The User & The Viewer
4 Design Lessons From LACMA’s Gallery Floor
“I would just as soon that the process evaporates and you have to deal with the experience of the work.” — Chris Burden
Recently, I was walking the gallery floors of the newer Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles Museum of Art. The building, designed by Renzo Piano, contains a collection of modern and contemporary art, including large scale sculpture and ambitious installation pieces. During every visit there is always some piece that seems to stand out and stick with me. Curiously though, at first I didn’t even notice the crows laying there.
Entering the ground floor of the west Broad building, the gallery space is easily dominated by Richard Serra’s monumental “Band”, and the steady droning of Chris Burden’s “Metropolis II” pulls your attention down the hall.
But as I walked around I was also struck by how little a divide there is between creative mediums like art and interface design. I’ve come across a lot of opinions about the differences between art and design, but in practice all creative mediums are ways of crafting experiences for people. Behind the interactions we create with objects and ideas, whether in a gallery or on a screen, is a human being. Noticing how the art moved viewers through the gallery that day, communicating an artist’s intention, was not so different from observing the way users move through an app or a website. Design, like art, is an examination of the interaction between ideas and human experience. So this article is part excuse to philosophize about art (critical theory papers I miss you!), part examination of this idea, and will expand on some of the commonalities I observed between contemporary art and design.
1. Tone is the heart of engagement.
(aka art direction is where it’s at)
For awhile it’s easy to get lost in Burden’s mechanized playground. Fascinated by the attendant encased in a cage of punctuated metal and smooth ribbons of plastic, roadways of toy cars and trains screaming by in feats of clever engineering. It’s playful and encompassing, easily engaging viewers in a cacophony of sound and movement. The piece uses the design of movement and sound to captivate an audience in a playful, poignant, disorienting performance. The tone supports the intentions of the artwork.
Engaging a website user isn’t about creating a web page filled with animations and background video. Those can be perfectly appropriate when the tone of the interaction supports the content. And by support I don’t mean matchy-matchy; a self aware juxtaposition of tone and subject can be equally (if not more) effective. However it’s a disjointing experience to see a web site overloaded with bouncing illustrations and content that is anything but bouncy (corporate fiduciary, I’m looking at you). Now a news website with a Lisa Frank/Frank Miller aesthetic mashup? That’s a divergence of tone I can get behind.
To really engage users, the tone of the design and interactions must be the fine point at the end of the content. The tone strengthens the messaging, underpinning what can’t be communicated through words alone.
Boston University’s editorial content has long been an excellent example of good art direction, which is essentially what I am talking about when I say tone here. They have done an excellent job matching the tone of the design, with the message of the content — specifically in their considered use of interactions. In their article on ant evolution, the addition of exploring a 3-D model of ant brain is an appropriate and effective interaction — engaging without being obtrusive.
The same goes for this Polygon article on Black Tusk Studios. I have seen plenty of unnecessary uses of the popular ‘before and after’ slider, but here it’s presence is helpful and appropriate — putting that fine point on the article’s content. This visual introduction to machine learning by@r2d3us is another example of well articulated tone. The animation of the content visually illustrates the core concepts presented in the article. For the tone, content, and design to meld successfully, there really needs to be solid art direction (this oldie but a goodie A List Apart article by @danielmall sums it up nicely).
2. Provide many paths, but be specific.
On the gallery floor of LACMA, every visitor has a purpose. Their purposes can be different but they are there, seeking information with a unique set of expectations and even challenges to experiencing the gallery. As I walked through Serra’s “Band”, winding through each undulation, into and out of steel rooms, I noticed how each viewer around me approached the piece differently. There was a directness and purpose with some, a trepidation and hesitancy with others. Yet all viewers were welcomed into the rooms to experience a direct connection with the sculpture’s physical presence. An artwork is a specific experience, filled with the intentions of the artist but it is also a dynamic experience, infused with the purpose a viewer brings to the artwork.
As designers, we have to create experiences that lead users towards action, and are accessible across devices and abilities but to be effective we can’t shy away from specificity. Because specificity in tone, design and content is what communicates intention, just as it does in an artwork.
Specificity communicates intention, just as it does in a work of art.
It’s not uncommon as a designer to encounter a client afraid of being specific, concerned with casting the net too narrowly. But generic images, interactions, design and content — while intended to be inclusive easily become un-memorable, leaving little substance for a user to connect with or react to. Design to speak your intentions clearly and specifically, providing many paths for the user to experience that intention.
All the clients. All the messages.
As a university with a large clientele and diverse messaging, this is an area that is a challenge for us. We need to maintain clear messaging with intentional tone while remaining sensitive to the range of content our different schools and colleges produce. One solution we are experimenting with is the repetition of key CTAs connected to relevant content throughout the interface, rather than exhaustive navigation.
To achieve a specificity and clarity of Chapman’s message we are focusing on designs that represent the core qualities we identify with a Chapman education: namely an open, innovative space filled with resources and cross disciplinary hands-on work. I am of the mindset that our web products are always under improvement, so implementation of this idea is an on-going project, some of which will be deployed over the coming months.
3. Resolvable tensions move users towards action.
“To design a Spatial Interface, you need to think inside and outside the bounds of the screen.” — Pasquale D’Silva
As I moved around a bend in Serra’s sculpture, light flooded in from the windows and punctuating that light, in stark contrast, were a handful of distinctly black figures strewn upon the concrete floor. And that punctuation of space moved me right across the gallery floor to inspect what I saw.
Laying on the floor at my feet were more than a dozen dead crows cast in bronze comprising Kiki Smith’s “Jersey Crows” installation. The crows lay there in intimate tension with their surroundings, intended as a reference to an environmental tragedy in her home state of New Jersey. I had skipped right past them before, engaged by other artworks, but it was the spatial interplay that moved my eyes, and then my feet to see it.
Animation alone doesn’t increase interaction, to engage a user and move them toward an action, there must be a tension that needs resolving. All users scroll, the data supports this but what compels a user to engage? In my example from the gallery there were two things at play: intrigue and spatial relationships. An intriguing video, a narrative layout or content that answers the right question at the right place. The websites and apps we interact with become an extension of ourselves. There is a physiological connection between the user, the screen, input and the UI’s layout. The placement of CTAs, the timing of an animation, the contrasts in color and content are all aspects of a design that benefit from considering spatial relationships. In his article Designing Spatial Interfaces, Pasquale D’Silva nails this concept with some excellent examples and tools for bringing greater spatial awareness to your designs.
Chapman University’s Digital Signage
One of the projects we worked on this last year was the implementation of an in-house digital signageproduct. Clients across campus were all using different products on hardware of varying ages. The university needed an in-expensive way to display consistent messaging and emergency information. This is one our of projects were considering the inside and outside bounds of the screen was an inherent requirement. Some of the screens were capable of touch, others were not. Some ran on antiquated hardware. We also needed to be sensitive to our campus users, introducing an entirely new application that required extensive training wasn’t an option.
Our solution was a ractive based web application that worked with our current cms, Cascade Server, running as a chrome kiosk app. We also wanted to meet the clients where they were, so we conducted an extensive audit of the content currently displaying on the screens. From this data we were able to determine core uses for our digital signage and create a series of flexible templates for the first release. Screens were primarily being used to market events, display announcements, schedules and directory information.
During the design of the templates, we considered how the product should adapt to the screensize, the viewing distance, how a user could interact with the screens when touch was an available input and especially how we could mitigate frustration when the screen did not have touch capabilities. Key components to achieving these goals were ensuring solid responsiveness tied to ratio and including wayfinding elements viewable from various distances.
Once deployed we were able to quickly see ways to improve the product, as is always the case, but this first iteration achieved our primary goals and created a consistent experience. It remains to be determined how much action is associated with the change in signage on campus, data and time will tell. However, like the space inside and outside of Serra’s sculpture, designs that carefully consider spatial relationships create resolvable tensions that move users towards action.
Designs that carefully consider spatial relationships create resolvable tensions that move users towards action.
4. Let the user see where they are going and where they have been.
Smith’s crows are half strewn within the gallery, and half outside in the garden beyond a wall of windows. Fallen out of the sky above, the crows lay in perpetuity upon a gallery floor. And they are effective in their messaging. The medium’s literal heaviness is significant and their placement upon the ground final. Yet the piece is fully accessible, you can stand near it and within it, gazing out the window, it’s subject moving you beyond the gallery walls. It doesn’t overwhelm or force the viewer into a hierarchy, it suggests and leads towards action. You stand near it and you can see beyond it, you know your place in the piece and it’s ideas.
Interfaces that require a user to input data need to communicate to the user where they are going and where they have been. Smith’s crows communicate a strong sense of place to a viewer. If a user is trepidatious about what a submit button means, or if whether they can correct mistakes they become frustrated. A well designed input, a well designed website will leave a user with a comfortable understanding of their place in the site or process without the need for an overwhelming amount of detail.
Basically I should have titled this article…
Why kick ass art direction and UX is always present in successful creative projects: Regardless of medium.
Kiki Smith’s “Jersey Crows” were my favorite piece from this last visit because of the way they interacted with the gallery space. They were aesthetically beautiful, tactile and full of tension. They stood as a reminder that underpinning all designed experiences are people: the viewers and the users who have showed up to your idea, ready with their own purpose, to experience what you created. There are never any clear answers, no article can tell you exactly what you are doing right or wrong but that is what is great about doing creative work. Your job is to ask questions and search for answers. Sometimes even between the walls of a gallery.
