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USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN SLIDESHOW by Cindy Chastain
- 1. Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design [email_address] @cchastain Cindy Chastain
- 2. content : What’s This About, Anyway? Characterization of a Theme A Story of How This Bloody Idea Came About How Experience Themes are Applied to Design How to Find a Theme Final Thoughts
- 3. Storytelling and UX Design Frame Communication Tool Vehicle for Engagement/ Response methods purpose value Team Building Persuasion Marketing Selling Validating Comics Storyboards Scenarios “ Concept Narrative” Shared Vision Understanding Unifying Sharing Validating Theme Comics Storyboards Scenarios User Flows Emotion Meaning Identification Immersion Coherence Fun ? Theme Scenes Structure Pacing/Flow
- 4. What’s This About, Anyway?
- 6. Parti & The Design Sandwich Luke Wroblewski at interaction09
- 11. Characterization of a Theme
- 13. the subject-matter, topic or idea on which a work of art or literature is based
- 15. A true theme is not a word but a sentence---one clear, coherent sentence that expresses a story’s irreducible meaning. Robert McKee, STORY
- 16. The [theme] shapes the writer’s strategic choices. It’s yet another Creative Discipline to guide your aesthetic choices toward what is expressive of your [theme] and may be kept versus what is irrelevant to it and must be cut. Robert McKee, STORY
- 17. Impact of theme on… response decisions reader writer
- 18. So what can themes do for user experience design?
- 21. What’s not to like?
- 22. A Story of How T his Bloody Experience Theme Idea Came About
- 23. Case 1: AgnesNixon.com
- 24. The Nixon family would like to leverage their tremendous library of content in a new, engaging, interactive video-centric web property.
- 25. So where does one start?
- 26. Question: What’s this site ABOUT?
- 27. If flickr had a theme… Story Premise: A playful, fun to use site helps people to easily manage their vast store of digital photos and share them with one another. Theme: Define yourself with photos
- 29. “ As experiences now span multiple media, channels & formats, we need to look to narrative, interaction, emotional elements to sustain transitions across channels and formats.” Joe Lamantia, in the Beyond Findability Workshop at IA Summit 09
- 30. Gasp! I am the beast that is part website, part software, part product, part service, part interactive multimedia experience. What will you do with me? user technology product
- 31. To create a truly memorable and satisfying experience, a UX designer needs to understand how to create a logical and viable structure for the experience and needs to understand the elements that are important to creating an emotional connection with the product users .
- 32. tangible intangible emotion meaning pleasure characters setting scenes visual design content pages flows images
- 33. The meaning of meaning… what this is about what this will do for me how it works where this fits into my life
- 35. Three Levels of Processing Experience reflective behavioral visceral
- 37. optimal user experience function performance ease of use beauty emotion meaning
- 38. New Elements User Experience? beauty emotion meaning function performance ease of use intangible tangible
- 39. Writers and filmmakers design, if you will, for emotion and meaning all the time.
- 40. The tangible elements of experience in a… visual design image/cinematography Website Film actors locations/sets music/sound editing copy/text information/content navigation interactions/system response processes animations music/sound error messages help lighting words/lines layout/content presentation coordinated in service of story not coordinated desktop widget mobile app
- 41. An example of the uncoordinated elements of a web experience visual design copy/text information/content navigation layout/content presentation processes animations creative marketing business information architecture/ interaction design error messages outside resource music/sound help engineering product VP’s assistant Note: This is for illustration purposes only and not mean to be an exhaustive list of elements of a web experience encountered by users. interactions/system response
- 42. If emotion and meaning can emerge from the harmonizing of elements that make up a story, then to design for optimal experiences we need a story by which to harmonize the elements of a product, service or system.
- 43. From the point of view of design, the STORY can be used as frame that defines the product, service or system. visual design copy/text information/content navigation interactions/system response processes animations music/sound error messages help layout/content presentation Story frame
- 44. theme
- 46. Given his choice [of theme], the writer sharpens and clarifies his ideas, or finds out exactly what it is that he must say, testing his beliefs against reality as the story represents it, by examining every element in the story for its possible implications with regard to his theme.
- 47. theme focus design process define product and/or strategy
- 48. The Legacy of Agnes Nixon The Story of a Soap Reliving All My Children
- 49. Possible themes…
- 50. How Experience Themes Can Be Applied to Design
- 51. Case 2: Showtime Sports Redesign
- 53. Where the Fight Never Ends
- 55. Structure and User Paths
- 56. Content Presentation and Flash Interactions Sketching with theme in mind…
- 57. Chronological fight storyline…told in a sequence of videos.
- 58. How to Find a Theme
- 59. analysis creativity insights empathy theme
- 60. Case 3: MSG Insider Program
- 62. Everything must be from the point of view of our users… We’re not thinking about goals, tasks and process scenarios just yet, but the kinds of feelings that might arise out of a user’s experience as well as the attributes that contribute to those feelings. The rules:
- 68. analytical creative insights empathy Time to brainstorm themes… theme
- 70. Discuss, evaluate, combine, refine…
- 71. Keep in touch. Discover something new. Get it first. The best fit…
- 72. Package into an Experience Brief that also defines strategy…
- 73. Experience Brief: Part 1
- 74. Experience Brief: Part 2
- 76. So what’s the difference between a Story Theme and an Experience Theme?
- 77. Found through insight into raw material of design planning: business goals and requirements, content analysis, user research Found through insight into raw material of story planning Induces a longer-lasting effect on the user Induces a longer-lasting effect on the reader Produces pleasure in unity, emotion, meaning Produces pleasure in unity, emotion, meaning Manifest in product concept, strategy, content choices, layout, interactions, visual design Manifest in concept, conflict, character, setting, scene, sub-plots, story structure, climax Applied to overall design of product Applied to overall design of story elements Reflects users needs and desires Reflects author’s view of the world Decided upon by a team of stakeholders Decided upon by the vision and passions of single author Experience Themes Story Themes
- 79. Final Thoughts
- 81. thank you. [email_address] @cchastain Cindy Chastain
Editor's Notes
- This presentation will explore this area. It’s about how we can USE stories as a framework for design and as a vehicle for response. And it’s just one small part of that conversation. One element among many …
- If you had read my overly long presentation summary, you would have deduced that I have somehow convinced myself and my company that there was a missing component to our design process . Based on my own context and experience, I had come to the conclusion that, as designers and developers, we often fail to nail down a central vision about what it is we’re designing/making/building/creating.
- (Okay, so I figured I’d put in my obligatory Apple reference out of the way early on…) Some of you might not be failing in this respect. And if you are succeeding, you probably have names for it, like…
- At ixd09 Luke W spoke of the concept of Pa rti & The Design Sandwich. (elaborate)
- Adaptive Path recently published the excellent book, Subject to Change, which speaks of Experience Strategy. Jesse James Garret spoke of these same strategies in an excellent podcast in 2007. All of these things seem vaguely related, reaching for the same concept, the same goal, the same destination. In many ways, they’re all about this idea of
- But after thinking a great deal about Experience Strategy (which is related, but different) and considering the notion of The Design Sandwich (which I think is beautiful, but too abstract to apply easily) I’m still convinced that there’s a different AIM AND EFFECT in the application of an Experience Theme. I would argue that an Experience Theme is related to something much deeper than all of the above; it’s related our 35,000 year history and culture of storytelling.
- If you think about it, Storytelling is so pervasive and essential to our experience as humans that we have all internalized a sense of what a good story feels like, even if we’re not practiced or skillful in telling them ourselves. And that’s what I find interesting. That there’s something we instinctively respond to when something echoes the shape and structure of good storytelling. It could even be found in the rhythm and pacing of a friend’s dinner party. [explain]
- But, you say, we’re here to talk about the experience around technology products, the kinds with interfaces, and systems, and services. Yes. We are. But I’m hoping to make one small connection between what we do and what we can learn from storytelling. So that’s what this presentation is about. It’s about an attempt to broaden the conversation, to test one small idea amongst peers and to introduce a fresh way of thinking about how we might approach our work. It’s also a story of finding your own way of finding method in the madness.
- It may serve us well to first talk about what we’re not talking about. After all, theme is another one of those words like design, innovation used in so many ways that it’s practically lost all meaning. So, for the record…
- No. I’m thinking of themes as they are generally used in literature and film. Becaause that’s the place that we can really learn from. Traditionally, these kinds of themes are recognized as
- the subject-matter, topic or idea on which a work of art or literature is based. In literature, writers weave stories around themes which, in turn, offer readers an understanding or response to the story that is often much deeper and more memorable than details of plot.
- [anecdote about experience of theme after reading Revolutionary Road] But from the point of view of the storyteller, Robert McKee, the author of STORY and itinerate screenplay workshop guru, says this about theme…
- He goes on to say…
- So, from a storytelling point of view, themes help us MAKE CHOICES. By making choices related to theme, we pave the way toward unity and cohesiveness of form. But most important: when used well, themes give us ADDED DIMENSION TO THE EXPERIENCE OF STORY. As a reader or audience member, there is pleasure in perceiving a unified structure or form which gives rise to meaning and emotions. So themes have two sides…
- On one side, they are used by the storyteller to help him make decisions during the process of creating the story. And on the other, themes are perceived and/or interpreted by the reader in a way that deepens the emotional and cognitive response to the story
- My theory is that themes, used in the context of design, are not that different. For the design process, themes can…
- And ultimately get us one step closer to truly designing a product that reflects the needs and desires of users. But, as mentioned earlier, there are two sides to a theme, and like the way a truly strong theme works in a story, why couldn’t an experience theme, when manifest in a product…
- THAT, to me, is what differentiates an Experience Theme from, say, a Strategy. We have a long way to go before we can speak persuasively about how these things are really manifest in product stories, but I think it’s safe to assume that there’s a very strong correlation.
- But, if I were you, I might be a bit skeptical until I had more information. So…to better understand how I arrived at these concepts, still being explored, let me tell you…
- In this story, an Experience Theme, helped us define a product concept from the ground up, helped us narrow down requirements and inspired solutions to the design. I like telling the story about this one, because it’s where the idea of experience themes first emerged in our practice at work. It’s also one where I attempted to refine what I understood about user experience. All in all, it was an unusual situation for us, but was one that demanded a new approach.
- Our company had agreed to take a small project on to see if there was a potential partnership with a company who was developing a proprietary video player. This company had been hired by the primary client, who needed someone to build a website to support their video content. I know you’ll love this because the client was literally an 80-year old woman who knew absolutely nothing about the internet. The lady was Agnes Nixon, the very smart creator and long-time writer of the soap opera, All My Children . In the early years of the program, Ms. Nixon negotiated, as producer, the international rights to the show. Now years later, she wanted to create a site that would propel the Agnes Nixon brand and make these episodes available to her fans worldwide. She had a reputation for bringing cutting edge stories to a new medium (television) and she now wanted to carve out some space on the internet. Now the opportunity within this situation was that the client (Agnes Nixon and her family) didn’t have a specific idea of what they wanted beyond the statement that:
- Now how often does that happen? At our agency, we’re often in the position of facing media and technology-savvy clients like the BBC or The Independent Film Channel who have very specific ideas about what they want going into projects. Basically, this client needed a vision for the product. We were in the position of not only recommending what the site should do, but what the site should be. And for that we needed a concept.
- Well, we started where one would expect...
- We immersed ourselves in the domain, read about soap operas, watched episodes, and spoke to fans until we got to the point where we felt like we finally understood what this rather obsessive world of fandom was all about. (And, believe me, it was a lot more interesting than you’d think.) When it came time to define functional requirements, it simply wasn’t enough, I felt, to come to the conclusion that, based on business objectives and user needs, we should create a site that would include: a flexible portable that would do x, y and z, a really cool interactive timeline of Agnes Nixon’s life and a blog authored by Ms. Nixon herself. I kept thinking, that’s not a concept OR an experience. It’s nothing more than a library of content. It might be usable. It might be functional . BUT what IS IT? WHAT’s the site ABOUT? Why on earth would someone want to come here? And that’s when I started to think more deeply about how storytelling techniques might be relevant to what we were doing as user experience designers. You might think it’s a stretch to compare how stories provide experiences with how websites provide experiences, but in everything we experience we’re telling story to our selves based on the situations we find ourselves in and the things we interact with. [example]
- Does, Flickr have a story? I don’t think the creators sat down and thought of a story, but the clarity in their thinking naturally created a premise for one: We will help you share photos with your friends and family. The theme, in this case, would probably be Define Yourself with Photos That, in turn, might lead to a premise about the story that is Flickr: A playful, fun to use site helps people to easily manage their vast store of digital photos and share them with one another. It’s something you get instinctively when you first visit the site. The story that you then tell yourself is about your own experience with the site. But way too many sites, whether it’s a banking site, a shopping site, provide little beyond architecture. As if brand were enough, they slap a logo on the top of a site then provide “tools and features” to a do a bunch of things. As a storyteller, I couldn’t get away from my natural impulse was to ask what the Agnes Nixon site was about, and by about, I meant the core purpose of the site. Only after we could figure out what this was, what the nature of this service would mean, what would be most desirable to users, would we be able to decide what it should do. Only then, could we decide on the scenes, if you will, for user interaction. So trying to understand what this site was about, naturally led me back to storytelling. Figuring out what thing was about, is the core of what writer’s do. But before we could apply storytelling techniques to user experience, it was important to be clear about what we actually mean when we say user experience. And what better place to start ?
- This diagram beautifully, elegantly and brilliantly renders a view of the elements of user experience, but in today’s world it’s an incomplete picture. It visualizes, in Jesse’s own words, the considerations that go into creating user experiences, but it stops short of the EXPERIENCE of the Experience Design. (if you will) In Wednesday’s, beyond Findability workshop, Joe Lamantia talked about how our scope as designers will need to change along with the convergence of media & platforms.
- “ As experiences now span multiple media, channels & formats, we need to look to narrative, interaction, emotional elements to sustain transitions across channels and formats.” And I say that we need narrative and emotional elements to SUSTAIN interaction in a world of complex technology where websites, software and interactive multimedia have become part of the same beast…
- So shouldn’t the experience of the experience design be a consideration?
- In Russ Unger’s and Carolyn Chandler’s newly published book: A project guide to UX design, they say: [quote] That, to me, sounds closer to where we are today. In fact, I would say that Russ is describing the yin and yang of our practice…
- The tangible and the intangible. But on the intangible side, I would include not only the emotional connection, but pleasure and the meaning of the experience. In storytelling, the tangible and intangible are two sides of the same coin. On one side, there’s the tangible structure of story illustrated at it’s most basic through characters, setting and a structure of scenes; and on the other there’s the intangible emotion and meaning derived from story, experienced by the reader and/or audience. In User Experience the tangibles are expressed through: the content, pages, flows, visual design, to name a few. So maybe this is another way of looking at what we must consider when creating User Experiences , bu t it still feels incomplete. It lacks a certain level of detail to make it more meaningful or useful. Of course, this is not new stuff… We’ve all heard much about how the full range of considerations that go into creating user experiences now extend to this murky and mysterious area of emotion. But meaning, that’s a tricky one. We don’t necessarily make meaning for others, they make it for themselves. True, but people, in large part, make meaning from sensory cues that they encounter. I’m going to talk about meaning a bit more in the presentation, so by meaning, in this context of technology products, I mean primarily four things…
- So that maybe, Jesse James Garrett’s original diagram might look more like this in today’s world? I’m just sayin’… But still, apart from the bad graphic I overlaid on this beautiful diagram, it doesn’t feel right of the purposes of this presentation. The models aren’t the same.
- In Don Norman’s book, Emotional Design , he breaks down product experience from a cognitive scientist’s point of view by saying that our human brains have three interrelated ways of processing:
- And he goes on to describe the complex relationship between these three levels of processing. About how they constantly influence each other and almost always happen together. Meaning, the best experiences are made up of all three levels. He even goes on to prescribe approaches to design for each of these levels. But how can we translate these very powerful ideas into something that doesn’t require reading his book to fully understand? Something that gives us a new way of understanding the elements of user experience one might design for. So, for the purposes of this presentation, here’s an equation to think about:
- SO, this was the region, we were trying to understand how to design for so that a person arriving at the Agnes Nixon site would encounter not just a collection of easily browseable videos, but an experience that delighted and thrilled in its ability to tap into common pleasures shared by serious soap fans. So, how do we design for that? That was our big question. A lot has been said recently about how product designers can design for emotion. And as mentioned, Don Norman writes at length about how one might design for the visceral, behavior and even the reflective. But sadly, I had not yet read Don Norman’s book when we, at Interactive Partners, were trying to come up with solutions to this design problem. If I had, I might have had different answers, but I was going on instinct and that instinct was related to storytelling. From that perspective, it made sense:
- In fact they have processes and techniques---otherwise known as cr aft---to do just that. So what could we learn from their techniques? Think about this…
- [explain build of slide] What’s happening on the film side is that there’s a harmonizing of elements, which support the story in service of an optimal audience experience. As mentioned earlier, it’s partly from this working together of elements that the pleasure of an emotional/visceral response, and a higher-level meaning and understanding emerge. The same is true of great fiction, where all of the story elements, one could say, are also harmonized in service of an op timal reader experience. On the Website (or product) side, these elements are often created in a silo by very different roles. (explain)
- show diagram This is a function largely of business and the structures within which we work (most of which we little control over), but it’s also a function of DESIGN PROCESS . And as long as elements are designed independently, I say that we ARE NOT, as UX Designers, truly designing for optimal experience. This is only one piece to designing optimal experiences but I would argue that it’s a rather BIG piece. I also say there’s no reason we can’t do it. So, when we were trying to figure out how to approach this Agnes Nixon project, I started to think:
- You might even take it further and say:
- Any takers? (okay, let’s pretend you buy it up to this point) So if you AT LEAST buy the concept that a product story can be used as a frame for designing for an optimal experience . How do we begin to find that story?
- As a writer, one way I knew how to find what “a story was about" was to sift through all of the stuff that I’ve gathered, written, researched and search for a THEME.
- When I’m at the early stages of planning a script, sometimes I have nothing more than a germ of an idea, but not a complete story. I could start to string together a series of scenes or actions, but that’s still not a story. A well-told story must have structure and FOCUS, and much of the time that focus comes from designing story elements around theme:
- For Agnes Nixon, we had no more than germ of an idea. We didn’t even have a premise. So to my mind, we could not design this site until we had a story. If the STORY defines the product, the theme, I reasoned, would not only help us make decisions as to the WHAT and HOW of what we were designing, but it might also translate to a more valuable and meaningful experience that users could connect to. An experience theme, in this case, would work in two ways:
- It would help us define our product concept and strategy and then, in turn, help us focus the design process across various stakeholders. So that’s what we did. We found a theme. We set about synthesizing what we learned about users and soap fans in general, and developed three possible themes, one of which would form the basis of the product concept and our design strategy for the project. Our goal was to channel as much as possible about what we had leaned about the users to come up with an experience theme that would capture something that would be useful and desirable to her fans. It was NOT an exercise in TOP DOWN creative authority, but one of empathy and understanding about users. At least that’s what we hoped. So we started brainstorming. Our impulse was to throw out themes that also suggested concepts. We went though a long, mostly horrific list that ultimately led to three solid themes that stood out among the rest.
- Well, it wasn’t quite that dramatic. We broke it down more or less like this…
- As you can see, each theme, at a high level, suggests different kinds of functionality and features. (describe matrix and breakdown) So we brought these ideas to the client. When they saw them, an amazing thing happened They could suddenly articulate more clearly what it was they wanted to do. So we ended up combining two of the themes to create something that chimed more closely with their business goals as well as characterize an experience that would tap into the deepest desire of her fans. Which made sense for this client, because Agnes was, after all, a storyteller and suddenly we were speaking her language. And now we knew what we had a starting place for our design. In any case, this was an atypical project for us, but it got us started down the road toward further exploration of the uses of an experience theme.
- For this project, our Experience theme influenced everything from the functional requirements, to the site structure, user flows, content layout and details of rich interactions. So here’s the story: Showtime was known among Boxing and MMA fans as a host for some of the top-billed events, but in the online world, it was completely lost in the crowd. My company was tasked to create a brand-new site that would capture the attention of the sports’ fans and encourage conversation and community participation around events. To do this, we needed to design a means of following a fight that would be not only emotionally compelling but of great value to a fan. After talking to a variety of boxing and MMA fans, we sifted through the raw material of our research to locate patterns of emotion, desire and meaning amongst these fans of the sport. From this investigation, we concluded that boxing and MMA fans, from novice to hard-core followers, shared these things about the experience of a real world fight:
- With these core insights about the target users, an understanding of the available content and a list of business goals from our client, we found our theme:
- To us, this theme encapsulated and distilled the idea that the site could provide an online experience that seamlessly extended the kinds of real-world desires and engagement found among fans of the sport. Not only could the fight li ve on in the context of the site, but fans would be able to engage, follow and learn about the full fight story from the site. The notion that a fight never ends was as much about this seamless engagement from real world to online world as well as the idea that the site would archive the full story of a fight for which users could return. The important thing was that it captured an idea that signified what we were aiming for in terms of user experience, an experience that would not only be functional, beautiful and easy to use, but one that would give rise to an emotion and understanding that would bring pleasure to fans using the site. Here are three examples of how it was used:
- We started by analyzing the task and features against frequency, importance and relevance to the theme. Anything that was deemed irrelevant to the theme was thrown out. We then took a second look at the available content to see if what Showtime was currently producing, fulfilled the aims of the theme. From this we identified where there were gaps and came up with content ideas for Showtime to pursue.
- Once we’d identified the phases of engagement with the fight, we mapped all of the content in a model that illustrated the multiple pathways a user would have for engaging with information about fighters, stats, moves and past fights In this way, the structure and distribution of the content mirrored the theme as well.
- When it came time to create sketches for wireframes, we heavily leveraged the theme when ideating concepts for the fight or event page that would be the main locus of conversation and activity on the site.
- I truly believe that we would not have come to the same solutions without the experience theme as our guide. In these ways, I would say that we were successfully able to use the experience theme as a framework for coming up with specific concepts and solutions to the site.
- So how does one find a theme? More than once have I referred to the process in a way that makes it seem so easy that it should practically leap off the thick pages of your project notebook, but I have so far failed to give you a method to work from. But as a disclaimer, I have to say that this is a process we’re still exploring. And it’s not easy. In fact, I find the process of finding, then defining an experience theme to be one of the most difficult parts of the process. Now that I think of it, it’s same for storytelling…
- Finding a theme is simultaneously an act of analysis and creativity. But unlike most story themes it’s not something we impose, by design or vision or some other form of inspiration; it’s something we extract from our insights. Ideally, it will emerge from the raw material of your assembled goals, research and analysis. But most important, it will emerge from our EMPATHY with users. And from this, we find theme. Now…I’m getting a feeling that this is also the point in the presentation where I can address one of perhaps many silent questions. In other words, I bet some of you are wondering about how this technique can apply to applications and websites that aren’t so , w ell, flashy. Wh at if I’m designing a corporate intranet? Ca n this be applied to e-commerce? S o cial Media? Me thinks, YES. Which is why I leave you with this last case as well as some guidelines about how a team can generate a theme:
- This is a about project I’m currently working on. It’s a live event alerts program not unlike what TicketMaster or LiveNation offers. You sign up for alerts, choose your opt-ins, and, presumably, get out a n d never return. Our long-term client, a media and entertainment conglomerate, asked us to re-design their membership alerts application for their network of venues. In its current form, it’s no more than a registration form and user profile. When we started this project, I had the same question as some of you might have: Do we really need an experience theme for this thing? Does it really APPLY to this kind of project? This is a pretty small piece and after all it’s just a sign up, choose your opt-ins kind of thing. For this past year, I had been qualifying the experience theme idea by saying not perhaps every project warranted one. But now that we decided to go through the exercise, I can’t imagine not having one. To my mind, this is the clearest example to date of how an experience theme can transform our approach to design. For this project, it gave us a whole new way of thinking about what this alerts program might become.
- Our process for finding a theme in this case was relatively simple. We did not have the time or the budget to go through a full process of modeling users, by creating scenarios or mental models, but we did have the time to talk to users and to examine research previous done by the client’s marketing people. So with our document of business goals and requirements, and limited, but useful, amount of qualitative research in front of us we sat down and started to gather a list of Experience Attributes. [explain] And for this brainstorm there was only one requirement:
- Based on what we’ve heard in conversations and read in reports, let’s do our best to bring to imagine the users that we’ve spoken to, actually interacting with the program. What kind of experience would be most useful, attractive and meaningful to these users. What kinds of patterns did we find in our conversation. Which is harder than you’d think. Well, of course, you must be thinking. In fact, it all must seem rather unscientific starting out like this. But we felt that it was important to focus on the core aspects of experience, that rather intangible side, before we examined specific goals and tasks. In fact, it was stated explicitly that…[show quote]
- So we came up with this list. So we threw a bunch of words and phrases onto the whiteboard. And like any brainstorm, there was no analysis, just a pure act of EMPATHY for what we understood to be true about the targeted users for this kind of service. Then, after exhausting our list, we analyzed it…
- In doing so, we realized that some of the items on our list were not really attributes of the user’s experience, but of the application/system or service. And others were indeed about what the experience of joining this alerts program, such as it was, might cause users to think and feel.
- So we re-arranged these and created two lists. You’ll notice that the first list is for the intangible side of the user experience, which we called cognitive/emotional experience. The other was for the tangible application/service side of the experience, which we called application/service experience. We then, put the list of application/service attributes aside and focused completely on the cognitive/emotional user experience. [LOSE LIST] Looking at our list, what we had was still not adequate for describing the qualities of the experience we might deliver. So, we narrowed down the list, eliminating duplicate concepts, and focused on rephrasing these items to more clearly convey a cognitive/emotional response.
- So, we narrowed down the list, eliminating duplicate concepts, and focused on rephrasing these items to more clearly convey a cognitive/emotional response. For example: Then, we divided this list into primary and secondary experiences. Which gave us something like this:
- So, we narrowed down the list, eliminating duplicate concepts, and focused on rephrasing these items to more clearly convey a cognitive/emotional response. For example: Then, we divided this list into primary and secondary experiences. Which gave us something like this: After this, we had a SECOND brainstorm session, and this was about the experience theme.
- Now, with our experience attributes distilled, we went through an exercise where we brainstormed ideas for core themes. Some people might think that list is good enough. GREAT let’s go design for that. But like a good story, too many ideas, too many goals will weaken the overall impact. We needed to find a theme that would encapsulate the application for a service that we were trying to build. What was it about this service that we would focus on and design around? So we came up with a list of ideas. As you’ve seen, they tend to be phrases, rather than values like “sharing” because we think a phrase is something that captures more, but is still small enough to carry around. So we came up with things like.
- Here are a few examples of a large list of ideas that were tossed out. (Yes, I should not quit my day job.) On the other hand…
- So after discussing an evaluating our options, we decided that this best captured what the users seem to want as well as fulfilling the business goals of our client. So what do we do with this mysterious theme when it comes to the client? As mentioned earlier, one of the values of a theme is that it can generate a shared vision of the project. Another value of a theme is that it can help define strategy. I had mentioned earlier that I felt that a theme was different from the experience strategy as defined by adaptive path. My feeling is that an experience theme is the place to start. It’s where we can begin to define what that strategy might be. So we took this theme to the client in the form of an Experience Brief.
- [explain] This is an example of what the first part of the brief looked like…
- The second part described a strategy for the overall approach to the application. [explain] So that’s where we’ve evolved with this thing. So what did we learn?
- And so…
- BONUS slide. Was not used in preso.
- BONUS SLIDE! Not used in actual presentation. Based on the evolution of this concept through work I’ve been doing over the past year, I would now characterize an experience theme like this:
- Definition of Experience Theme.
- And so…