2012

aesthetics or experience?

I have a post-it on my desk. the post it says:

Robin Hunicke

Mechanics, rules

Dynamics, rules+users

Experience (Aesthetics),rules+users+context

it is a note to myself as I would have liked to use Robin’s classification (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics. more about it here: www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf) and show how it can be used to describe the third step as Experience.

the beauty with the notes to self is that you change your mind over time and now that I’m thinking about it, I see Experience more as a 4th level, where it includes memory and goals, together with rules, users and context.

does it make any sense?

Not for Climbing use

Some of my friends started using climbing hooks as a key rings – back in the ’90s.

The same object is now a key ring only. The usage changes the function of the same object.

Moreover, the object prevents future mis-use: you can read NOT FOR CLIMBING USE on one side of the hook. I’m sure it’s fore safety reason (materials are different, I reckon). Is this a good example of a misleading cultural affordance? And what happens when the object is used for other purposes (e.g. fixing a net to a pole, to create an improvised goal)?

On a similar note: what does the CHINA mark mean, if visually connected to the alert written on the hook?

fostering participation and business rules

A couple of weeks ago I watched an Icelandic movie (Noi Albinoi; AKA Noi the Albino ), and I was really impressed by one of the most trivial scenes of the movie.

To make it short: Nói (the main character) get into the coffee of the local gas station (where Iris works as a waitress) and asks for something to drink. Normal – so far.
Then Iris asks Noi if he wants to drink it in the coffee or take it away. Again, this is really common in places such as Starbucks and similar.
The surprise is that in this case the juice is actually cheaper if the customer drinks it in.

Subverting the “eat in / take away” balance has an economic reason: the juice bottle has a cost, and drinking it inside the coffee means the possibility to have it back.
But it also has a social reason, or at least a social consequence: it invites people drinking inside. The rule becomes one of the factors to spark a bit of “social life” into the bar (much needed, if you work at the coffee of a gas station in a remote fishing village in western Iceland).

Fostering participation is a difficult stuff. It involves environment design, a consistent conception of every touchpoint, a content to share, a great work on identity and trust, but also strong business rules: everything should row in the same direction. That’s the experience design, I guess.

User Experience what?

My flat is made for parties: a big open space with terrace, and the possibility to invite tons of people around. Being my flatmates in the Financial Services area of expertise, I often have to explain why on earth I do what I do. It always happen with clients, and with colleagues.
A few months ago, one of these cyclical started on my company mailing list, and I hate doing precise definitions, so I was a bit concerned: why should I start now?
Actually, for a long time I’ve been fighting with the problem of defining what an user experience architect is, and what does (s)he look like. It started with a lunch chat with some colleagues, and the World Usability Day ignited a sparkle and made me think of different things. All that complexity had to be simplified in my head.

Essentially, the label of my/our role is one of the things that convinced me to do what I do now.

“User” is the first word. User is what is most important in our 40 hours a week (not to consider that the rest of my life I see users everywhere…). Researching their behaviors and preferences is the necessary first step for everything we do; unveiling their needs is the force to get innovation in services and design; putting the user (I prefer “people”) first is a way of exhibiting our intention to follow a UCD process when designing.

Experience. I always think experiences are something emergent from the interaction of many different variables: there are physical, cognitive, emotional, social, historical variables that all contribute to the way a bunch of people enjoy the relationship with someone/ something else.
Obviously, we cannot control all of these variables. We can barely control a small part of it. I think we can’t design the experience. But, we can design for experience. IMHO, it means we are considering as many ways an individual / collective interacts with the environment, and we model these interactions consequently. It’s a really general definition, and it involves designing physical spaces, devices, digital spaces, communication strategies and so many other things I can’t even think of. This is a dream, probably. This what I hope the perfect User Experience Architect (UEA) would do. Better: this is what I hope a team of perfect UEAs would do, together with other competences, which integrate knowledge and expertise.

The term that initially puzzled me the most was “architect“. I always connect “architects” to the concrete design of buildings. Actually the etymology simply means something like “supreme maker” (sorry for the awful translation from Greek), but in daily usage it’s the dude with a yellow safety cap who overviews the construction site of the building he has designed in blueprint and plaster. Architect is not the carpenter, of course. It‚s not even the engineer.
If we think that we are architects of user experiences, we have to define our blueprints (sketches?) and our plaster (scenarios? prototypes?). If our bricks are interactions, then it’s not about lining up bricks, but the representation of them

What I think is missing from the term “architect” is the strategic part. I feel really comfortable with the Adaptive Path composition of User Experience, as blending of 4 different disciplines (at least): Interaction design, Design research, Design strategy and Information architecture. Unfortunately, the term architect doesn’t convey the richness of this. Designer doesn’t help as well. Consultant and researcher only capture part of this mix. Maker is too practical, God is too abstract (and maybe a bit profane). For now, I’d stick with architect, which is a good metaphor of the fact that we don’t build or fill with furniture, but I’m not completely satisfied.