CAPTivate (SXSW 2014)
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A framework for designing for engagement. Presented at SXSW 2014.
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CAPTivate (SXSW 2014)
- 1. Time: The Invisible Design Medium Boaz Gurdin User Experience Researcher, EchoUser boaz.gurdin@echouser.com Twitter: @boazgurdin #TimeDesignSXSW 2014 © 2014 Boaz Gurdin
- 2. “The way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives.” — Annie Dillard via Jonathan Harris
- 3. A brief history of technology…
- 15. “There is an ancient pact between tools and their users which says that tools should be used by their users, and not the other way around. Good tools should help their users accomplish a task by satisfying some pre- existing urge and then getting out of the way. Attention economies, at their most addictive, violate this pact.” — Jonathan Harris
- 16. A brief history of technology…
- 17. A brief history of technology… A briefer history of interaction design…
- 18. A B C Scenario
- 19. A B C Scenario
- 22. Product Development Phase Optimization Phase
- 23. User goals Business goals Before After = engagement
- 24. How we can get better at timing when our products and services interact with users? What kind of time design framework could help us translate user-centered design insights into opportunities for repeated engagement?
- 25. Product Development Phase Optimization Phase ???
- 26. A C T P CAPTivate Framework Product Development Phase Optimization Phase
- 27. A C T P The CAPTivate Framework Barriers Triggers Plans ContextsActivities
- 28. A is for Activities
- 29. Activities
- 30. A C T P The CAPTivate Framework Barriers Triggers Plans ContextsActivities
- 31. C is for Contexts
- 33. Home AM AM Bus Commute Office PM Bus Commute Restaurant 9am 9pm Team meeting Dinner with friend
- 34. Contexts
- 36. Contexts
- 37. A C T P The CAPTivate Framework Barriers Triggers Plans ContextsActivities
- 38. Barriers Lack of Motivation Lack of Ability
- 39. Barriers
- 40. Barriers Lack of Motivation Lack of Ability Problems Core strength not a priority Don’t know good ab exercises Abs @ Office Solutions Pinspiration Virtual coach No workout equipment at the office Workout mat at the office
- 41. A C T P The CAPTivate Framework Barriers Triggers Plans ContextsActivities
- 42. T is for Triggers
- 44. Triggers Abs @ Office Entry Exit Motivation from workout leader Motivation from workout music Facebook More abs Keep working Bored or stressed at work Lunch break More abs Feel the burn
- 45. A C T P The CAPTivate Framework Barriers Triggers Plans ContextsActivities
- 46. P is for Plans
- 47. A C T P The CAPTivate Framework Barriers Triggers Plans ContextsActivities
- 48. Plans Abs @ Gym
- 49. The CAPTivate Framework A C T P Barriers Triggers Plans ContextsActivities
- 50. A C T P CAPTivate Framework Product Development Phase Optimization Phase
- 51. User goals Business goals Before After = engagement
- 52. Time: The Invisible Design Medium Boaz Gurdin User Experience Researcher, EchoUser boaz.gurdin@echouser.com Twitter: @boazgurdin #TimeDesignSXSW 2014 Thank You.
Editor's Notes
- Welcome and thank you all for joining in this conversation about designing time. My name is Boaz and I'm a user experience researcher at EchoUser, a design agency in San Francisco. I'm curious about the perspectives that you all are coming from. Show of hands: how many of you in some capacity practice: - Interaction design? - Visual design or artists? - Product management? - Social media or marketing? - Blogging or journalism? - Anything else I missed? Great, we have a nice assortment of time designers in the room. Sketches by Ameila Altavena
- There's a quote attributed to Annie Dillard that's stuck with me: "The way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives.” I was always motivated to work in technology because I wanted to impact people's lives. To do that, we need to design the way they spend their days. We need to design time. I'd like to use this hour as a time for us to reflect on how the technology we create affects how our users spend their time, and thus how we affect the way our users spend their lives.
- But first, a brief history of technology. I want to take you back in time, back to a day when technology was invented to save people time.
- The washing machine was a revolutionary timesaver when it became popular in the early 1900s. Before washing machines, home-makers and hired help spent full days on laundry. Laundry day was a big deal. Today we can throw our clothes in the laundry machine, and spend our time on leisure and work activities while our technology does the hard work. http://www.prof.chicanas.com/98/?page_id=1210
- Fast forward to the 1950s when television, the first engagement-oriented screen, penetrated American homes. For those of you who have read Bowling Alone, you know what happened next. Television replaced community organizations as Americans' choice evening activity.
- Fast forward another thirty years to the 1980s and 1990s when computers and the Internet appeared on every desk. Information technology was supposed to be the laundry machine of information work, a time-saver freeing workers from the tedium of manual spreadsheet calculations and typewriter re-writes.
- It succeeded, but it also created new demands on people's time, and became a source of stress in people's lives. Soon email overload became commonplace. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/aug/28/email.addiction
- Then mobile came around, with the ability to work anywhere anytime, and with that, a growing responsibility to work anywhere at any time. We began to see people addicted to their Blackberries, working on nights and weekends, interrupting their family time. http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/07/12/parents_on_phones_in_support_of_ignoring_your_kids_to_text_and_email.html
- That brings us to today, an era dominated by technology products and services like Facebook that are optimized for engagement and growth, often driven by an advertising-based business model that incentivizes getting attention at all costs. Growth-oriented services like Facebook train people to interrupt themselves to engage with the product anywhere at any time, whether they're at work, with friends and family, or pausing for a free moment of personal time.
- How many of you are among the 40 million people who have seen this video? Clearly there's a growing problem of digital addiction. As with any addiction, there's an element of personal responsibility. This guy could clearly use a boost of self-discipline to be more present with his friends and family. Not to worry: there's help…
- He could start by joining the Phone Faced Down movement, temporarily unplugging himself from technology to engage with the world around him. http://undigitize.me/phone-faced-down/
- If he still can't resist the temptation of digital interruptions he could take the next step and enroll in a longer-term digital addiction recovery program. There's Camp Grounded, where you can spend a weekend in the woods at a hipster sleep-away camp, where the rules are: no technology, no talking about work, and no real names.
- There's the National Day of Unplugging. This just happened this past weekend. I'm guessing that by being at SXSW it's unlikely that you spent 24 hours this weekend removing yourself from technology.
- Lastly, there's innovation in wearables to help us get through our digital addiction cravings. This is the Coca Cola Social Media Guard that prevents the user from looking down at their phone. These extreme reactions show that people are recognizing that technology is affecting how they spend their time, and that it's not always healthy or in line with their personal and professional goals. Interruptions promoted by engagement-oriented services are interrupting moments of emotional presence with friends and family, and interrupting moments of cognitive flow at work. Our users have a responsibility to be more self-disciplined, to be more present with friends and family, and at work. But as purveyors of digital addictions we share the responsibility to help them focus on things that matter to them.
- Another quote that I pulled from the same set of essays by Jonathan Harris. http://farmerandfarmer.org/medicine/healers.html
- That concludes our a brief history of how technology went from saving people time, to technology that maximizes engagement that takes people's time. That's a well-worn story that we all know.
- What's less known is the behind-the-scenes story, the making-of story behind interruptions and digital addictions. How did we, a community of people who take pride in designing delightful interactive experiences for our users, become agents of interrupting our users and mismanaging their time? In short, by narrowly framing scenarios as one-time events, from start to finish, and forgetting that users repeat these scenarios over and over.
- Interaction design started with a simple concept: the scenario. Scenarios were a great innovation. Instead of designing features with only the system in mind, scenarios forced us to start thinking about a user, and the steps the user had to take to complete a task. Scenarios made work visible, and exposed inefficiencies that we could improve upon to save the user time.
- Scenarios and their related representations such as user flows, use cases, and agile user stories, are still cornerstones of how we design today.
- Then came the journey map. Whereas scenarios let us design interaction moment-to-moment, screen-by-screen, journey maps zoom out to a larger time scale. Journey maps, and their equivalents such as agile epics, make visible how users interact with our services over the lifecycle of a transaction. In one of the first journey maps, the EuroRail traveler's journey, the journey included researching travel, purchasing tickets, getting to the train station, and remembering vacation memories. Journey maps draw attention to difficult or unpleasant steps in the journey, and identify those missing links where the service provider can provide better products and services.
- Scenarios are great for designing time at a micro scale, and journey maps are great for designing time at a macro scale, but both are incomplete representations of how our services interact with users over time design because they only show a single path from start to finish. Even journey maps that look at multiple use cases just imagine a single lifecycle, not repeated engagement. As interaction designers we don't have a representation to design repeated engagement, and thus we've left the design of engagement features to marketers and growth hackers who are focused entirely on business goals without regard to user goals.
- Many engineering teams develop features using a disjoint two-phase process: a product development phase, where they build new features, informed by user-centered design, using tools such as personas, journey maps, and scenarios and then an engagement optimization phase, informed by analytics, that mostly ignores user goals This is the process happening behind-the-scenes that creates technology that mismanages people's time, because engagement tactics aren’t timed with users goals in mind. (optional) You might consider it to be hopelessly idealistic to imagine that engagement-oriented services would respect the user’s time and goals outside of their service. Of course growth-oriented companies bombard users with interruptions - it's a business imperative. Companies like Facebook will never reduce notifications or train their users to stop checking Facebook because it would negatively impact their advertising-funded bottom line. To this I'd like to suggest that: #1: there's an ethical case to be made for respecting users' time and attention -- we can talk more about that in Q&A -- and #2: a design framework for timing repeated interactions can be used to further both user goals and business goals.
- Here's one way to imagine the result of optimization that is blind to user-centered design: Today, we take a scenario, like viewing photos on a photo-sharing service, and we do whatever we can to get the user to repeatedly engage as much as possible, regardless of what else they are doing in their life. We can see it in this engagement signature that doesn’t vary as the user goes about various activities during their day. If we master time design, we can time our interactions with the user to fit with other activities in their life, and also discover new opportunities to engage with them. Minimizing interruptions supports the user's goals, and discovering new opportunities to engage supports the business goals. We need a user centered way to design how people engage with our service over repeated engagements over time. Any questions so far?
- To recap: to master time design, we need a design framework that lets us design users' time to optimize for both user goals and business goals.
- What I want to present next is a framework that I've been developing to bridge the gap in our process, bringing principles of user-centered design to engagement, and principles of engagement to user-centered design.
- I call it the CAPTivate Framework, as it draws attention to four key aspects of time design: contexts, activities, plans, and triggers. This is the first time I'm presenting this framework, outside of my office, so I'm looking forward to hearing your questions and comments about how it fits or doesn't fit with the way you work. To work through this framework, let's imagine that we work at a fitness-oriented company like FitBit. Our goal is to increase the frequency that our users engage in physical activity. How do we find the best times to plug into people's lives to get them to exercise?
- Let's take a closer look…
- First we'll start by listing all the possible activities that we might want the user to engage in.
- For our fitness company, we might want to include domain-specific activities like: Walking Running and also product-specific activities like: Refer-a-friend This is the first step in exploring scenarios that we want to optimize for more frequent repeated engagement. Notice how we're already more user-centered than the typical engagement optimization process. In a typical optimization phase, we would start by slicing and dicing our analytics data instead of thinking about activities from the user's point-of-view. We would only see product-specific metrics like steps taken -- our metrics would most likely not distinguish between domain-specific activities like walking vs running, which we might design for in different ways. We start by listing all the possible activities that the user might want to spend their time doing. You could imagine doing this by yourself, or in a facilitated group brainstorming session, where each participant contributes ideas using sticky notes on a wall. To discover new opportunities for engagement, we want to push ourselves to explore new activities that might engage the user. In our fitness example, let's add an abs workout as a possible activity. Next, following the diamond pattern of design thinking, we'll switch from divergent thinking to convergent thinking. Using our favorite design facilitation techniques like dot-voting, and also considering user impact and business impact, we'll choose one of these activities as our target for increased engagement. In this example, let's choose abs.
- Now let's move onto Contexts, the contexts where our users might do ab exercises.
- The secret of time design is that you can't really design for time, but you can approximate it pretty well by designing for context.
- In an ideal world, we would be able to take our target activity, abs, and map it to specific times: Monday at 7:36am, Tuesday at 11:36am, Saturday at 3:34pm. Obviously this isn't practical; life is too uncertain.
- But let's start with the ideal. Imagine the user's time as a calendar or timeline. Imagine that this is our canvas. We want to understand want it looks like today, and redesign it into a masterful composition in the future. What does it look like? We see our user spending some time in the morning at home, doing some activities in her morning routine, commuting to work, doing some activities at the office, and making his way to some evening activities, such as dinner with a friend. A traditional calendar would let us represent hour-long meetings at the office, or dinner with a friend, but we don't have a good way of representing how unpredictable interruptions like Facebook and text messages are significant parts of how users spend their time. So many of the activities that we want to engage our users in -- things like ab workouts, checking Facebook, or taking a photo -- are short bursts of activity at unpredictable times that we can't represent on a calendar. So much for our masterful composition on the canvas of our users' lives. Or is it? What we see here is that we can't predict exactly when every activity will happen, but it's not entirely random either. There are some activities like eating breakfast and getting dressed that are more likely to happen at home in the morning; there are some activities like meetings with co-workers that are more likely to happen at the office; and there are some activities like having a conversation with a friend that are more likely to happen over dinner at a restaurant than at the office. These are what I call contexts: the environment that includes nearby people, objects, and spaces, that make some activities easier and more likely, and other activities harder and less likely to occur at that time and place. The nice thing about focusing on contexts, is that we can design them. We can design technology for the home and office, and mobile technology at hand during commutes. By adding technology into these environments, we can make activities more or less likely to occur during the time that users spend in these contexts.
- So let's get back to our example of how we apply the CAPTivate Framework to increase engagement with a fitness app. We chose abs as our target activity, and now it's time to brainstorm contexts when the user might engage in that activity. Again we start by capturing the knowledge on our team about what we know users do today. We know some users do ab workouts at home, and some do ab workouts at a gym. Again we push ourselves to imagine new possibilities for engagement. Perhaps somebody in the brainstorming session suggests doing an ab workout at the office.
- As silly as this sounds, office abs is actually a thing. At my office, pre-lunch YouTube clip viewing was recently replaced by a pre-lunch ab workout, led by the multi-talented designer who drew the sketches in this presentation. I also found a startup here at SXSW who's business is an iPad app for office abs. So watch out, our example app has competition.
- Back to our brainstorming session. After our divergent brainstorming, we converge on a target context where we want to increase engagement. In this case, let's suppose that after considering user goals and business goals, we conclude that abs at the office is the next big thing. We now have a target for engagement.
- Now that we have a context and an activity, a target for engagement, we can move on to implementation. What can we do to increase the frequency that users engage their abs in the office? That takes us to the bottom half of the CAPTivate Framework. Plans and Triggers cause people to engage with an activity within a context. Their effect is mediated by the Barriers to performing the activity within the context.
- Let's start with barriers. What is preventing the user from performing the activity in the context at the desired frequency? Why don't we all have super-strong cores from office ab workouts? It usually comes down to two types of barriers: Lack of motivation Lack of ability
- If these barriers sound familiar to you, it's because they're taken from the work of Professor BJ Fogg at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab. The title of the CAPTivate Framework is a hat-tip to his definition of captology: the study of computers as persuasive technologies. In the Fogg Behavioral Model B, the likelihood of a behavior to occur, is a function of M, the user's motivation, A, the user's ability, and T, the strength of the trigger To get a user to do a behavior at a given moment in time, they need a trigger, but the trigger only works if the user has enough motivation and enough ability.
- So let's get back to our CAPTivate Framework. We want to identify any barriers that are preventing our users from doing the activity as frequently as we would like them to in the context. Then we can brainstorm ways to overcome those barriers. In our example, a strong core might not be the user's top priority, indicating a lack of motivation. Alternatively, there could be indicators of lack of ability: they might not know good ab exercises, or they might not have proper workout clothes and equipment at the office. In the solutions column, we can start brainstorming ways to overcome these barriers. Perhaps we'll provide some Pinspiration that motivates the user to value core strength. Or we could provide a virtual coach to teach them ab exercises. We could introduce some workout mats into the office context to make the ab activity easier and more comfortable in that context, increasing ability. Identifying these barriers and solutions requires qualitative insights from user research. By not including these user-centered design approaches in our current engagement optimization process, we're missing out on opportunities to engage the user in a way that furthers the user's goals and our business's goals.
- Now that we've identified an engagement target and removed barriers to engagement, we're ready for the bottom half of the CAPTivate Framework, the plans and triggers that switch users from one activity to another, and from one context to another.
- In a target context, such as an office, the user could do all sorts of activities. Some of those activities are interactions with our service, and some of those activities are interactions with others who compete with us for the user's time. How do we get people to switch from one activity to another? People switch activities in response to triggers.
- When my office started the pre-lunch ab workout, the trigger was the leader going around and rounding people up. Soon after, one of the devotees set up a calendar reminder to notify her every weekday at 11:30am to round people up for abs. One could imagine more subtle triggers, such as playing a workout mix. For those of you who are familiar with Nir Eyal's work on Triggers and Hooks, you know that we could also think about internal emotional triggers, such as being bored or stressed by work. We could hook onto those triggers by training people to respond by doing some crunches instead of checking Facebook.
- We can also think about triggers that get people to switch away from our activity, and think about how to overcome them. Midway through the ab workout, feeling the burn or feeling tired are internal emotional triggers that might trigger people to switch to a different activity. The music and the encouragement from the workout leader mitigate this trigger. On a more serious note outside of our toy example, most productivity apps do not design for exit triggers, such as boredom and stress, that drive people to interrupt their work and spend time on Facebook or their digital addiction of choice. By working through the CAPTivate Framework, and especially focusing on exit triggers, productivity apps could become more engaging and competitive with digital addictions like Facebook.
- (nothing to say here, just reorienting)
- Finally we arrive at the last component of the CAPTivate Framework: Plans. During my three and a half years working as a PM on Hotmail Calendar, I spent a lot of time thinking about how people plan events, and I think that's one of the main components that's missing from BJ Fogg's Behavioral Model.
- If we want to switch users from one activity to another within a context, we use a trigger. Want to get someone to switch from working to doing a quick office abs workout? A co-worker in their face rounding them up is a powerful trigger. But what if we want to get them to the gym in the evening, because we know that their ability to do exercise is greatly increased in that context? That can't always be as spontaneous as a trigger. They might want to coordinate with a personal trainer to meet them at the gym. Or they might have made conflicting plans to go to dinner with a friend. The crucial moment that most strongly influences whether the user will end up at a gym or at a restaurant is the conversation the user had with their friend, making plans for the evening. Just as triggers get users to switch activities, plans get users to switch contexts. If we have a stake in where the user spends their evening - and as a gym-oriented app, a restaurant-oriented app, or a movie-oriented app those stakes are high - then we want to influence the user to come to our context. As a fitness-oriented app, we win or lose that evening in that conversation when the user plans their evening. Because no matter how good we are at getting them to do abs at the office, the chances of us convincing them to do abs at a restaurant are pretty low.
- For this final exercise in the CAPTivate Framework, we do one more brainstorming exercise. We brainstorm all the possible moments that users make plans to go to our context or a competing context. Then we brainstorm possible design interventions to persuade them to make plans to go to our context. For example, one possible planning context is having an IM chat with a friend. One of the activities in that IM chat context is an activity of planning to get together in person. We might identify this as the moment that we want to win, persuading the user to avoid making dinner plans and instead go to the gym. Or better yet, to invite the friend to the gym.
- So that's it. We've worked through Contexts, Activities, Plans, and Triggers to identify identify ideal moments for engagement and to brainstorm design interventions that might persuade the user to engage at those moments.
- We've bridged the gap from user-centered design to engagement, and we're ready to proceed with the optimization phase. We can continue with our standard product development process, using A/B testing to see if our user-centered designs measurably increase engagement.
- If all goes well, we will have successfully redesigned how the user spends their time -- well at least the slice of their life in which they engage in activities related to our service. We will have: 1. Increased "good engagement" by translating user-centered insights into engagement that aligns with both user goals and business goals 2. Decreased "bad engagement" by minimizing poorly timed engagement that interrupts people from personal and professional activities that matter to them (example for Q&A: target Facebook engagement for commute context and break context, and target decrease in Facebook engagement in office and social contexts) By designing those moments of repeated engagement, we can nudge users to spend more time on the people and activities that matter most to them, while also discovering new opportunities for users to engage with with our products and services.
- My hope is that with the CAPTivate Framework, we will be a step closer to mastering time: the invisible design medium. Special thanks to: - Renato Verdugo for pushing me to create a design framework and provided a lot of feedback along the way - Amelia Altavena for the sketches, the feedback on barriers, and leading the EchoUser pre-lunch ab workout sessions - Jyoti Uppuluri for being a supportive partner and helping me think through the presentation - Everyone else at EchoUser for supporting this endeavor