Tag: Matt Jones

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.

Are games media or design objects?

In a recent post on the Edge blog – which, if you consider yourself a games designer, you absolutely must read – Matt Jones asks:

“Why should pocket calculators be put on a pedestal, and not Peggle?”

He writes about the need for games to be appreciated and critiqued as design objects. He points out that the creation of any successful game is “at least as complex and coordinated as that of a Jonathan Ive laptop”. He also speculates that reasons for games to be ignored is that they might be seen primarily as media, and that mainstream design critics lack literacy in games, which makes them blind to their design qualities.

Reading this, I recalled a discussion I had with Dave Malouf on Twitter a while back. It was sparked by a tweet from Matt, which reads:

“it’s the 3rd year in a row they’ve ignored my submission of a game… hmmph (L4D, fwiw) – should games be seen as design objects? or media?”

I promptly replied:

“@moleitau design objects, for sure. I’m with mr Lantz on the games aren’t media thing.”

For an idea of what I mean by “being with Mr. Lantz”, you could do worse that to read this interview with him at the Tale of Tales blog.

At this point, Dave Malouf joined the fray, posting:

“@kaeru can a game be used to convey a message? We know the answer is yes, so doesn’t that make it a form of media? @moleitau”

I could not resist answering that one, so I posted a series of four tweets:

“@daveixd let me clarify: 1. some games are bits of content that I consume, but not all are

“@daveixd 2. ultimately it is the player who creates meaning, game designers create contexts within which meaning emerges.

“@daveixd 3. thinking of games as media creates a blind spot for all forms of pre-videogames era play”

“@daveixd that’s about it really, 3 reasons why I think of games more as tools than media. Some more thoughts: http://is.gd/5m5xa @moleitau”

To which Dave replied:

“@kaeru re: #2 all meaning regardless of medium or media are derived at the human level.”

“@kaeru maybe this is semantics, but any channel that has an element of communicating a message, IMHO is media. Tag & tic-tac-toe also.”

“@kaeru wait, are you equating games to play to fun? But I’m limiting myself to games. I.e. role playing is play, but not always a game.”

At this point, I got frustrated by Twitter’s lack of support for a discussion of this kind. So I wrote:

“@daveixd Twitter is not the best place for this kind of discussion. I’ll try to get back to your points via my blog as soon as I can.”

And here we are. I’ll wrap up by addressing each of Dave’s points.

  1. Although I guess Dave’s right about all meaning being derived at the human level, what I think makes games different from, say, a book or a film is that the thing itself is a context within which this meaning making takes place. It is, in a sense, a tool for making meaning.
  2. Games can carry a message, and sometimes are consciously employed to do so. One interesting thing about this is on what level the message is carried – is it told through bits of linear media embedded in the game, or does it emerge from a player’s interaction with the game’s rules? However, I don’t think all games are made to convey a message, nor are they all played to receive one. Tic-Tac-Toe may be a very rough simulation of territorial warfare, and you could argue that it tells us something about the futility of such pursuits, but I don’t think it was created for this reason, nor is it commonly played to explore these themes.
  3. I wasn’t equating games to play (those two concepts have a tricky relationship, one can contain the other, and vice-versa) but I do feel that thinking of games as media is a product of the recent video game era. By thinking of games as media, we risk forgetting about what came before video games, and what we can learn from these toys and games, which are sometimes nothing more than a set of socially negotiated rules and improvised attributes (Kick the can, anyone?)

I think I’ll leave it at that.

Notes on play, exploration, challenge and learning

(My reading notes are piling up so here’s an attempt to clear out at least a few of them.)

Part of the play experience of many digital games is figuring out how the damn thing works in the first place. In Rules of Play on page 210:

“[…] as the player plays with FLUID, interaction and observation reveals the underlying principles of the system. In this case the hidden information gradually revealed through play is the rules of the simulation itself. Part of the play of FLUID is the discovery of the game rules as information.”

(Sadly, I could not find a link to the game mentioned.)

I did not give Donald Norman all the credit he was due in my earlier post. He doesn’t have a blind spot for games. Quite the contrary. For instance, he explains how to make systems easier to learn and points to games in the process. On page 183 of The Design of Everyday Things:

“One important method of making systems easier to learn and to use is to make them explorable, to encourage the user to experiment and learn the possibilities through active exploration.”

The way to do this is through direct manipulation, writes Norman. He also reminds us that it’s not necessary to make any system explorable.1 But (on page 184):

“[…] if the job is critical, novel, or ill-specified, or if you do not yet know exactly what is to be done, then you need direct, first-person interaction.”

So much written after DOET seems to have added little to the conversation. I’m surprised how useful this classic still is.

I’m reminded of a section of Matt Jones’s Interaction 08 talk—which I watched yesterday. He went through a number of information visualisations and said he’d like to add more stuff like that into Dopplr, to allow people to play with their data. He even compared this act of play to Will Wright’s concept of possibility space.2 He also briefly mentioned that easily accessible tools for creating information visualisations might become a valuable tool for designers working with complex sets of data.

Norman actually points to games for inspiration, by the way. On page 184 just before the previous quote:

“Some computer systems offer direct manipulation, first-person interactions, good examples being the driving, flying, and sports games that are commonplace in arcades and on home machines. In these games, the feeling of direct control over the actions is an essential part of the task.”

And so on.

One of the most useful parts of Dan Saffer’s book on interaction design is where he explains the differences between customisation, personalisation, adaptation and hacking. He notes that an adaptive system can be designed to induce flow—balancing challenge with the skill of the user. In games, there is something called dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) which has very similar aims.

Salen and Zimmerman have their doubts about DDA though. In Rules of Play on page 223 they write:

“Playing a game becomes less like learning an expressive language and more like being the sole audience member for a participatory, improvisational performance, where the performers adjust their actions to how you interact with them. Are you then playing the game, or is it playing you?”

Perhaps, but it all depends on what DDA actually adjusts. The technique might be objectionable in a game (where a large part of the point is overcoming challenge) but in other systems many of these objections do not apply.

“With a successful adaptive design, the product fits the user’s life and environment as though it were custom made.”

(Designing for Interaction, page 162.)

Adaptive systems explicitly anticipate transformative play. They allow themselves to be changed through a person’s interactions with it.3

A characteristic of good interaction design is playfulness, writes Mr. Saffer in his book on page 67:

“Through serious play, we seek out new products, services and features and then try them to see how they work. How many times have you pushed a button just to see what it did?”

The funny thing is, the conditions for play according to Saffer are very similar to some of the basic guidelines Norman offers: Make users feel comfortable, reduce the chance for errors and if errors do occur, make sure the consequences are small—by allowing users to undo, for instance.

Mr. Norman writes that in games “designers deliberately flout the laws of understandability and usability” (p.205). Although even in games: “[the] rules [of usability] must be applied intelligently, for ease of use or difficulty of use” (p.208).

By now, it should be clear making interactions playful is very different from making them game-like.

  1. Apparently, “explorable” isn’t a proper English word, but if it’s good enough for Mr. Norman it’s good enough for me. [↩]
  2. I blogged about possibility space before here. [↩]
  3. Yes, I know I blogged about adaptive design before. Also about flow and adaptation, it seems. [↩]