There are a number of elements that are common and fundamental to a solid design education. These include studio courses, a combination of methods, theory, and practice, small class sizes, and room for growth through informed trial and error. But what about producing founders, entrepreneurs who will start their own companies to drive social change through interaction design?

You’ll typically find the founder-model of education in business schools, where students end their programs with a pitch or “demo day” that displays their new idea to a group of potential investors. How about combining this with a user-centered approach to social innovation?

In this article, I’ll describe the intent of this approach we have at the Austin Centre for Design (AC4D), articulate some of the results, and offer some reflections on challenges I see our alumni — and future designer-entrepreneurs — facing as they continue to push their companies forward.

The Intent: Disruption

In a word, the intent of our educational model is disruption. At AC4D, we intend to empower our alumni to make a difference in the world, using the persuasive, thoughtful, and provocative ualities of design (or “design thinking” combined with “design doing”) as the mechanism. We feel strongly that design is a powerful force in shaping human behavior and culture, and that this force can be directed. The qualities of this discipline are largely evident and embraced in our corporations – look no further than the humanization of technology offered by Apple, and our willingness to celebrate their every new product launch. Apple asks, and elegantly answers, a question: how can we best design technology to support a popular culture and lifestyle?

But there’s another question that we ask, and strive to answer, and this question is more important: what should we design, in the first place?

But there’s another question that we ask, and strive to answer, and this question is more important: what should we design, in the first place?

The answer to this is disruptive, and controversial, for three reasons.

First, it implies that we can (and must) place a value judgment on our productive efforts as designers, and that not everything is equally worth our time and attention. Put another way, it implies that we must judge the value of a design. We’ve all likely heard that it’s “not ok to judge”, or that we “shouldn’t be so judgmental.” And if design work is judged at all, it’s commonly evaluated based on superficial qualities of aesthetics. Instead, let’s provoke our students to find their own answers to this question, and to examine the societal value of a design.

The answer may be difficult and threatening. It pokes at our careers, and for many of us, our careers are representations of ourselves. But if we recognize the power of design, and also recognize the finite length of our careers, we arrive at an interesting place – a place that demands we focus only on the most pressing, demanding, important, and critical work.
Consider that, in your career, you have about forty or fifty good, productive years to work.
Should you really be focused on creating a new UI for a thermostat? A new facade for a banking website? A new operating system for a mobile phone? Or are there other things – things that are more financially, culturally, or spiritually more valuable – that you could, and should, be doing?

Second, by questioning if all design efforts are equally valid, we force a conversation of cultural relativity, perspective, and shares values. We spend a lot of time discussing the qualities of values, morals, norms and ethics. We examine examples from other cultures, learn about and practice methods of empathy through ethnography, and discuss and debate the various methods of “designing with” vs. “designing for.” Again, these are challenging conversations. They threaten our views of a marketplace with produced goods and obedient consumers, they challenge the view of designer as rockstar or god, and they fundamentally change the skills a designer needs to be successful. If we are empowering others to design with us, the things we make, tools we use, and way we talk about our work changes dramatically. It’s not about “making the perfect thing” – it’s about providing enough tools that other people can make their perfect thing.

Finally, our initial question – what should we design, in the first place – alters the conversation about “career.” When we start to question the fundamentals of our industry and the economic system that contains it, we arrive quickly at a rejection of “corporate vs. consultancy”, “job titles”, and the other baggage of our jobs. Our students may still end up in traditional jobs, but our ideal outcome is that they go on to form their own paths by starting their own for-profit or double-bottom line enterprises. We emphasize financial independence, where students can support their operational costs and avoid the pitfalls of traditional nonprofits with their endless cycle of grants. This requires fundamentals in accounting, budgeting, and estimating demand – all skills taught in business skills, but things rarely covered in design courses. And it requires a degree of confidence, something that’s hard to teach in any program.

The Results: Four Successful Companies

Our process has been successful. In our first year, we converted four projects into companies. These are described, briefly, below.

• Patient Nudge
  After observing the limited time and resources case workers have to manage an increasingly large at-risk population, Ryan Hubbard and Christina Tran developed an online compliance and persistence tool. This tool – Patient Nudge – allows a care provider to automatically check in with a large population via SMS, aggregate results into compelling visualizations, and identify outliers in the data.
• Hour School
  Through participatory design research, Ruby Ku and Alex Pappas observed a dramatic change in self-esteem when the chronically homeless were empowered to teach something to their peers. The homeless have skills – often robust technical skills, such as information technology or medical abilities – yet are rarely provided an opportunity to utilize these skills in support of one another. Ruby and Alex developed Hour School, an online service that identifies people in your social network who can teach specific skills, and helps support the creation of impromptu classes.
• OneUp
  As Kristine Mudd learned more about the homeless teenagers in Austin through immersive research, she identified a particular at-risk group – teenage girls – as exhibiting signs of low self esteem. This lack of confidence made simple tasks – like opening a bank account or applying for a drivers license – seem impossible. She developed OneUp, an online tool that breaks down these tasks into small, manageable pieces, rewards the girls for completing these tasks, and shows them a sense of measurable progress.
• Pocket Hotline
  While conducting ethnographic research at a local shelter, Chap Ambrose and Scott Magee observed an overwhelmed and poorly trained desk attendant try to answer a variety of questions about services and operations. Through a process of prototyping and testing, they’ve developed Pocket Hotline, a distributed call center application that routes customer support calls to volunteers’ personal cellphones. They’ve spun off a variant of Pocket Hotline for the Ruby On Rails community — Rails Hotline —  which has generated some great press.

Nudge Project

The Challenges: Sustained Focus

I’m excited to see our educational model leading to success, and I hope other design programs begin to tackle some of the fundamental issues I’ve described above. But as I reflect on our first year, there’s one main challenge that I see in combining interaction design with social entrepreneurship. That challenge is on sustaining the focus, passion and interest of our students after they graduate.

Roger Martin describes the knowledge funnel as a progression from mystery to algorithm. Designers (and other passionate, curious people) look at the way things are, see a mystery, and wonder how they can unpack it, understand it, fix it, or improve it. Good businesses manage to package their efforts into an offering, and then duplicate this offering over and over and over. This emphasizes efficiency, with a focus on cheaper, better, faster. Martin notes that designers typically lose interest once the mystery is gone; for them, the most exciting and interesting part is solving the problem, not operationalizing their solution.

And this poses a problem for designers acting as entrepreneurs: how can they remain focused, passionate, and excited during the process of packaging, refining, detailing, and producing the actual offering?

Wow can designers acting as entrepreneurs remain focused, passionate, and excited during the process of packaging, refining, detailing, and producing the actual offering?

Our students ended their education with working prototypes of their ideas, and with a roadmap towards a successful commercial launch. But that roadmap requires months of hard work, always with an eye on an idealized end state and with blinders on to the churn and chaos of the world around them. And simply, this focus is hard. Very hard. Incubation efforts exist to help, and we’ve explored our own formalization of incubation. But fundamentally, this seems like the largest challenge for programs like ours, and it’s a problem I look to the community for help and support in solving. How can we better support design-driven entrepreneurs as they formalize their companies, drive towards their vision, and act to drive large-scale behavioral changes? What support structures, services, and new tools can we offer them as they pursue their dreams?

I’m proud to be a part of what’s emerging as the new design, a form of design that’s rigorous, empathetic, and magical. This new form of design helps to disrupt conservative models of commerce, and rejects assumptions related to “career path.” I hope we can help formulate community-driven guidance for the new generation of entrepreneurs, those focused on social change and on bringing innovation to problems worth solving.

—–

Header image CC David Roessli

With their February 24^th revelation of more features in the upcoming OS X Lion operating system, Apple may have taken its first steps toward an unfamiliar future… a future in which the file system does not exist.

Credit for this observation goes to Mike Rundle, who tweeted about being able to imagine “a future in which the Finder does not exist”. Documents would be associated with the apps that created them, like on the iPad. Mike went on to describe his vision in more detail, a vision in which users simply have apps. “Documents associated with them appear magically. Presto.” While this might sound like some kind of user experience utopia, I have a grave concern that eliminating a file system in this manner misses a huge audience.

Us.

While opening Pages to work on the family newsletter might make sense for casual home users of a computer system, it does not make sense in a professional context. In the professional world, we work on projects. Projects are composed of many different types of files. And yes, we might have the same apps open all day, but do we want to be forced to duplicate a hierarchy of information in every single application?

No.

Besides, “projects” are just one type of organizational scheme. As a user experience designer, I’ve seen a lot of professionals in other fields organizing a lot of stuff in a lot of different ways. So even attempts at inter-app organization around the concept of a project, such as Microsoft’s Project Center, are not effective replacements for an infinitely flexible organization scheme like simple folders.

Some Wheels Need Reinventing

The conversation that Mike’s comments sparked led us both to the conclusion that we still need a high-level organization system of some kind. And that is the challenge. It’s a challenge because that problem has already been solved by the file system. The challenge is to solve it better.

At Interaction11, Tim Wood called for designers to reject the “complacency artifacts” of the past, design patterns that have lost relevance in the modern world but continue to be used simply because that’s how things are done. He encouraged us to be bold enough to reinvent wheels that need reinventing, and that’s exactly where we’re at with file systems.

Gestural user interfaces, effortless portability, and ubiquitous network access… All these things and more are redefining how people interact with technology. UX designers need to recognize this and push themselves beyond the limits of our vision. Yes, we absolutely must continue observing people interacting with technology, analyzing those interactions, and synthesizing solutions that work in context. But what’s even more important now is that we rely on our raw creativity for that last part. There are old problems out there that need to be solved in new ways, and the file system is one of them.

——
Header image courtesy of Tim Wood.

As interaction designers, we’re keenly aware of the explicit meanings in words and images. But how many of us also focus on the what is suggested by our words and images?

What does a "base camp" make you think of?

Consider Basecamp. For a project management tool aimed at “the Fortune 5,000,000,” it would be difficult to find a better a product name than “Basecamp.” With one simple word, so much is suggested: A base camp is the safe place from which to plan your trek to the summit. Base camps are positioned to be safe from the harsher conditions above. It’s where you return to. And think of the folks who’d be staying in a base camp—likely a small, adventurous team. It’s the perfect product name to appeal to the small businesses who use 37 Signals’ project management tool.

We’re all keenly aware of the explicit meanings in words and images—we talk ad nauseam about everything from clean button labels to accessible content. But how many of us also focus on what is suggested by our words and images?

Great poets are masters of imagery. Skilled speakers know how to phrase and frame their arguments in a way that is difficult for their listeners to resist. Artists and comedians thrive or fail based on our ability to connect the dots. Words, images, animations—these elements all work on a suggestive level that (whether we’re aware of it or not) affects our recall, judgment, and decision making.

A Little Psychology

Here’s a little trick from psychology. Let’s say we’re having a conversation and I want to nudge the conversation in a certain direction; I want to influence what comes to mind for you. To do this, I might try using associative priming. Basically, I’ll tell a few stories or inject specific language into our conversation that your brain will pick up on, bringing associated mental objects into short term memory. A few minutes later, I might ask you a certain question. If I’ve done a good job at priming, there’s a good chance I can predict how you might respond (I suspect this is one way magicians are able to predict what someone is thinking!).

For example, let’s suppose I asked you to name some kinds of “blue boxes.” If a few minutes earlier we had been talking about wedding bands and jewelry, you’re much more likely to think of Tiffany’s blue box. If instead we were talking about science fiction and time travel, you’re much more likely to think of Doctor Who’s iconic telephone box, the Tardis. Our brains are constantly working to make associations. Assuming you’re familiar with Tiffany’s or (a riskier assumption) Doctor Who, our earlier discussion would have “primed” your brain, making it much easier for you to recall a thought or idea not entirely of your own choosing.

Here’s a simpler example: If I was to say “the dog was chasing the ____,” what word comes to mind? If you said “cat,” that’s consistent with most of the population. Our brains think and learn by associations and analogies. Even if the rest of that sentence was “squirrel” or “piece of trash being blown by the wind,” our brains are primed to think “cat” is what comes next. If you can make a reasonable guess about the associations your audience might make, priming can be a powerful tool, as evidenced by politicians and other kinds of persuasive speakers.

Most studies I’ve seen focus on linguistic priming, but what about ways we can use visuals to prime an audience?

Visual Priming and Semiotics

Classic advertisement for Panzani pasta

Our brains are trained to make associations. This is a basic way we learn and acquire knowledge, leveraging what we already know to make sense of new information. Just as specific words or phrases might trigger an association, images can do the same thing. This idea is nothing new to advertisers.

Our brains are trained to make associations. This is a basic way we learn and acquire knowledge, leveraging what we already know to make sense of new information. Just as specific words or phrases might trigger an association, images can do the same thing.

In 1964, the French philosopher Roland Barthes published his paper “The Rhetoric of Image,” which deconstructs an ad into three messages: the “linguistic” message, the “coded iconic” message and the “non-coded iconic” message. What we’re talking about here are the “coded iconic” messages associated with specific images, that is, those things suggested or associated with the literal objects pictured. In Barthes’ example, he discusses how the choice to show beautiful, fresh vegetables (and a box of pasta displaying a brand name) in a mesh grocery bag suggests freshness, plenty, and even “Italianicity” (in the yellow, green, and red of the tomato and peppers). A certain still-life aesthetic is also suggested. All in all, these are very positive brand associations. That’s nice for selling things. But how might we use this idea help us design better interactions?

When Decoration Isn’t

I’ve been working on an application focused on formal businesses meetings. I emphasize formal, as you might find this a bit burdensome for things like lunch meetings or daily standups.

'Add Meeting' form

To clearly communicate this intent, we’ve chosen design elements that evoke a more formal business atmosphere. The most overt of these is the background image used on the form page where a new meeting is added:

Although this boardroom image might be viewed as texture or decorative ornamentation, it serves a functional role in this application.

First, we’re hoping people have a favorable response to the overall feel, as this is one of the first pages encountered by new users. But beyond any perceived attractiveness, we need to communicate the intent of this Web app. Chances are, most people will skip past all but the shortest of written explanations. In the same way that microcopy, clear labels, and icons are explicit cues to help out users, we are using this image to suggest—through connotation—the kinds of meetings where we think this tool will be most valuable. We use this specific image to suggest board meetings, staff meetings, presentations to a VP, planning sessions—the kinds of formal meetings that would take place in that conference room.

Additionally, this imagery was included as a prime for the “meeting type” form field. In the event that people don’t read the microcopy that cues people as to kinds of meetings you can create, this image is our backup. It’s decoration that suggests usage. Or at least that is the intent.

Elsewhere in the same application we use a more subtle cue to suggest a degree of formality:

Accepting a request

What does the ornamental border bring to mind? Perhaps a certificate or legal contract? This is a key area of the application—asking people to accept a request made of them during the meeting. We want everything about this page, from the literal language to the associative visual elements to suggest the seriousness of this moment: You are about to make a commitment to another person, a commitment that will be visible to everyone in that meeting. Do you intend to follow through on this commitment?

To be clear, these are subtle nudges. And they may be difficult to quantify. But there’s good reason to justify these aesthetic choices, for what they say and what they suggest.

Avoiding Negative Associations

The layout and photography used by Groupon bring to mind high-end catalogs (click for a larger image)

Here’s another example from the Groupon site. For the uninitiated, Groupon offers “one ridiculously huge coupon each day, on the best things to eat, see, do and buy in [your city].” I’ve purchased gift cards for everything from a favorite Thai restaurant to an artisan cheese shop. Their daily deals are typically on the classier side—think salons, fancier restaurants and shopping. These are not closeout deals like you’d find on other “deal” sites. In fact, I believe Groupon wants to avoid any suggestion of a “cheap” deal. Consider the photography and layouts they use in their daily deals. The photography is usually top notch. And the layout style brings to mind high end catalogs.

That’s an example of positive associative priming. But here’s an interesting discovery I made while researching the site: in earlier versions of the site, Groupon used the familiar dotted line or scissor clipping design element to border their deals, a design choice that has since been dropped for a simpler solid border.

Why do you think Groupon dropped the coupon style border?

Why did they lose the scissors and the association with coupon clipping? I suspect this goes back to communicating a “value” message versus one that suggests cheap clearance. This would be an example of avoiding what for them would be a negative (cheap) association.

On that note, have you ever wondered why the original iPod Nano resembled (and was compared to) a stick of gum? Think about how that association might have shaped perceptions.

Concept Models and Metaphors

Visual priming is also a powerful tool in print contexts. Below is a poster I created to explain The Fundamentals of Experience Design. The content of the model should, in and of itself, be fascinating, but that’s not what attracted people to this poster. No, what people found most striking about this was the floating chunk of earth.

On the surface, it is a fairly intriguing image. But what associations come to mind? Conceptually, this functions the same way as the cliché iceberg model we see everywhere—there is the obvious stuff everyone sees, and below that the critical stuff that gets overlooked. But if we consider this visual metaphor a bit more, we might also think about the roots. An experience (the grass above) that has no roots is likely to result in tumbleweeds. However, the deeper our roots go, the stronger our foundation. These are good associations. Beyond the conceptual suggestions, though, consider the style of the illustration. Does it resemble technical illustrations you might find in an academic textbook? Not a bad association if you wanted your ideas to be taken seriously!

I could go on, but you get the idea: The images we use, the words we choose– whether we’re aware of it or not, they function at an associative level that can (if given conscious attention) work in our favor. What are you suggesting?

UX London 2010

This is just one of many such ideas from psychology that Stephen will be sharing at the UX London conference (May 19-21), in both his Seductive Interactions talk and his Concept Models Workshop.

If there is a future for designers and marketers in big business, it lies not in brand, nor in “UX”, nor in any colorful way of framing total control over a consumer, such as “brand equity”, “brand loyalty”, the “end to end customer journey”, or “experience ownership”. It lies instead in encouraging behavioral change and explicitly shaping culture in a positive and lasting way.

Brand is a phenomenon that has emerged over the last century as a method of differentiation and control, with marketing beating a drum of “brand messaging”, “consistent impressions”, and a single “brand value”. User Experience is a more recent unicorn to chase, with designers claiming to drive business success through a focus on a prescriptive customer experience. There is a long history of extremely fragile collaboration between the offices of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and the traditional shepherds of behavior-by-design, as designers become enamored with brand embodiment in products, and marketers striving to “own” the product specifications, features and functions. The fragility of the bond is obvious, as both groups frequently disparage the other in both private and public venues. As blanket generalizations, designers describe marketers as less honest then themselves, and disparage the Product Requirement Document as a laundry-list of jargon and nonsense. Marketers, in turn, often view designers (and by proxy, the product itself) as a means to an end; the goal – revenue, market share, and brand equity – will be achieved through business rules, not through creative endeavors.

Both groups are to fault, and both groups are perilously ignoring the huge potential at their fingertips. As members of both groups cling to brand and UX as differentiators, they have mistakenly focused on control as a means of generating revenue. In fact, neither brand nor UX will serve as the driving force behind financial success in the coming decades. “User experience” is just a new name for old thinking, and “User experience practitioners” exhibit the same hubris that has long plagued “brand thinking”: the large name-as-mindshare mentality that a company can own a space, a segment, or even a consumer.

clients struggle with the reality of brand complacency

The Problems of Brand and User Experience
For most of the twentieth century, brand – and the marketing machine that created it – ruled the culture of developed countries. The earliest parts of the 1900s boasted brands built around industrialism and production, and these acted as literal and figurative crests, positioned as major pillars of production. The mid part of the century led to the family-focused brands positioned as domesticated icons of class and consumption. And the late 90’s exposed global brands, dominated by large, faceless and relatively unknown holding companies making profit simply by waiting for an opportune time to offload a company to another company. Yet the rules of the game are in deep flux, due to sustainability, a credit meltdown, and an awareness of humanitarian efforts in developing countries. The basic, fundamental properties of major brands are increasingly questioned, as evidenced by the disparaged and embattled Ford and Citibank, and the questions of these mega-brands are more commonly rhetorical and pejorative.

In spite of this, brand equity facilitated by market share is still a goal of the Fortune 500, and it is common to hear clients – both marketers and UX professionals – speak of “winning” in relationship to the user experience.

Brand complacency indicates a trend towards commoditization

Simultaneously, however, clients struggle with the reality of brand complacency. They describe how their customers have become familiar with a particular brand-purchasing behavior, and continue to perform that rote behavior based on circumstances. This includes placement on the shelf, color of a label, and the realization that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. There is no “relationship” with the customer; this is a fragile connection that is the consumptive equivalent to taking the same route to work each day. This is a scary reality to face, as brand complacency implies a dependency on switching-costs as a means of retaining market-share. Brand complacency indicates a trend towards commoditization.

The Threat of Commoditization
A commodity is something that has no qualitative differentiation. Mass production drives commoditization within a particular product line, while the traditional “bunch and swarm” mentality of the marketplace drives commoditization across product lines. A desire to create a new set of interactions is an urge to escape this push towards sameness. Innovation is a business goal to produce products that have qualitative differentiation, and there are various forms of innovation – such as disruptive innovation – which are intended to produce massive qualitative differentiation.

In western civilization, the artifact is continuing to diminish in relevance and importance. While people continue to consume things, these things are increasingly a means to an end. Our relative wealth has positioned even the lower-middle class in a position where there is time for leisure, entertainment, and emotionally charged experiences.

Interesting, too, is the speed at which the digital artifact has moved from being exclusive and expensive to nearly free and ubiquitous. Software, once priced at hundreds of dollars and appropriately as scarce, is now widely available for no cost; networked services have enabled content feeds across artifacts, rendering even some services as irrelevant in the larger scheme of the competitive landscape. As an example, for many years, Microsoft offered a for-fee product called Outlook, which manages electronic mail. Google then offered a free service called Gmail, which also manages electronic mail. Then, as Google externalized the Google mail feed through a series of APIs, mail can be embedded in unlikely places – including other products, such as an instant messenger client (like Trillian), or even on other websites. The “designed product” has become less interesting and relevant, and no matter the innovations pushed by Google or Microsoft in their products, the data itself has been shifted to a champion position of value.

Behavioral Change: The Goal of Our Work
The focus on brand and control of the user experience is an attempt to avoid the above commoditization and irrelevance of artifact, and it references a dated model of dominance – one where a company produces something for a person to consume. This is the McDonalds approach to production, where an authoritative voice prescribes something and then gains efficiencies by producing it exactly as prescribed, in mass. The supposed new model is to design something for a person to experience, yet the allusion to experience is only an empty gesture. An experience cannot be built for someone. Fundamentally, one has an experience, and that is experience is always unique.

The focus on brand and control of the user experience is an attempt to avoid the above commoditization and irrelevance of artifact

Interaction design is the design of behavior, positioned as dialogue between a person and an artifact. A person commonly doesn’t talk to an object; they use it, touch it, manipulate it, and control it. Usage, touching, manipulation and control are all dialogical acts, unspoken but conversational. Conversation is only a metaphor for interaction, but it’s a useful one. Many of the same ways we “read” an actual, spoken conversation have parallels in describing and discussing interactions between people and things. Consider:

• Both conversations and interactions have flow, and often have a beginning, middle, and end;
• Both conversations and interactions act as intertwining of multiple viewpoints. In a conversation, the viewpoints come from people; in an interaction, viewpoints are embedded in an artifact by a designer;
• Both conversations and interactions act as both methods of communication and methods of comprehension; participants both contribute to, and take from, the activity;
• Ultimately, both conversations and interactions serve to affect behavioral change in participants.

This is powerful, as it describes an implicit way of extending a designers reach – and personal point of view, or message – into the masses. It is this mass distribution of dialogue that describes culture; we build culture through our objects, services and systems, as we define behavior through interactions. This is of equal prominence to the claim of “designing experiences”, yet leaves open the potential – the need – for the people (pardon, the consumers) to actually participate and contribute in a meaningful way. The things we do in the design studio have grand significance in the world. Our design decisions – even small, detailed, nuanced design decisions – resonate for years, and usually in a phenomenally large scale. Yet because these design decisions have an impact that is diffused and quiet, our impact is hard to notice and pin down. Culture is something that’s not immediately describable; the question “where does culture come from?” is almost as large a question as “where does life come from”, and is equally as evasive.

Cultural Change: The Implications of Our Work
This is a fundamental point that serves to elevate the importance of a designer, and also serves to articulate the implicit responsibility a designer has to the world around them. It’s such a fundamental point that it’s worth making again, in a more overt manner:

1. The interaction designer designs various aspects of an artifact;
2. The designer either explicitly or implicitly hopes to change behavior in a user;
3. This behavioral change is “baked” into the artifact, and then disseminated, in mass;
4. The artifact serves as a stimulus to change behavior in society;
5. This combination of artifacts and behavior describes culture.

Every design decision – from the large and strategic decision to design accounting software, to the small and nuanced decision to use a checkbox instead of a radio button – contributes to the behavior of the masses, and helps define the culture of our society. This describes an enormous opportunity for designers, one that is rarely realized. We are, quite literally, building the culture around us; arguably, our effect is larger and more immediate than even policy decisions of our government. We are responsible for both the positive and negative repercussions of our design decisions, and these decisions have monumental repercussions.

Our Deep Responsibility
For most designers, this responsibility is hidden by the celebratory claims of designing experiences. This claim almost abdicates the long-term responsibility, as “an experience” has an end, at which time the designers’ role seemingly ends. The work is meaningful only on an immediate level of craft and creation, and while designers often take pride in a product once it has launched, they do not frequently make the connection between their creations and the culture that surrounds them. “They’ve stopped using my product – their experience is over.” Convenient – but utterly false. Because emphasis is placed on innovation or brand, designers learn to value their work based on newness or recognition; metrics for success are tied to profit and marketshare, rather than positive and long-term culture change. As the causality is extended over a long period of time, it is diffused as a single product mixes with the rest of the milieu. The individual contribution of a single designer feels muted and insignificant, as there is no feedback loop to indicate the role of an individual design in shaping culture and society.

These negative qualities of our last century’s focus on brand and experience have been forced upon the business of design and the design of business, but it is only interaction and the ability to change behavior that will serve as fundamental pillars upon which to drive successful new endeavors. We must refocus and reposition our work within major companies away from a marketing-driven focus on brand and a design-driven focus on experiential ownership. Instead, it is up to us to emphasize the value a company can provide in changing human behavior – the lasting, nuanced, intellectual, and deep responsibility we have to the culture we are building.

This requires a conscious tradeoff and reprioritization. Instead of control, we must focus on frameworks. Instead of seeking to own and prescribe a singular experience, we must strive to adapt to the peculiarities and nuances of human behavior. And instead of complicity absorbing the corporate drive towards power and brand positioning, we must acknowledge the huge responsibility implicit in our work and constantly vocalize how our work supports humanity and the cultural landscape that surrounds us. We’ve built that cultural landscape, and we owe it to ourselves and to our work to tend to our creation as it morphs, changes and adapts. As you cringe from someone talking into a Bluetooth headset on the subway, or smile as a child and mother look at photos on their phone, realize that this technological culture is ours in the making. Both the bad and good are our ongoing fault and responsibility.

Interaction 10

If you want to meet Jon Kolko in real life: he is one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 10. It is the third annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Savannah, Georgia (USA).

Photos by: hipposrunsuperfast, Lord Jim & arquera

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

A Lack of Affordances Leads to Low Learnability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inconsistent Visual Cues Don’t Help Either

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

An example of an iPhone application with button labels.

Others, mostly Apple applications, do not:

The iPhone Mail app

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fun is the New Usable

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

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

Play

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

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

Effective & Delightful Convergence

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

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

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

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

Implications for User Experience Designers

iPhones fly off the shelves despite being difficult to learn.

Why?

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

Experience and Research Play

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

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

Become Familiar With Game Design

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

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

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

Re-Learn the Art of the Tutorial

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

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

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

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

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

The Way Forward

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

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

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

The delay of this article in no way should be construed as a lack of passion on the topic of Foundations for Interaction Design. I’m very proud of the presentation I gave at Interaction 09 just a month ago and the delay in writing this invited follow up to my talk is more to do with life events and well needing time to reflect than anything else. The depth of the conversations I’ve had during Interaction 09 and since definitely required more time than a quick follow up would allow.

Where’s the “clay”?

As a reminder to what this is all about use the following references:

• The original Boxes & Arrows article
• The subsequent podcast follow up
• The slides from my talk at Interaction 09

At Interaction 09, the conversation about my piece often consisted of the question, “What is the clay that interaction designers mold?” I juxtaposed this question next to industrial design and also visual design. Their clay is very well understood and in the case of industrial design codified beautifully in the education practice developed by Rowena Reed Kostellow at the Pratt Institute. For details you can read “Elements of Design” by Grace Hannah. I recommend that any interaction designer who is truly interested in the design side of interaction design (as opposed to the science side) take a look at this book as guidance on understanding design education, design thinking (not the IDEO type), and the goals of design beyond mere utility.

But back to our question … What is the clay that interaction designers mold? I put forth for now three elements of our clay: Time, Abstraction (or physicality) and Metaphor. The three work in tandem building off of each other like color, value, volume and texture do for 3D form.

An assumption that I make that others may not is that interaction design is ostensibly formless. That the conversation and engagement that takes place within an interaction can have a fluid or formless embodiment. Wherever there are embodiments while influenced by the interaction design they exist within the realm of other design disciplines. Thus, the success of any design is in how the partnership of behavior and form come together. The goal of the form-giver is to clarify and communicate the behavior (what is possible & system feedback) along with other non-behavioral needs of the system.

I’m not being rigid for lack of flexibility. Rather, by holding out there a rigid absolute truth I hope to create a crucible that allow us to test the limits and definitions of IxD. In this way I hope to create the conditions where a true foundations and a better education system can develop. My goal is to create a true design discipline with as much foundational grounding as our partners in form design (architecture, graphic design & industrial design).

“There is no [clay]” — Neo

Ok, so there is nothing new there since February. So what’s new?

There was one person whom I felt challenged my foundations in a way that made huge sense to me. Robert Fabricant, an executive creative director at frog design, told me point blank, “Maybe, interaction design doesn’t have clay.” I’m still holding onto my class as I move forward with my own teaching, but also trying to understand what a “clayless” design discipline might be.

Design in my mind is about making. But if there is no clay, it seems to me that you are only left with thinking and that doesn’t feel like design to me. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but I don’t like it, so I’m going to move on from it until someone proves otherwise. Keep trying, Robert.

Robert did say more. He talked about how interaction design is about mapping for example which fits the conversation fundamental that Uday talks about in his recent piece. In this case I am assuming that mapping is about mental models to task flows. But again, for some reason this just doesn’t fit for me the thoughts of what a foundation is and what it means to be a designer. Further in my conversations with Robert (a veteran educator of Interaction Design) he discussed exercises he would give his students about using context and choreography that definitely feel MORE like what I’m thinking of in terms of interaction design and go way beyond mapping towards exploring frames. These frames are constructed in both time and physicality in order to evoke different behaviors.

But I do agree that in terms of process we create maps of mental models (implicitly or explicitly) and use them to create guide the framing (creation of system language) that expresses the components of my foundations.

Why no context?

To move on from Robert, another constant theme I hear when I present these ideas is “context”. “Where is context?” I always address this one quite simply by saying that context is not what you design, but what you design for. You don’t design personas, but doesn’t FOR the personas (if you use that tool). I don’t want to come across as dismissing the importance of context though. It is in the constraint of “context of use” that interaction designers work best. Our tools for research and framing are about defining context, bringing understanding to it, and dissecting it. So while we do a lot of work with context, it is not the final clay of our behavior, but rather, is the kiln. We have to build a custom kiln every time we have a new project to work on and that kiln exists of context and many other parts that come together to define the canvas or collection of constraints we design against and within.

I must say that I’m quite convinced that Time, Abstraction and Metaphor are still core elements of foundation in thinking about deconstructing interaction designs separate from the embodiments they are contained within. Through this, we can begin to create a language system of design criticism. It is also a basis for us to think about how to educate thinking of interaction design outside of the usual HCI oriented semantics that drive data driven designs.

Well, where are you with all this?

Marshall McLuhan taught us that every medium uses a previous medium as its content. The same applies to social media. But in any social technology the progression of technology and design innovation is accompanied by the increasing complexity of the social practices it enables. This is as true of the stirrup (Mongol warriors, jousting, cattle-herding, equestrian games) as it is of television (reformatted radio plays, stand-up routines, comedy shows, soaps, reality tv) and, most recently, securitized investment vehicles (asset-backed, mortgage-backed, credit default swaps, derived credit swaps, synthetics, even cubed derivatives). At each stage in the “evolution” of the technology, social uses and practices enable corresponding cultural “progress” of increased complexity.

The history of social media began with Geocities, as a simple form of homesteading: establishing an address, or Here I Am. It moved through identity-based sites: or This is Me, such as Friendster. (This was in part why Friendster suffered through Fakesters — it was trading in the attributes of personal identity: trust, friendship, authenticity, etc.). Then came communities: early social networks based on discussions, such as Tribe, and This is What I Think. In the next phase the social network came to the fore: MySpace, Facebook, each of which thematize the social currency or value of social capital, based on more or less real relationships and testing the symbolic and “real” meaning of relatedness: This is Who Likes Me (and Who is Like Me). Today we are animating the face, and extending the face beyond the page.

At each stage of development, a socio-technical dynamic drives what will succeed or fail. This dynamic is like a governing principle of social technology design, and it articulates both design and use together: for each stage of social technology evolution, social practices complexify in increasing order of self-reference. With each stage, previous social practices become available (as references) to new practices. Established social customs and conventions, in other words, can either be practiced “directly” or become embedded and referenced in newer ones. Subsequent levels of social complexity make each new socio-technical practice possible.

we can suppose that the next round will involve presentation layer innovations and meta-level practices

Identity, for example, which is an important theme of dating sites. The early years of dating sites established conventions, meanings, playful and serious behaviors, etiquette, and so on. They saw the emergence of subcultures among online daters, from lurkers to stalkers, late night hook-ups to eharmony’s bureaucratization of romantic compatibility, etc. In its earliest days, dating sites suffered from the stigma that a) nobody’s real, truthful, or sincere on dating sites and b) they’re a means of last resort. But in the ten or so years that they have been around, it’s become understood that some 20% of a profile is inflated, but that everyone does this — and in part because we want to like ourselves, too. Gross lies and deceptions are less common now in online dating; it simply doesn’t pay to misrepresent oneself.

Online dating is now a theme or practice available to other social media. Indeed many, if not most Facebook apps, play in the flirtation and with the subtleties of symbolic and linguistic interaction that enable higher-order social games. Facebook social apps use practices already explored and sedimented out of several years of precipitating socio-technical discovery and experimentation. In this way social conventions can continually reference themselves, making an ever-growing landscape of technical features viable.

If we take status and activity feeds and their applications as another example, we can see this evolution at work and imagine where it goes next.

If it is likely that on-going innovation will kick off with the next level, or layer, up from today’s application interfaces and user practices, we can suppose that the next round will involve presentation layer innovations and meta-level practices. By meta I mean observing the “world” or activity produced through social media. If today’s twitter is for tweeting, meta Twitter would be for watching the world of Twitter.

This progression has already occurred in social networking sites (consider the number of facebook apps that report on facebook user activity, their demo or friend data, social rank, popularity, etc.). The next round of lifestreaming apps will mine usage to construct and represent the feed-based world of activity. Designers will design new and compelling ways to show this activity and make it interesting in the dimensions of social use that can be compelling: presence; activity; social rank; social networks; location; notifications; topics; and so on. Some of these are already off the ground: tag clouds and hashtags for topicality; counters for popularity and rank; twittervision for location; and so on.

With each iteration of social media sites, tools, and applications, designs leverage the familiar for the purpose of something new. We have tried to show here that it is possible to identify aspects of social interaction, social activities, the acts that comprise them, and social technology forms commonly used in social practices. Now, while a designer doesn’t need theory to practice design work any more than a musician needs music theory to play a tune, I hope to have demonstrated that a framework for social interaction design can help organize the field of social media design. One could write further on other social media tools and practices, and identify the modes of use implicated in design choices. And apply these insights to bigger goals, such as new business opportunities and uses for social media. But that would be a separate undertaking — and a separate primer!

Image by Elvire-r

We have covered just three forms of social action common to one kind of social media application. There are others more important to social networking, profile-based sites, mobile, and other kinds of social media. They include the form of self-presentation (profiles), the form of social networking (friends and friends of friends), the form of social gaming (apps, widgets, and games), to mention just three. But our goal here was to use lifestreaming applications as an introduction to applied social interaction design, and we chose to focus on temporality, audience presence, and communication.

Design choices made will shape whether or not questions are answered personally, by friends, by experts, or by anyone.

Now within each of these forms are design formats. These are more specific and particular than broad forms of mediated social action. We don’t have the time here to detail each, but we would be selling the framework short if we failed to at least mention some examples and explicate how a design language might be described for several of them.

We will take just some of the formats of the form of communication as examples. As noted, lifestreaming applications are fairly unstructured and open. But communication, and social talk in particular, can be very structured. According to Erving Goffman, forms of talk in face to face social encounters include such diverse examples as intimacies, pastimes, games, rituals, and ceremonies, in increasing degrees of structure and organization. Intimacies are highly personal and private, and are navigated by participants by means of personality and individual character, competence, and preference. Rituals, on the other hand, can be virtually devoid of personal qualities and will often rely heavily on role, position, authority, and so on. Lacking the context demanded of rituals, online social interactions by nature tend to emphasize higher degrees of personal handling. But some degree of ritualization does seem to have emerged around conventional online behaviors, especially greetings, acknowledgments, and other examples of interaction in which a preliminary acceptance or rejection sets up later communication.

Designers have of course been working with communication application design interfaces for years. And indeed, message envelope, priority, order and sorting, notifications and alerts, and other design conventions were established in email applications long before their adoption by social media. Similarly, groups, channels, and subscriptions share some number of design standards. And the design of chat, too, has influenced IM, and lifestreaming in turn (as have message boards and web-based discussion boards).

Users may be as or more interested in who is talking than in what she or he is saying

But there are ways to structure talk and communication that deal less specifically with message formatting and navigation and more with the structure of the kind of talk. Questions and answers, for example, are a structured kind of talk. Designers can use question and answer formats to facilitate and display these kinds of exchanges. The designer may also use conventions for the display questions and their answers, ratings, answer threading, answer categorizing, and more. There are some lifestreaming applications built around questions and answers, and there will certainly be more. In each, designers can choose how to route questions (publicly, to a social network, by design, or by text formatting), how to handle answers, how to make them searchable and browsable, how to tag or categorize them, qualify and rank them, verify, validate, accredit, relate them, and so on.

Design choices made will shape whether or not questions are answered personally, by friends, by experts, or by anyone. Those design choices will in turn shape whether or not questioning and answering is a social activity, a personal activity, or whether it serves the purpose of building new relationships, creating a knowledge base, surfacing experts, recommenders, and so on. Without going into the design white-boarding that might accompany these choices, we can see already that just one format of communication (QA) is richly textured and design-ready.

We could also take the example of symbolic exchanges, and of meta-communication in general. Here we deal not necessarily with what is said but with what is meant, and not in words but in hints, suggestions, solicitations, and other non-linguistic forms of symbolic interaction. Symbolic interaction on Twitter and on most lifestreaming apps is conducted with words. Twitter does not have an icon or smiley set available, as most IM and chat applications do. For this reason, the use of @name by convention solicits a written reciprocal acknowledgment. (Users can be nice, generous, or cold and unresponsive, or seem to be, depending.)

There is the example of what we call the message envelope: its urgency, priority, newness, subject, and addressing. Again, lifestreaming applications share the stripped-down design simplicity of flat messaging presentation. All messages look the same, even those that reply to or direct message a user. And there is no distinction between “normal” and “commercial” messages. These enhancements would be easy to imagine, regardless of whether we think they would be improvements to the application. These are important attributes of communication insofar as they tell about the message, conveying how important it is, time sensitive it is, and so on. Currently, lifestreaming apps simply show messages. But a meta-Twitter application that summarized twitter activity might be an interesting tool if it provided visual cues and notifications — sparing the user the need to read messages one by one.

In addition to structuring and organizing communication and messages, we can structure and organize the speakers or participants. Users may be as or more interested in who is talking than in what she or he is saying. Users can be grouped, by their relationships or by their affinity to topics and themes. And of course direct communication between members can be distinguished or separated from the rest of the stream of talk. The formats for these are emerging only now, and will evolve as social technologies proliferate and increasingly go mobile.

It would take significantly more time and space than we have here to outline and arrange the forms and formats of social action for social communication alone, let alone other forms and their related formats. And these would only address the interactions on social media. We are already seeing games and experiences that play with the meta-data and representation of online social interaction, and these would require their own frameworks of social action. For this reason we will stop here and conclude with a view to what comes next for social media.

We conclude this post in the next and final part.

Image by timparkinson

In order to proceed now with these examples, we need to develop our framework further to account for and describe what’s on the screen in terms of individual user experiences and aggregate social practices. We will do this on the basis of the social action systems touched on above. We will structure these social action systems into forms. While an imperfect term, “form” conveys the degree of structure and organization as well as materiality we are looking for. “Frames” could work also, or possibly “formats” — but both of those terms carry other connotations. Frames are used mostly with “perspectives” of experience; and formats for visual treatments or media forms. Our forms of social action will be user-centric, in that they will start from user activity and behavior, but will accommodate the resulting production of social content also. These forms will combine social media acts, actions, and activities, and provide us with an interpretive schema layered on top of conventional interface and design frameworks. Forms support the two major types of social action, but are material technical implementations, and so require slightly different treatment. They have a several components, including: visual, functional, temporal, and content components. (Note that forms do not describe user intentions or motives—those require a psychological framework for user behaviors. The psychology of social media use practices will describe what users “think” is going on; forms will describe what we think is going on.)

The social media “forms” of social action most germane to lifestreaming and feed-based applications are temporal forms (for sustaining talk over time); forms of creating audience presence (a sense of presence is a must for any social conversation tool); and forms of communication (for identifying the what, where, and for whom of communication).

Temporal forms
Temporal forms are perhaps the most interesting, because they require some visualization of (past) time. All social media “design time” insofar as preserve past interactions and content, and all are used over time insofar as they become a part of regular habits and routines. But there are two kinds of time: lived time, and incremental time. Put differently, the time which has rhythm, pacing, speeds and intensities (boring, exciting); and the time we use to measure and which is all equal: minutes, hours, days. Time is a challenge for visual design languages. The “lived time” of social media lacks the continuity of face to face encounters, and is best described as discontinuous. Furthermore, it is asynchronous: interactions are out of synch, and what may be a highly-attentive stretch for one user could easily be out of step with his or her friends. (Members of dating sites and chat-oriented communities often have routines, such as after work and late night, which supply some of the sense of “being there” that comes with being together.)

In lifestreaming applications, content, usually posted messages and items, is displayed in order of newest to oldest — as is common to email, chat, and IM (messaging apps). Messages are browsed or read by means of paging back (Twitter over web) or scrolling down (Twitter in desktop application). Dipity, Swurl, and Twittervision exemplify several alternatives: left to right scrolling through a timeline; flipbook for flipping messages one at a time; and mapping for attaching messages to place. For the most part, however, the chronological form is adequate and little other navigation encumbers flow-oriented application design. It helps that Twitter is designed to be an app for “now,” or for present-tense communication. In fact Twitter archives do not stretch back more than a couple days on most clients.

Is this the only way to design time-based applications? Is an application like Twitter simple because our needs and uses for it are simple, or because content belongs to a now and a recent past — as opposed to sections, categories, pages, lists, and so on? Chronology is not the only means by which to structure or organize temporal activities. Talk, for example, uses turns as a means of organizing time when there are several participants involved. Turn-taking comes from face to face conversation, and structures participation such that a “round” of talk “sticks to the topic.” Participants “take the floor” to talk, then hand it to somebody else. And Twitter, notably, does not handle turn-taking well. Twitter’s open-ness and unstructured-ness preempts the visual continuity that commenting on Facebook status updates successfully provides. In fact Twitter is by some accounts leaving many of the benefits of serialized social interaction to others: Friendfeed and Facebook’s news, activity, and status feeds most significantly.

Serialization is visualized differently by several lifestreaming applications. These applications either provide alternative views of message archives, or complement the conventional message list with these alternatives. These visualizations include flip-books (page through messages), horizontal timelines, slideshows, and calendar views. Storytlr.com is an example of a lifestreaming service that invites users to create narratives out of their feeds, thus taking the “serialization” of daily activity streams literally and visually. (Facebook’s implementation of commenting builds comment threads, or “loops in time” attached to particular updates.) None of these create a different “temporality” but are different ways of viewing archives (the past).

Presence
Presence is the hidden dimension of the temporal continuity sustained during an open state of talk. In co-present social encounters, participants need to be in close enough proximity to be able to hear, if not see, one another. How then does an application like twitter establish this kind of presence? And since social media deal in non co-present interactions and encounters, are we not talking about a dimension better described for what it lacks than what it avails? Indeed, presence can only be signaled or indicated online — like temporality online, presence is discontinuous and asynchronous, or absent.

When we talk about presence in social media, we mean several things: the indication of a user’s presence; indication that the user may be paying attention; and indication that the user is available for communication or other interaction. A user’s state of presence may be indicated as “currently online” — as in case of synchronous or state-aware applications. Or it may simply be built into the assumption (social practice) of the application’s use. A user’s attentiveness, too, can be indicated or assumed, although indicating that a user is presently paying attention is of course difficult, barring use of live video/webcam. And a user’s presence availability for interaction, likewise, is indicated or assumed (we can usually tell when a user is active, and when s/he may simply have “checked in” but has not indicated active participation).

The fact that audience presence and interest is motivating to many users is clear from the amount of attention so many users pay to their stats.

Presence provides a ribbon of discontinuous attention across talk-based tools in general. But we can use the example of twitter to tease out a few observations of the particular modes of presence common to social media. For one, the less that is indicated, or made explicit, in the form of an application’s user presence status (“online now”), or as a user declaration (such as a question posted to twitter, which would suggest that the user will watch for replies), the greater the ambiguity raised with respect to presence, attentiveness, and availability. This may seem at first to be an inefficiency of the application. But as we have said, social media benefit from ambiguity: it can engage, motivate, and often captivate users. Ambiguity of presence then takes shape in user experiences like “is anyone here?”, “are you here?”, “did you get my message/see my post?”, “are you ignoring me or do you disagree with me, not like me, or simply not want to talk to me right now?” In face to face interactions, these are easily handled by facework, looking at and looking back, use of body language, and of course suggestive language and statements. They are not so easily handled on feed-based apps like twitter, and thus become a factor of the user experience and of emergent social practices. Ambiguity piques user interest. (The kind of interest piqued is a matter for an article on user psychology.)

Discontinuous temporality and presence through absence thus form the “situation” or context of talk-based tools, and their production of “time” in particular. Let’s move on then to the matter of assembling an audience. Unlike social networking sites, the audiences on many feed-based applications are open: in the form of a public timeline. Audiences are comprised of followers, friends, and a public. Indications of an audience’s membership and presence are critical to talk-based tools, for the obvious reason that users are interested in posting to audiences, either of known friends, individual users, or “everyone” at large. And users are not just interested in the audience, but in being seen by the audience. (Given the choice between being on stage with no audience, and being in an audience, there are those who would prefer being on stage.) The application can show the audience present for an interaction, or show the audience comprised of a user’s followers, or simply reference the “possible” audience by means of a user’s network, or the greater web in general. The fact that audience presence and interest is motivating to many users is clear from the amount of attention so many users pay to their stats. Audiences can be indicated by means of numbers of people, numbers of links, comments, numbers of views or visits, and even ratings, diggs, bookmarks, and so on. Again, there’s ambiguity between audience size and audience attentiveness and engagement, and again, this ambiguity can be motivating and compelling. Every social media user is compelled first and foremost by the possibility that his or her presence is noticed, acknowledged, distributed, and liked, for the simple reason that the user’s position and status in relation to other users is undermined by physical and temporal separation.

We could say much more about the differences between talk-based and feed-based applications and how they assemble audiences and indicate their presence. But for now, let’s just touch on the most recent development in gathering social media audiences: aggregation of distributed conversations. Applications like Friendfeed, SocialMedian, Swurl, and numerous others aggregate the “conversation space” by pulling in feeds and comments on feed items for convenient viewing and participation. Aggregators are tackling the problem of audience fragmentation created by the proliferation of social media applications and the acceleration of talk and commenting across them — and of the adoption of faster, shorter posts in an ecosystem of increasing proximity and presence. Unfortunately, aggregators only partially succeed, for their existence adds to the list of talk-based applications. Clearly, the need for a user-centric application interface to a user’s relevant friend, colleague, and topical news sources and feeds begs addressing. Destination sites all hope to become the few preferred means of getting this done.

Aggregators address the problem of audience presence by collecting incoming feeds and messages. However, for each aggregator to provide the use and social value promised on top of information value, it needs a user base of active members. The audience problem cannot be solved by aggregating pipelines alone.

Communication
Finally, feed and talk-based applications of course organize and facilitate communication. As we saw, communication may be direct or indirect. Messages are posted to a person or audience directly when they are addressed to that audience, or indirectly when they are just posted in front of an audience. Communication itself comprises message content (what is said) and meta-message communication (what is solicited, suggested, and implied beyond what’s stated in words themselves). Linguistic types exist that are common to social media, for example, simple declarations of fact, intent, and feeling; requests and questions; recommendations; invitations; greetings and sign-offs; and more. Some linguistic types are less common, for example: instructions, commands, orders, and special speech acts such as pronouncements (the “I do” of a wedding) and physical threats.

It’s a fact of communication that the information in the utterance is separate from the utterance itself, that in other words what is said is not said just in the saying of it. This distinction between “performing” speech and saying something opens up the intentional and interpretive possibilities for communication, and this is doubled again when a medium is involved. For the medium requires first that communication is captured, or rendered as an artifact. It’s the artifact that is posted/distributed, not the performance. Any recording of communication is thus already at one remove from the act of performing the communication.

There is a further dimension to communication critical to designing talk-based social media. It is the conversion of communication into an action system. Strictly defined, publishing is communication, but it requires no action. In social media, communication solicits action (interaction, or participation). An action system exists when communication is followed by the act of acceptance or rejection (of what is communicated). Here, too, ambiguity arises, for the communication can be accepted without being agreed with. In fact, it can be accepted without even being understood — either in terms of what it says or what its author intended. Furthermore, a person can acknowledge the person communicating and not in fact accept what is communicated, thus committing to communication without accepting its claims. Any of these aspects of communication may come into play with social media. Thus a tool like twitter can be many things to just as many people, according to the ways in which they tend to communicate, and according to the aspects of communication that compel or touch them the most.

In the next section we look at designing to different forms of social action, looking at communication in particular.

Image by voght

Let’s now take some examples of how social action systems describe the user and social interactions on social media. Because there are so many different kinds of applications out there, we will look at just one kind of social media application. We will take those that have attracted the most attention this year: feed, status, “micro-blogging,” and lifestreaming applications. These would include Facebook (although Facebook is also a social networking site), Twitter, Seesmic, Jaiku, Pownce, Dipity, Swurl, Tumblr, Soup.io, Dopplr, Friendfeed, Storyt.lr, Spokeo, and others). They include also the applications that interface with Twitter (Tweetdeck, Twhirl, etc.), and those that aggregate feeds as customized RSS readers (designed to simplify blog tracking, friend tracking, etc.).

Attention: this article is part of a series.

If the profile is a representation of one’s face, then the feed brings it to life — feeds are the medium’s “talkies.” Feed-based applications are more immediate, more conversational, more personal, and more mobile than profile-based networks. Some have reproduced aspects of social networking (followers, following, subscribing, grouping). Some are concerned with topicality and navigation of conversations by content. Some extend the user’s presence across devices, working with the rich possibilities of mediated social presence. Some extend the medium’s capacity for discovery, surfacing, and serendipity. Some seem designed to surface influencers, experts, recommenders, reviewers, and so on, while others enable co-accidental meetings (coincidental accidents, or accidental coincidences, whichever you prefer as a description of Loopt, Dopplr and geo-location services). Generally speaking, feed-based applications focus on the conversation flow, or stream, and do so with a lighter footprint than other community and networking sites. (I understand that social networks also have feeds and status messages — but there is little doubt that lifestreaming and aggregators are their own category.)

All “talkies” play in presence, presence availability, presence extension, audience membership, audience attention, “public” behavior, regionalization of public “spaces,” and other matters described by symbolic interactionism. Feed applications represent a speeding-up of communication across social media, and involve a nearer sense of proximity and presence than many earlier social media. They have audiences but those audiences are somewhat invisible and can be less organized than in online communities; many feed-based apps are designed around the individual user, and not around a network or community. There are thus social effects deriving from the many possible interpretations of what’s being said, why, to whom, for what purpose, in response to what, or whom, and so on — all aspects of symbolic and communicative action ripe for the designing.

The primary evolutionary step taken by feed-based applications comprises of two parts:

• the immediacy, proximity, and sustained attention of their users, which supply the necessary social preconditions for presence that makes their use relevant and rewarding;
• and the design innovation of the short-form verbal declaration, which provides a highly distributable, aggregate-able, extensible, and flexible presentation format and simplicity of user input from multiple applications and devices.

These applications are interesting because they point to a departure from page-based social networking and profile-based systems. Their emphasis on talk overthe profiles and rich media interactions can make them more appealing to the conversational audiences. Their blend of friend followers and public followers creates interesting opportunities for social talk, as in talk that is “addressed to friends” but “in front of everyone.” Their open-ness and unstructured-ness begs for (and creates opportunities for) more channeled, closed (Yammer being one) and structured variants (e.g. topical, typical — Q/A, location, recommendation, ecommerce — commercial, niche and similar types as have emerged on message boards and in discussion-based networks). (Of course it is also possible that some feed-based services will successfully layer on social networking, discussions, and profiling, thus reproducing variants on the success of Facebook and MySpace, but around short-form talk.)

Feed-based applications are loosely related to what Goffman calls an “open state of talk.” Open states of talk are the types of conversation that do not require full front-and-center attention from their participants. They often accompany a task, and are common among co-workers. The continuity of an open state of talk is not handled as much by direct and focused attention (of each participant on the other), but by their co-presence: participants are readily available to conversation when it picks up, as when it fades out. Feed-based applications bear some similarity to this form of conversation. Indeed, all asynchronous communication tools do, and point to an ubiquitization of networked presence and social awareness.

In the next part, we will look at forms of action common to feeds and lifestreaming, and begin to formalize our approach to designing screen and interaction. We will take three significant aspects of feeds and lifestreaming — temporality, presence, and communication — and examine ways in which social interaction design accommodates them. As we will see, the richer our understanding of the interface between user and social, between social and technical, the better we might anticipate the trajectories of any particular social technology.

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