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Rosenfeld Virtual UX Conference, Laurel
- 1. Five Dramatic UX Tips Brenda Laurel, PhD Adjunct Professor, Computer Science Affiliated Faculty, Games & Playable Media, Digital Arts & New Media University of California, Santa Cruz www.tauzero.com blaurel@tauzero.com blaurel@soe.ucsc.edu with illustrations by Verna Bhargava from Computers as Theatre, 2nd Edition
- 2. Consistent representations of action are superior to interface metaphors.
- 10. Focus on designing the action— the design of objects, environments and characters must all serve this grand strategic goal.
- 11. GRAND STRATEGY STRATEGY STRATEGYSTRATEGY action: to present five serious UI “tips” in a light-hearted way character environment object (content) friendly face TACTIC TACTICTACTIC TACTIC TACTICTACTIC TACTIC TACTIC TACTIC clear speech gentle colors smooth transitions Comic Sans logical progression readable images dense bulleted lists
- 12. UX is experience. Design choices that set up the probability for dramatic action.
- 17. Human-centered design research informs your intuition.
- 18. Design Research appropriates some methods from Market Research… demographics great big data focus groups surveys home visits observations interviews
- 19. …but uses them for a different purpose. who will buy it? how can we sell it? what should we design?
- 20. some people have an allergy to design research. “Ack! I have to give up my creativity and obey my research!” The hula hoop is a lesson in informed creativity.
- 21. Hang your values at the door. You will revisit them later.
- 22. Meet people where they are.
- 23. Your “ideal” player, reader, user does not exist. To touch people you must meet them where they are. To change people you must gain their confidence by showing respect.
- 24. Your values come back into play when you have analyzed your data and are ready to synthesize it with your design creativity.
- 25. You can change lives by meeting people where they are.
Editor's Notes
- An “interface” is itself a metaphor for that ethereal boundary between human and computer.
- Standard view: the interface is between me and it. Both of us communicate through it.
- But to communicate effectively, I have to have a mental model of it and it needs a mental model of me.
- Then again, I must have a model of its model of me, and so on. This is the horrible recursion version of an interface.
- In conversation, we have the notion of common ground. In interpersonal psychology, the client and therapist are parts of a field that contains both of them, and the “patient” can be seen as the relationship.
- In the theatre, also, there is a relationship between audience and players on the stage. The composer Wagner called this “interface” “the mystic gulf”.
- In the late 60s and 70s interactive theatre became popular, where audiences and actors intermingled (e.g., Hair, Dionysus in 69, Café La Mama). Interactive theatre is alive again in forms like “Sleep No More.” In interactive theatre, the audience assumes a role in the action.
- To them, and to us when we are immersed in human-computer interaction, the representation of the action is all there is. Each agent, whether human or computer-generated, is capable of making decisions and taking action, and they influence one another. This model gets rid of the notion of the “interface” entirely and puts the focus where it should be – on the unfolding action.(say this a couple of different ways – give audience a chance to let it sink in)
- Many designers make the mistake of starting with environments or objects in their design process. A more coherent model begins with the design of the action. As with a play, the characters (or agents), environments, and objects are all derived from the action being represented. This relationship can be visualized using the model of strategy and tactics.
- The basic structure looks like a tree with branches, beginning with the design of the central action. I’m using the design of this talk as an example.(make red lines thicker)
- Continuing with the idea of dramatic action, it follows that the sorts of choices and actions humans can take will lead them on a journey that has a pleasing dramatic shape.
- In the Poetics, Aristotle described the pleasurable shape of dramatic action. Later, Gustav Freytag diagrammed this shape as a function of complication and resolution over time. Complication may take the form of questions, unfolding desires, or efforts to take action for a purpose. Emotions rise during complication and ease during resolution, when the answers or goals have (or have not) been reached. The captions shows the anatomy of a pleasing dramatic action in all its parts. These terms are not as important as the canonical shape.
- So for example, this action is not producing pleasure. Someone has tried and tried with mighty efforts then given up.
- This fellow is having no fun either. He takes steps toward his goal in a methodical way. Then, something blows up or he reaches an insurmountable problem. Perhaps the learning curve has risen sharply. He messes around with it a little, quite agitated, then gives up and dribbles off into self-pity.
- These all look like more or less pleasuable actions. They vary because the human agents can make various choices, but they keep their dramatic shape because the designer has constrained those choices in ways that feel helpful rather than limiting.
- Nobody has time or budget for design research, it seems. But user testing is not the same as design research, and it’s not enough to get you a great product with a great UI. My students almost universally make the initial mistake of designing for themselves. Companies will often create “personas” – little characters to serve as potential users, but these are usually drawn from an image of what a good user should be or a set of stereotypes. They never make a mistake or hit a bump in the road; they exist to show how clever the designer has been. Personas are only useful if they are based on real people, and that takes design research. And you can do great design research without personas at all. Let’s look at some methods.
- Observational reseasrch, interviews, and a lot of other methods are probably familiar to you from Market Research. Designers employ them similarly, but for a different purpose.
- Traditiionally, market research happens later in the game – when you have a product or service with a UX strategy already cooked up. The marketiing folks are there to find out who will buy it. Once that is learned, then the question becomes how best to sell it. But design research is for the purpose of understanding what should be designed in the first place. You may indeed have a product idea and an interface in mind, but you need to know as much as you can about who is going to use it, and finding that out will inevitably change some of your ideas. Is your user under stress? What is his or her environment like? What other products and services are part of their lives? How do they feel about themselves and their technology skills? What are their actual needs? What gives them delight?
- Students and even professionals often misinterpret what design research is. They are apt to say, “you mean I have to ask the customer what to make?” They feel that their creativity is at stake. But here is the important lesson: design research doesn’t literally tell you what to make; it informs your intuition and inspires creativity in the right direction. Consider the Hula Hoop. When Whammo Toys invented it in 1957, you can bet it was not because some kid at an interview told them they would like a plastic hoop to rotate around their hips. But Whammo observed rhythmic play patterns like jump-rope and clapping games, and they probably noticed the moves in some of the dance styles of the day. Their creativity was informed by this research.
- A pitfall to avoid in research is letting your preconceived ideas or your values bias your findings. You literally have to hang them at the door if you’re going to get good data. For example, I didn’t have a clue about how to design the player experience in some games I designed for little girls. But my design research showed me that these girls need emotional rehearsal space for the choices that come up in their lives. That led to a strategy of what we called “emotional navigation” for the interaction strategy. Likewise, we all wanted to believe that little girls were wonderful, wise and innocent, but if we hadn’t probed their social behaviors we would not have presented them with something realistic or respectful enough to engage them.
- There is no ideal user. There are a bunch of different people who have enough in common that you can design for them. To meet them where they are – at their messy desk with the cat on the keyboard, or in a state of agitated math anxiety, or taking half-hearted swipes at managing their finances – is to show them respect. They are not ideal users. They are YOUR users, if you treat them right. And if you meet them where they are, you can bring them along to a happier place through your design of their experience.
- And this is where your values come back into the picture – when you know your people and you begin to see how you can bring them along to some new ways of thinking, doing, being. That’s the essence of your creative process.
- When I was designing games for little girls in the late 1990s, most were afraid they’d break a computer, and few thought that technology had anything to offer them. How times have changed! Both incrementally and dramatically, we have met them where they are and taken them along into good relationships with technology. Informed by design research, we can not only create great user experiences – we can also help people grow and change in positive ways. That’s pretty cool.