Recently I got a chance to interview none other than Oliver Reichenstein. For those of you who don’t know him: he is the designer of the Web Trend Maps, owner of iA and the voice behind many provoking articles. In September he will be speaking at EuroIA 2010, Paris.

In the past you studied philosophy. How did you end up in the design business?

Oliver Reichenstein

I studied philosophy because I fell in love with a girl and to be next to her I went to philosophy class. In order to impress her I started studying Plato, Aristotle and Kant. That didn’t really work out, but a second woman I was impressed with, my French teacher, told me that in order to start making sense my chaotic brain needed some structure and logic. She was right.

Of course, I was not aware at the time that dealing with abstract notions was the ideal preparation for what would be known later as “information architecture.” At a time when I started working, the title “IA” was mostly a sales trick for people that sold overpriced card sorting sessions to naive customers. Still, what defines information architecture as I understand it today (concept, structure, interaction design), was sort of my first job.

As for surface design… Since there were no good screen designers around back in 1999, I decided to learn Photoshop and do the realization of my concepts myself. The rest came naturally.

What drives you to wanting to create the best designs?

Often it’s because I get angry about wrong standards or superficial bullshit that is commonly accepted as a standard. The more I ramble about bullshit and broken design standards, the higher the pressure for me to fix it.

What defines you as a designer?

Only recently I started call myself as a designer. I always felt that what I do is not fancy or slick or innovative enough for me to deserve that title. I now call myself a designer because the job titles in our field are all messed up (is it “screen designer,” “interaction designer,” “interface designer,” “web designer,” “interaction designer,” “UX designer”?) and it’s the easiest way to answer. It’s also a great conversation starter.

Over the years you’ve come up with many redesigns. From Facebook to the Mozilla browser. How do you approach these challenges?

ZEIT ONLINE

The two examples you’ve cited were design studies that were never realized. So is the somewhat famous paper redesign of Tages-Anzeiger. I think that the best designs we’ve done so far were too courageous for our clients. Literally too courageous. The courage to do what needs to be done, no matter how politically realistic the concept might be is what drives us. Sometimes we get through with our unconditional thinking (as in the case of ZEIT ONLINE), sometimes we don’t. Luckily, we are now in a situation where we do not need to do free work anymore, so whether our designs get realized or not, we now get paid for being courageous. How cool is that?

Our goal: The articles, the brand concepts, the strategy, the surface design—in everything iA does, we try to improve the quality of information. I believe that the best way to change things for the good is to clarify information. With the advent of digital communication things are getting better, but there is too much bullshit, too much bluff, too many lies in corporate communications. As naive as it sounds, I believe that by focussing on the essence, that is improving the reading and writing experience, we can actually change how things work in this world.

Some years ago you decided that your design future was in Japan. What made you move to this country?

First the absence of noise, then meeting my wife. Japan is a very noisy place, but as long as I didn’t speak Japanese, Tokyo was the calmest place I’ve ever seen—since I speak Japanese that calm is gone; but the memory of it remains. In spite of the noise, Tokyo is still the ideal place for me. The city is so big that it lets everybody be and become who they are. As much as I still love my home country, and in particular my home town (Basel), letting people be and become who they are is not given in Switzerland.

Could you share with us some of the highlights of Japanese interaction design?

The Toilets. The Metro system. The Service at Japanese Restaurants.—Japanese Web design, application design, mobile design is horribly overloaded and dated. Have a look at the Alexa top ten if you don’t believe me.

Here in the west we are constantly shifting from interaction design to UX, experience design and service design. How is our field developing in Japan?

Not much going on here. I can see three main reasons:

1. Web design is engineering. In general, Japanese are good at engineering because they’re diligent, cautious and disciplined. That’s why they produce good cars. But car and screen design have a different half life. Screen design is much more short lived and much more test oriented. Release-soon-release-often, A/B-testing or decisions taken by a UX expert against the general opinion of the CEO or the group the UX expert belongs to are against Japanese business culture where decisions are taken unanimously.

2. The lingua franca in our field is English. Japanese web designers just can’t keep up with the fast paste of screen design because most of them don’t speak the language well enough to follow the silicon valley madness.

3. The standard for Japanese web design is still: dense, granular, info overload. Much like our websites around 2003/2004. It’s mostly pre Web2.0 aesthetic (and logic) that dominates. Also, useless silly shiny flash micro sites are still common practice. And the really bad news is that nobody here one cares as long as everybody follows the same trend. Maybe things will change after we got our first big Japanese client to finally innovate.

What can we learn from Japanese (interaction) design culture?

Interaction designers should learn from product designers. And in that sense Japan is a little paradise. As much trouble as the Japanese economy is facing, Japanese product design is in many ways still a paradigm of craftsmanship, consideration and care.

What can the Japanese designers learn from western  (interaction) design culture?

The value of user testing. The value of taking strong decisions . The value of feature reduction (!).

With iA you own one of the smallest and most succesful design agencies in the world. What’s the secret?

Hire few. Hire only people that are better than yourself at what they are doing.  Pay them fairly. Never be late paying salaries. Never be scared of big corporations (most of them suck exactly *because* they’re too big).

You’ll be speaking at EuroIA 2010 in Paris. What will you be talking about?

Not sure. We’ve invested a lot of time into our first application (a word processor). If everything goes as planned, it should come out at the end of July. So I might talk about our first experiences or the “making of” (it has been a long long way). But we already have another internal news project lined up that might be more interesting from an IA point of view.

Thanks for your time.

I’m still in awe of the essence of the Web: connection and collaboration on a previously unimaginable scale. Yet I also feel like these connections waste my time. Not because anything in old media can provide them more effectively, but because the tools that make up the social web are still in a very early stage of evolution and they create a lot of unnecessary waste. This waste is a consequence of the Seven Digital Sins.

The first digital sin: Disorder

The absence of ordering by subject matter

disorder

The Web generates conversations between masses of people all over the world. Yet a long online discussion, whether it takes place on a forum, a mailing list or a comments thread always ends up as a huge mess. For example, take this Guardian article criticizing the value of vitamin supplements. It generated a lively debate in the comments section which highlights the value of the Internet conversations: different people from different perspectives are giving opposing, informed opinions. These give greater insight into the article and ensure the ‘other side’ has an unfiltered voice.

The problem is that, unlike the article itself, the comments have no coherent organisation. There are no dividers or subheadings, no logical progression of arguments or groupings of opinion and no distinction between unique, intelligent insights and throwaway expressions of approval and opposition. It’s painful to work out what’s going on. (And this is a relatively brief conversation! Many forum conversations go on for pages and pages.)

The second digital sin: Clutter

The existence of more posts than necessary

clutter

Online discussions are also cluttered with extraneous information. Any public discussion will usually be littered with many posts making the same basic point. For example, when Google unveiled Wave last year, tech blog comments were filled with criticisms that the interface looked too busy and complex to engage ordinary Web users. This is a worthwhile, interesting point, but there’s no value in hearing it 30 times in the same thread.

The other main cause of clutter is misunderstandings. For example, in the pictured forum, you can see ‘shyuhe’ asks a question to which ‘Abaddon’ gives an answer. Shyuhe points out that Abaddon has misunderstood his question, and creates a new post which poses the question in a different way, prompting a new reply by Abaddon. The exchange goes on in this manner for several more posts. The reader ends up going through a series of posts that are just clarifications of previous posts. In a wiki article, the original text is continually revised until it’s clear. It’s another reason why it’s so much more time-consuming and painful to absorb information from a conversation than from an article.

The third digital sin: Reinventing the Wheel

Failure to build on past discussions

Because big online discussions are so messy and cluttered, very few people have the patience to read through the entire discussion before writing a post themselves. The discussion tends to get focused entirely on the last few posts. Older posts are forgotten about. This of course means that the same conversation happens again and again within the same thread. The newcomers to the conversation don’t notice that the points they want to make have already been made. Even discussion participants who have been following it from the very start struggle to retain an understanding of everything that’s been said because there’s no way to quickly get an overview.

The Internet should be a place where people can access all the knowledge and ideas surrounding a particular subject and then say something which builds on that. In other words, discussions should progress. Instead, they resemble Groundhog Day.

The Internet should be a place where people can access all the knowledge and ideas surrounding a particular subject and then say something which builds on that. In other words, discussions should progress. Instead, they resemble Groundhog Day. As soon as a conversation has reached a certain length it is submerged into the oblivion of irredeemable messiness. Another conversation duly arises to make all the same points.

The fourth digital sin: Inconsistency

Too many competing formats within the same collaboration suite

The first three sins are most obvious on forums, comment threads and email mailing lists. But they’re also a problem on dedicated collaboration tools like Basecamp and Huddle . These tools are characterized by the stitching together different tools: typically wikis (or ‘writeboards’), forums (or ‘message boards’) and comments. Unfortunately this only adds to the general messiness of online collaboration:

Firstly, it’s often unclear whether ideas should be posted as wiki pages or forum threads. A wiki page encourages organization but a forum encourages better brainstorming (since it’s more obviously participative and conversation-like). You could start with a forum discussion and then summarize the results as a wiki page, but that splits the topic in two, making it unclear where people should make further contributions. Moreover, the act of summarizing a conversation is itself a time-consuming task.

Secondly, it’s difficult to create a coherent interface for managing all these different tools. Interaction design thrives on consistency. The more ways there are to contribute to the site and engage with other users, the more difficult it is to create a consistent interface.

These problems are exacerbated when additional collaboration formats are thrown into the mix. Blogs, social bookmarks, microblogs and Q&As all have their own unique advantages. But throw them all together and you have so many competing formats that it becomes very hard to build a clear mental picture of how things are organized and how, as a user, you should engage with the site.

The fifth digital sin: Automated miscommunication

Too little or too much information about what’s happening within the collaboration suite

Auto miscommunication

The fourth sin contributes to this fifth sin. Vital to any social media application is the ability to quickly get an overview of relevant updates and new content. How do users know when a wiki article relevant to them has been updated? How do they know if someone has replied to a comment they’ve written? How do they know if there’s some new question or idea they should be responding to? Answering these questions satisfactorily becomes much more difficult when there are half a dozen different formats to keep track of. You can’t have a simple email-style inbox if each tool has its own interface and performs a radically different function.

Some collaboration tools—Wetpaint, for example—notify users of practically everything that happens on a site. This is overwhelming, and most users will respond by ignoring all notifications. Other collaboration tools go too far the other way, minimizing notifications with the consequence that some important changes have to be hunted down on the user’s own initiative. Google Docs is a surprising example of this: there is no fast, intuitive way to see exactly what new additions a collaborator has made to a document. Showing too little and showing too much both waste users’ time and make it harder to effectively coordinate your work with others.

The sixth digital sin: Aimlessness

Discussions that run off-track and waste time

The Internet has inherited this sixth sin from the offline world. We’ve all attended meetings that meander from topic to topic or get sidetracked by inconsequential details. Online discussions are no better. They should have the advantage of allowing readers to simply ignore the inconsequential parts, but lack of structure makes this difficult in practice: you need to read from top to bottom to understand what’s going on.

The simplistic comment-followed-by-reply-followed-by-reply format of today’s online discussions has the advantage of being easy to use, since it imitates how we have discussions offline. But it misses the opportunity to create a new, digital-native discussion format in which comments are not organized chronologically (or according to the person you’re responding to, as is the case with ‘threaded’ forums) but according to the specific point being discussed. Such a format would lead to claims being broken down into their component parts, leading to much clearer thinking.

We’re still relying on the mental frameworks of the old, offline world of communication. The Internet doesn’t need to be structured this way; and it shouldn’t be if we want to take full advantage of its potential for facilitating mass collaboration.

We’re still relying on the mental frameworks of the old, offline world of communication. The Internet doesn’t need to be structured this way; and it shouldn’t be if we want to take full advantage of its potential for facilitating mass collaboration.

The seventh digital sin: Incivility

Personal attacks which don’t make any constructive point

Two words: YouTube comments. How many people have been put off online discussions because of the sniping, personal attacks, pointless insults and general needless rudeness that is so common on public forums? The root of this excess is twofold. Firstly, it’s easy to over-estimate people’s hostility when you can’t see their face and so over-reactions are common. Secondly, online commentators can choose to be anonymous, and anonymous people don’t suffer any consequences for bad behavior. This has led some to demand the end of online anonymity.

Such a drastic solution would be a shame because online anonymity has a hugely positive flip side. There are many people too shy, oppressed or otherwise restricted by the duties and bonds of real life to honestly speak their mind if that involves revealing their offline identity. The anonymous Web has provided such people with a voice. Allowing secrecy of identity creates true openness of debate.

An alternative solution to incivility may lie, once again, in the discussion formats themselves. A future format might serve to undermine the one-on-one personal bickering that existing formats make so easy.

Conclusion: Sins old and new

Pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony and sloth: The Seven Deadly Sins are as old as humanity. Whether we blame brutal evolution or rebellious angels, they’re probably here to stay. The future of the Seven Digital Sins however, lies in our hands. They’re embedded in tools over which we have practically unlimited control. The impact that Twitter, an app whose revolutionary innovation was simply to impose a character limit on blog posts, has shown that shaping online interaction is now more an issue of design than technology. Our progress towards genuine mass collaboration is limited only by our inability to think outside the offline mental box.

The internet changes over time. That the technology has evolved is obvious. But how we use the internet is also changing. So we have two conceptual distinctions — technology and people — that we frequently conflate into one idea of the internet. This post is about teasing apart the objective and subjective dimensions of social media, to examine what’s behind the relational economy we now live in, and its particular mode of production. All commerce and much personal and social utility implied by use of social media owes to the subjective value added to what was, previously, a mode of production of information (publishing).

I will try to demonstrate here the manner in which social acts and communication result in mediated social realities. And suggest that the relational connections and value-added associations which are the byproduct of social media use create a marketplace of content whose highest value, individually motivated subjective choices, we are only beginning to capture and mine.

Technically speaking, the internet distributes data. Data that is also stored. Data we also call information. Information being a very loose term used sometimes to refer to the contents themselves (words, numbers, it doesn’t matter) and sometimes to its social/cultural meaning (information is something meaningful, a fact). Technically speaking, information is the bitstream and lifeblood of the internet. It’s objective. But speaking in common terms, information is what we know. It’s subjective.

The world of the first, we might consider the “reality” of the online world. Information is the foundation on which a rich medium of presentation and interaction is constructed (it is a constructed world, it is a world produced and manufactured as are all media).

The world of the second we might consider the “subjectivity” of the online world. Interaction and communication, in which information is used and referenced, linked to and embedded, is now the most fascinating aspect of the online world. In this medium nothing exists unless it is connected to something else. Unlike the real world, the online world exists only insofar as it is navigable. That is, only on the basis of a connection.

The connectedness of the real world is material, substantial, and alive. Forces of change are natural and inevitable, in short: causal. Time moves all substance; all is in motion and change is a natural “causal” chain. Connectedness is simple causality of the world becoming, in time.

The connectedness of the online world is constructed. Connections are constructed by machines and by people, according to the logic and relations that exist at the level of information, and at according to the subjective choices (tastes, preferences) of people (users).

The old model for the online world was web publishing. Separately, there were communication tools and applications (email, chat, IM etc). The current model combines the two. In the old model, connections between bits of information might be made according to the relations that made sense for those bits of information: taxonomic, categorical, by genre, topic, what have you. The online world had more objectivity in that its production reflected “industrial” methods.

The online world today reflects a much higher degree of subjective and social use — connections are made not only as a reflection of these subjective values and interests, but as a byproduct of subjective relations and activities. Put simply, people create value when they interact and communicate online, often-times including ingredients provided by the medium (we can use words, which of course pre-existed the internet; we can also use the stuff found only here).

The online world is capturing more and more subjective choices. Selections made by people for reasons of taste and preference, motivated by others (for, because of, to attract…), reflecting individual identity, group identity, community, you name it. Social media permit online activity to reveal a vast amount of social and cultural preference as well as relational interest. And much of it is recorded, stored, and indexed.

The real social life?

But extracting meaning from the social web is a challenging proposition, let alone undertaking. When content is created, connected, distributed, embedded, or otherwise attached to people, their talk, or their interactions (activities), its meaning becomes ambiguous. Meaning may be obtained from the user’s intentions in using content, or from the content’s semantic meaning, from the relationship between users, the group, site, community context, application context, and so on. And I’m radically over-simplifying the interpretive options here.

Counting and quantifying by-and-large has served as our means of qualifying social web content. This is perhaps now going to change somewhat, as realtime tools like Twitter (and their practices) contribute ever-increasing amounts of “information” to the internet. When information first appears, when it is news and is completely new, it is distributed. This original flow of information creates connections, establishes content relationships, facilitates indexing by search engines, and will make possible socially-validating actions (comments, tagging, bookmarking, sharing etc).

The real social media life

There is a bias in this first flow of news. This bias owes simply to the fact that new information must be observed before it can become part of the online reality’s facticity. Information cannot be valued until it first has been observed. So the “first hit” if you will, in traffic, is relatively meaningless and belongs to the information’s coming into existence. It is merely the appearance of news in the realtime stream.

The second selection of that information is the first to reflect user interest — the second selection is not observation but action. It is confirmation of the information’s subjective value, or of its social relevance. This second selection, be it a retweet, a like, or some other act of “sharing,” transforms the news item (information) into communication, for it is now voiced not as fact but as an individual statement, or personal choice. This move transforms fact as facticity into social fact as subjective interest, and not only as individual choice but as a communicative expression.

Behind the choice of the like or retweet, in other words, is an intention taken up with an audience in mind. In this way our likes and retweets convey, indicate, suggest, solicit, and identify our interests in a social act that engenders further interaction. In the transformation of fact as news into social fact as choice, this second selection attributes new meaning (adding value to the information), as it is sent, shared, rated, saved, tagged etc. That added value is the subjective interest, and is the reason that in the world of social media, the news (facts) that matter are those that are most communicable; in short, tastes by means of which we disclose who we are, what we find interesting, and with which we identify.

Counting accrues over time, as content is validated/used in a variety of social interactions. Because connections may be counted without qualifying the type of connection or the kind of relation, a simple count is the most common way of validating information. This is a reality in which the number of connections to a piece of information is its volume or mass — it’s social reality.

More recent social web practices, however, suggest that qualifying these connections, and accounting for the variety in social relations, will be increasingly valuable if not necessary. For whom is information consumed; in front of whom is it shared or published; for whom is it told; who else chooses it? Where in the world of facts, validity is measured in terms of truth, in the world of social facts, validity is an expression of relevance. Relevance in a social sense is significance. Understanding the significance of information means understanding an act, a social relation, and the connection made with information embedded in social interactions.

The social act is far more complex, relationally, than may at first appear, and to date exceeds the capabilities of search and filtering to model and represent. For relational values attributed or attached to social fact as they are communicated across networks may belong to a number of meaning domains.

These relational values may be indicative, of personal interest. May be expressive, of personal feeling, state, or mood. May be solicitous, of recognition, validation, or some other acknowledgment. May be associative, as in similar to or related to some category of interests and tastes, values, events, and so on. May be inter-personal, as when they are intended to further interaction with a person or persons. And so on. All of these and other social actions may furnish the reasons for which we confirm and communicate, select and distribute, connect to and share, content in mediated social systems.

The social web grows by supplementing information with social significance, or what makes information socially relevant. The old world, the world of web 1.0, was a world of publishing. It was a one-column world. The new world, the social world of web 2.0, is a two-column world. What the double-entry method of book-keeping did for finance, inaugurating a system of debits and credits, and liberating capital from its exchange form, we need for the social web. Facebook is on this already, but still primitively, insofar as social content in feeds is liked and acted on within an inter-personal relational context.

But outside Facebook, the added value of so many one-click expressions or gestures is still lost in a system that captures action in a single column social model. Social needs to model communication, not just information, and for this it needs the equivalent of a two-column transactional model. Like markets run by brokerage and trading systems, the ask and the offer, the sale and purchase, need to be coupled. Only then are social expressions validated by the reciprocation, or confirmation, supplied by another (the audience). Value can then be assessed on the basis of its confirmation.

Communication is just communication as long as it remains observed only. But it calls for a yes or no, for acceptance or rejection. When that is supplied by another person, it becomes social action. Not information, but action, and what we need to capture it, measure it, relate it, and repurpose it, is the challenge facing us today.

Photo by malias

When we say that the design must “tell a story,” we are not just talking about games or interactive fiction, or even about turning a work application into an adventure (“Conquer the benefits allocation maze…”). Instead, we mean the kind of stories that help you create new designs. These stories are used to make you think of new possibilities, give you the tools to encourage a self-reflective kind of thinking—design thinking—or so you can imagine designs that will improve the lives of other people. Stories explore ideas from user research.

This article is an excerpt of Rosenfeld Media's latest book 'Storytelling For User Experience'

In Tom Erickson’s view, design is as much about communication as it is about the end result. This includes communication with the eventual users, as well as communication among a collaborative team. The stories are a tool to help designers “grapple with the messy, ill-defined issues” that are part of the design process. They do this by not only creating small scenarios, but also by communicating the emotional overtones, the social and organizational dynamics that are just as much a part of the story as the factual narrative. Used in this way, stories activate the mind by providing rough sketches with openings for discussion.

Imagine that you have been researching attitudes toward new “green technologies” as you work on a product to help people use resources more wisely. You might have heard people talking about how difficult it was to tell how much electricity or water they were really using. And you probably heard attitudes ranging from the altruistic (“We should use fewer resources for the good of the earth.”) to the selfish (“Why should I be the one to scrimp?”). You probably have a few story fragments. But you still need to turn this information into a design. That process might involve sketching ideas for screens as Jeremie Jean and Aaron Marcus did in “The Green Machine: Going Green at Home” (in UPA’s UX Magazine 8.4) when they imagined a smart phone application that would help people visualize their energy use by showing a graph that compared their goal to average use by others. Or you might create a story showing how your design idea would work.

Purple Buildings

Tom Erickson’s story describes a design solution to the problem of how one might use monitoring of resources to encourage people to moderate their usage habits while at the same time not having a Big Brother scenario where every toilet flush is metered and reported to the utility.

Xiang-Wei left the transit station and turned onto her street with foreboding in her heart. She looked down the street, and her fears were confirmed: Her building’s skin, normally a healthy green, was discolored with purple streaks. How embarrassing–their building was overdrawn on its water allotment.

It wasn’t her fault. That morning, alerted by feedback in their apartment, she and her husband had skipped their showers and made certain that their children used no more than their 10-liter allotments.

But it was difficult to believe that their building-mates were to blame. She’d gotten to know the 24 other families that lived in the co-op over the last two years, and they were all generally responsible. Her husband thought that there was a leak somewhere in the building. That seemed unlikely to her because most appliances monitored their resource usage and sent out requests for assistance when out-of-band consumption events occurred. But her husband said not everything was instrumented–pipes for example–and that there could well be a leak, especially since they’d had a mild earth tremor last week. Old Dr. Lee, who lived just down the hall, spoke darkly of hackers, implying that vague enemies had broken into the resource monitoring system with the aim of embarrassing them. But Dr. Lee was well known to be a bit…odd and, besides, the penalties for hacking into resource control systems were severe.

Xiang-Wei reached her building, and hurried up the walk through the front garden, feeling her cheeks color. Fortunately, she had come home early, and there weren’t many people on the street, but still…

There was just one thing to do: organize a vote of the co-op to ask the resource authorities to turn on fine-grained monitoring. That would enable them to identify any leaks, or to put the finger on the miscreant who was wasting resources.

Not all new design stories have to be as big as a building. Stories can illustrate designs that solve smaller problems as well. No matter how big or small the idea, one type of design story takes a point of pain and transforms it into a successful, happy ending. As an example, here are some short story fragments from users of a payroll program:

• “My co-worker usually does the payroll. When she’s on vacation, we always have to scramble to get everything done right and get the staff paid on time.”
• “It’s not the routine things that are a problem. It’s special stuff like bonuses and advances.”
• “The instructions in our software are fine, but they don’t include little details like which set of checks we should use for payroll. We all dug through our wallets looking for a stub so we could see which number series to use.”

Maybe you used these fragments in a short story to illustrate the problems and frustrations:

• “Mary was filling in on payroll while the office manager, Kathy, was away. On Thursday, just as she was about to run the payroll checks, she remembered Kathy telling her about some special bonus checks due that week. She groaned. Special checks…special anything always seemed to go wrong for her. If she could just remember what Kathy said. She stared at the confusing mass of notes pinned up on the wall behind the accounting computer. None of them said anything about bonuses. She groaned again. Last time she got something wrong, it took weeks to clean up the problems.”

Now you can think about how this story could end differently and write a new story that changes the pain into delight with a new feature for the payroll software.

• “Mary was filling in on payroll while the office manager, Kathy, was away. She didn’t like this part of the job—ever since she’d made a mistake that took weeks to clean up. But Kathy told her not to worry this time and when Mary clicked on “Weekly Payroll” she saw why. All the information she needed was right there on the screen. Instead of the confusing grid of numbers that had caused all the problems last time, she saw step-by-step instructions built into the forms. Best of all, Kathy had obviously written some of the instructions, because they described the procedures in their own office, like the note that told her which way to put the checks in the printer. But the best was the reminder of the special bonuses due this week. Everything was set up, and all she had to do was click.”

A short story like this not only suggests new features, but connects them to the user research and the people who will benefit from them.

Stories evolve through the design process

During the design process, your use of stories will evolve as the design goes through brainstorming (generative), concept (expressive), and specification (prescriptive) stages. As the design progresses, your stories will too, changing format and adding detail.

The number of people working with the stories expands as you move from analysis to design. In the early stages of user research, the user experience team was working most directly with the stories. Now, as you move into the design phase, more people are involved. People who were not involved in the user research (or were only involved in some parts of it) will begin to work with what you have learned and with the stories you have collected and selected.

How your company or project is organized will also make a difference. If you have a strong user experience team, your experience with using stories will be different than if you are the lone voice of user experience on a more traditional technical development team.

Brainstorming for new stories: Generative stories

In a good user experience design process, you will move into the design phase with a collection of stories to work with. But this may not always be the case. You may find yourself in the midst of the design process without having done user research and without the stories you find during that work.

This does not mean that you don’t have any story ideas to draw on. But those stories will come from your own past experiences and assumptions about the product and its users. Your own history and even the language you use to think about the design challenge can be a trap, preventing you from seeing the large quantities of creative fodder around you.

While brainstorming is a technique that’s been around for a long time and is practiced widely, it is not always as productive as you would like. While it is good to collect all the wild and crazy ideas a team might have, what might be more useful is to have a sort of “brainstorming helper,” something that can trigger creative ideas—or at least ideas that are different and new for the team.

If you are starting to work with stories for the first time at the design stage, you can use brainstorming games to generate some new stories.

Even engineering PhDs can play games

Early in my career, I had to travel to a meeting of researchers and research managers for an idea generation session on a particular area of technology. These “ideation sessions∫ were popular because they appeared to generate a lot of ideas off the top of all the participants’ heads on the chosen topic of the day. They were sessions with a lot of talking (though not a lot of listening), and the primary goal as far as I could tell was to generate patentable ideas, with a secondary goal of generating ideas that could become products.

A day or two before I was to leave for the meeting, my manager let me know that I would be leading a part of this meeting, and that our director would be in attendance. I calmly responded to him, ™Sure–ok,∫ as my panic ensued. What was I going to do with a room full of engineering PhDs? I was sure that my boss wanted to test this whole storytelling thing I often talked about. But at that time, I primarily had writing and performance experience, and little experience teaching and leading workshops.

What I did was use a game that I saw a friend use, which she got from Doug Lipman’s bok Storytelling Games. I adapted a game designed for sixth graders to work for research PhDs, and prayed I wouldn’t lose my job. I had them pair up and play a game similar to Mad Libs. The objective was to choose from a list of sentence structures with blanks and fill in those blanks by choosing words from a set of word categories, all related to design and to the technology topic of the day. Once they had filled in a sentence with the appropriate words, the story supporting that sentence should leap out at them. All they had to do was write down that supporting story.

Each researcher pair was given 15 minutes to go off and write their little story and then come back to share their stories with the group.

“You mean you want us to pick words and write stories?” There was a certain level of skepticism in the room. During those 15 minutes while they were writing, I was weighing job options. Surely, I would be busted for making a room full of doctors play a childish game.

When the time was up, I checked with the pairs, and they all requested another five minutes. After that I checked again, and again they asked for more timeºand again once more. At that point, I could feel the warmth of job security flowing back into my life.

When the group finally reassembled, we only had 45 minutes of scheduled meeting time left to share stories. When we were still sitting there two hours later sharing stories and identifying all the interface and technology ideas they had triggered, I knew we had something.

Stories can be tough to just come up with, but they can be triggered easily. Remember, we are storytelling beings. It doesn’t take much to trigger a story. A simple story fragment will do.

Brainstorming helper: The storytelling game

This is a version of Doug Lipman’s game, adapted for user experience brainstorming.

1. Choose one of the story sentences;
2. Choose a set of items from the People, Places, Activities, and Motivations columns to fill in the blanks in the story sentence. Modify the phrases so that they make grammatical sense for the sentence;
3. Once the sentence is completed, write a short story to provide context for that sentence.

A good story sentence will have at least one person, place, motivation, and activity. The simplest story sentence is:

• A (person) in (place) needs help doing (activity) because (motivation).

You can use details that are appropriate for your company to make more complex story sentences. For example, these sentences are for constructing stories about mobile communication and computing.

• While a (person) is in (place), they need to find and meet up with a (person) because (motivation).
• A (person) who is trying to (motivation) at (place) must prepare for (activity), which they will have to do in one hour.
• A (person) at (place) just realized that they lost their keys and wallet while (activity) and needs to rearrange… everything.

The options for these categories should reflect the full range of possibilities—and even some that might seem a bit over the top. When you make your own list for a project, be sure to include some wild examples. If you are working with ideas suggested by your user research, be sure to include some of the less frequent types of users. If you stick to your current categories, you end up with the same old thing. But keep the descriptions short and easy to understand. You want broad categories, not finely drawn differences. The idea here is to free you up to think in new ways.

table 8.1

Table 8.1 has a list of options in each of the categories.

Here are a few of the story sentences filled with words from this list:

• A small business owner in a foreign country is trying to pay household bills to stay sane.
• A spy in an airport needs help feeling secure about her children when she is not at home.
• While a student is at the beach, he needs to find and meet up with a supermodel because he wants to improve his social life.
• A nun at a baseball stadium just realized that she lost her keys and wallet while spending her Saturday chauffeuring kids between activities, and she needs to rearrange… everything.

Your combinations can be fanciful, or you can choose ones that seem to make more sense. Don’t be afraid to get more outlandish because you can explain anything in a story. But don’t pick sentences that just tell the same story you already know. Remember, the point of this exercise is to get creative in how you think about the design challenge.

The story begins with the completed sentence and creates a narrative about how the person completed the activity. To suit the needs of different types of groups and personalities, here are two methods of doing this exercise.

Raw brainstorming. Generate lots of stories for different sentences very quickly. Don’t worry about the details. Just do them rapidly and without judgment. The idea is to generate many stories that might be the germ of a new idea. The method should work particularly well with groups able to loosen up and let their brains throw out ideas without the need to fix each one first.
Pick one sentence and stick with it. Develop the best story for one sentence. This method works well with groups that like to dive deep into ideas. While they may not benefit from a wide variety of ideas, as in the first method, they will take comfort in an idea that is rich by design.

You can even use both methods. Start with the first one to generate a lot of ideas. Then select a few for the more detailed presentation in the second.

Different work styles need different story styles

I was once paired with a young engineer in a technology brainstorming workshop. We were supposed to pick from two lists of unrelated words and use the combination of these words as sparks for generating new ideas. We were given about 30 minutes to run down the long word list and generate as many ideas as possible. Fun for me! “What better way to spend a half hour,” I said.

But my partner needed to work more deliberately, grounding each piece of any idea in a technology already familiar to him. Nothing could go unanswered. Mystery was not allowed. We were not even close to fast or innovative. I kept trying to push us on–he kept wanting to ruminate. At the end of 30 minutes, we had only a few ideas completed while the other groups had 10, 15, even 20. I was frustrated.

When I thought about the experience, I realized that our different approaches gave us the worst of both worlds. If he were more like me, we would have had a lot of ideas, some of them really good. But if I were more like him, we would have had a few, well-developed ideas with deep roots in computer science, mechanical engineering, manufacturing, perhaps even product marketing. We would have fully solved some stuff. Instead, because we each had different approaches, we had a small collection of mish-mash ideas.

No one approach is better. While it’s really good to have a lot of ideas to work with, some people just can’t let go of how they naturally think. You’ll have to judge whom you are working with and adjust appropriately, because much as we might wish to, we can’t always make other people change.

Don’t worry about wasting time. The whole idea of brainstorming is to create a lot of ideas so you have a rich mix of stories to work from. Brave New Workshop, an improvisational comedy group, comes up with 600 ideas to create a show with 25 sketches. In fact, they don’t start refining any of their ideas until they have created all 600 of their one-sentence ideas. Story sentences generated quickly work in the same way, loosening you up by generating a lot of quick sketches. You’ll throw most of them away, but some will spark ideas that can grow.

Here’s an example of how one of the brainstorming story sentences might grow into a larger story and begin to explore the context to expose possible design concepts.

A generative story

Story sentence: A nun at a baseball stadium just realized that she has lost her keys and wallet while spending her Saturday chauffeuring kids between activities, so she needs to rearrange everything.

The story: It had been a hectic morning for Sister Sarah. She had picked up three kids at each of their homes, taken them to the teen empowerment meeting downtown, and then ushered them off to the afternoon Phillies game. When she discovered her wallet and keys were missing, she didn’t know where she could have lost them. In the parking lot? In the stadium? In the car? On the ground? Who knows?

Fortunately, she had kept her 4G mobile in an inside pocket of her habit–the pocket without the hole in it. She was able to use the bank application to lock her savings account against any future activity, knowing she would eventually have to go into the bank personally to have it unlocked.

She was worried about her car keys. If someone found them on the ground and figured out which car they belonged to, she would lose all the children’s art she kept in her trunk.
From previous bad experiences, she had learned to use her mobile phone to save the GPS location of her parking space in the massive stadium parking lot. So when she went to the stadium security office, she was able to tell them exactly where the car was. Very quickly the call came back from the parking lot that her keys had been found a couple of rows away from her car.

This story suggests several possible concepts for new products, ready for further consideration:

• A mobile application for parking lots that records the location of a car on the parking lot grid;
• A mobile banking application that allows users to do an emergency account lock;
• A device attached to a key ring that can reply to a mobile signal with its location.

Hearing this story, an engineer or business development person may respond with these ideas:

• We could trigger the car alarm from the mobile to help find a parked car easier;
• If the mobile could unlock and start her car, she wouldn’t need to carry car keys;
• An RFID tag on the phone could be made to work with ATMs so she could always get money if she lost her wallet.

Interested in more?

This was just a short excerpt from Rosenfeld Media’s latest book ‘Storytelling for User Experience‘. If you want the entire experience: go get the book at our UX Book Store. You can also win a copy.

The contest starts on the day this article went live and ends June 30th. The winners will be informed before July 5th. You can send in as many tweets as you want. Everybody can compete, except for our own kahunas and dudes.

Thanks to Rosenfeld Media for sponsoring this contest. Don’t forget to follow them @rosenfeldmedia.

Over 400 enthusiastic designers gathered in Amsterdam for the 2010 edition of The Web and Beyond. The theme of this year was Proximity and the slogan of the day ‘How close do you want your web to be?’ We had a wonderful day filled with (mostly) interesting talks. And especially for you we wrote this overview.

Proximus Maximus: Design Imperatives from the Roman Empire to the NASA Space Program and Beyond – Michael Meyer

The day was kicked off by Meyer. He starts with a great story about the creator of color changing glasses. Meyer isn’t sure if the story is true or where it comes from, and actually he doesn’t care. What he does care about is that there is a hero in the story we want to believe in. And Meyer says that everybody can become a hero in a his or her own story, as long as we truly understand what we can do.

While writing this piece I find it very hard to summarize the keynote. The entire talk is so connected to beautiful stories that I am certain that this summary will never come close to the talk, but I’ll do an attempt anyway. The essence of Meyer’s talk is that we must completely understand the product or service we work with. As long as we don’t understand every little detail we’ll never be able to create superb solutions or understand the consequences of our design decisions. When you are controlling a nuclear plant you have to have an understanding of what water wants to do. If you work in a financial institute you need to understand what makes money flow. The same is true for design. And this is what Meyer calls empathy.

In total he says that there are three things a designer focus on:

• Empathy. An emotional closeness. A deep, intuitive understanding of the materials you work with is important to get the most out of your work;
• Core. Each person (but also object and service) has a certain core. This is essential material that you have available to craft the product, service, experience. Discovering and understanding this core is really important when working together with other disciplines. There are (for example) often frustrations when engineers and user experience designers work together, this is because they have a different core. When you start not just understanding your own, but also the other cores, you’ll be able to work together in a situation where everybody can be a hero of his core.
• Proxy. This is the thing that represents the sum of your knowledge, to communicate your understanding and ability.

The Human Interface – Christoper Fahey

The bottom line of Chris’s talk is: “We make better products if we think of them as human beings”

We people being Natural Born Cyborgs ourselves (“Yes, I too wear glasses”) tend to attribute human characteristics to non-human objects. We respond to a face, or a perceived face. We respond to computer interaction as if they were human. That’s why crude error messages trigger such a negative emotional response. It’s our old brains. Thinking in humans only, seeing faces everywhere. So we should start designing everything to look like a human face? To act and talk like a polite human being? No.

First of all Fahey states that interaction design is a creative form to create deeply human experiences. And secondly: change is in the air, with technologies that finally permit more compelling interactions. These technologies like touch, voice recognition, image recognition and gesture are not so new as we think but are only now coming into full swing. We should be really happy with this development, but also take good care of how we use the technologies. The lessons Fahey wants us to learn are:

1. don’t replace humans
2. don’t replicate humans

Nothing you design can ever come close to an actual human being, so it’s probably better to not even try it. And even if it is possible, what’s the use? We shouldn’t try to mimic, but try to enhance and support. He then shows us ‘the uncanny valley’ by Masahiro Mori. A graph that plots our emotional response to the system, plotted against how much it resembles a real human being. Fahey states it’s better not to aim for the top because we are not there yet (future dreams) but to go for the peak before the valley. But how do make the perfect human interface, the one just before the valley?
Most importantly: it should not be mimicking but reflecting human behavior. 
Twitter is great example of this. Think of a cocktail party, where everybody is chitchatting away, mostly about nothing. Twitter mirrors this behavior online.

The human interface…

• is about persuasion and seduction 
;
• is smart and has awareness;
• is physical, embodied;
• is linguistic, poetic and narrative;
• is emotional and feeling;
• has a name and an identity
;
• has a personality.

Personally I really like the idea of designing our interfaces with human behavior in mind. I too often design only with the users human behavior in mind. It helps me to look at the interface and ask myself “if it where a human, what is it saying to me”? I can easily see how you could fall into the uncanny valley here, so beware of that. But trying to make our systems a little more humane, a little more polite, nice, praising and personal is definitely a good thing.

Managerial Implications of a ZIP-filed World – Jemima Gibbons

Most of us are active social media users, being able to pick and use the tools we need in our daily workflow, but a lot of companies struggle to figure out how they can use social media in their benefit. In her book Monkeys with Typewriters, Jemima Gibbons talks about how 21st century companies embrace social media. During the research for her book she interviewed 50 people like Tim O’Reilly, Craig Newmark and Jason Fried. The number one concern is being afraid to open up from a personal perspective. Surpisingly nobody mentioned the security aspects of social media.

So what can these companies do? According to Gibbons they need to start by becoming more web oriented. In order to become successful users of social media they can follow these six steps:

1. Cede control. Management should actively persue the use of social media without trying to influence this. IBM did this by allowing employees to become poster boys and girls for social media tools. Best Buy created their own network for communication: the Blue Shirt Nation. At one point Best Buy management wanted to reduce staff discount which resulted in a lot of complaining on the Blue Shirt Nation network. The discount remained but the network eventually got replaced by a system their management can control better, something most Blue Shirts didn’t appreciate.
2. Be passionate. An example Gibbons used to illustrate what being passionate is all about is Lauren Luke, better known on Youtube as panacea81. She is a classic example of someone who turned being insecure about her body around into a great youtube hit where she shows viewers how they can apply make-up in the same way the Hollywood stars do. This resulted into Luke getting her own make-up line. Gibbons explains that being passionate is all about great storytelling.
3. Use the network. Luis Suarez, a social media evangalist at IBM hated his job untill at 2008 he moved back to Gran Canaria and stopped using email all together. Currently he loves his job and is the only IBM employee living and working from Gran Canaria. He is able to do his job only using social media and phone.
4. Open up. Gibbons believes that on the internet people should just add data even if they’re not an expert. Scott Monty, head of social media at Ford is a very engaged and open Twitter user. During the Ford bail out a lot of people complained about the management using private jets while having funding problems. Monty publicly questioned these action on Twitter allowing others to talk to an actual person about their frustrations. According to Gibbons sometimes its not an option to be silent.
5. Listen actively. Not only listen to your customers but listen to all stakeholders and most importantly listen to people who have critique and show them that you are listening. When the United Kingdom had it’s Parliamentary expenses scandal, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown tried to address the issue by posting a message on youtube. Although this might work, the people who actually uploaded the video made a big mistake, they disabled the comments. Soon afterwards someone not from Browns staff uploaded the video again this time allowing comments to be made. Anyone using social media should realize that any kind of content can be reused and remixed.
6. Be generous. During the interview Gibbons did with Andy Bell, Chieft Creative Officer at Mint Digital, Bell told that all their employees are made (tiny) shareholders. They also go on weekend trips with the entire team where they create web apps together. Gibbons mentioned that by open sourcing your apps you allow others to continue to build. Being generous isn’t always about giving away free swag.

Social Interaction Design for Augmented Reality – Joe Lamentia

People As Content – Anton Nijholt

Anton Nijholt is professor of computer science at the University of Twente. His main research interests are multi-party interaction, multimodal interaction and entertainment computing. Nijholt showed a lot of examples from his field of research while at the same time expressing uneasiness about it.

Nijholt starts his presentation by asking a couple of questions: Can humans become computable? In 1982 Time Magazine chose the computer as Man of the Year, only to reverse that statement in 2006 when they made “you” Man of the Year since you are in control of the computer. Nijholt questions this, as he states, we are molding humans into ambient intelligence situations. According to Nijholt our daily life interactions as humans are different than the Gricean paradigm. As humans it is in our nature to show emotions like teasing, lying and joking. Computers aren’t able to do this very well and since people become more and more embedded with internet it is important to research how this can become better. Most of the apps Nijholt demonstrated during his talk are used in situations without a mouse of keyboard, turning the app into a mixed reality environment with virtual humans, social robots and environments.

Most of Nijholts research consists of hundreds of hours of looking at videos where people perform tasks while listing all visible emotions like blinking, confusion, frustration and provocing. During the first example we see four webcam feeds, one person tells a story, three others listen. The listeners see the storyteller but he can only see one person. It’s interesting how body language like mimicing isn’t possible in this situation. Techniques used in this demo are also shown in the Microsoft Virtual Receptionist.

Another demo showed how you can measure all body movement from a single person. During the demo a fitness instructor can check positions and correct them but also notice when someone starts becoming tired even before this person might actually notice it himself.

In games this kind of research can be worth a lot. Hungarian researchers from the Budapest University for Technology and Economics can measure skin signals that betray a person’s move before the move is made, allowing gamers to react a lot faster. One of Nijholts own projects takes place in World of Warcraft. By measuring alpha waves he can tell when a gamer is acting angry. In-game this adds a Hulk like feature allowing the gamer to morph from an Elf into a strong angry Bear.

When Data Gets Up Close and Personal – Stephen Anderson

In today’s world we are used to the constant availability of statistics. We’ve become addicted to them and especially the ones about ourselves. This has caused the growing popularity of personal informatics, generating tools and sites like Dopplr, Klout and Hunch.

In his talk Stephen explores this world and wonders if it would be possible to turn e-mail into a game that will make life easier and happier at the same time.His talk is based upon a Johnny article he wrote earlier this year.

Proximity Wormholes: How the Social Web Enables Initmacy at Scale – Lee Bryant

Lee Bryant gave a presentation about proximity wormholes and how this metaphor can add intimacy to the social web. He wrote a detailed article about this topic last week on Johnny. During his presentation Bryant added that if we haven’t seen it yet we should defenitly watch the TED Talk by Stefana Broadbent about how internet enables intimacy. Specifically the part of the Brazillian family (at 3:30).

Photo credits: Chi Nederland

In-person user research used to be the only game in town, and as with most industry practices, its procedures were developed, refined, standardized, and then became entrenched in the corporate R&D product development cycle. Practically everything gets tested in a lab, hallway, or conference room nowadays: commercial web sites, professional and consumer software, even video games. But nowadays we’ve got remote usability testing.

This is a revised chapter from Rosenfeld Media's 'Remote Research'

Part of the appeal of formal lab research was that it provided a scientific-seeming basis for making decisions by using observational data, instead of someone’s error-prone gut instincts. Stakeholders appreciated the firm protocol and apparent reliability of properly managed lab research. But for all of us who have sat through formal studies with two-way mirrors, we know that there is a lot of bullshit that goes on—participants pretending to care, moderators pretending to understand, and stakeholders pretending to be open-minded. The appeal of what the kids call “guerilla testing”—informal testing, where you simply grab someone within shouting distance and ask them to use your interface—is clear. It’s easy, fast, and can produce great results. Lots of user research practitioners continue to use in-person methods because it’s what people have been doing for a long time.

There’s nothing specifically wrong with in-person research. But there is that whole Internet thing that’s been happening. It does have some unique properties we can take advantage of to do things that weren’t possible with old-school research. Like these things:

Insane Cost Savings
Usertesting.com is $39 per user. Compare that to flying to Chicago for three days to watch twelve people talk behind a two-way mirror, and that’s thousands of dollars in savings. Rolf Molich has been organizing the Comparative Usability Evaluation study (CUE) for eight years, where different usability methods and teams independently evaluate the same site. He knows something about comparing different research techniques, and makes the point that while there are advantages and disadvantages to a remote method like UserTesting.com, the “price/performance ratio was amazing” (that was before a price increase, but the cost is still quite low). Beyond travel expenses, other costs associated with in-person testing may be reduced or eliminated when you test remotely. Unless you’re doing guerrilla testing. With tools like Silverback, guerrilla in-person methods don’t have to cost much more than remote, but you are usually more limited by the audience. So in terms of cost comparison, let’s just say that remote testing will usually offer a big cost savings.

Time-aware research
Catching people in the middle of a task with a web or software intercept like ethnio (note: this is a product of ourselves) and calling them within a few seconds to share their screen and watch them use a tool remotely on their own timeline. It’s a degree of accuracy that never existed before. You could argue that it’s ethnographic in a way that is not possible with physical observation, but you could also spend your whole life arguing about that. Let’s not. Tools like Revelation and the Track Your Happiness project at Harvard use native timelines to gain insight. That’s a really big deal.

By now UX researchers are familiar with the importance of understanding the usage context of an interface—the physical environment where people are normally using an interface. Remote research opens the door to conducting research that also happens at the moment in people’s real lives when they’re performing a task of interest. This is possible because of live recruiting (the subject of Chapter 3 of the book), a method that allows you to instantly recruit people who are right in the middle of performing the task you’re interested in, using anything from the Web to text messages. Time-awareness in research makes all the difference in user motivation: it means that users are personally invested in what they’re doing because they’re doing it for their own reasons, not because you’re directing them to; they would have done it whether or not they were in your study.

Consider the difference between these two scenarios:

1. You’ve been recruited for some sort of computer study. The moderator shows you this online map Web app you’ve never heard of and asks you to use it to find some random place you’ve never heard of. This task is a little tricky, but since you’re sitting in this quiet lab and focusing—and you can’t collect your incentive check and leave until you finish—you figure it out eventually. Not so bad.
2. You’ve been planning a family vacation for months, but you’ve been busy at work so you procrastinated a bit on the planning, and now it’s the morning of the trip and you’re trying to quickly print out directions between finishing your packing and getting your kids packed. Your coworker told you about this MapTool Web site you’ve never used before, so you decide to give it a shot, and it’s not so bad—that is, until you get stuck because you can’t find the freaking button to print out the directions, and you’re supposed to leave in an hour, but you can’t until you print these damn directions, but your kids are jumping up and down on their suitcases and asking you where everything is. Why can’t they just make this stupid crap easy to use? Isn’t it obvious what’s wrong with it? Haven’t they ever seen a real person use it before?

Circumstances matter a lot in user research, and someone who’s using an interface in real life, for real purposes, is going to behave a lot differently—and give more accurate feedback—than someone who’s just being told to accomplish some little task to be able to collect an incentive check. Time-awareness is an important concept, so we’ll bring it up again throughout this book to demonstrate how the concept relates to different aspects of the remote research process (recruiting, moderating, and so on).

Circumstances matter a lot in user research, and someone who’s using an interface in real life, for real purposes, is going to behave a lot differently—and give more accurate feedback—than someone who’s just being told to accomplish some little task to be able to collect an incentive check.

Technological ecosystem
Some interfaces just don’t make any sense to test outside their intended usage environment. If you need the users to have their own photos and videos to use in a video editing tool, having them bring their laptop or media to a lab is an amazing hassle. Or, let’s say you’re testing a recipe Web site that guides users step-by-step through preparing a meal; it wouldn’t make much sense to take people out of their kitchen, where they’re unable to perform the task of interest. When this is the case, remote research is usually the most practical solution, unless the users also lack the necessary equipment. We also call this the participant’s “technological ecosystem” because it implies that their devices and computing environment have an impact on how they interact.

Democratization of user testing
That’s right, I said it. Democracy. As in, anyone in the world no matter how far removed from their potential audience can conduct user testing with less obstacles than before. After ten years of user research, 260 studies, and 3,000 participants at bolt | peters, we’ve noticed a trend lately that more people are doing their own research than ever before. And it’s great. There’s no reason to hire a specialist to observe real-world technology behavior. And that’s coming from a specialist.

Geographic Diversity
Even if you do have a lab, the users you want to talk to may not be able to get to it. This is actually the most common scenario: your interface, like most, is designed to be accessed and used all around the world, and you want to talk to users from around the world to get a range of perspectives. Will Chinese players like my video game? Is my online map widget intuitive even for users outside Silicon Valley? Big companies like Nokia and Microsoft are often able to conduct huge, ambitious research projects to address these questions, coordinating research projects in different labs around the world, flying researchers around in first class. If you don’t have the cash for an international longitudinal Gorillas-in-the-Mist project, then remote research is a no-brainer solution. If you can’t get to where your users are, test them remotely.

And Why Not?

Both in-person and remote UX research share the same broad purpose: to understand how people interact and behave with the interface you’ve made. There’s no need to set up a false opposition between the two approaches—one isn’t inherently better than the other. Despite the versatility of remote research, there are lots of reasons you might want to conduct an in-person study instead, most of which have to do with timing, security, equipment, or the type of interaction you want to have with participants.

Both in-person and remote UX research share the same broad purpose: to understand how people interact and behave with the interface you’ve made. There’s no need to set up a false opposition between the two approaches—one isn’t inherently better than the other.

Security
Security is often a concern for institutions like banks and hospitals, which deal in sensitive information, or companies concerned with guarding certain types of intellectual property. If you’re testing a top-secret prototype, you obviously don’t want to let people access something from their home computer, where it could be saved or screen-captured. On the other hand, you might also be doing a study on users who would be secretive about sharing what’s on their screen—government employees, doctors, or lab technicians, for instance. Either way, you’ll want to test users in a controlled lab environment to keep things confidential, especially if what you’re testing is so hush-hush that you’ve got to have your users sign a nondisclosure form.

Inability to use screen-sharing
You might also want to use a lab if your users are unable to share their screen over the Internet, for whatever reason. Some studies (of rural users, cybercafe patrons, etc.) may require you to talk to users who don’t have reliable high-speed Internet connections, who own computers too slow or unstable to use screen sharing services effectively, or who have operating systems incompatible with the screen sharing tools you’re using. These restrictions only apply to moderated studies, for which you need to see what’s on your users’ screens.

The need for special equipment
Depending on the interface you’re testing, you may require certain special software or physical equipment to run the study properly; this is most often the case with software that’s still under development. Getting users to install and configure tools to run elaborate software can be a pain (though that’s not unheard of), and requiring users to have certain equipment can make recruiting needlessly difficult.

The importance of seeing the user’s body
Some kinds of research will require you to study certain things about the user that are difficult to gather remotely. UX research has recently begun using eye-tracking studies, and for that kind of study, you’d need to bring the users to the eye-tracking device. Other studies might require you to attend to the participants’ physical movements, which may be difficult to capture with a stationary webcam.

Conclusion

You don’t necessarily have to choose between lab and remote methods. You can even conduct multiple studies on the same interface, using the findings from one study to add nuance to another. Probably excessive for the average study, but for really large-scale projects where you just want to gather every bit of information you can (a new version of a complex software program, an overhauled IA, etc.), being comprehensive can’t hurt.

You should have a good idea of whether or not remote research suits you. Give it a try—if it’s not your thing, you can always go back to lab testing. We won’t tell anyone.