Takeaways from each talk from Design Matters 18

Talking shop with people who know their stuff

It’s not every day that you get to drink brew and eat waffles, whilst taking in in a talk you’ve just heard. Well, that was what we were up to these past few days over at the Design Matters conference. The neverending nodding, unexpected light bulb moments and takeaway pieces such as this were sure to have followed after it was all done.

Thanks for the waffles Adobe!

So there we were, a couple of days smarter and sharper, ready to return to homebase with plenty of conviction and fire in our bellies. It’s been more than a few days (a week or two actually), and I’m already noticing holes in what I was so fervently agreeing with. Why’s that? Well, science of course. There’s this thing called the Ebbinghaus Effect, or more commonly known as the Forgetting Curve.

Here’s a curve to make a point, because science.

Unfortunately, I’m not well-equipped to write about this phenomenon, so a quick Google Search tells us that this effect comes into play because “humans tend to halve their memory of newly learned knowledge in a matter of days or weeks unless they consciously review the learned material.” I think I’ve done enough to convince myself why I needed to write this piece. So, in light of this fascinating find, let’s talk takeaways.

Tobias Ahlin: Where did all the feelings go?

The first talk was delivered from Tobias Ahlin, an experience design director at Minecraft. He spoke about how product designers have come to think that designing for emotion and engagement is in conflict with simplicity, a principle we seem to be overly attached to.

The design dogmatism that we’ve adopted and the beliefs and truths that come with it, has made products utilitarian and shallow when it comes to actually feeling something. Tobias argued that this very dogmatism has come in the way of the very thing we’re paid to do — making informed predictions. We get better at making predictions with time, however only if we allow our judgement and thinking to be more nuanced.

Here’s where I think Casumo lies in Tobias’ quadrant of complexity and utility

As part of his thesis, he also showed us a quadrant, similar to the above, illustrating where different products where at when it came to complexity and utility. Products such as Excel and Word aren’t really the most expressive products, since they were designed with specific jobs that their respective customer segments need to fulfill. On the other hand, something like the Threes game is a hallmark of minimalistic expression.

I’d like to think Casumo is way closer to Minecraft than Excel 🤞

In his closing remarks, Tobias urged the rest of the audience to leverage other practices such as motion & sound design as well as take cues from products like the Nintendo Switch to embed playfulness when appropriate. He left us with a tidbit, asking us how playful should our experiences be on a scale of Minecraft to Excel.

Takeaways

• We should stop thinking about quantifying every single thing to rationalize our decisions, the more we think what isn’t quantifiable musn’t be true, the more our product is bound to get lost in a sea of generic interfaces.
• Nuanced thinking allows us to have better judgement which in turn makes for better predictions when testing hypotheses.
• Designing for emotion and engagement allows your product to be distinguished from the competition, encourages long-term memory of the brand and most importantly it impassions people to become evangelists of your product.

This shot is actually from the workshop because I was taking way too many notes during both talks

Vicki Tan and Christine Cha: Ancient Methods for New Interfaces

One of my personal favourite talks of the conference was from Christine and Vicki Tan from Headspace who both talked about their specific experiences in trying to make meditation more relatable through their flagship product.

Christine walked us through her role as a brand-focused product designer and told us about the challenges she faced in communicated loaded feelings like stress and pain. Generic stock imagery wasn’t going to translate well if the assets that were illustrated were a one-to-one representation.

Metaphors were used to help that translation be done more gracefully such as showing a character in a forest of cacti conveying composure in an uncomfortable situation. The mission played a big part in trying to realize how both the micro and the macro illustrative details should tie in to different touchpoints within the customer journey.

Takeaways

• Make deliberate decisions when building assets to communicate your brand, bring purpose to the details and match the mission of the company.
• When something’s unclear, it’s fine to use metaphors through animation and illustration to communicate ideas that may be a bit difficult to represent.
• I was able to draw some parallels with the abovementioned challenges as meditation in itself is still something people think monks can only practice with the promise of some tangible results. In our case there’s an obvious stigma attached to gambling and playing casino games which makes it difficult to normalize the product and the category for newer audiences.

The second part of the talk was grounded in the all too familiar struggle of making design decisions with multiple data points, qualitative customer feedback and personal intuition, not knowing what will translate into a healthy output for the business. Vicki walked us through the new Headspace onboarding experience that had been rolled out a few months back, noting that the convergence of the three led the team to believe that decisions need to be made with incomplete information.

That said incomplete information doesn’t mean rolling out something without rationalizing the primary intent. In trying to address the dropoff and early user retention metrics, four hypotheses around the older onboarding experiences were built.

1. Choose your own adventure
2. Ability to dismiss value proposition
3. Animated GIFS as opposed to the video reliant onboarding
4. Bundling the first meditation session within onboarding

Each of these delivered differing outcomes that made an incremental improvement upon retention rate, however despite these efforts the team couldn’t ignore the fact that data is backwards looking. If they were to really understand why people were churning beyond the first two weeks of using Headspace, they had to pair metrics with qualitative data.

With this in mind, the design research team set out on conducting a diary study. They did so by asking new users to log their first two weeks with the service in the hope that the question, “What are you hoping to experience in the short-term and the long-term using Headspace?”, would shed some light.

Vicki and her team then rallied around the information gathered from this study and started noticing themes in the qualitative data which were then mapped to the habit formation loop framework. It turned out that asking for goal articulation, helped in understanding what the goals and intentions were for different people.

The Habit Formation Loop

At each stage of this loop, the team then had different quotes the research team had helped them earmark in an attempt to understand what people had been struggling with. After taking this in, the last step was really all about pairing the retention metrics and qualitative data with the intuition to build an experience that stayed true to the findings. Vicki stated that whilst intuition is a fuzzy part of the process, it can be the compass with regards to what decisions we can make.

Takeaways

• Design decisions should be composed of data, both qualitative and quantitative, intuition and ultimately what makes financial sense for the business to continue serving customers.
• Being a conduit for feedback and goal articulation is a sure way to better serve both potential and existing customers.
• Certainty within product development comes at the cost of having waited too long to deliver value to people. Having incomplete information to act upon is normal, it’s how you react after releasing something that determines the value you’ll be able to deliver.

Ben Sheppard: The True Value of Design

In this talk, Ben gave an overview around a study being conducted by McKinsey Design that has been examining the design actions of 300 companies over the past 5 years. Whilst Ben was somewhat tight lipped on the results that could have helped piece together the relationship between the two (design and business outcomes), the talk itself was still helpful for those who are still seeking that seat at the business table. He noted the following takeaways from the study:

1. Design is more than a feeling
   Any right-minded designer knows that part of their role is to deliver great customer outcomes. Better customer outcomes which can be measured through quantitative data and qualitative data, are usually the cause of better sales figures. Heavy investment should be done within areas that amplify those outcomes, not just move figures as that’s usually a short-term strategy.
2. Design is more than a department
   When embedded within cross-functional teams, design can help break frictional silos and get products to market quicker. This is due to the fact that when dispersing the responsibility of design to even non-designers, everyone becomes the custodian of the customer experience.
3. Design is more than a phase
   Involving designers very early on within the strategy phase up until post-launch will force designers to think about the entire ecosystem your product or service is within and how to make it better for prospective customers. An example of this could be by coupling design research such as an ethnographic study with existing proxy data to understand customers’ needs and habits, which could inform the next line of products.
4. Design is more than a product
   The sad truth is that the majority of product teams live in splendid isolation, which is then reflected onto different touchpoints within the customer journey. Some product designers think that their responsibility is to shore up the UX & the UI and call it a day. Design is more than software. This particular takeaway lends itself to a process I firmly believe we should be more invested in, this being organizational design.

He noted that through conducting this study, he observed different cases of leadership trying to make sure the rest of the company did not lose touch with their customer. One example of how a select number of companies tried to achieve this was to tie the performance of a team’s output to customer satisfaction. In an attempt to counter this detachment a member of JPMorgan’s leadership said that they intentionally block out one entire day every month to spend time with customers and understand their needs, motives and frustrations.

Takeaways

• Isolated sales figures or conversion metrics are shallow if not coupled with customer outcomes when measuring business performance. Those outcomes could even be as crude as looking at your products’ Amazon reviews or ratings.
• Design is too important to belong to just designers, everyone should feel responsible for shaping the best customer experience possible.

Jack Koloskus: Designing New Aesthetics

Jack started his talk by arguing that the way certain companies have gone about communicating the news to audiences is outdated, as it’s almost solely reliant on cues from traditional media. He also argued that the quality of internet advertising has suffered because of this as it becomes heavily diluted when trying to convey a brand’s message within a limited space.

The Outline’s comprehensive CMS which Jack walked through, was no different to how we’re accustomed to building design systems. We usually set up a toolkit within our respective tool, usually made up of components or symbols, which our peers can use to iterate faster on core product flows. In this case, the limited toolkit enables editors to enrich their stories and pieces.

Some of the results that this toolkit enabled were almost like a love letter to the early days of the web where dogmatism within interface design was inexistent, and interfaces were garish and unpolished but delightful. Whilst some of the output was somewhat brutalist, the art direction still undergoes different rounds of hypotheses and A/B testing.

In his closing remark, he noted that designers should start building systems for ourselves and others to prescribe delightful outcomes because if we control the platform, we can control the design.

Takeaways

• Designers should be capable enough of building a watertight system that supports an infinite number of combinations so as to enable their non-design counterparts to make great design decisions without the need for supervision.
• These systems should always be built with an escape hatch that’s used sparingly to try different things that aren’t yet supported. Before introducing this, there should ideally be a clear definition of how and when to break out of the system.
• Having hypotheses-backed aesthetics and a data-informed art direction can help elevate the message or enable the intended behavior.

Masuma Henry: The Business of the Underserved

Masuma started off her talk by sharing a personal anecdote with the rest of the attendance about her upbringing and how her early experiences have had a hand in taking note of the proclivities of the underserved. She followed up by saying that designers have a responsibility in not only adding business value, but also support the needs of different pockets of customers including low-income, gendered and racialized populations along with people with disabilities.

In an attempt to achieve this, Masuma asked each of us to reconsider the questions that we ask ourselves and stakeholders at each of the different phases in the product development lifecycle.

1. Define: When we’re defining the problem space, trying to see why it’s a problem in the first place and who it’s affecting we should be asking ourselves: “Who should be included that isn’t today?”. This will help us broaden (at least intrinsically) the pool of people that we should be solving this problem for.
2. Develop: Once we’ve synthesized our findings and started to converge on a direction, another question that should make its way into our lexicon is: “How might we represent more of our society?”. Masuma actually brought up an example of how MOD pizza stuck by their early commitment to use their business as a platform to make positive social impact. An example of this can be seen in the company’s workforce which is made up of individuals with somewhat troubled pasts, developmental or physical differences.
3. Deliver: In our attempts to fine tune the vocabulary of our press releases and messaging, we should be asking “What shared values should we promote?”. Your product’s benefits could be best communicated when it’s producing value through addressing actual societal challenges and making social progress. Looking at the economics and processes around your product can help with realizing its broader impact which in itself could translate into a message that genuinely resonates with prospects.
4. Refine: In our endless pursuit to iterate and refine experiences within products to move figures and satisfy customers, we need to sometimes stop and ask: “Which viewpoints need exposure?”. Regardless of how hard you try, there’s always going to be a pocket of customers that you’ve supposedly served that have been left feeling underrepresented after going through a particular experience. By asking this question, it would help not only relieve the former, but might also unlock newer opportunities.

Takeaways

• In the age of highly personalized experiences and intelligent recommendation engines, inclusivity is no longer a nice to have, it’s a must.
• Being intentional in representing more individuals through your product development process can come through making deliberate decisions such as hiring people in underrepresented communities. The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.
• Asking these questions helps our products, some of which have been solely developed for medium to high-income professionals in developing countries, become resilient in the face of systemic challenges such as poverty, lack of education or other marginalizations. Design can no longer be separated from the societal impacts it will inevitably have.

Anisha Jain: How Small Learnings can Add Up to Big Changes

This talk by Anisha was another one of my favourites. It was structured in a way as if it was almost a retelling of the cyclical design process that lives in the back of our heads. She started the talk with a personal anecdote of how her brother had convinced their parents to have an open mind and allow for momentary shifts in perspective, in their quest to get a dog.

These same attitudinal shifts needed to happen for Dropbox to realize there needed to be a change within their initial mission statement to have a broader impact on the world. One particular study carried out by a design researcher which stated that high functioning, collaborative teams don’t care about productivity, started to set the gears in motion.

Once she socialized her findings to the rest of the team through an immersive workshop, the company found itself in a state of flux. Until this point, Dropbox was investing in productivity tools for people who don’t really care about productivity. What happened after that realization was a series of things that set the company on course to rethink their reason for being.

Listen for the Unexpected

Notifications seem to be bane of every office worker’s existence. Tools that brandish themselves as productivity enablers, have seemingly added more to our mental load rather than remove. They seem to be omnipresent, always asking for our partial attention through badges and widgets whooshing in from every corner of our screen. Supposedly, these things were designed to enable maximum focus for the thing we’re actually paid to do, creative work. Dropbox was fueling this, instead of enabling people to feel creatively fulfilled at work.

Change the Inside First

“Walk a mile in your customer’s shoes” is what Dropbox did to make sure they fully understand the ramifications of shifting their focus. Anisha stated that a few teams had started by experimenting with the internal culture such as having a no meeting Monday (which sounds glorious), moving one-on-ones outside and introducing Spark Talks for team members to share different skills. Only then could they find out whether these ideas actually translated well.

Distill Learnings

The consistent nudges of change that came about as a result of the findings led the product designers to organically start exploring these same ideas within Dropbox’s product line. They started to ask questions like “What if you could search for conversations about content?”, “What if there were prompts to enable more actionable feedback?”, “What if you could onboard a new employee through a tailor-made knowledgebase?” and “What if you could connect to a calendar to help you prepare for a meeting?”. Each of those ideas came as a result of a workshop designed to distill those earlier findings into four product principles, these being shown below.

Amplify Beliefs

The rebrand that somewhat divided the design community, was a significant amplification of the initial murmurs from different users. If Dropbox was to be a tool that enabled less busy work and more creative work, the brand needed to reflect that same belief, starting from the mission. The cosmetic layer of the brand was one that had been adopted by countless other productivity tools, this included the flat illustrative pastel-washed assets. To re-engage a demotivated workforce, sometimes you need bundles of optimism to unlock their creative energy. One of the design principles within the rebrand was defined to do just that. This was duality, whereby seemingly functional standardized visual decisions were coupled with those that were surprising. This was mirrored in elements like the disharmonious color combinations and the endless typographic combinations.

Takeaways

• The mission our products are usually driven by, might be ill-informed or outdated since the landscape of products competing in the same space, wanting to have as large of an impact, starts to grow exponentially. It’s best if sometimes we step back and see exactly what questions we have about the values and aspirations of the customers we’re serving.
• The most effective teams focus their energy on relationships, not productivity. They are motivated by the why not the way. They also identify as creative workers, not knowledge workers.
• It’s worth actually asking questions that we might have about the values and aspirations the people we build products for, hold dear. In doing so, we might find ways to better serve them instead of fulfilling another short-term metric. A bottom-up approach that starts from a set of findings just might change the company’s trajectory, and as a result its impact on the world.

Benjamin Hersh: Every Product has a Voice

Another really great talk was delivered by Ben from Medium (this is super meta) who talked about the importance of words and how we could best use them in product experiences. In an attempt to understand this idea, Ben proposed a framework whereby an effective dialogue between parties follows three principles.

1. Be Clear

Reading takes effort, it’s why people gravitate towards speeches that are simple but effective in their delivery. Clarity doesn’t always mean using just a few words. There’s an underlying message through everything we say. Yet, sometimes we lack the conviction in actually laying it out using simple terminology.

It’s not just that, we also need to recognize that ideas are complicated. An example of where we can exercise clarity is through payment walls. These views usually have a low opacity paragraph written with all the legal jargon you’d expect, chucked down at the bottom, telling you how it’ll handle your credit card data. That in itself is irresponsible. This moment, often designed with a certain hostility can turn into a conduit for trust and credibility.

2. Be a Friend

By nature, we’re social beings, designed to respond to positive interactions. When we’re interacting with a product, we’re interacting with an imaginary friend helping us navigate the situation. It’s usually best to speak to a user, using the second person (“You”).

It’s important to note that just because you’re speaking to your customer through a product, that doesn’t give you the liberty to say something you wouldn’t actually say in person. An error message written to deflect such as ‘You’re not invited to your organization’, isn’t really going to build confidence. One example of how to use friendly microcopy is Medium’s payment wall that comes in the form of an interruptive modal headlined by ‘Pardon the interruption’.

3. Be Expressive

Your product’s personality and voice can manifest themselves into the tone that you establish within your copy. An example showing this was Medium’s inline paywall after reading a few sentences from a paid article with a headline ‘You read a lot’ followed by some subtext trying to upsell the service.

Whilst it may be somewhat passive aggressive and suggestive, it also has playful elements that make up the overall tone of voice. Other examples included a random story generator at the end of a newsletter and microcopy that is self-aware and poking fun at itself at the expense of the reader’s liking.

As shown above, each of these qualities are interdependent and are closely related with each other. A conversation needs to be clear for it to be understood, it can be amplified if it actually has social nuance which makes it relatable to an extent. When that same conversation is conveyed through a charismatic disposition, it becomes a rich experience.

Takeaways

• The majority of products are made up of words, thus each of those words making up sentences has a direct link to how effective someone understands your product. Plan English is the best form of communication, bar none.
• Clarity is not just effective, it’s also ethical and it’s in your user’s interest. Words matter because the underlying subtext may be about signing off something we don’t really agree with in the first place.
• You can couple expressive microcopy with business intent and still get results and a movement in specific figures.

Vanessa Li: Reducing Friction in Design

Well-designed products usually heed by the age-old principles such as reduce cognitive load and maintain consistency. TikTok is no different as it aims to captivate and cultivate a typically young audience of avid social media users. Vanessa‘s talk was focused around how the company’s flagship product has evolved through a series of iterations by addressing friction.

She argued that most content consumption platforms that are heavily focused on video content, do not enable immersion due to overlapping priorities within the interface itself. As such, friction stands in the way of true immersion which in turn affects a person’s true sentiment. Vanessa outlined three takeaways from her experience in addressing this problem.

1. Friction can be found anywhere at any time

The TikTok design team set out to answer four key questions in an effort to enable further uptake of the product with the intended audiences. Through talking to users and looking at metrics, each of the questions below came to a resounding no, which signalled the need for redesigning core flows or views. Ultimately, what the team went for was to overhaul certain views such as the profile view, minimizing the branding and personality throughout to not let it impede the actual content.

2. Reducing friction is not just a design decision

In addressing a problem we think is just visual, the first thing on the chopping block seems to be the interface. In TikTok’s case, the team owes up to the fact that the product is a vehicle for user-created content. As such, the role of algorithms designed to make decisions on what content a user is exposed to, is just as important in addressing friction as the way the product experience is packaged.

As a designer you have no control over the content itself. That being said, you do have control over how and what content is rendered to your user. Below is a visual representation of the predictive models and behavioural-based systems at play, rendering content at different points of discovery or consumption. Naturally, as each of these tailored models are refined through methods like machine learning, possible points of friction are minimized.

3. Reduce friction even further

There will always be points of friction that can be addressed, even if seemingly negligible. By addressing them, you help your user become fully immersed rather than partially occupied. Vanessa walked us through some practical examples of how TikTok is doing this, like optimizing how users recharge their in-app coins which they use to get gifts for content creators to continually upload quality content. Another example of tackling friction was through intelligent tagging using computer vision, helping creators make their content more discoverable.

Takeaways

• Reducing friction doesn’t necessarily mean that we should redesign a module or an element every time, it can even come through different efforts that aren’t directly tied to the interface design, such as optimizing the algorithm rendering the actual content.
• If people use your product to consume content, you can maintain stickiness by removing interruptive experiences that focus on effort to discovery and move them towards a more immersive experience.

Alyson Nakamura: Reinventing Charity with Design

Like Masuma, Alyson also started her talk with a personal anecdote in which she described her experience as a young child collecting rocks, which she considered a treasure. Jean Bosco, a teenager on the other side of the world was collecting water from a brown, murky, stagnant pond. He considered the mere existence of there being water to collect, a treasure.

With 660 million individuals still not having access to clean drinking water due to the water crisis, and 42 million Americans distrusting charities, it’s safe to say that Charity Water has their work cut out for them. In an effort to address both these issues Scott Harrison, the founder, reframed them using the ‘How Might We’ question structure. A couple of questions that came to light as a result of this exercise were “How might we radically change the giving experience?” and “How might we be radical stewards of donor money?”.

Naturally, after pondering about these problems, a few light bulbs went off in Scott’s head. Those ideas would then later culminate in a brand that captivated people just like consumer brands did, a fully transparent and trackable process by which a 100% of the proceeds went to charity, and a number of software products that facilitated all of this. Before any of that could take place though, Scott had to validate one hypothesis he had around the stewardship of donor money. So, he hosted a party which people had to pay 20 dollars for entry to, and donated the total capital raised to a refugee camp in Northern Uganda, building three wells.

Each donor received an email telling them where their money had gone to, coupled with the GPS coordinates of the project and photographic proof of the water flow. Scott knew his initial statement around virtuous stewardship to be true when partygoers wouldn’t believe that a charity would report back after what seemed like, a negligible donation. This early experiment not only helped validated his initial insights, but also paved the way in how Charity Water now builds donor experiences.

The three things that Scott landed on when asking that initial ‘How Might We?’

It turns out that articles talking about how a company’s culture comes mainly from the founder, aren’t an overly used soundbite. This was evident when Alyson started to speak about a few hypotheses that the product team were testing in an effort to improve their reporting and donor products.

Hypothesis #1: Communication

The first hypothesis was around connecting donors to their monthly gift with measurable projections and meaningful representations of people being served. This was tested by asking Spring members, to fill in information around how they spend their time and what they valued the most. The result would be a video portrait of someone like them staring back, juxtaposed alongside a data visualization detailing how their donations have been used.

Hypothesis #2: Reinspiration

With industry titans Netflix and Spotify normalizing the subscription model, it was only a matter of time until Charity Water capitalized on this opportunity by introducing it’s own subscription-based donor experience, Spring. The problem here is that value in consumption-oriented experiences is much easier to perceive at a shallow glance, whereas subscribing to a service like Spring requires a deeper more genuine buy-in, even though the decision to donate should be obvious.

Apart from the material coming straight from the field where wells are being installed, subscribers are also exposed to gated content in the form of newsletters, video clips and stories. Each of these contains feel good gems that further validates the initial decision to donate on a monthly basis. One of the challenges that the product team faced was the well-known problem of inbox equity, which led to the team hosting the content locally to give the donor better control over viewing it.

Hypothesis #3: Recognition

The third hypothesis was around giving each donor a place in the larger narrative by recognizing their contribution through milestones and achievements. Whilst this is an age-old product mechanic, it still amplifies and complements all the reasons to remain a recurring donor. Another way in which this hypothesis was put the test, was through a chat prototype, connecting donors to partners on the field. One participant remarked that she was actually talking to the “hands and feet of her donation.”

Near the end of the talk, Alyson recalled her experience working on a corporate travel product and how she decided to make the switch to the non-profit space. She ended the talk on a thought provoking note, asking each audience member “Will you wait to give back, or will you work to give now?”

Takeaways

• Impactful social change can happen through product design, the shortage of people working in that space is a problem that needs to be addressed.
• Verbalizing assumptions and framing them as deductive measurable hypotheses can help when tackling challenging problems such as maintaining a healthy retention curve for your flagship product.
• On the other hand, if access to data is somewhat limited, making bets using an inductive approach can be just as useful for your team. Your hypotheses could be one that doesn’t necessarily have to arrive at a specific outcome, but is informed on an educated belief. In Charity Water’s case, igniting the already existing generosity of humanity can be one of those beliefs.

Felix Lai: Crafting Emotional Journeys in FIFA

Similar to Tobias’ talk, Felix Lai talked about the importance of embedding emotional immersion within our product experiences. The talk was centred around how this was being done on the latest installment of Electronic Art’s FIFA series. I know this series all too well having played every installment since FIFA 06 back when Rooney donned the front cover, so it was kind of surreal to listen to the design decisions behind a game that’s frankly been a part of my life.

In each installment, the thrill of scoring a goal and remembering how to do a knee slide celebration was the gold standard for immersion. With every passing year, it seemed as if incremental improvements to the game engine through new animations and better ball physics were the only ways to deliver emotionally engaging experiences.

By asking “How might we better communicate these complex emotions within a game”, the product team landed on a well-known technique, storytelling. This realization inevitably led to the development of a new game mode called The Journey, which took the player through all the trials and tribulations of becoming a professional footballer in one of the hardest leagues in world football.

In an attempt to shed some light on how challenging this actually is, Felix also walked us through the number of sub-experiences, states and flows that would need to contain that same emotional experience. Now the question becomes “How might we scale emotional immersion from a system design point of view?”. In order for each part of the interface to match the immersion established within gameplay, each experience needs to follow the below framework.

Purposeful Immersion

Triple A titles in the game industry sometimes feel like they’re reusing a formula from the same playbook when it comes to immersion. What it usually comes down to is an abundance of polished animations at a specific plot point, only to be disappointed when it comes to maintaining that same feeling throughout the entire experience. As the fidelity of technology drastically increases it seems as if at times, a select number of developers choose to turn to the superficial rather than the functional.

Novelty can turn into an annoyance quickly, if not embedded with purposeful consideration. The diagram above describes the immersion matrix used by the FIFA user experience team to make sure that a player actually remains engaged after an endless amount of interactions. The horizontal axis can be used to answer a question around where an experience should lie in the spectrum when it comes to balancing emotion and function. On the other hand, the vertical axis is more helpful to understand whether you want to deliver a realistic experience, or something that is abstracted from realism for players to understand the mechanics as quickly as possible.

As an example, Felix used a well-known game mode called Career Mode which is essentially a manager simulation game that deals with transfers, player relationships and managing finances within a club of your choice. He argued that an experience shouldn’t just sit in one quadrant. For it to deliver the same immersion as done so within gameplay, it needs to be functionally immersive. In short, it needs to be complemented with something more emotional. For true immersion, the transfer negotiation experience was one particular element that had to transcend the limits of the interface, for a player to actually feel anxious and tense about getting the player they want.

When we design experiences, we usually look to linear one-dimensional visualizations when it comes to measuring emotion, noticing anomalies and trying to rationalize dips. Truly immersive products and game user experience design flies in the face of all that. They contain emotional journeys that are wholly dependent on different angles, dimensions and perspectives.

Contextual Design

The Journey was one example where the presentation went beyond static interfaces that acted as shortcuts, towards complementary in-game experiences. The challenge that the product team faced was connecting players with Alex Hunter’s emotional moments. They realized that these on-pitch and in-between moments could be leveraged not just for immersing players, but also onboarding others who are not as familiar with the game.

The key moments that were identified as opportunities for contextual design were during training sessions, matches, making a decision and career development. One practical example of how this principle is applied is within the training hub, setting the tone with an immersive user interface, realistic environment and player positioning. Another example was how the team turned pre-game loading states into delightful and productive experiences, showing Alex Hunter walking out from the tunnel along with all the necessary context. Both these moments were opportunities that the product team identified to capitalize on the emotional aspects that emanate from the gameplay.

UX Principles & Frameworks

Naturally, scaling all these moments consistently across the entirety of the game is a challenge. With a game mode like the Journey, each design decision would need to adapt to the dynamic nature of Alex’s story. To do this, Felix outlined a framework of interaction metaphors that the team uses for different moments within the experience.

As the fidelity of the interaction increases, the interface increases in coverage and prominence. An example of a light interaction metaphor is during an interactive dialogue, where the player must be enabled to make a decision after being immersed in the emotional hurdles of the story that’s unfolding. The hub that’s used in between matches is an example of a medium interaction metaphor whereby the player is shown the different paths they can take, but still have a window into Alex’s life at different points in his journey. A heavy interaction model, that’s employed by most AAA titles, namely God of War, Spiderman and Horizon Zero Dawn is a skill tree where the player can purchase different skills after gaining some form of in-game currency.

Takeaways

• Designing emotional and immersive experiences is a multidimensional undertaking wherein multiple experiences would need to be orchestrated gracefully enough to enable true delight.
• Immersive products usually contain sub-experiences that can live or transcend to multiple quadrants. Whilst not exceedingly immersive, a functionally abstract experience such as adding a listing could still possibly be amplified with an emotionally realistic greeting message, showing the host’s hospitality.
• Identifying key moments within your product where you can decide what emotions you can make more prevalent, and then delivering an impactful solution that reinforces those emotions can make for a compelling and meaningful experience.
• A weighted interaction framework can provide clear mental models, scalability and maintain consistency across multiple products and cycles.

Sofija & Teodora: TeYosh

This particular talk was inline with one of the themes for the conference which was to be a design rebel. Both Sofia and Teodora took turns in walking us through some of the projects they’ve worked on for clients using brutalist visuals and elements in the process. Each piece of work they showed was meant to not only provoke thought and start a dialogue, but also mirror the relationships that humans have developed with technology. It was clear that through their brutalist portfolio, they were trying to connect design to social topics through different means, be it Virtual Reality or Fashion.

One of the projects the pair had worked on, was was the Internet Dictionary of Online Behaviour. This project investigated and defined different internet phenomena that have emerged and become prevalent in our daily interactions. It laid bare the unwritten code of conduct that brought about terms like “cyberbullying” and “selfie”. The dictionary itself, offered a new satirical take on these terms, that can help with navigating the communication landscape in an era of overly pervasive social networks. One such term was the “forcie” which is defined as a selfie that you don’t voluntarily take part in, but are forced to do so by someone’s enthusiasm.

One common thread that stood out as the pair walked through their portfolio was the idea that, changes in user experience and user interface design stem from society’s needs. By creating new coherent aesthetics, being rebellious and pushing the boundaries on what’s possible, we may be able to not only better understand how to build experiences but also better understand our own individual needs.

Takeaway

• There is a direct correlation between the changing needs of society and the interfaces that don the products we use. As a result, our online condition and behaviour is reflected in different features and experiences. An example is our inclination towards short-form content due to our sometimes, limited attention span. This is reflected in products like Instagram and Snapchat.

This was only my second ever conference and I couldn’t have asked for more. Thanks to Ingrid Haug and the rest of the Design Matters team for the really well-organized conference, plus the really great brew! Now, it’s time to put all these takeaways into action, learn more and get results.

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