Tag: behavior

Design without touching the surface

I am preparing two classes at the moment. One is an introduction to user experience design, the other to user interface design. I did not come up with this division, it was part of the assignment. I thought it was odd at first. I wasn’t sure where one discipline ends and the other begins. I still am not sure. But I made a pragmatic decision to have the UX class focus on the high level process of designing (software) products, and the UI class focus on the visual aspects of a product’s interface. The UI class deals with a product’s surface, form, and to some extent also its behaviour, but on a micro level. Whereas the UX class focuses on behaviour on the macro level. Simply speaking—the UX class is about behaviour across screens, the UI class is about behaviour within screens.

The solution is workable. But I am still not entirely comfortable with it. I am not comfortable with the idea of being able to practice UX without ‘touching the surface’, so to speak. And it seems my two classes are advocating this. Also, I am pretty sure this is everyday reality for many UX practitioners. Notice I say “practitioner”, because I am not sure ‘designer’ is the right term in these cases. To be honest I do not think you can practice design without doing sketching and prototyping of some sort. (See Bill Buxton’s ‘Sketching User Experiences’ for an expanded argument on why this is.) And when it comes to designing software products this means touching the surface, the form.

Again, the reality is, ‘UX designer’ and ‘UI designer’ are common terms now. Certainly here in Singapore people know they need both to make good products. Some practitioners say they do both, others one or the other. The latter appears to be the most common and expected case. (By the way, in Singapore no-one I’ve met talks about interaction design.)

My concern is that by encouraging the practice of doing UX design without touching the surface of a product, we get shitty designs. In a process where UX and UI are seen as separate things the risk is one comes before the other. The UX designer draws the wireframes, the UI designer gets to turn them into pretty pictures, with no back-and-forth between the two. An iterative process can mitigate some of the damage such an artificial division of labour produces, but I think we still start out on the wrong foot. I think a better practice might entail including visual considerations from the very beginning of the design process (as we are sketching).

Two things I came across as I was preparing these classes are somehow in support of this idea. Both resulted from a call I did for resources on user interface design. I asked for books about visual aspects, but I got a lot more.

  1. In ‘Magic Ink’ Bret Victor writes about how the design of information software is hugely indebted to graphic design and more specifically information design in the tradition of Tufte. (He also mentions industrial design as an equally big progenitor of interaction design, but for software that is mainly about manipulation, not information.) The article is big, but the start of it is actually a pretty good if unorthodox general introduction to interaction design. For software that is about learning through looking at information Victor says interaction should be a last resort. So that leaves us with a task that is 80% if not more visual design. Touching the surface. Which makes me think you might as well get to it as quickly as possible and start sketching and prototyping aimed not just at structure and behaviour but also form. (Hat tip to Pieter Diepenmaat for this one.)

  2. In ‘Jumping to the End’ Matt Jones rambles entertainingly about design fiction. He argues for paying attention to details and that a lot of the design he practices is about ‘signature moments’ aka micro-interactions. So yeah, again, I can’t imagine designing these effectively without doing sketching and prototyping of the sort that includes the visual. And in fact Matt mentions this more or less at one point, when he talks about the fact that his team’s deliverables at Google are almost all visual. They are high fidelity mockups, animations, videos, and so on. These then become the starting points for further development. (Hat tip to Alexander Zeh for this one.)

In summary, I think distinguishing UX design from UI design is nonsense. Because you cannot practice design without sketching and prototyping. And you cannot sketch and prototype a software product without touching its surface. In stead of taking visual design for granted, or talking about it like it is some innate talent, some kind of magical skill some people are born with and others aren’t, user experience practitioners should consider being less enamoured with acquiring more skills from business, marketing and engineering and in stead practice at the skills that define the fields user experience design is indebted to the most: graphic design and industrial design. In other words, you can’t do user experience design without touching the surface.

Buildings and Brains at the Nijmegen Design Platform (NOP)

It’s been a few weeks since I presented at the Nijmegen Design Platform (NOP), but I thought it would still be useful to post a summary of what I talked about here.

Update: it took me a while, but the slides that accompanied this talk are now up at SlideShare.

A little context: The NOP run frequent events for designers in the region. These designers mostly work in more traditional domains such as graphic, fashion and industrial design. NOP asked Jeroen van Mastrigt — a friend and occasional colleague of mine — to talk about games at one of their events. Jeroen in turn asked me to play Robin to his Batman, I would follow up his epic romp through game design theory with a brief look at pervasive games. This of course was an offer I could not refuse. The event was held at a lovely location (the huge art-house cinema LUX) and was attended by a healthy-sized crowd. Kudos to the NOP for organizing it and many thanks to them (and Jeroen) for inviting me.

So, what I tried to do in the talk was to first give a sense of what pervasive games are, what characterizes them. I drew from the Hide & Seek website for the list of characteristics and used The Soho Project as a running example throughout this part. I also tied the characteristics to some theory I found interesting:

  • Mixing digital technology with real world play — I emphasized that ultimately, technology is but a means to an end. At Interaction ‘09 Robert Fabricant said the medium of interaction design is human behavior. I think the same holds true for the design of pervasive games.
  • Social interaction — Raph Koster once said single player games are a historical aberration. It is clear much of the fun in pervasive games is social. In a way I think they bridge the gap between the “old” board games and contemporary video games.
  • Using the city as a playground — Here I could not resist bringing in Jane Jacob’s notions of the city as an entity that is organised from the bottom up and Kevin Lynch’s work on the mental maps we create of cities as we move through them. Cities play a vital role in facilitating the play of pervasive games. At best they are the main protagonist of them.
  • Transforming public spaces into theatrical stagesets — This is related to the previous one, but here I made a sidestep into the embodied nature of player interactions in pervasive games and how embodiment facilitates reading at a distance of such actions. In a sense, the social fun of embodied play is due to its performative quality.

After this, I tried to show why designers outside the domain of games should care about pervasive games. This I did by talking about ways they can be used for purposes other than ‘mere’ entertainment. These were:

  • Enlarging perceived reality; you can create games that play with the way we customarily perceive reality. This was inspired by the talk Kevin Slavin of Area/Code delivered at MIND08. Examples I used were Crossroads and The Comfort of Strangers.
  • Changing human behavior for the better; think of the Toyota Prius dashboard’s effect on people’s driving behavior. Examples of games that use feedback loops to steer us towards desirable goals are CryptoZoo and FourSquare.
  • Crowdsourcing solutions; games can simulate possible futures and challenge players to respond to their problems. Here I used Jane McGonigal’s ideas around collective intelligence gaming. The example game I talked about was World Without Oil.
  • Conveying arguments procedurally; Ian Bogost‘s concept of procedural rhetoric isn’t specific to pervasive games, but I think the way they get mixed up with everyday life make them particularly effective channels for communicating ideas. I used The Go Game, Cruel 2B Kind and Join the Line1 as examples.

By talking about these things I hoped to provide a link to the audience’s own design practice. They may not deal with games, but they surely deal with communicating ideas and changing people’s behavior. Come to think of it though, I was doing a very old media style presentation in attempt to achieve the same… Oh well.

  1. Join the Line is a game students conceptualized during a workshop I ran. [↩]