In my previous incarnation as a philosopher, I spent a lot of effort trying to argue for a different, phenomenological approach to the sciences of cognition – the very sciences at the root of the study of human-computer interaction. I find myself turning back to that train of thought in light of recent discussions I’ve had around establishing a methodology for user experience design.

One thing that American philosopher Richard Rorty really liked about his student Robert Brandom‘s book Making It Explicit was that the word “experience” was not to be found anywhere in the index. Rorty was one of the most important philosophers of language of his time – as Brandom is today – and their pragmatist approach is extremely influential in contemporary philosophical circles.

Rorty’s praise – which Brandom would no doubt have appreciated – gives you some idea of how far contemporary trends in interface design, which regard the design task as enhancing or enabling certain sorts of user experience, are from the mainstream philosophical conceptions of what such users are and what they are doing when they engage with texts and symbols everywhere, including online.

Balancing Intuition and Evidence

Perhaps like all forms of design, in practice user experience design rarely resembles the execution of a method, so much as it resembles the practice of an art. There is a heavy reliance on intuition, and when a designer does choose to refer to some piece of shared knowledge, that knowledge usually takes the form of a pattern (in the architectural sense) rather than empirical studies or a unified theoretical framework. (There’s no problem with stealing from other intellectual traditions – as Vicky Teinaki suggests – while theoretical frameworks are regarded simply as large pattern repositories.)

The famous Sidney Harris cartoon - must we be more explicit?

Still, it’s not uncommon for designers to worry that such a heavy dependency on intuition is problematic, or at least risky. As the profession matures, and businesses establish a more critical engagement with agencies offering UX design services, clients are becoming more confident in demanding details of the design process itself, in the hope of ensuring that an agency is designing for that client’s customers and not simply to satisfy the tastes of its own designers.

In this way, there is a growing sense that user experience design should be – not merely intuitive – but evidence-based. The emphasis on user testing in all its forms is a manifestation of this.

Partially because the way we test our designs resembles a traditional psychological or ethnographic study, it’s often assumed that the kind of evidence required is statistical evidence. I want to suggest that this may actually be a misunderstanding – itself a result of a naturalistic bias inherent in our society – and to suggest an alternative view.

Finding a methodology that is true to practice

This tension between the design process itself and the requirement that its products have statistical validity is felt most keenly when trying to articulate a UX methodology, for example, in the context of a pitch, or to formalise the design process. It quickly becomes clear that any method that lives up to this requirement is one that no UX project could ever actually live up to.

On the one hand, no design firm has the time or the resources to conduct a large-scale psychological or ethnographic study of the users whose experience they are purporting to represent. In a world in which quantitative analysis is king: the rapid, qualitative psychological studies that are standard among designers appear as nothing more than arbitrary, and certainly insufficiently large, sample populations.

On the other hand, there is the hunch that this lack of statistical rigor may well be a “good thing”. Incomplete data leaves room for designers; for the speculative leaps that are what make design feel like design. And anyway, the alternative threatens to make the process into something akin to “design by committee” – where the committee is a population in the hundreds… or hundreds of thousands!

Proving the pudding

At this point, it’s important to distinguish between imposing the requirement of statistical validity on the design process, and imposing it on the products of that process, i.e. on the design itself. I’m not trying to argue that user experience design should be immune to criticism, nor that the only criticism a user experience designer should listen to is that of another designer. The ultimate test of any design is how it actually performs in the wild, in front of those hundreds of thousands, and every effort should be made to identify design flaws in advance of a product’s release by exposing it to tens – or hundreds – of potential users in a controlled setting. (Of course, the test setting needs to controlled, not to resemble the target audience, which is “in the wild”, but to minimise the assumptions built into the inferences derived from the test results; to maximise their scalability.)

Eye tracking - tells you what is wrong, not right

Let’s spend another moment on user testing, because it will help clarify the kind of validity that I think is appropriate for user experience design. The thing about user testing – which as I’ve said, should be grounded in statistical evidence – is that it can tell you that a component of a design is broken, but not what is broken about it.

Take the case of eye-tracking. An eye-tracking study can reveal that the current design inhibits the completion of a particular step or objective. It does so by illuminating that a statistically significant section of the population tested took an inordinate amount of time to complete that step or objective (where inordinate might mean “above average” or “above a certain threshold”).

But the crucial thing is to realise that this is all it reveals. In order to diagnose the problem, a different sort of mode of interrogation is required. It’s necessary to watch one particular case, or a few, and develop a sense of what is going on.

It’s tempting to say that this sense is an “interpretation” of the data, but that word is loaded up with all sorts of connotations, and these get in the way of capturing the richness of the experience of watching another human being interact with something and ultimately understanding the nature of that interaction.

Diagnosing a usability problem is an achievement

An interpretation is commonly parsed as a point of view on something. Moreover, all points of view are necessarily subjective, so an interpretation is just my point of view – it has no objective validity. What that misses is that while this point of view I am offering is mine now, it’s something I’ve achieved, namely by watching another human being whose behaviour I didn’t predict or initially understand. In diagnosing a problem with our design on the basis of watching someone else interact with it, I take my best stab at adopting the point of view of the person I’m watching.

Now, it may be that I fail to adopt their point of view entirely, and I may even be wrong in my diagnosis of the problem, but clearly, it isn’t just my point of view that’s involved here. At the very least, the diagnostic point of view I come to adopt has its origins (and so, some of its validity) in the behaviour of the test subject.

What’s more, there’s obviously a skill involved here – an ability to effectively, and reliably, adopt other points of view, other ways of engaging with an interface. This is the skill that I suggest is at the heart of all user experience design.

But a UX designer has to do more than this. After all, our brief is to design for all users in one fell swoop. Thus, to develop a unified design – a design that works – a UX designer has to discover that configuration of design elements that has a relatively stable meaning across the diverse range of potential modes of engagement that can be adopted by users. User testing, therefore, keeps a user experience designer honest. Testing exposes a design to an actual diversity of actual modes of engagement, and the point is to ensure the designer hasn’t become parochial or staid in their approach, favouring one or a few modes over all others.

Psychology with a sample space of one

Edmund Husserl - 1859-1938.

The picture I have painted above of user experience design is remarkably similar to that of phenomenological psychology, as championed by the early twentieth-century German philosopher, Edmund Husserl. As I have tried to do above with regard to design, Husserl counterposed his phenomenological understanding of psychology as an “eidetic” science, or science of essences, against an empirical psychology grounded in statistical data. An essence for Husserl is an invariant structure in our engagement with things. It is, if you like, the flip-side of understanding how a certain perceptual structure might be misunderstood. Once you have exhausted the ways something can be misunderstood, or misperceived, what you have left is its essence. The crucial point is that Husserl regarded these essences as a perfectly valid form of evidence on which to base inferences about the world and our behaviour within it. In fact, he regarded it as the only philosophically respectable form of evidence.

That might be going too far, and Husserl was probably also overreaching in jumping straight from endorsing the practice of criticising assumptions by exercising the skill of misperceiving, to asserting the existence of an essence of every perception. But what is clear, however, is this: if what I have said above about user experience design is correct, the methodology of user experience design might share a great deal with that of phenomenology.

An association with phenomenology might go some way toward alleviating that anxiety associated with trying to establish a methodology for UX design. I’ve heard phenomenological psychology described as “psychology with a sample space of one”. Among phenomenologists, that’s not a cause for embarrassment. It’s a source of pride. And that’s because to them it’s a reaffirmation of both the possibility of adopting perspectives other than our own and our responsibility to do so as reflective human beings. What UX designer wouldn’t want to be associated with that?

…

In case you want to learn more about phenomenology:

I can recommend the New World Encyclopedia article on Eidetic Reduction – this is the technical term for the “skill of misperceiving” I describe above – I’d never used this resource before, but it has a better article than Wikipedia.

Also, have a look at Hubert Dreyfuss with Bryan Magee on Husserl, Heidegger and Existentialism (70s BBC show), which gives a nice overview of the tradition in the comfort of a soft, beige couch!

Husserl image via Wikipedia

Do you know about phenomenology? If you’re an interaction designer, you should. It’s a branch of philosophy that will change the way you work, especially if you’re used to the idea of ‘invisible interfaces’. But it’s highly likely you don’t, as up until now phenomenology has been one of academia’s best kept secrets. I hope to change that by giving you a quick guide to this thought provoking field and its relevance to interaction design.

The basics
Phenomenology is, as you might guess from the name, the study of phenomena. To be exact, according to Stanford, phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.

Though it’s a branch of philosophy, it also owes a lot to psychology. In particular, if you know about Gestalt psychology you’ll see a lot of parallels.  However, the most important difference is that phenomenology does not see a person and any object they perceive as being completely separate (for those who know Descartes: the subject-object paradigm). Instead the two are fundamentally linked, we are never just conscious, we are always “conscious of …” something, and so on.

Phenomenolgy is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.

This “conscious of” gets more relevant when Martin Heidegger explores using tools. In an example from “Being and Time” known as “Heidegger’s hammer”, he describes the hammer shifting between being “present-at-hand” and “ready-to-hand”. When we pick up the hammer, it’s “present-at-hand”: we can feel its weight, texture, and perceive it as being something separate from us. Once we start using it to hammer a nail, it becomes “ready-to-hand”: we act through it, and in a way forget that it’s there. Once we stop, it’s “present-at-hand” again. What’s important is that it disappears through use but can always come back.

However, using the body comes to the fore with the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In his book “The Phenomenology of Perception”, he describes us as perceiving the world as we do because of our bodies (two eyes facing forwards, standing upright etc). What’s more, our perception of our body isn’t necessarily the same as our body itself: when we use an object, it becomes part of our body:

To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power of dilating our being in the world… (p 143)

This may seem pretty much the same as Heidegger, but there’s an important difference: the object does not disappear. Instead it becomes part of us. Take the example of using a car. No one who drives would ever say the car disappears. Instead, through sitting in the seat, putting your hands on the steering wheel and your feet on the pedals and starting the motor, it becomes an extension of you. The car doesn’t become invisible, your bodily awareness expands to include the car.

The final aspect of phenomenology most worth touching on is about learning. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty both agree that there is no such thing as a priori knowledge; knowledge from a higher consciousness (it may sound strange now, but a lot of philsophy assumed this!) and that instead we learn through doing, and in doing so create flexible ways to carry out actions. Hubert Dreyfus describes these as ‘purposeful without purpose’.

How it is relevant
Over the last few years, we’ve seen the way people relate to digital devices completely change. Thanks to the popularity of laptops and smartphones, people are no longer using one eye, one finger and their ears to interact with their computers. (See my previous post for more about that paradigm)

How do we design for this new way of using devices? In the desktop era, many designers used semiotics (the study of signs) to help inform their work. But now, as we use more of our bodies to manipulate computing devices, we need another framework. That is phenomenology. It helps us get away from the idea of the “invisible interface”, and instead look at the how our interactions are “embodied” (Paul Dourish) or “coupled”.

Taking a phenomenological approach, it’s easy to see why the Wii has been such a runaway success: the controller is pretty much Heidegger’s hammer gone digital. (However, it’s worth noting that it is almost a gestural device, which is something different altogether).Portable devices require a bit more thought – unlike Heidegger’s hammer or Merleau Ponty’s blind man’s stick, they have the extra layer of the virtual domain. In these cases, it is how the physical interactions relate to the virtual ones that can be considered by phenomenology.

Schultze and Webber explain that with the Palm, it’s the action of taking it out of its holster:

When you unholster a Blackberry, you don’t need to turn on or unlock the keypad. Perhaps this makes it easier to “act through” the physical device to directly manipulate the data of emails and appointments.

From a more computational perspective, it also helps us understand how we learn things through doing. Hubert Dreyfus, arguably the world’s best interpreter of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, showed this in the 1970s when his book “What Computers Can’t Do” correctly predicted that artificial intelligence would be a failure. He used phenomenology to show that assuming people learn using rigid systems of knowledge was wrong.

More information
For those who want to try and find a quick way into phenomenology, Hubert Dreyfus has a number of readable articles (his paper “The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment” is particularly useful). For more of a design bent, Paul Dourish’s (albeit academic) book “Where The Action Is” looks at social computing and tangible interaction along with phenomenology. Those who are interested in mobile communications should look at Myerson’s “Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone” (though the book is beginning to date as mobile phones become more like computers).

For those who want to deep dive into phenomenology, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are where to go: Heidegger’s “Being and Time” lays the groundwork, while Merleau-Ponty’s “The Phenomenology of Perception” deals with the main area that Heidegger did not cover, namely the body. However, be warned that neither are easy going (Dreyfus suggests that Heidegger is dense to the point of being cryptic and Merleau-Ponty is badly written!). If you choose to go that far, for Heidegger at least there is a great resource to help you: Hubert Dreyfus’s Berkeley lectures are freely available from Berkeley or iTunes.