Human centered design in the age of experience
Design’s growing influence in bridging our relationship with technology as we move further into the experiential age
Back in May this year I had the intention of writing this article as a review of my key takeaways from Semi Permanent 2016. However coming back to writing this several months later (and with a decent dose of procrastination) I’ve had the opportunity to attend talks, design hacks, watch film screenings and read up heavily on what looks to be not only the permeating theme of Semi Permanent 2016, but also the dominant approach to design as we move towards an age of experience— Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design (HCD).
It’s a concept popularised by design powerhouse IDEO as a process of approaching design at the “intersection of empathy and creativity”, that begins with empathising with users then moving to build, test and iterate, keeping the user at the centre of the entire process. The growing popularity of the approach seems fitting for many reasons, primarily since:
- We are steering away from a consumption based product-focused economy, towards one of experience and platforms
- The human-computer relationship is tightening a rapid rate, propelled by the surge in the sharing economy, the Internet of Things (IOT) and smart systems, and immersive technologies including VR and AR.
One only had to glance at the tech-heavy lineup of Semi Permanent to notice the shifting face of design, with speakers including Ethan Eissman of Uber, Jon Wiley of Google, Jurgen Spangl of Atlassian, Dantley Davis of Netflix (now at Facebook), and Jon Lax of Facebook. But rather than reflecting a cultural shift of the festival away from its roots as a fringe design festival however, the lineup seems to reflect the maturation of the design industry as a whole and it’s movement upstream in business. The new path forward for Semi-Permanent looks to be of design as a way of thinking and solving problems, and the key role design is playing in shaping the ‘experience economy’ that we now live in.
“The problems that challenged designers in the twentieth century — crafting a new object, creating a new logo, putting a scary bit of technology into a pleasing or at least innocuous box — are simply not the problems that will define the twenty-first”
Tim Brown in Design for Change
From consumption to experience
As Jon Lax of Facebook suggested during the Future State panel discussion, we are now in the Platform Era in which design is focused more on what a product does and how it behaves, rather than what it looks like. Whether that be through re-imagining what TV show to binge on with Netflix, the way we collect loose change with Acorns, the way we get to the pub with Uber, or the way we write articles like this on Medium.
The surge in the sharing economy is testament to our increased reliability on digital platforms to connect us with services. What is also clear is that if a service is to succeed, it not only has to have visual appeal but more importantly has to offer a flawless user experience that places the user at the centre of the design experience to stand apart and ensure a resonating experience that people will want to return to.
Furthermore as our range of options increase, so too do the standards we place on the services we interact with. Just the other week I remember going to order some take-out food after a long day in the studio. I flopped in an exhausted heap onto the sofa when I got home, pulled out my phone and flicked to Menulog to make one of my usual orders. After placing my order and waiting a few minutes for the confirmation SMS to come through, nothing happened so I gave the restaurant a call to see if they received my order. After finding out that they hadn’t, do you think I tried ordering on Menulog again? Of course not, I simply browsed to another food delivery service and had them deliver the food instead. This may seem harsh, but it’s the reality we live in — users attention is short, and choice creates empowerment. For the service provider, user empowerment means offering a seamless user experience.
Experience is a two-way street
Likewise, involving the customer in a participatory capacity is key to empowering them. Think airbnb, Uber — the premise behind these services aren’t unique, however what sets them apart is their ability to actively engage the user in participating in the experience and allowing their voices to be heard through direct feedback, including ratings and excellent customer service. By activating the consumer as a participant, the paradigm of a passive consumer is shifting towards one of active engagement.
“Instead of seeing it’s primary objective as consumption, design thinking is beginning to explore the potential of participation. The shift from a passive relationship between consumer and producer to the active engagement of everyone in experiences that are meaningful, productive and profitable”
Tim Brown in Design for Change
This feedback places accountability back on the service provider to ensure the experience is pleasant for the user — either that, or they walk. These days, it’s really as simple as that.
A culture of empathy
At the heart of HCD is a foundation in empathy for the user — from the early stages right through to testing. By placing the user at the core of the design process, Dantley Davis described how Netflix are able to develop deep, informed insights on the needs of the user through real-world interactions with customers from all walks of life, stimulating a culture of cultural awareness and empathy for their users. Through these real-world interactions, they were able to learn how many users were finding themselves spending far too much time browsing through titles than actually watching, showing a clear need for more powerful machine learning and recommendation system (likewise, a concept which Spotify has executed effectively). Harnessing real-world insights with rich data and machine learning provide Netflix with the fuel they need to develop design solutions that genuinely understand their users needs and engage with them in a way that develops a strong relationship that encourages them to continue to use the service.
Furthermore, as services become increasingly cross-platform and multi-regional, cultural awareness is vital in the success of the experience. In designing the Uber experience for India, Eismann described how Uber discovered how, upon immersing themselves in the Indian market, a cashless experience was simply not feasible.
“One trip to India is enough to spur 100 new ideas. When a local experiment works, that new innovation is likely to get pumped back to our headquarter team where we then distribute it out to the rest of the world.”
Ethan Eismann
By adopting a human-centered design approach starting with empathising with the user, other friction points were discovered such as differences in driver literacy rates (leading to a focus on color and iconography), and wireless dropout zones.
For more in-depth writeup on the Uber cash experience, check out this article.
Gretel’s work for Netflix is an excellent example of a seamless design experience that places the user at the core of the experience, rather than a design limited to the confines of a single medium. For example, it makes use of familiar visual metaphors such as “the stack”, bold text for legibility to account for all ranges of viewing ability, as well as echoing natural interaction paradigms that translate across platforms such as ease-in-ease-out motion.
“Really it translates across all parts of branding: Language behavior. Type behavior. Motion behavior. We’re trying to create things that can speak and have signature behaviors across any medium.”
Greg Hahn, Gretel
The importance of HCD in immersive interfaces
I recently had the opportunity to attend a masterclass with industry guru Mark Pesce on Human-Centered Design in VR. What quickly became clear is how fundamental adopting a human-centered approach is when designing for immersive experiences, and one of the key points that resonated with me was that the designer should always remember the body and that people have a broad spectrum of capabilities and experiences.
For example, reading a review earlier in 2016 of Crytek’s original release of The Climb, the majesty of the graphics cannot be denied — it is a stunningly realistic looking game which the reviewer Scott Hayden points out, however the fundamental issue of exacerbating neck pain leads to a poor user experience. And when your users are high-end computer equipment owners who probably spend hours hunched over a computer per day, causing neck pain is a real issue.
“The amount of craning and straining you have to do really takes its toll, and immediately makes you play more conservatively for fear of pulling something….There wasn’t any instruction warning me about neck strain, so I tried the game standing up which greatly reduced the pain since I was in part using my back to incline my head. The damage however had already been done, and my neck is still killing me.”
Scott Hayden, Road to VR
Three things about this quote really leaped out to me as being fundamental design issues:
- The physical strain placed on the user led to them approaching the experience uncomfortably
- No indication warning of neck strain
- No assumption that standing was the correct way to play the game.
Where in a static screen experience like a console game, a design flaw can cause frustration and ruin the experience, in virtual reality poor design has the potential to do real physical harm. Adopting a HCD approach would have highlighted these fundamental design flaws in earlier stages and forced the design team to iterate and address the problems.
Designing beyond input and output
Going a step further than addressing the true needs of the user from a human-centred point of view is predicting users needs — being proactive rather than reactive, an area that Hector Ouilhet of Google elaborated on during the Future State discussion panel. He described the importance designing beyond input and output in creating a truly engaging experience, through implicit interaction where the user’s primary intention is not to interact with a system, however the system understands it as input. For example, Hector used the example of planning a trip to Semi Permanent, and the number of steps (booking a flight, checking visa requirements, choosing a hotel etc) that one has to go through to get to the final result. What if, say, I dictated to Google — “I’m thinking of taking a trip to Semi Permanent” — the system would understand the implicit interactions behind this request, and get to work at making arrangements in the way a personal assistant may do.
Now go another step further and fuse this concept of implicit interaction with another service like Netflix — you turn on the Apple TV, and load up the app. A voice asks you, “What do you feel like watching today?” and you replied “I’ve had a long day, nothing heavy” — the system would then curate results for you based on your likes and mood, and after the film ask you “What did you think?” “Not bad, but not great” The interaction would allow for a more personalised and friction-less experience.
This human-centred viewpoint addresses one of the key friction points that people encounter when interacting with a system — its inability to remember. By transferring what Don Norman refers to as ‘knowledge in the head’ to ‘knowledge in the world’, it is clear that AI is going to play a key role in the the future of interaction design. With the announcement of Google Assistant last week, it appears that this future is very much here.
What does this mean for the designer of the future?
As a visual designer trained in interaction and motion design, particularly in media, my career has been focused on the execution side of design. Time would always be focused on the ideation and execution stages of design, and launching into the design stages without a firm grasp of the users needs and a general lack of empathy was not at all uncommon. Sometimes it seemed like more time was spent obsessing over that perfect typeface, fine tuning keyframe tangents, and perfecting layouts. However what has become clear over this last year in particular, is that there is becoming less and less room for this isolated school of approaching design, particularly in media which is evolving at a rapid rate as viewing habits fragment across platforms with varying levels of interactivity and audience participation. An approach that begins with empathy and understanding the user is no longer a luxury (as of course it involves more time and resources), but is crucial in ensuring a seamless holistic experience that will engage users to return to the service.
This new way of approaching design inevitably calls for an evolution of the designer itself, and whilst there will always definitely be a place for the designer as a skilled executor of ideas, the future is yearning for the designer to evolve beyond design do-er to design thinker. One that not only excels in their discipline, but that also possesses the depth to branch out into other skills to collaboratively work with an interdisciplinary team — what McKinsey & Co coined the “T-shaped” designer.
Design is expanding beyond what our eyes can see and beyond what our fingers can touch on a flat screen. The future of design is less and less about discreet objects and more and more about continuous experiences.
Julie Zhou in 99U’s Make Your Mark
With the transition into an era of design that focuses on the human-centred experience and tightens the relationship between human and machine, the ability to work collaboratively within an interdisciplinary team and approach design solutions from a diverse human-first, rather than aesthetic-first, perspective could never be more important.
Kelsey Shanahan is Co-founder and Digital Innovation & Design Consultant at Studio Hi in Sydney. Studio Hi is a design-led innovation and digital transformation consultancy, using human-centered design practices to enable businesses to thrive in digital innovation with the agility they need to move like startups.
