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

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

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

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

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

Design Ethnography

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

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

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

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

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

Design Research & Mood Maps

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

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

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

Phases and Emotions

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

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

Cycle of Exploration

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

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

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

Addendum

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

Resources

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

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

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

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

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

I read Marshall McLuhan years ago when I was knee deep in media theory and cognitive psychology, but it took a trip to the IA Summit in Memphis last week to bring that back – and I immediately began thinking about the materials, medium and methods we choose to use in our ideation and exploration phases and how it impacts our designs and solutions.

Here’s Jesse James Garrett at the recent IA Summit 2009 in Memphis quoting Michael Wesch quoting Marshall McLuhan:

We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.
~ Marshall McLuhan

I think that design materials, methods and problems are all tied together in a mutual dependency. Consider the example of an online training for an interactive system. The material is set to be HTML,  and perhaps Adobe Flex. This controls what the designers can do and how they perceive the problem. There are some things the designers cannot even imagine to do. I would not, for instance, consider interactive 3D-visualization of a database. To give another example, if it is decided that we build a computer game in 3D, I have already reckoned what some of the problems are: for example, modellers and animators are needed rather than a HTML-coder. But why not architects? Why not model train builders? I got this inspiration while visiting the National Building Museum, where the local Washington DC Lego Train Club was showing off their extraordinary creations. I realized that when we are framing a design problem, we shouldn’t choose the material, medium or method first – this might limit our possible solutions.

When designers decide which method to use (i.e. how to approach the design work), they also perceive the design problem in a certain way. The method (whether Agile or User Centered Design or Activity Based Design) blinds the designer to some aspects and it highlights others. Methods are nevertheless necessary, but in order to get the whole picture I must recognize these blind spots from the outset, and perhaps explore the problem space using multiple methods. Otherwise the method is pressed upon the material and the problem,  and they get locked into being certain things.

when we are framing a design problem, we shouldn’t choose the material, medium or method first – this will limit our possible solutions

This has been a problem with the design of many applications and websites. The management decides on a method and it is imposed on the problem and onto the material. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, and it doesn’t matter what material the project is working with, they still use the same method ( probably one that is also trendy). However, it´s irrational to try to use the same development method in web store projects as in space shuttle projects. We should not think that there is one material and one method that works for all problem spaces, and this is especially important in the early ideation phase when we should be engaged in divergent thinking – how much divergence can their really be when the medium, material and method are already set?

Don’t get me wrong, I love the web. I hope to be working with the web in 10 years, in 20 years. But the web is just a canvas. Or perhaps a better metaphor is clay — raw material that we shape into experiences for people. But there are lots of materials — media — we can use to shape experiences. Saying user experience design is about digital media is rather like saying that sculpture is about the properties of clay. That’s not to say that an individual sculptor can’t dedicate themselves to really mastering clay. They can, and they do — just like many of you will always be really great at creating user experiences for the web.
~ Jesse James Garrett, IA Summit 2009 The Memphis Plenary

What is our clay? How do we explore and create great user experiences when we always go back to the same well, use the same materials and the same design method – how can we not always arrive at the same solutions?

When you have a hammer goes the old cliché. But what if you used clay? Legos?

In my view, a design method consists of a complex set of techniques tied together by a common, underlying philosophy. Every designer has a repertoire of methods and examples that make up his or her experience. The experience is of course tied to what sorts of projects the designer has been working on. The examples that a designer has seen influences how design problems are framed; they also embody the designer’s knowledge of the design materials. Someone who has worked only with web projects has a repertoire of examples from the web, but also has  knowledge in design materials like paper, Omnigraffle, XHTML, Photoshop, JavaScript, et cetera. As user experience professionals charged with designing information,  spaces,  and interactions between people, people and spaces;  people and objects;  and people and systems,  I think we need to step back and try other media, materials, and methods in the problem space exploration phase of our engagement. We shouldn’t limit ourselves to doing what we´ve always done, with the materials we´ve always used, according to a methodology handed down by management because it is the latest three-letter acronym.

“We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.” McLuhan´s simple maxim is more relevant to today’s user experience designers than ever before. We need to explore new ways, new materials, and new methods if we really want to innovate and create fantastic, crafted, playful experiences that engage our audience.

Top image by batega

This February is the second annual Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Interaction 09 conference which is being held in Vancouver, British Columbia in conjunction with Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Dave Malouf, one of the founder’s of the IxDA, was kind enough to allow me to interview him recently about a workshop he will be giving, his take on the field of interaction design, and some thoughts about where the field is going.

[Will Evans] How did you get your start in Interaction/Information Design?
[Dave Malouf ] Well, I started in the web world. Back then doing HTML 1.0 meant you were a designer. I bounced from technologist to producer/project manager for a few years until I found User Experience and fell in love. The last 10 years has been a personal journey of discovering from the outside what “D”esign really means, how it is really meant to be practiced, and now how it is to be taught. Then I connect that to my passion for technology and human beings which combine to me into  Interaction Design.

it is important for future (if not current) interaction designers to be educated in design foundation in order to connect more and be taken more seriously

[WE] Who/Where do you look to for inspiration?
[DM ] What a great question. My greatest inspirations come from the Cooper Hewitt Triennial. Companies like Antenna Design where two people do amazing work spanning so many disciplines of design. Other designers who span multiple planes of design particularly architecture. I’ve also been trying to look deeper into game design theory and practice and I’m really excited that my new position at SCAD will put me in closer contact with some of the best educators of game design anywhere.

[WE] I’ve said to many people that a lot of us have not come by our current roles honestly. That is, many–like you and I, weren’t formally trained as interaction designers – coming from a formal design program (like SCAD or CM). Do you have an opinion on where the interaction designer of tomorrow will evolve from?
interaction design is about deciding the flows and conversation, the narrative that these interface points make up–the notes that are played by the musician.

[DM] Despite my own lack of pedigree, I really feel strongly that for the sustainability of the discipline of interaction design, that most people will need to go through a formal design school education to become contributing parts of the interaction design practice community (community of practice?). But it is also important for future (if not current) interaction designers to be educated in design foundation in order to connect more and be taken more seriously by the rest of the design community including industrial, architectural, communications, and interactive media.

[WE] I have heard you talk quite a bit about drawing from fields like Industrial Design – do you think people equate interaction design with web design? Do you think that limits how we as a profession are seen and how do you think we can grow out of that perception?
[DM] I don’t think that people equate interaction design with “web design”. I think they falsely equate it with “software design” at least inside the United States. And even then that doesn’t speak to what is the more exciting practice of IxD in the US which is most directly connected to the Industrial Design world, which–ironically enough, doesn’t really get interaction design as a community.

But I draw upon Industrial Design as I think it is the older, more established design discipline that most speaks to interaction design. Having worked in an industrial design studio for a bit, I really learned how far ahead they are in understanding and executing the basics of design foundation practices and having an established communication protocol amongst their peers. This lesson more than any other drives me towards education and towards my work around communicating a foundation of interaction design. Something I feel is sorely missing and needing.

[WE] Following up on your your previous answer – People are sometimes confuse or conflate interaction design with interface design? How do you see these as different?
[DM] Part of my gut tells me that they are the same thing. I’ve heard people define both terms in such a way that they are so similar that they might as well be the same thing. But where I usually take interaction design out of interface design is that interface design requires visual interfaces and not all interaction design has visual points of interaction. But even then, there are VUI designers (voice interface designers), so that blows my initial assertion out of the water that UI is only graphical. 

If I dig deeper, though, and if I hold to my own guns, I believe that UI is about presentation of interfacing points, but interaction design is about deciding the flows and conversation, the narrative that these interface points make up — the notes that are played by the musician.

[WE] I know you were very politically active this past year during the election and I think a lot of digital ink was spent discussing the role of social media/internet in this recent election of Obama as president – do you think the effectiveness of the Obama website including the My.BarackObama website brought more focus to the interaction design community and to the importance of good IxD in general? Tell me what you think about how Obama’s call for greater government transparency will impact the IxD community.
[DM] I’m not sure it called attention to the IxD community because it is unclear what role the IxD community played in the creation of all these tools. But it is clear that the tools themselves did make a big difference, at least for me. I think that my.barackobama.com gave me an outlet to express myself and to turn thoughts into actions both online and offline.

On the issue of transparency, I have been using the work I’ve been a part of in this campaign as a source of inspiration in thinking about IxDA. So it isn’t so much about effecting interaction design as it is effecting the interaction design community and possibly even more so the Open Source community.

[WE] One issue that at least I haven’t seen addressed in the IxD community is ethics – could you reflect a bit on the issue of ethics and the role of the interaction designer in an enterprise? Will you be incorporating anything into the curriculum SCAD?
[DM] I am lucky in my career in that many ethical issues haven’t really come up. I’m actually sure — there is something about “forcing users” down paths that I felt were unnecessary, or schlocking wears that only contribute to the downfall of the world on so many levels. 

The more serious answer to your question is that there are so many levels of ethics and concerns, but a point I want to make clear is that interaction design has as much application to pornography and gambling as it does to changing behavior towards sustainability and raising money to end poverty in Africa. 

But personally, I do lean to the left more than the right (understatement) and the design community as a whole is so intent on applying its methods and processes towards “transforming” those elements of society that seem to be in imminent collapse.

Interaction Design… can be applied equally to gambling and pornography as it can in creating a service used to advocate for or change the behavior around positive change for the world.

A point I’d like to make about ethics is that as a discipline Interaction Design is not bound by ethics. This is true because the discipline of IxD is about the methods and rules of designing behavior. It is like a hammer. What you do with that hammer can be used for good or bad. It can be applied equally to gambling and pornography or to creating a service used to advocate for or change the behavior around positive change for the world.

[WE] Along those same lines – your new role as professor of interaction design at SCAD (Savannah College of Art & Design), how hard has it been developing a curriculum? What are some of the key disciplines you will be focusing on this year?
[DM] SCAD is a design school. Everything in the industrial design program is project and studio oriented from as far as I can tell and my courses are no exception. I’m inheriting so far the curriculum of Jon Kolko. It is a minor program to the Industrial Design major for undergraduates. The crux of it is very sound: HCI, Interactive Product Design, Information Architecture, Contextual Research and a senior studio. But as I’m teaching the courses, I’m hungry for more theoretical depth. I’m lucky that it is a minor in industrial deign because  I know these students all went through foundation and get to really hone the crafts of ID (3D, graphics, etc.) 

On the flip side, I’ll be putting together a Masters degree curriculum soon for Interaction. I can’t go into too many details here but I’m very excited with looking at what US programs like CMU and SVA are doing and comparing that to what Ivrea, RCA, Domus, Delft, Umea and Malmo are up to. I think bridging the European-North  American divide is key for future education programs.

[WE] Many top tier universities like Standford and MIT are opening up all their classes including lectures, notes, syllabus to the public – do you think you and SCAD will be following suit?
[DM] Not sure about that, yet. I  think it is a false hope, thinking that interaction design can be learned from watching video’s on the web, even accompanied by course materials and syllabi. The key for most design practitioners is studio work. You can’t fake it. You either have to find an environment where you live it, or you have to go back to school to gain access to it. Almost no software environments run as studios.

 I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot though and I think we need to be inventive about continuing education. Events like AP‘s and UIE‘s week long multi-workshop experiences are interesting, but in their attempt for breadth they miss depth. Cooper‘s practicum is also too wide. What we need are week long courses that are deep and intense and that bring together different levels of practitioners into the same studio space. I’m working on some programs with SCAD but until I can get them off the ground, I can’t really talk about them yet.

[WE] Finally, What should the audience take away from your workshop at Interaction ’09?
[DM] The main purpose of the course  is not to teach students everything they need to know to be an interaction designer, but rather teach them everything they need to know to build a framework for plotting their career path and their own self-education. My biggest lessons have always been ones that inspired me to hunt for more knowledge as opposed to false attempts to impart knowledge itself. 

The workshop is going to present a framework of what interaction design is, how it is practiced and what leads to success. It is also going to be lessons on critique and non-linear thinking tools. Finally, it is going to be a chance for participants to think about their career, their current practice and what type of practice they want to be doing in 5 years. Visualizing that goal will allow them to choose a path. 

The most important thing I tell my students is that the path’s are like design itself. The flow of ideas head towards a horizon point, but there are many opportunities for disruption along the way. At any given point on the path, the direction of the horizon can and should change, influenced by the past, but put in motion by the present.

[WE] Thank you very much for taking the time for this interview.
[DM] You’re welcome.

About Dave’s Workshop
This half-day seminar will provide a solid background in Interaction Design (IxD) for those who are coming to the practice of IxD from other areas, such as information architecture, software engineering, business analysis, project or product management, technical writing, architecture, industrial design, visual design, and interactive design.

For more information about Dave’s workshop at Interaction 09, go here.

About Dave Malouf
David Malouf is currently a Professor of Interaction Design in the Industrial Design Department of the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). Before taking this position, David was a Sr. Interaction Design for Motorola Enterprise Mobility where he designed software, webware, and hardware interactions and interfaces. Motorola was the last in a 15 year journey of practicing interaction design, information architecture, ui design, project management and other roles and positions working almost exclusively with think client technologies.

David is also one of the primary founders and first Vice President of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). David’s passion for evangelizing and teaching interaction design, came to a climax in 2008 when he co-chaired the first Interactions conference, Interaction 08 | Savannah.