone of curiosity.” You can, with nothing required of you, get a ton of free and quite useful site metrics: traffic stats, demographic information, lists of similar sites and so on. The value to a site owner is obvious. But there’s a bit of information withheld: to get Business Activity data, you must “Get Quantified.”

What’s nice about this version of Quantcast’s call to action is what we our brains see: something being hidden from us. You can almost see through the sticker covering some data! Obviously, this is a static image—there is no live data there beneath a sticker. But we think in images and this visual affordance registers as: “Here’s a sticker. We need to know what’s underneath it. We can’t allow this knowledge to remain unknown!”

Netflix

Netflix leverages these same ideas when returning a movie rental. For Netflix, the data from your movie rental preferences is gold. Rating a movie not only improves your recommendations, but we as a collective improve the entire recommendation system. Consequently, the site is built around this idea of rating movies. So why then, would they ask you “Rate your recent return to reveal 2 movies you’ll love?”

There is an immediacy to this request—we see the empty slots where two movies will be revealed. Sure, I can rate movies and get recommendations all over the site, but there is something more immediate (and novel) about how this presented.
As with Quantcast, I see the thing I want to take action on; I’m presented—visually—with two unknowns. For the “cost” of rating this movie, I can reveal two more (hopefully interesting) movies. I can make the unknown known.

Specific Motivation

It is human to be curious. And human to pursue a mystery until it is resolved. This has motivated scientists and explorers for centuries. If teased with a bit of interesting information, we want to know more. But to be clear, what we’re talking about here is a very specific kind of curiosity.

In the early 1950s, D. E. Berlyne was one of the first researchers to propose a categorization of different types of curiosity: He identified two dimensions of curiosity: one extending between perceptual and epistemic curiosity; the other spanning specific and diversive curiosity. I’ve plotted these below with a few of examples based on my own understanding of his research.

Although Berlyne’s conception of curiosity has been challenged, it still remains the backdrop against which many subsequent curiosity studies have defined their research. I’ve found this model useful for thinking about different kinds of curiosity and clarifying which flavor of curiosity is most easily applied to interaction design.

In the context of this article, I’m referring to a perceptual-specific curiosity, one in which we confront people with very specific gaps in their knowledge in a novel manner or context. While you can certainly create “gaps” in knowledge in a variety of ways, the examples in this article are more concerned with a variety of curiosity akin to teasing.

Now what?

If you want to make someone curious, make them aware of something they don’t know. Find that information you can use to tease people. Chances are, you’re either withholding all the specific information or giving it all away. To get attention and engage the senses, look for ways to turn these direct messages into a quest to be completed. A few tips:

• Your “tease” needs to be interesting, or at least proportionate in appeal to the cost required
• Strive to make this personally relevant to your target user
• Make the promise of something worthwhile—what’s it going to cost people?
• Establish trust through other givens and context clues
• Use visuals suggest or create the immediate perception of mystery

and,

• if you’re trying to lure me with something that is given away freely elsewhere—don’t.

With that, I’m curious to see how you work these ideas into your interactions!

All research methods have their pros and cons, the problem comes when you rely on just one method. I’m often disappointed when UX and IxD practitioners describe the research they do, and it’s obviously very one dimensional. They only do surveys, for example. Or they only do usability testing at the end of the project (it’s quite alarming but this practice does continue).

This problem isn’t restricted to UX and IxD of course, our marketing brethren might do likewise, referring only to Roy Morgan for insight, for example.

Each of these techniques can be incredibly useful for giving insight into a particular aspect of what you’re studying, but relying solely on one is a big mistake.

Introducing triangulation

This is where the concept of “triangulation” comes into its own. Also known as “mixed method” research, triangulation is the act of combining several research methods to study one thing. They overlap each other somewhat, being complimentary at times, contrary at others. This has the effect of balancing each method out and giving a richer and hopefully truer account.

[Triangulation is an] attempt to map out, or explain more fully, the richness and complexity of human behavior by studying it from more than one standpoint
- Cohen and Manion

The effect is rather like the use of telescope arrays, such as that shown in the photo above, which make use of many small telescopes spread over a large area to simulate the effect of one very large telescope. Not only does the array have the power of one very large telescope but it is more nimble, more practical and has the ability to cross-check itself. Because each individual telescope’s view overlaps that of its neighbours, the accuracy of each telescope can be validated to a certain extent by the others. This last property is a key benefit of triangulation in research, and one which we’re going to explore further.

Let’s start with a real life example of triangulation. Most of my own research projects of late, have included:

• Analytics
• Stakeholder interviews
• Interviews (face-to-face or phone as needs be)
• Cultural probe (aka diary study)
• Focus groups or workshops
• Secondary research (including an examination of market research data)
• Quantitative survey (to help validate findings with a much larger sample size)
• Usability testing (of existing product or early concepts)

Lots of different views, lots of data! Each method is used in a way which is appropriate for it, and when combined they allow a degree of cross checking. The above list would be applied to quite a large project; a small project might just include a competitor review, heuristic review and maybe a few interviews. Horses for courses, really.

Triangulation to minimize bias

Specifically, the problem with relying on just one method is to do with bias. There are several types of bias encountered in research, particularly the qualitative design research we use in the field of UX and IxD. And triangulation can help with most of them.

• Measurement bias – Measurement bias is caused by the way in which you collect data. Probably the most common form of this is the effect of the setting in which you conduct your research, for example, peer pressure on focus group participants. Triangulation allows you to combine individual and group research methods to help reduce this bias. Related to this is “response bias” in which participants tend to tell you what you want to hear. Again, a triangulated approach means you can combine self-reported and observational research methods to help balance out the problem.
• Sampling bias – Put simply, sampling bias is when you don’t cover all of the population you’re studying (omission bias) or you cover only some parts because it’s more convenient (inclusion bias). Some research methods make it easier to cover certain parts of the population, for example using phone interviews for interstate participants can be a good substitute for the face-to-face interviews you do with local participants. Similarly online surveys or cultural probes might make it easier for you to include geographically distant participants. Triangulation combines the different strengths of these methods to ensure you getting sufficient coverage.
• Procedural bias – Procedural bias occurs when participants are put under some kind of pressure to provide information. For example, doing “vox pop” style interrupt polls might catch the participants unaware and thus affect their answers. Similarly, an online exit survey might make the participant rush their answers to finish the survey quickly. Triangulation allows us to combine short engagements with longer engagements where participants have more time to give considered responses.

You can never rule bias or preconceptions but you should be cognizant of their presence and potential impact. In fact, failing to recognize bias is itself known as “design bias” (which also includes failing to disclose assumptions and possible bias when reporting your findings). Particularly with qualitative research, it is considered best practice to acknowledge bias and preconceptions. This is what Anthropologists and social scientists refer to as “reflexivity”.

In this regard, a bit of navel gazing is very important; self reflection and awareness of the limitations of your methods help you assess possible bias and take them into account when analysing data. Is my own sense of fashion affecting my perception of the fashionistas I am studying? Does my own view on smoking/drinking/gambling impact my research into marketing those products and services?

Tips for triangulation

Mix it up

Combine different techniques that balance each other out: quantitative vs qualitative, individual vs group, face-to-face vs remote, self-reported vs facilitated, short engagement vs long engagement etc. This is central to the idea of triangulation.

The right tool for the right job

It’s important to know what each is good for and ask the right questions in each. For example focus diary studies on what people do and think at a pertinent time, when you’re not around. Don’t ask them questions in the diary that you can ask directly (while still keeping the context). Likewise, don’t assess the usability of a website in a focus group.

Two heads are better than one

A kind of triangulation can also be achieved by having two (or more) people on the project. This helps immensely in terms of making observations, taking notes, analysis and “sensemaking”. Because unless the two researchers are very similar, they are likely to have quite different perspectives on what they are seeing and hearing, thus giving them different theoretical platforms from which to interpret and analyse. As well as simply allowing them to capture more data, the researchers balance each other out.

Layer upon layer

Yet another way of achieving a kind of triangulation is to conduct your research in successive layers of detail. Start off with a very broad piece of investigative research to identify top level issues and to provide better scope for the next layer. That next layer would be more detailed and focus on a smaller area than the first level. And so on and so forth.

Setup a feedback loop

Feedback findings into later methods to help validate or flesh out issues that have already popped up. Continuing the above example, during a focus group you might explore an issue that only one interviewee mentioned and see what the rest of the group thinks. Similarly, you can adapt your interview approach as you go, feeding back what you learn into the questions you ask. My favourite example of this would be using a quantitative method with a large sample size, such as a survey, to validate findings from earlier research using a relatively small sample size.

Be reflexive, grasshopper

Look for where preconceptions might exist, in yourself and your colleagues, and work out how you might be able to minimise their impact. As discussed above, using multiple researchers will make this easier, but if you’re working alone, keeping a journal or diary for yourself can work well in this regard. It forces you to examine what you’re doing and how you felt at the time—your emotional state on any given day actually makes a big difference to how you conduct research. And make sure you state a summary of this in your findings, along with any bias that you feel may have had an effect on the research.

Re-visit participants

Visiting the same people at multiple times throughout the research can give good results. For example, you might invite interviewees back for a focus group, allowing you to compare and contrast their views with other similar participants. This longer engagement with these individuals allows you to see how their goals, attitudes and behaviors change over time.

It’s often said that any research is better than no research, and largely this is true, but you need to take account of the fact that your methods may have limitations, such as bias. Triangulation is a very useful means of capturing more detail, but also of minimizing the effects of bias and ensuring a balanced research study, no matter how big or small that study may be.

Note: Patrick will be running a full day workshop on design research methods for UX practitioners at UX Australia 2009 – a 3-day user experience design conference, with inspiring and practical presentations , covering a range of topics about how to design great experiences for people. It will be held on 26-28 August 2009, in Canberra (Australia).

Top image by watchsmart

When I first played Star Fox 64 I was extremely excited to see the polygons move smoothly over the screen. It made me feel as if I were really flying over the combat zone. With the 3D technology (Google Earth, games, etc.) of today things look even more beautiful. Unfortunately we still have to experience this on our 2D screens… I can’t stop imagining what it would look like with future technology. And here is what I hope to see.

3D desktop concept

This 3D hologram concept from the University of Tokyo just makes me want to have a holographic desktop. It made me come up with my desktop concept: Bring the black curtain down so that the hologram can be seen more clearly in front of you. There are tiny projectors installed, giving off 3D hologram in front of the curtain.

A browser window can be resized by actually “pinching” and dragging the tab at bottom right.

It would be fun if a document could be made as if you were using a typewriter. The curled paper hologram comes out of the keyboard.

Touching the 3D objects would be really fun. Dragging, throwing, resizing, etc., but crushing paper to dispose it would be the most interesting.

You have to adjust the “depth” of the cursor on screen, so how about a mouse like this? By pressing the mouse body downwards, the cursor sinks (goes deeper) on screen. When you release it, it goes back to the default position (front).

3D mobile phone

In the future, the display that has been conventionally used for a screen will no longer be needed. And if there is a flexible material that can be used to a mobile phone, we can have a mobile phone with a large hole in the middle like this.

The 3D hologram appears in the hole (2D also). So we can finally have video conference calls Star Wars style.

I just can’t wait to see it!!!

I live and breathe user experience design, and yet it took me two years to get myself the device referenced by almost every single presentation about user experience since 2007… Apple’s iPhone. My reasons were very specific and perhaps boring, but what is interesting is the perspective this wait has afforded me. Since it was released, the iPhone has grabbed an astonishing share of mobile Web traffic, been regarded as a “game-changer” in both the design and business worlds, and has even been referred to as the “Jesus Phone.” Now that I’ve owned one for two weeks I’ve developed a different perspective. The iPhone is surprisingly difficult to use, but it sure is fun! And that is why it’s a game-changer.

A Lack of Affordances Leads to Low Learnability

Learnability contributes greatly to the usability of a system. If a system is designed for a specific context, it should be easy for people in that context to approach it, assess its controls, and manipulate it. Granted, learnability isn’t everything, but when it’s tough to figure out how to do things you’re on the express bus to a frustrating experience. There are two things about the iPhone that contribute to its difficult learnability. It lacks physical affordances and suffers from inconsistent visual cues.

Gestural user interfaces (UIs) are the 21st century’s version of the command line interface… they’re really fast and easy provided you’ve memorized a bunch of commands. This is fine for those who are accustomed or inclined to explore a device, but many people just want to check their calendar, write an email, or make a grocery list. These people will react to what they see on the screen rather than explore possibilities, which leaves them out of luck with a gestural UI.

The iPhone’s featureless touchscreen is Don Norman’s proverbial glass door. Apple has done a stunning job of making things that are pressable look like they’re pressable, but that will never be as effective as an actual button. With physical, simple buttons we can rely on motor memory to manipulate a device without paying attention. But the iPhone’s buttons are highly contextual, which forces us to pay attention to the device to remain aware of its context even after extensive use of the system. The “problem” is that the iPhone is a convergent device, a device with multiple functions. With 50,000 apps, you might even say infinite functions. The only way to build a device that serves 50,000 different purposes is to make it almost entirely free of physical affordances. Of course, the big value proposition of the iPhone is that it is the first mobile device to achieve an effective convergence.

Pressing a button is an action that a gestural UI can communicate visually, but there are a number of other actions that have no visual cue. Direct manipulation gestures such as tap (on something other than a button), double-tap, tap-and-hold, swipe, and pinch/zoom are far more difficult to communicate. These rely on user experimentation and memory.

Even worse are the modal gestures such as shake to undo and swipe to delete. If users discover them at all it’s usually by accident. They don’t map to anything (outside of an Etch-a-Sketch) and there are no clues to indicate that they’re available. Being mentioned in a WWDC keynote does not count as a clue.

My phone displayed this message several times while I was simply using it. The message is without context, and what’s worse reveals an important feature without showing how to access it on purpose.

The red Delete button also showed up unexpectedly. I had no idea how I made it appear. Its appearance made me feel uneasy because I didn’t want to delete anything.

Inconsistent Visual Cues Don’t Help Either

Apple has gone to great lengths to make the UI consistent, even publishing the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines, but some inconsistencies remain. Application buttons can have labels or not. Some applications, like TweetDeck, AP Mobile, and others, obligingly label their buttons:

An example of an iPhone application with button labels.

Others, mostly Apple applications, do not:

The iPhone Mail app

Does the circular arrow mean reload like in Safari? Or reply? If it means reply, what does the other arrow mean? Labeled buttons communicate their functionality much more clearly. (The circular arrow does mean reload, but makes no sense in the context of a message. The swoosh arrow does mean reply.)

The landscape keyboard, despite being a basic device function, isn’t supported by all applications. When it is supported, there are no visual or other cues that indicate it. Not only is it difficult to learn when the landscape keyboard is available, cues as to its availability are stored in only one place, user memory.

Even the iPhone’s implementation of its standard gestural interactions is inconsistent. This is most frustrating on simple interactions like tap. There are obvious tap targets like buttons and non-obvious targets like received calls, tweets, emails, etc. In some cases, a tap on a non-obvious target means “open” or “get detailed info.” But in others it means “take action.” The worst example of this is the Recent Calls list. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally called someone when what I wanted to do was get more details about the call. Yes there is an arrow button, but it’s on the right side away from my focus. Other applications (like Mail) have trained me to tap an object to get a detailed view of it, so my natural tendency is to tap the contact name or number.

Clicking a contact name makes a call instead of revealing details about the call.

When applications do not implement buttons, device functions, and non-obvious gestural interactions consistently, this increases the learnability problem. Not only do users have to learn and memorize what the device does, they have to learn how each application makes use of those functions! This is much less of an issue in point-and-click interfaces, which require fewer physical interactions and present most options on the screen for users to react to.

If the iPhone is so difficult to use, why is it still regarded as a game changer by both the design and business worlds? Because it does several important things right, but most of all because it’s fun.

Fun is the New Usable

As a user experience designer, I thought my job was to make things not suck. Until recently. As technology has evolved, human behavior has evolved along with it. Since behavior is the basis of user experience design, my job has evolved as well. Now, my job is to make things people love. At the 2009 IA Summit, Karl Fast articulated the value proposition of user experience design with sparkling clarity. “Engineers make things,” he said, “we make people love them.” And then he held up an iPhone as an example.

This is a crucial change, the importance of which cannot be overstated.

Play

Any new system or gadget has a learning curve, but where the iPhone differs is that the nature of traversing that curve is more fun than frustrating. You swipe and pinch and tap and shake your way to familiarity instead of pressing awkward buttons and navigating byzantine menu structures. You learn the iPhone by playing with it, which encourages interaction because humans are built to play. Even in a system like this, we could quickly be dissuaded from doing so if wrong actions had negative consequences, such as getting online or sending messages accidentally. The iPhone is mostly devoid of these sorts of consequences. The only time I’ve run into this is repeatedly calling people I didn’t want to call while viewing my Recent Calls list.

The iPhone goes further than encouraging play; it rewards play. If you explore the phone’s applications, you will often find them anticipating your needs. When viewing a video you’ve shot and press the action button, you can email it or upload it to YouTube. If you try to email it and the video is too large, it will ask if you want to send a smaller clip from the video instead of preventing you from sending it. The iPhone then presents you with the UI to trim a clip and continue with your message. The original video remains untouched. Simple, sensible, satisfying.

Effective & Delightful Convergence

On the day I got my phone, someone sent me an email that contained a physical address. The phone turned it into a link. I clicked it, got a map, and the phone asked me if I wanted directions. From my current location. I giggled excitedly.

The delight induced by how well the iPhone’s applications interact with each other is another reason for its success. This is the point at which usability and playfulness intersect. The experience of having needs not just met but anticipated creates the joy that encourages users to continue exploring. This intelligent interaction between applications is absolutely key to making a convergent device delightfully convergent.

But you can’t have a delightfully convergent device that isn’t effectively convergent. What converges are contexts of use. The interactions between applications that I described above represent relatively minor, detailed contextual shifts. These small shifts result in delight only if the device handles major shifts effectively as well.

Before I had an iPhone, I would switch major contexts by switching devices. If I got a call while listening to my iPod I’d stop it, put it down, and pick up my phone. This was intuitive to the point of being instinctual. But now my iPhone must handle that switch of context for me. If it failed to do that in a sensible way, I would think the iPhone sucks. An effectively convergent device is one that, like the iPhone, can handle major shifts in context in a way that supports the user’s transition between those contexts.

Implications for User Experience Designers

iPhones fly off the shelves despite being difficult to learn.

Why?

Because they let you do what it says you can do and they make you happy while you do it. This proves that my job as a user experience designer has evolved rather than simply changed. While it’s still my responsibility to prevent things from sucking, now it’s also my responsibility to add a little playfulness. As Kim Goodwin said in her Interaction09 keynote, we have a limited window in which to prove how valuable design can be to business. There are three ways in which user experience designers can learn to incorporate play into the systems they design.

Experience and Research Play

You can’t build playfulness into your designs without experiencing playfulness yourself. Play games and pay attention to what makes them fun. For example, the only rule in the card game Fluxx is that the rules constantly change. Completing a level in Peggle gives you the “Ode to Joy,” rainbows, unicorns, and fireworks! Use these elements as inspiration for working playfulness into your designs. You might not be able to play the “Ode to Joy” when people complete a purchase, but can you delight them in another way?

Play is a behavior. As a user experience designer, you should explore research about play and playfulness just as you’d explore research about gestalt perception or information seeking. The National Institute for Play is a good place to start. The ACM digital library has some resources on playfulness and computers. Questia has resources on play in general. (Both ACM and Questia are paid services.)

Become Familiar With Game Design

Game designers put a lot of thought into how to design a fun experience. We can learn a lot from the principles they use to make this happen. Much of game design seems to revolve around creating, sustaining, and developing a narrative. This aspect is less important to user experience designers than game mechanics and the design of casual games.

A game mechanic is anything that guides the play of a game. Most mechanics take the form of either rules or possible actions. In cribbage, players must discard two cards to the crib (rule) and they keep track of their progress by placing pegs on a board (possible action). Game mechanics translate into the user experience design world as interaction patterns. Understanding how game designers make games fun by designing pleasing game mechanics will help you design pleasing interactions. The Critical Gaming Network’s Game Design 101 has a great discussion of game mechanics.

Casual games are those that are meant to be picked up and played simply for the joy of playing them. They are always enjoyable, often compelling, but not engrossing. Peggle and Paper Toss are canonical examples of casual games. Casual game design is important to user experience designers because they place special emphasis on learnability and delightful interactions. When we design systems that are fun, delightfulness should be a side effect of interacting with them even though it is not the goal. People still have tasks to complete and we can’t let fun get in the way of that. For more on casual games, read the Casual Game Design blog as well as Nicole Lazarro’s “Why We Play Games.”

Re-Learn the Art of the Tutorial

My experience with the iPhone has led me to think that maybe fun doesn’t need to be intuitive. Maybe fun is so valuable that people will make the effort to learn a system built on fun interaction patterns. If I had the opportunity to change one thing about the iPhone, I would add a tutorial. By tutorial I don’t mean a boring list of stuff you can do with it. I’m specifically thinking of some sort of mini-game. It would introduce users to all the different gestures they can do and the contexts in which they’re appropriate, challenging them to choose and perform the right one.

Tutorials in the casual games I’ve played take one of two forms. The first is much like the mini-game I described above. This type of tutorial is composed of levels in which the goal is to learn, explore, and practice one or more game mechanics. The player then begins the “real” game. The iPhone games Isotope and TaxiBall contain good examples of this type of tutorial.

The second is the in-game tutorial. In games with this type of tutorial you simply start playing. Early on the game will put you in simple situations that require you to use one or more of the game’s mechanics. The game will then display a short description or demonstration of the mechanic you need to use to get over the current hurdle. The frequency with which the game shows these descriptions decreases over time. The iPhone games Spore Origins and Rolando contain good examples of this type of tutorial.

Both types of tutorials have their advantages and drawbacks. Mini-game tutorials are very focused. They allow users to learn everything at once. They keep out of the player’s way as they play the game. But what mini-game tutorials lack is context. In a game, context is less important because the world is rigidly defined. But in real-world systems, context is key to good user experience design. In-game tutorials are all about context, but they interrupt the flow of play. This is less of an issue in a game than it is in real-world systems. In a game, the frequency and temporal location of tutorial elements can be highly controlled. They appear when players expect them to appear, when beginning a game. The contextuality required to make these work in the real world means that they could interrupt important tasks and cause frustration.

Casual Game Design has several good articles on game tutorials if you are interested.

The Way Forward

I strongly believe that play is an integral part of the future of user experience design, and I am looking forward to making that future happen. To do that, I’m going to take the words of Mary Poppins to heart:

For every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and SNAP! The job’s a game!

I dub this the Mary Poppins Principle, and I challenge you to use it to find the fun in the jobs that your users must do. But for now, go have an ice cream cone. You deserve a treat for reading this whole thing.

Collaborative design methods play a key role in aligning team members towards a shared and strategic project vision. In this article we describe how user stories stimulate and facilitate discussion and decision making with clients in the development of a User Experience Strategy. In our context (the development of online projects) the User Experience Strategy becomes an ‘in principle agreement’ on the shape of the project (what), its purpose (why), and provides potential implementation strategies (how). It takes into account all perspectives (e.g business, technical, marketing, brand) but privileges the intended user experience.

A collaborative approach enables clients to actively participate in the process, increasing the likelihood of achieving a collective vision for the project. This article focuses on the first step in the journey towards collaboratively developing a User Experience Strategy and is concerned specifically with how user stories are generated, themed and prioritized. Interested in more? We will be talking about this subject at UX Australia 2009 at the end of this month.

Background

Working agency side, our involvement as User Experience professionals in a project often starts after the client has already invested in developing initial project assets. These might take the form of requirements, objectives, user profiles, user research or feature lists for example. There might also be pre-existing content or collateral if an existing site or service is being replaced.

While this information goes some way to describing the future project, it does so via the different agendas of marketing, technical, business, or brand; each asset takes a different perspective and is presented in its own ‘language’.  These different perspectives can effectively point in different directions, making a holistic view of the project difficult. It can also mean stakeholders hold different visions of project outcomes. Engaging in design at this point means risking significant tensions and costly delays down the track.

Different perspectives on the project.                           Different agendas impacting in the design phase

Reframing the project

By collaboratively developing a User Experience Strategy with clients, we can create a shared and holistic vision for the project that guides us through the design phases of the project. Central to a User Experience Strategy is the perspective of the people who will actually use the Website. Part of developing the strategy is re-framing the project from a user experience perspective.

Looking at the project from a client perspective

Looking at the project from a users perspective

The client perspective often starts as an abstracted, inside out view of the project via feature lists and technical specifications.  A user perspective on the other hand looks at the project from the viewpoint of those who will use it. By re-framing the project in terms of the intended user experience we shift to this perspective. This perspective is necessarily more concrete because it forces us to take context into account. In order to effectively think through the project from the user’s point of view we must think though some of the variables of the situation in which it will be used. This is the role of tools such as personas and scenarios; they work to ground the project in the real world, ensuring we don’t design in a vacuum.

Creating user stories

User stories are collaborative design tools which help the team to think through what the project needs to deliver from the perspective of those who will use it. User stories are generated by means of a critical translation of all existing project information (e.g scope, project objectives, business requirements, content analysis, comparative analysis, brand guidelines). User research is also analyzed through this method and the majority of the user stories are generated from this resource.

User stories (derived from agile development practices) are short statements that include the role of the user and the activity they wish to perform: the achievement of some goal, in the context of some constraint. They articulate the future system from the perspective of those who will use it (see examples below). Personas and scenarios provide supporting background and context.

Example of how user stories are created from existing data:

Requirement: Display all new news content on the homepage

gets translated into:

“regular readers are able to easily see all new news content”

Or a feature description like: Podcasting

might get translated into:

“As a member I can subscribe to news stories about gardening”

It is common in the early stages of design for clients to communicate a solution as a way of communicating an intention. E.g. “users can see their shopping cart from every page on the site”. What we want at the start of the design process, however, is not a proposed solution but rather a clear understanding of what the project, and the users, are trying to achieve. User stories place the focus on what the user is trying to do, not how the system delivers it. User stories frame the problem space without identifying the solution.

During the strategy phase the user stories remain high level. They can be broken out and refined in more detail for estimating and implementation in later project phases.  At this stage of the project we also capture business goals as user stories, naming the institution as a stakeholder e.g. “As [client] I can promote the institution”. This ensures (and reassures the client) that all the objectives and emphasis in the original project assets are captured, though these kinds of user stories are likely to be replaced out over time by related stories that take a users perspective. There are some things that are not converted into user stories, for instance standards, business rules and specific technology specifications (e.g database descriptions, browser specifications etc). These are resources to return to later, as it becomes necessary to interrogate those particular aspects in detail.

Theming Stories

Once all user stories are generated, grouping and theming the stories provides a top level picture of what the site contains and reveals an initial ‘loose’ structure. It enables team members to confirm that all bases are covered and indicates the major types of patterns and flows the site is likely to support (e.g searching, looking up contact details, applying for scholarships).

In the next step, user stories are edited from a list of all the things we could have, to the things we should have. Determining what the project should do is central to developing an effective strategy. The user stories become the framework for supporting these strategic discussions about project purpose, goals and approach.

Prioritizing User Stories
The aim of the prioritization process is to enable the client team to come to an agreement on the overall goals that (in principle) must be met by the site and why. Many factors motivate clients when prioritizing the scope of a project; cost and time are common motivators, but personal preferences can also play a part. The focus on user experience provided by user stories helps people to think through the priorities in a different way. This is in part because they offer a common language that all team members can access. Talking “through” user stories also allows the client team to better understand the implications and differences between various decisions and approaches.

The value each user story has to the project depends on its relationship to the primary user groups (represented in our case by personas) and to the overall project goals. User stories are evaluated individually and in relation to each other, through open discussion with the client team. The following sort of questions occur during this discussion:

• What kinds of things would we have to do to get this done?
• Is it really important that these stakeholders (users) are able to do this?
• Is it actually possible for us to support this activity currently?
• Is it important enough to us that we should consider infrastructure/policy changes?
• Can we meet these goals another way?
• Do we need to meet these goals now?
• Is this a short or long term project goal?

Essentially, this is a discussion where the client team thinks through how the project would “look” with or without certain user stories. The aim is not to decide how the user stories should be met but rather to allow a more holistic view of the project goals and constraints to emerge. As the implications of meeting different user stories are considered, team members can get a sense of how their choices about priorities impact on the overall shape and form of the project. Based on these discussions clients are prompted to rank user stories, using the MoSCoW_Method of method of Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, Wont Have . This means all issues are captured for future reference, but the most important issues are clearly stated and agreed to by all.

Our role in this process is to facilitate the discussion and guide decision making so that agreed project goals, primary stakeholders and prioritized user stories align and support each other. Sometimes a user story will appear important, yet it won’t align with the stated objectives. In this case it is our role to ask questions like: “This user story doesn’t support you to meet your currently stated objectives, so does the user story need to be re-prioritized, or do the objectives need to change?

Why User Stories?

Flexibility, accessibility and manageability
Compared to other project documents, user stories are conceptually very accessible, they are also fast to generate. Clients can easily edit existing user stories and add their own, regardless of their technical capability. Depending on the project, users can also be directly involved in the generation of user stories. From a project management perspective, they reduce potentially hundreds of pages of documentation to just 4 or 5, making them suitable for circulation and as a shared resource for discussion and feedback.

Cohesive and exhaustive
The translation of core project information into user stories is a relatively easy way to get an early handle on the project. Reading through the user stories gives a much clearer sense of “what the project is” than lists of features or content and functional requirements. Clients can easily read through the list and ensure that their concerns have been captured. In the early stages of a project we can often be anxious of missing things, and this methods allows all possibilities to be easily collated into one place.

Common language
User stories become a common language for the client team as well as the design team. They remove the emphasis on solutions and features, and instead frame the discussion around what the project is trying to achieve. This helps clients to focus conversation around the future design possibilities, rather than be held back by existing constraints or agendas. This is particularly important when there is a conflict between different client stakeholders as it allows team members to refocus the conversation on the end goals and work backwards from there.

Shift perspective on the project (for everyone)
Lastly, and most importantly, user stories fundamentally shift the perspective of the project from a list of abstract (and potentially arbitrary) requirements to a description of user focused activities; these are necessarily more concrete and tangible and allow the stakeholder team to conceive of the project in different ways.

The UX perspective provided through user stories becomes a framework through which we can examine and explore the future project strategically and holistically. The process of prioritizing the user stories with the client team becomes a strategic intervention, facilitating discussion around project goals and purpose. The project goals and possible ways of achieving them simultaneously emerge as a result of thinking through the project from a user perspective.

Next…

In this article, we have outlined the initial step in collaboratively developing a project User Experience Strategy via the generation and prioritization of user stories. However, any single user story could be implemented in a number of different ways during the design and build phases. Different approaches will require different levels of investment, and be more or less appropriate given the constraints. Prior to moving into design a better sense of the actual scale of the project is needed. To to this we use visual, tangible and collaborative design tools such as paper prototypes, which allow team members to think through core user pathways and key interaction elements in more concrete ways. While user stories help us to get a shape of the project (what), its purpose (why), these tangible design tools support a shared conversation about potential implementation strategies (how). These steps will be presented in a future article.

Acknowledgments
The reflection on methods outlined in this article was largely made possible through project work completed on behalf of Digital Eskimo, a social design agency in Sydney whose Considered Design methodology makes embracing these methods and approaches possible. We would also like to thank our clients UNSW, Melbourne Journal of International Law and Inspire Digital and our project partners Zumio and Redrollers for their generous commitment to sharing the design experience and process, and to all the participants who give time to our projects.

UX Australia

Michelle and Penny will be giving a presentation called “Emerging a user experience strategy: People, pencils and post-its,” at UX Australia 2009. Their presentation will outline a collaborative approach to developing a User Experience Strategy: a shared vision for the project that aligns all perspectives (e.g business, technical, marketing, brand), but is driven by the potential user experience.