While the idea of applying gamification to UX design has been around for a while, the topic has been generating more discussions lately. Høgenhaug recently wrote a nice article in which he identifies the different elements of a game and thereby making it easier to grasp how a design might benefit from gamification (or how it can ruin it). Using some practical examples he argues that when you’ve found the right balance, gamification can aid in improving the experience, but it doesn’t sell the product.

We are not looking to transform our products into games. Instead, we are trying to learn from an industry with an extremely engaged audience. We shouldn’t blindly use these theories; rather, we should adapt them to our needs and to the platforms on which we deliver our products, without compromising with the quality of our products.

Read Peter Steen Høgenhaug’s article on Smashing Magazine

Next to being well told and fun to watch, the principles and guidelines he talks about can be applied to much more than the (by now pretty much iconic) animated films he has been using them on. Have a look!

Overpromise and Overdeliver is a book on how to design and deliver customer experiences in order to create ‘unshakable customer loyalty’. Now the title does make one think this is yet another book trying to convey a theory on how to be the most successful company in the industry, and that assumption is completely right. We’ve seen a lot of them in the last couple of years, which made me wonder; does Overpromise and Overdeliver live up to the theory it’s trying to convey, and to which extend is it applicable to design?

Just to clarify things up
When I started reading the book I assumed that ‘Overpromise and Overdeliver’ means promising a remarkable product or service, and than to deliver even more. But that is only partially right. It’s about delivering exactly what you’ve promised.

The book

The book consist out of two parts. The first one is called ‘Overpromise’, and the second (of course) ‘Overdeliver’. In part one Barrera explains what a brand overpromise actually is and how you can build one. This is where he introduces what he calls ‘touchpoint branding’: the three touchpoints associated with this. These are:

• Product touchpoints: These occur when customers interact with a product or service;
• Human touchpoints: This is the case when a customer directly interacts with the company’s employees;
• System touchpoints: These include things like return policies or a website. Basically all other points of contact between a customer and an organization.

Barrera uses numeral examples and cases to explain why and how these touchpoints influence the whole customer experience (in fact I reckon that a good 60% of the book consists out of analyzed real-world examples). It might sound a bit simple, but it boils down to the fact that all these touchpoints must be in line with an organization’s overpromise in order to be successful. You start with a remarkable product or service and than make sure that the customer always gets what you’ve promised, and what he/she expects from you.

In part two Barrera explains how you can optimize these touchpoints in order to overdeliver. In case of a product/service touchpoint the keyword is ‘buzz’. Make sure people are talking about your product. When it comes to system touchpoints he claims that they should be as invisible as possible. Think of the lighting placed within stores; you want to create a pleasant lighting situation without drawing attention to the lights themselves. Human touchpoints are a bit of a different story because human emotions are involved. Though very important Barrera also warns for overreliance on human touchpoints because of the unpredictability of human emotions. The key here is to use human touchpoints only when situations are complicated, and when flexibility and initiative are required to save the day.

Conclusion

Though it’s an interesting and easy read I haven’t had the feeling I was reading something new. That isn’t very strange when you think of the enormous amount of real-world examples Barrera uses throughout the book. Every chapter answers the question stated in the title within the first three or four pages followed by 15 to 20 pages of examples and case-studies. It’s these examples and cases that make it a pleasurable read by sometimes providing you with some inspirational insights. It’s definitely not a ‘must-read’, but if you’ve got a couple of hours to spare… read it.

Book Details
Overpromise and Overdeliver: The secrets of unshakable customer loyalty
author: Rick Berrera
publisher: Portfolio, 2004
details: 240 pages, hardcover

During the E3 2009 expo, which was held from the 2nd to the 5th of June, Microsoft presented Project Natal. The project brings human-computer interaction without an electronic input device to the masses. By capturing your full body movement and your voice (and being able of doing this for several people at the same time) it brings gameplay to an entirely new level.

Here is the video:

Interesting to see is that again activities within games which up till now didn’t seem fun enough for the player to be involved in, are suddenly becoming much more interesting simply because the type of interaction has changed (the video shows an example of changing the tires during a race). The same thing happened when the Nintendo Wii was introduced. By adding more physical engagement, the fun-factor of certain activities is increased.

Could this be a general rule within gaming and other activities which involve play? More physical engagement equals more fun? Off course it’s not applicable to every type of game, and the amount of fun or ‘satisfaction’ one gets from playing a game isn’t only determined by the degree of physical engagement (think of puzzle or strategy games where this is achieved on a more reflective level), but it certainly proves to be quite a big factor.

This technology will soon find it’s way out of the gaming industry and into other industries, as Steven Spielberg already indicated at the E3. The question now is how big it’s impact will be.

This is a pivotal moment that will carry with it a wave of change, the ripples of which will reach far beyond video games - Steven Spielberg

Primal Source is an interactive performance/installation which has been created for an art festival in California. They used a large-scale outdoor waterscreen/mist projection system to project a stunning light-show onto the mist. The installation responds to sound emanating from the crowd, thereby letting the crowd create their own performace. That night 200.000 people brought it to life, by walking past the installation.

Different modes where displayed depending on how active the crowd was and some modes even created ‘creatures’ whose shape, color and movement all reacted to the crowd. Here is a video. You might want to turn down your volume a little bit since screaming is the first thing people tried to make it come to life.

Next to the fact that the installation is just so incredibly overwhelming and stunning to watch, it reminded me of something else which al together gave me an interesting perspective on the whole concept of interactive art/architecture.

Just recently I came across a man on television who was passionately explaining why the bow and arrow are such an important part of our history. He even claimed that without it, we would have never gotten to the moon. I can’t remember who he was since I came across it while flicking through the channels and I just watched it for a minute or two, but he made an interesting point. He saw the bow and arrow as the first time man exceeded/amplified their own physical abilities. Before that, spears and where used and we where limited to our own physical strength. Now if you look at it from that perspective, the bow and arrow are suddenly a much more interesting phenomenon (at least that’s what I found it to be).

What I see happening more and more nowadays within interactive art/architecture is that it amplifies things we haven’t been able to amplify before. A lot of them are starting to amplify the presence of people and sometimes they even react upon it. But what we’re also seeing now is that they’re trying to amplify emotions and expressions. To me, this is something very interesting. Especially because that’s an area which is still relatively undefined. What would happen if we would take this out of the museums and bring it into our daily lives? What will happen when we amplify our emotions and thereby making them visible to others? That’s a question which is occupying my head at the moment. I’m curious what you think about that.

Primal Source is an installation from Haque design + research.

By now we have seen a number of different ambient futures for the web here on Johnny, which almost all include some form of augmenting the physical world. Recently Pattie Maes of the MIT medialab presented Sixthsense, a wearable interface that augments the environment and uses gesture based input. A big difference with the things that we’ve seen here so far, is that this one actually works…

Sixthsense is the work of Pranav Mistry. I could give it try to explain to you how it actually works, but I’m sure Pattie Maes does a far better job than me so I’ll just leave you with the video.

Sixthsense is one of the first things (and one of the most impressive things as well) I’ve come across, which puts the data from the internet to good use in such an intuitive way. Off course the device itself, in its current form, is not something you’ll find on the shelfs any time soon. But it is one step closer to a future in which we are able to use any data, anywhere, in any way, and without having the feeling that we’re interacting with a computer.

I can’t wait till technology like this becomes available to a broader audience and gets accepted by society. When more people get access to a certain technology, the more interesting things tend to happen with it.

Hylozoic Soil is an interactive architectural sculpture created by Philip Beesley, an architect based in Toronto. It can sense the presence of someone or something using proximity sensors and kinetic actuators, and responds with air movement. The result is an incredibly organic sculpture. So organic that the way people tend to interact with it, shows more resemblance with human-human interaction than human-computer interaction.

Here is a video of the sculpture (there is something wrong with the sound though):

Next to the fact that this sculpture is an incredibly impressive piece of work that interacts and moves in some of the most organic ways I’ve ever seen, it’s also interesting to look at how exactly people interact with it. People tend to move around it in a very careful manner and explore the sculpture using their hands and body movement without loosing their patience. It’s a form of human-computer interaction which we rarely see.

Today’s human-computer interaction is often subject to numerous expectations. If it doesn’t meet these expectations people tend to lose their patience and sometimes even get angry. I guess meeting these expectations is part of ‘user-centered design’. However, we have different expectations from human-human interaction than from human-computer interaction. What a project like Hylozoic Soil shows us is that the more organic human-computer interaction feels like, the more our expectations start resembling those from human-human interaction (in which we take the time to get to know each other, respect each other and often have more patience). A very interesting phenonomen.

More about the sculpture (including more video material) can be found here on Philip Beesley’s website.

Beautiful Evidence is Edward R. Tufte’s fourth book on visual evidence. His earlier books about this topic where ‘Visual Explanations’, ‘Envisioning Information’ and the highly praised ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’. Beautiful Evidence deals with analytical design and is a collection of critically analyzed (and very beautiful) images, principles and pitfalls which apply to everything from MS Powerpoint to sculptures.

Analyzing different visualization methods

The first four chapters respectively deal with mapped pictures, sparklines, links & causal arrows and words, numbers, images together. By critically analyzing beautiful images Tufte succeeds in explaining which characteristics make these methods work for a certain goal. Also for each method some principles are presented at the end of the chapter.

A great example of this is the analyses of Alfred Barr’s book cover / table of contents / history map for the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition in 1936, pictured here below on the left (on the right is Tufte’s stripped down version which he uses to explain the role the arrows play within this visualization).

Art-styles and a few artist are mapped on a grid of time whereas the color indicates if it was an internal (black) or neighboring (red) influence on Cubism and abstract art. The size of the nouns tells something about the historic relevance. The arrows represent causal paths (which only go in one direction). What it does so well, is focussing on causality and combining multiple sources and levels of data (which happen to be 2 of the principles mentioned in the next paragraph).

Although the causal paths in the art chart are complex, the idea of causality is simplistic.

Principles and pitfalls

After one hundred twenty-one pages of critically analyzing images, Tufte comes with a number of (fundamental) principles for analytical design which are derived from the principles of analytical thinking. He emphasizes that these principles apply broadly and are indifferent to language or culture or century or the technology of information display:

1. Show comparisons, contrasts, differences.
2. Show causality, mechanism, explanation, systematic structure.
3. Show multivariate data; that is, show more than 1 or 2 variables.
4. Completely integrate evidence; words, numbers, images, diagrams.
5. Thoroughly describe the evidence. Provide a detailed title, indicate the authors and sponsors, document data sources, show complete measurement scales, point out relevant issues.
6. Analytical presentations ultimately stand or fall depending on the quality, relevance, and integrity of their content.

He continues with some pitfalls which need to be avoided in order to apply these principles right. Important is that both cause and effect are shown because that’s how we can determine what happened, by comparing before and after. The most common pitfall is that people start ‘cherry-picking’ (making a selection of the content which only advances their point of view). Furthermore one should be careful that the conclusions drawn from the data aren’t overreaching and that meaningless content doesn’t replace the real evidence.

Microsoft Powerpoint and sculptural pedestals..?

Up till now, the structure of the book made perfect sense. From critically analyzing the most amazing images (from Galileo and Da Vinci to medical monitors) and coming up with principles and pitfalls, Tufte suddenly devotes an entire chapter to a full frontal attack on MS powerpoint in which he boldly states:

The PP slide format has the worst signal/noise ratio of any know method of communication on paper or computer screen.

The sudden change of topic might be strange, but the arguments he provides for his statements are solid. In twenty-eight pages he explains how powerpoint’s workflow forces people to create bad presentations. From the emphasis on bullet structures to providing the wrong layout for data visualizations. He thoroughly explains why powerpoint is contradicting with his principles. He even conducted comparisons of various presentation-tools using ten case-studies in which powerpoint was outperformed by all alternatives. In order to make better presentations we should use ‘good teaching’ as a metaphor in which explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism are the core ideas.

In the last two (short) chapters another rather strange switch of topic is made. These chapters briefly explain how pedestals influence the sculpture they carry, but they mostly consists out of photographs of sculptures (of which half are made by Tufte).

Conclusion

Beautiful Evidence is a typical ‘Tufte-book’, which means that it’s full with beautiful images and photographs, mostly from greats like Galileo, Da Vinci and Newton, which he critically analyzed. To me they’re all very inspirational and often work as eye-openers. They tell a lot about how people interact with and perceive visual information. Furthermore the book is full of principles and pitfalls which I’ve already written on a separate piece of paper to keep in mind for when I have to design analytical visualizations again. All very useful content.

The strange switches of topic make the book feel more or less like a collection of information then a solid coherent read. To me it feels like it does take away some of the strength of the book, however this doesn’t make me like the book any less. The chapter about powerpoint, though unexpected, was an eye-opener and also a very entertaining  read.

However, there are some topics in Beautiful Evidence which Tufte has already discussed in his earlier books, which sometimes results in somewhat of a deja vu when reading it. But there’s enough new content to keep me satisfied. I really like it and I would buy the book even if it was just for the critically analyzed images. A incredibly inspirational read.

Book details
Beautiful Evidence
author: Edward R. Tufte
published: Graphics Press, 2006
details: 213 pages, hardcover

Siftables are small devices which have a graphical display, a number of sensors and wireless communication capabilities. They are small tangible user interfaces which can function individually or in a group, and can be manipulated to interact with digital information and media.

Siftables is a project from David Merrill, a fourth year Ph.D. student in the Fluid Interfaces group at the MIT Media lab, and Jeevan Kalanithi, a designer and technologist from Taco Lab. For the design of Siftables they were inspired by how humans use both hands and all fingers efficiently when manipulating large quantities of small objects. This is a capability which isn’t utilized in today’s human computer interaction. Siftables however does make use of it, and it does it in an extraordinary manner.

Here is a video in which Siftables are demonstrated:

David Merrill’s presentation at TED about Siftables is also definitely worth watching.

Siftables totally makes use of the five themes for interaction design described in the research paper from the Standford Univeristy HCI Research group which we wrote a post about in december. It’s exciting to see how these human capabilities are finding it’s way into human-computer interaction. Are we going to find this in our living-rooms 15 years from now?

From October 2008 to January 2009 the Milwaukee Art Museum hosted the first exhibition in an art museum. It was an intuitive, digitally developed interactive art. Here are two video’s to give you an impression of the exhibition.

What I find wonderful about interactive art is the fact that next to being art, it’s often also an area of play and discovery. It’s a great source of inspiration for everyone who designs human-computer interactions. So hopefully there will be many more exhibitions like this to come.

More about the exhibition can be found here on the website of the Milwaukee Art Museum.