Experience from Thinking and Making

Weekly usability tests, Nielsen talks about Tivo

Austin Govella — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:05:38 GMT

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox shares how Tivo did 12 usability tests in 12 weeks and offers some tips and guidelines for doing the same at your organization. I've actually been hearing about this a lot lately: design teams running weekly or bi-weekly usability tests. It'd be nice to have more companies share their experiences, the how and why and such. At CIM we did something similar in concert with a project using the scrum process. While this is all cool, the article summary really stuck in my craw: "frequent and regular testing keeps the design usability focused". Why would you want to keep your design usability focused? Nielsen probably doesn't mean only focused on usability, but it sure comes off that way. It just feels so 90s. If we all know the design should be focused on the experience what kind of frequent tests can you run to keep your design experience focused? Well? If you were running some kind of bi-weekly validation to keep your team experience focused, what would it look like? Hint: There's a comment box right down... there. Fess up.

A sample 'Only' statement for the I.A. Institute

Austin Govella — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:13:00 GMT

To kind of go through how this works, I thought we'd work through an example using the IA Institute. Now, I'm not picking on the IAI. I love them. I am a reasonably vigorous part of them. But when I was sitting in the annual meeting, I though to myself, "man, do these guys need an only statement". So here goes our fictional exercise at crafting an Only statement for the IAI.

We'll start with their tagline (“The IAI supports individuals and organizations specializing in the design and construction of shared information environments”) and convert that into an only statement:

WHAT	The only organization
HOW	that develops and supports a community
WHO	for information architects
WHERE	anywhere in the world
WHY	who want to design information spaces
WHEN	in a world of ubiquitous data, access, and connection

Well, that's not totally true. We still can't agree on what an information architect is, so let's change that the UX professionals:

WHAT	The only organization
HOW	that develops and supports a community
WHO	for ~~information architects~~ user experience professionals
WHERE	anywhere in the world
WHY	who want to design information spaces
WHEN	in a world of ubiquitous data, access, and connection

And do we really develop new communities, or do we support existing communities? Let's tweak that, and change the text so we don't use world twice:

WHAT	The only organization
HOW	that ~~develops and~~ supports a community
WHO	for user experience professionals
WHERE	~~anywhere in the world~~ around the globe
WHY	who want to design information spaces
WHEN	in a world of ubiquitous data, access, and connection

So, that's it. Now we have an Only statement that describes who we are and what we do. It's a nice enough exercise, but Only statement works best as a way to validate design decisions.

Using the Only statement

Creating the Only statement packs all of your meaning together. Once everything's packed, you can unpack the meaning to understand more about the project's core essence.

So, in the magic world of our example, we've reached the final version of our Only statement, and it reveals an interesting fact about the organization:

It's not necessarily a professional organization, and not necessarily supported by membership.
It's all about the community of practice, and not necessarily the practice. (Props for the 'Blurt!)

That definitely gives us some things to think about.

Based on the Only statement, we might reassess the services the organization provides. For our fictional version of the IAI, we might decide a community needs several things:

Jobs (an ecology of stuff to do and people to do it; not necessarily paid work.)
Discussions (email lists, forums, distributed conversations)
Multiple languages (translations)
Events (meetings, conferences, f2f conversations)
Localized news, events, discussions, jobs (Politicians always say "everything is local".)
Discussions with other communities (elevator pitches/mobile widgets, evangelization)
Mentors and mentees

And since we're framing things up, maybe we organize community needs into two chunks:

knowledge sharing (our list of community needs from above)
community memory (best practices, tutorials, case studies, library, books, links)

Already, we have an understanding of what the IAI is and what it's not. We have a framework for deciding what kinds of activities it should support, and those it shouldn't. Essentially, we've defined a strategy we can follow for years.

And that, I think, is the magic of the Only statement: that it can help guide product and design strategy. But does it have to? Next, I'll talk about at how an Only statement does and doesn't interact with strategy.

The 'Only' statement: focus on your project's key goals

Austin Govella — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:33:00 GMT

The myriad reasons mission statements suck has more to do with who put them together and why. Any time you explain your team's shared vision in bite-size morsels anyone can consume, that's what we call "a win". Although some mission statements explain your vision, they rarely explain why, or provide a convincing how. Tthe why and the how are what make your vision a signpost your team can strive for.

Introducing the Only statement

A couple of years ago, "Marty Neumeier":http://www.neutronllc.com/ released a follow-up to the "Brand Gap":http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321348109?ie=UTF8&tag=thinkingandma-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0321348109 called "Zag":http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321426770?ie=UTF8&tag=thinkingandma-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=0321426770. It's a great book. Although it might seem like a book about brand strategy, I thought it was more of an introduction to business analysis. (I posted a brief "review of Zag":http://www.thinkingandmaking.com/view/the-best-innovation in January.)

In Zag, Neumeier describes a great technique, the "only" statement (starting on page 65). An Only statement is like a mission statement except it focuses on what makes you _unique_. A mission statement might answer "what do we want to do?" The only statement answers "what do we do best?"

How it works

The concept starts simply enough. Complete this sentence: "You are the only [blank] that [blank]."

The first [blank] is for your category, and the second is for what makes you unique. An example explains it better. Neumeier creates an Only statement for a fictional wine bar as an example: "Our brand is the ONLY chain of wine bars that builds community around wine education".

Neumeier unpacks the magic:

Even with this simple statement you can see that there are three unique attributes that will set this brand apart: It's a chain instead of a one-off; it's about community, not just customers; and it's built on education, not just enjoyment.

The Only statement as an exercise

The more detailed version of the Only statement exercise has you answer six questions:

WHAT	is your category?
HOW	are you different?
WHO	are your customers?
WHERE	are they located?
WHEN	do they need you?
WHY	are you important?

For the wine bar, Neumeier provides these answers:

WHAT	The ONLY chain of wine bars
HOW	that builds community around education
WHO	for men and women of drinking age
WHERE	in cities and progressive towns in the US
WHY	who want to learn more about wine
WHEN\|	in an era of cultural awakening

As Neumeirer explains, answering these questions describes your category and how you're different (the WHAT and HOW). It also describes who your audience is and where they are, as well as focuses "on a need state" (the WHY) as well as an underlying trend (the WHEN).

Using Only statements to validate design decisions

Neumeier's goal is to help organizations find radical differentiation, so the Only statements focuses on your unique selling point. If you can focus your team on your project's Only-ness, then feature decisions get easier.

When you want to add a new feature, run it by your Only statement. Does the new feature match up with your WHAT, HOW, WHO, WHERE, WHY, and WHEN? If you're choosing between two features, which one is better? (Maybe neither?)

Using Only statements for shared vision

An Only statement is a really good way to focus a team on the project's constraints (the WHAT, WHO, WHERE, and WHY), as well as on its strengths (the HOW and WHEN). This kind of focus is especially important on teams where shared vision drives the quality of the work (like "an agile team":http://www.thinkingandmaking.com/view/agile-ux-six).

It's equally important to note the difference between sharing a vision and shared vision. Sharing a vision is when Kennedy says we'll have a man on the moon in x years and everyone agrees: yes, we will try to put a man on the moon in x years. Shared vision is more like a shared worldview. When Kennedy shares the vision that we'll have a man on the moon in x years, everyone believes, yes, we *can* -- and we _should_ -- have a man on the moon in x years. Only statements help communicate a worldview that a team can share.

Only statements in the wild?

As I was putting this together, I realized it's a little abstract, so I'll try to post an example using a real project. However, if you have an example we could use, let me know!

Growing up online in super cities

Austin Govella — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:45:00 GMT

Frontline re-aired an interesting report called "Growing up online" that examines how youth today has integrated their online and offline worlds. At about the same time, I came across the 19.20.21 project by Richard Saul Wurman, Jon Kamen, and others that aims to explore the opportunities and challenges we'll face with the rise of super cities. I thought the two pieces illuminated one another. How youth have integrated the on- and offline worlds is kind of the bottom-up structure driving the future while super cities are kind of the top-down structure.

David Armano interviews Bruce Nussbaum

Austin Govella — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 04:06:00 GMT

Livia Labate tweeted this great interview. David Armano of Critical Mass catches Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum for a great, relaxed sit-down. Sounds more like a conversation over drinks than an interview. It's fantastic.

Broadcast by Ustream.TV

How important is the polite fiction of secrecy?

Austin Govella — Fri, 02 May 2008 20:36:54 GMT

If we're moving closer and closer to a place where everything, everywhere can be exposed, monitored, and recorded for future reference, then what happens to the polite fiction of secrecy that surrounds crime, transgression, and deviance? Do these take to wrapping themselves in the polite fiction of play? How important is being hidden to their success in testing cultural limits and proposing changes to culture? I'd love to hear more about this, since it's kind of stumping me right now. Any ideas? Links? Off-the-cuff comments?

Some thoughts about Twitter

Austin Govella — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:26:03 GMT

If you'd like more, Russ Unger discusses Twitter, friendship in social networks, and death over at his blog, User Glue (complete with excellent comments from Whitney Hess and Cindy Chastain).

There were a couple of interesting thoughts about Twitter that came out at the Summit. It's not all my thinking (the Summit haze obscures the memory), but I thought it was interesting.

Twitter breeds a false sense of intimacy

Much of the communication that occurs on Twitter is the type of thing you normally say only to people you're very close to. After a long day of work, you might go home and tell your spouse, partner, or roommate how your iced tea was watered down, the copier was jammed, and your gelato was the best you've ever had.

Because a lot of these messages are the _types_ of things you usually speak to people you're close to, people you're less close to start to feel like they're in your close group. You can confuse a marker of intimacy with the actual status of the relationship.

Twitter as a platform

Lots has been written about how people socialize around objects (like photos on Flickr).

At the Summit, I noticed how Twitter provided a platform for ad hoc socialization around an event. (The event is an object.) So , people in a presentation would talk back and forth about the presentation, as it happened. And as soon as the presentation was over, a separate and different "object" would emerge for people to Twitter around (lunch, dinner, drinks, whatever).

Twitter exposes the relative nature of phatic communication

For people I don't know well, random Twitter quips function like phatic, "hey there", communication. However, for people with whom I've invested in a relationship, seemingly unimportant information about the "best gelato ever" feeds into my picture of them, as well as our shared history. It becomes a part of our culture.

Throwing away phatic communication

When people complain about this kind of unimportant, throwaway information (whether it appears on Twitter or in a blog), they've been distracted by the falling price of memory.

Existing systems and cheap memory mean our machines can (and do) remember everything we say.

Blogs emerged with assumptions from Content Management Systems where all content must be findable: blogs assume you want to find everything. They have search, time- and category-based archives, and ways of surfacing most popular, best rated, or most recently or even just most commented.

Twitter dispenses with this nonsense and encourages tweets to be forgotten, lost in time. Once a tweet has been replaced in recency by other tweets, it's forgotten -- despite the fact it still lives in a database somewhere.

Forgetting is good. When less important cultural information fades away, it allows more important concepts and ideas to stand out. They become memes. We don't need to find memes on a blog because we find them in our heads.

“...quite delighted by small gorillas...”

Austin Govella — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:09:03 GMT

About a year ago, violin virtuoso, Joshua Bell, played the street musician, occupied a Washington, D.C. subway station, and gave brilliant performances of classical music.

The Washington Post asked about the "moral mathematics of the moment"?

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you?

Gene Weingarten, "Pearls before breakfast", The Washington Post, April 7, 2007. Everyone seemed to ask or answer the same question: why didn't anyone notice the virtuoso? The Washington Post nails the prevalent assumption: "He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts." Art has been deified so that we expect the entire world to stop and listen. I'm not sure that's the purpose of a street musician. Seems like they're only supposed to make our time more pleasant.

Design, Art, and Performance

We think because "Design" has a significant impact, it should receive a significant response. People should notice. But that's not the case. And there's no logical reason why anyone should.

A photo from Alexis Lloyd's 'Concrete Jungle' street art project.

Alexis Lloyd glues miniature animals in odd places around the city. Anne Galloway calls Lloyd's work a street art installation. And then she describes it as interaction design:

First, unlike most work in [interaction design], it doesn't cater just to the technological elite. In fact, I imagine all sorts of gadget-less people quite delighted by small gorillas swinging from fences, and rhinos storming over parking meters. Secondly, it does not require any direct interaction. While walking down a busy urban street, to simply catch a glimpse of a tiny lion stalking a tiny herd of antelope is enough to change one's frame of mind without demanding immediate action.

Anne Galloway, "Reimagining the everyday", Purse Lip Square Jaw, March 13, 2008. The real question about Joshua Bell's performance, or any performance, isn't about whether anyone notices. The real question is whether anyone's day is better. That's the first question: Are you leaving people better off than you found them? The next question: does your audience want to notice? There are two take-aways. First, anything you design should be as unobtrusive as possible, unless your audience wants it to be. Second, next time you whinge about business or development not "noticing" the experience, stop. Why should they? That's your job. They care about something else. Do your job, and make their job easier. Always leave people better off than you found them.

Defining the user’s mental model: three factors that drive experience

Austin Govella — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 19:17:00 GMT

Once a user participates in an event, the user evaluates their expectations of the event with their realisation of the event. This point, where the user tempers their expectations with their realisations, we call this point experience.

However, before the user will participate in an event, three factors guide their participation:

What does the user want?
How do they try to achieve that want? What’s their course of action?
What do they expect to happen?

These actions happen in a chronological sequence: one, two, three.

The user has an idea about something they want or need.
They have an idea about a course of action, and
They have an expectation that this course of action will let them fulfill their want or need.

I find it useful to envision this as a conversation.

The user has an idea for something they want. This is their goal. Since this is an idea they have, we’ll illustrate this as a lightbulb.
In a conversation, they think of something they can say that will get them closer to this thing they want. I call this “message,” so we’ll use a dialogue bubble to represent this.
Finally, they have an expectation of what will happen. I’ll use a stack of coins to illustrate what the user expects to receive.

An expectation can’t be formulated without a message (course of action), and the message (course of action) can’t be formulated without the initial goal. We can illustrate this by expressing our sequence of events as a simple equation:

The goal, message, and expectation constitute the user’s mental model. All of this takes place in the user’s mind, so we’ll finish things up by placing it all inside a thought-bubble above our humble little user’s head (his name: Ulysses Xavier).

The user’s mental model is an important aspect of user-centered design. But user-centered design’s chief conceit is that it’s not about users, but context, and not only the context of use, but the user’s mental context.

The user’s mental model describes the mental context, but we still don’t have the full picture. The mental model operates in context with both the event the user participates in (a conversation, driving a car, browsing a website) and the user’s personal information space (see Dan Brown’s diagram of personal information spaces). The personal information space is a nebulous cloud of facts, tidbits, and rules the user leverages to choose goals, devise messages (courses of action), and formulate expectations.

Experience design at the brink of infinity

Austin Govella — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 21:37:00 GMT

Design’s fundamental product is experience, but we don’t really understand experience: why our tools help create a good experience, or how our decisions might affect this experience. Lacking this understanding, we’re driven more by common sense, luck, and instinct than by any expertise or discipline.

We face an astonishing future. Design in the age of information, no longer hindered by the material and technological limitations that faced the industrial age, can now create artifacts that communicate experience more quickly and with higher fidelity than ever before. But we can also create these experiences across a greater range of possibility — seemingly limited only by the human imagination. To have any hope of designing this impending infinity, we must understand the structure and properties of the experiences we create. We need to understand what we do and why we do it.

We need a better understanding of experience. We need clear definitions and models that apply to all ranges of experience, independent of media or interface.

Personal information spaces, diagram by Dan Brown

Austin Govella — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 17:53:00 GMT

Personal info space diagram analagous to commmunication/interaction model: the users mental model (personal information space) interacts via an interface (the task) with external actors (the external information supply):

http://www.greenonions.com/index.php?p=80

Evaluating experience design

Austin Govella — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:31:00 GMT

I edited this post to clarify how the facets would be used based on a conversation with Paula Thornton.

One of the most limiting factors in Design isn’t the splintering of specialist groups, nor the emergence of specialised vocabularies. We lack common language for discussing Design, for communicating and evaluating the creation of experience.

We all contribute to the overall user experience, but we don’t have a clear definition for what we do: what is experience? We have fuzzy definitions. Several models are emerging (I’m working on one as well), but we still lack an objective means for evaluating experience design. We may not understand it, but we know what it looks like, what it feels like, its general shape. I think we can use several facets to evaluate the resulting user experience:

Personal: How well does the experience relate to the individual user? A conversation with your best friend compared to talking to the clerk at the DMV.
Desirable: How much do the users desire the experience? How much do they want to experience it? How much do they need it? A triple heart bypass versus having your ears pierced.
Enjoyable: How much do users enjoy the experience? A chore versus something you enjoy doing.
Accessible: How accessible is the experience for the user? How understandable, comprehendable, physically available? Climbing Mount Everest versus climbing the curb.
Negotiable: How able is the user to negotiate the experience to better communicate with them? How customizable?

Theoretically, you could survey a group of users to evaluate a given experience in much the same way psychological surveys are performed. A numeric value can then be given to the experience in question. Two quick examples illustrate how you can evaluate different kinds of experiences using these facets:

Heart surgery: A very personal experience and very desirable (if you want to live), but not enjoyable.
Solving a rubix cube: A very personal experience, and very negotiable, but not very accessible. Anyone can try, and almost everyone can manipulate the cube, but very few can solve them.

Evaluating successful experiences

A successful experience evaluates differently for different purposes. Successful sales and education require the almost perfect transmission of mental models. The better sales or education evaluate across all five facets, the more effective the sales and education will be.

Compare learning on your own to learning how to program your VCR, and you can see why so many people have learned how to do the latter. I think one can say that communicative experiences, experiences where the primary goal is to communicate, should evaluate highly on all five facets in order to be successful.

Other experiences evaluate differently for success. The success of jail time’s deterrence requires it be neither desirable, nor enjoyable. And we work at making it undesirable: restricted freedoms; small, overcrowded quarters; and a culture of violence and racism. But, in the eyes of someone trapped in a recidivist culture, jail time loses many of its deterrent features.

None of these facets are mutually exclusive. If we assign values for a given experience, there’s an interaction among these values, but no zero-sum interplay. Improvement along one facet may improve or worsen an experience’s value for another facet. And a high value in one facet might suggest high values in another, but this is not always the case.

The more enjoyable sex becomes, the more desirable the experience will be. But desirablity won’t always correlate with enjoyment. A divorce may be very desirable, but it’d be foolish to suggest it’s an enjoyable experience.

Most importantly, just as no two users ever have the same experience, these evaluations are highly subjective and can only measure the users perception of a future experience (their expectation), or it can measure their perception of the past.

Secondly, though we assign values for an experience for each of these facets, we’re not making value assessments. A successful experience does not necessarily achieve a good end. Nazi propaganda had great design, fulfilled goals, successfully transmitted mental models: it’s a stunning portfolio piece. Nazi propaganda was a successful experience even though the result was far from “good.” Tobacco advertising is another example.

Also, “accessibility” has everything and nothing to do with web accessibility. It has to do with how able I am to participate in the experience. For example, when communicating with my cat, I can enter the same room, and even pet her. She’s physically accessible, but verbal communication isn’t possible. I don’t speak Meow. Who knows what she’s saying, or what she’s thinking. We could say the same thing about my girlfriend.

Finally, these facets for experience should work independent of device or medium. Most of us work on the web, but experience happens with everything, so evaluation methods should work any where. We should use the same method to evaluate using a watch as we use for reading a novel, having sex, or ordering books from Amazon. Experience is independent of devices or objects. It happens in the head, so we need to evaluate the way a given experience interacts with what some have come to call a user’s infospace.

Other facets and models

Splitting experience into conveniently digestable bits is nothing new, and I can’t say I’ve even come close to examining every other model (check out “Forlizzi”), but of the few I’ve seen that work independent of device and medium, they inevitably conflate the mechanics of interaction with the experience that results from the interaction. I think this muddles things.

Probably the most well-known model using “facets” and “expereince” in the title is Peter Morville’s “Facets of user experience.” For the most part, the five facets I’ve mentioned here overlap with several of Peter’s seven. For example, that an experience be usable or findable, I would evaluate as accessible and negotiable. However, the center colum for Peter’s UX honeycomb attempts to evaluate the “value” of an experience. For the web and for communicating with clients, I think the honeycomb works great. For other experiences, though, I don’t think usefulness or credibility have anything to do with an experience’s value.

But my partner at Grafofini, Alex, suggests that valuability and credibility represent additional facets we should add to the list. I’m not so sure credibility can’t be reduced and evaluated using the other facets. And isn’t value an abstract conglomeration of how an experience evaluates against all five of these facets for experience?

I’m not sure I have the answer just yet, but my gut says no.