Experience Design

What is life if not a simple series of experiences. When we stitch together our experiences they become our personal stories and the means by which we define our lives, understand our relationships and evaluate our character and self worth. When we hope and dream for the future, what are these hopes and dreams if not desires for certain types of experiences.

When crafting information for consumption by people, we need to understand that our aim is to craft both our messages and their environments such that those who interact with them become enamored and experience them as being beautiful, meaningful and valuable.

My research and musings are driven by an innate desire to understand people and their interactions with the types of communications environments that they experience to be exquisite. I hope that you find what I've gathered here to be beneficial in your own journey to understand the art and science of designing effective Web experiences.

Excerpts from TRAIN OF THOUGHTS: Designing the Effective Web Experience

‘Users’ Versus People—Understanding What Motivates Online Behavior

The people who interact with your Web enterprise through its online resources aren’t users; that would make you—the person or organization responsible for the existence of these resources—a pusher. They’re people and you function more like a facilitator. People don’t merely use the information that they access; they perceive it, absorb it, try to comprehend it, are affected by it, and then decide how to respond to it.

With this guiding notion in mind, the intent of this chapter is to persuade you to stop listening to those Web usability consultants who recommend that you dull-down your online resources and focus solely on the practical aspects of experience design. These one-track-minded consultants are as much hypnotists as anything else. They’ve basically succeeded in mesmerizing the online community by cultivating the false notion that people are mechanically minded robots whose sole motivations are to experience their online world as expediently and as practically as possible.

While there are certainly many valid practical considerations when designing online resources, under the guise of “usability standards,” practicality itself is currently being taken to an extreme.

01.00.01 Practicality is not an underlying human motivation.

Instead, people seek fulfillment through consumption, as well as through social interaction and emotional experiences. The Web can help us be more practical people, yes; but more importantly it has the capacity to help us become better people—to enhance our minds and our lives—to help us better understand each other, the world, and ourselves.

Although the appropriate application of practicality in the design of Web experiences can contribute to fulfilling our true human needs and desires, designing our online resources to be practical for the sake of being practical is a misguided and dangerously flawed idea. And most certainly—elevating practicality above all other design considerations goes far beyond necessity.

01.00.02 Journeying along a well-conceived experiential pathway is what makes interacting with [an online resource] compelling.

Because people are multidimensional, an effective Web experience is successful on many different levels. Consequently, paving this “experiential pathway” involves employing varied sets of principles that address our multidimensionality. This holistic design perspective should draw from and synthesize principles that are related to psychology, understandability¹, and creativity.

Up until now, however, consultants who are more technically minded have confused experience design with usability design. Usability traditionally relates to a “user’s” ability to navigate through and find information quickly on the Web, and grapples with some, but not all issues relevant to understandability as I’ve framed it in this text. Although usability does try to help people avoid the detrimental emotions that accompany frustration, for the most part usability ignores broader issues related to the psychology of emotion, the cognition of perception and learning, as well as the very real human need for aesthetic gratification. See Figure

01.00.03 As arguably the most influential Web usability consultant, Jakob Nielsen has, through a narrow set of heuristics, succeeded in convincing Web enterprises to base their experience design policies on a single facet of people’s experiential needs.

Dr. Nielsen has derived his heuristics—which are speculative formulations—largely from informal, context-specific Web usability testing. The conclusions drawn from years of conducting this testing have then been extrapolated by Nielsen and others to apply to all cases. The problem with this approach is that usability testing is geared toward determining the flaws in a specific interface through educated intuition rather than through empirical scientific testing.

Nielsen would himself likely be the first to admit that most Web usability testing lacks the rigor of scientific research. This makes the credence given to his Web usability heuristics as scientifically-proven fact all the more puzzling. It’s frustrating for many Web experience designers who are trying to build inspiring online resources when they’re blocked in their efforts by Nielsen’s heuristics—which are accepted as absolute truths, when they’re in fact only based on Nielsen’s observations. The heuristics of Nielsen and others have taken on a glow of sanctified commandments—Thou Shalt Not Use Flash!—rather than being regarded as the potentially helpful but highly subjective design suggestions that they really are.

Usability experts rightly feel that if a person can’t interact with an online resource easily, then that resource has likely failed. However the passionate conviction that makes them good advocates of interface logistics can sometimes blind them to the core purposes of an online resource. The most logistically predictable experience may not be the most engaging or the most persuasive or the most compelling one. Usability needs to support other design considerations, not replace them. A logistically appropriate, “practical” online resource that isn’t at all compelling is just as big a failure as one that’s compelling yet impractical.

Many of the design considerations that have traditionally fallen under the moniker of “usability” are important and should be considered when designing online resources. Some of Dr. Nielsen’s observations can, when appropriately applied in a given situation, be quite helpful. Usability, however, is only one voice in the democracy of experience design, and therefore should only get one vote. There are many other types of observations, both subjective and scientific, that must be taken into account when settling on a particular experience design strategy for a given situation and needs (see Chapter Seven).

01.00.04 Poor usability isn’t the primary reason why Web enterprises have experienced widespread failure.

They’ve experienced failure because the organizations behind these Web enterprises haven’t understood and fulfilled the needs of the people in the online marketplace holistically. By the online market’s rejection of the 1990s crop of dot-coms, people have made it clear that they’re no longer willing to subject themselves to bland, incomprehensible, poorly stylized, marginally valuable, OR difficult-to-use online resources. There are two reasons for this.

The first reason is that other forms of media such as TV, movies, and interactive games have trained people to have increasingly sophisticated expectations in terms of the emotional and aesthetic dynamics of the media that they consume. These media do a really great job of reaching people deeply on social and emotional levels.

The second reason is that conventional sources of needs fulfillment are beginning to combine the inherent social and emotional powers of live people and environments with progressive implementations of technology. The combined benefit in many cases provides a more compelling value proposition than their online competitors can offer.

We’ve reached the point where people expect to be treated as well online as they’re treated in physical consumptive settings. In light of this, we must stop expending all of our resources designing online experiences that, at best, try to be sensitive to navigational frustration and, at worst, ignore the broader body of people’s experiential needs as a whole.

01.00.05 The core of an effective Web experience is NOT user-centered design but person-centered design.

Therefore, we must design every aspect of an online resource to align with a person’s natural human needs and desires. Although one of our human desires is to avoid the frustrations of inefficiency and impediment, we also have very deep and primal needs to maintain a positive social and emotional relationship with our environment. When given a choice, people usually choose options that engender the most positive feeling (Reeves and Nass, The Media Equation).

In light of this fact, it’s essential that in addition to designing our online resources to be efficient, we design them—whether austere or flamboyant—to be compelling as well. In a sense, the role of an experience design team is to pave the way for people to enjoy themselves as they make unimpeded progress in their quest for consumption, meaning, enjoyment, or—whatever. And although people are often most interested in the direct route, it’s important that we don’t barricade the scenic route for those who feel that “half the fun is in getting there.” See Figure

01.04.02 We must stay on the road of progress and out of the ditches of mediocrity.

My gripe with those who condemn the use of sophisticated media and interactivity on the Web is that they offer nothing better than a fleshless skeleton as an alternative. They’re in effect pressuring the industry to exchange one set of mediocrity for another—to drive from the ditch on one side of the road right smack-dab into the other!

The Web development world is oversaturated with consultants who are experts at efficiently getting people to relevant content but are amateurs at helping people either relate to or make sense out of that content. Why is this? For every usability expert advocating sterile, stifling Web experience design, there are at least as many credible design and interactivity experts advocating experiences that reach deeper inside people. It’s an injustice on the part of usability experts when they group design and interactivity experts with the amateur crowd and blanketly condemn all attempts to employ high-concept media or sophisticated interactivity.

We can do better than we have done—and we will. Not because we limit the scope of our work, but because we refine the quality of our understanding. We must therefore do the hard work that’s necessary to hone our abilities to represent our ideas on the Web with passion, meaning, elegance, and clarity.

01.04.04 As Dr. Donald Norman says, humans are ‘active, creative, social beings.’

Dr. Donald Norman of the Nielsen/Norman Group offers some good insights in his book, Things That Make Us Smart, that should give other usability consultants some food for thought:

“We humans are thinking, interpreting creatures. The mind tends to seek explanations, to interpret, to make suggestions. We are active, creative, social beings. We seek interaction with others. All of these natural tendencies are thwarted by the efforts of the engineering approach to efficiency. The danger is that things that cannot be measured play no role in scientific work and are judged to be of little importance.”—Chapter One

“If we are to be able to use [digital media] easily and efficiently, the designers have to provide us with assistance, with an understandable, coherent structure. Design should be like telling a story. The design team should start by considering the task that the artifact is intended to serve and the people who will use it. To accomplish this, the design team must include expertise in human cognition, in social interaction, in the task that is to be supported, and in the technologies that will be used.”—Chapter Four

“It is also the social side of technology that is least well supported. After all, the technologists are not social scientists or humanists; they are researchers and engineers. They can be excused for not understanding the social side of their handiwork. However, they [can’t] be excused for not acknowledging their own lack of understanding and having some social experts join their team.”—Chapter Eight

04.05.00 Summary

Because effective Web experiences largely hinge on our ability to successfully and consistently guide people into comprehension of our online messages, we must begin to interact with people in a more meaningful way. This requires an appropriateness, depth, substance, and continuity to our online messages that our Web enterprises have up until this point never been able to produce. As a result, the time for a new vision for information design and delivery has come. This vision relates to the way that we think about, design, and develop the messages that our Intelligent Flowpath Management Systems (flowstems) present. It also relates to the way we design our flowstems to interact with people.

What’s more, our flowstems must accommodate the way that people naturally behave rather than force them to accommodate the way that technology naturally tends to behave. By doing this we’ll continue to increase the level of satisfaction that people experience from our online resources. This will lead to a competitive advantage within a market space for Web enterprises that follow these principles. Furthermore, by designing our flowstems to guide people toward the fulfillment of their goals rather than requiring them to ferret out solutions on their own, we’ll build goodwill and loyalty. This will lower costs and increase returns for all stakeholders of online enterprises’ cybernetic interactions.

In the first chapter, we learned the importance of understanding people’s online motivations holistically from not only a practical standpoint, but also from emotional, social, cognitive, and consumptive standpoints. In Chapters Two through Four, we learned the importance of formulating online messages that guide people into comprehension of our ideas on both the microlevel of notions and the macrolevel of flowpaths. We’ve seen clearly that in order to communicate effectively with people we must do several things. We must attract them, inform them, and invoke them to take action.

It’s time now to look at the role that creativity has to play in each of these stages to make the experiential pathways that we develop as effective and meaningful as possible.