Applying the Engagement Design model
My book “Engagement Design: Designing for Interaction Motivations” has now been published by Springer. Knowing the importance that models have in the applied domains, but also understanding the speed at which everything goes, I decided to write this short text to introduce the book, namely, adding a short explanation about how the model can be used and applied in different scenarios.
UX and Experience Design
The processes and methodologies of UX have proved to be very important when it comes to understanding what happens during the Experience of interactive works, however, we still need to design them. Of course, we need to understand the experience, but above all, we were interested in understanding how to can act on the experience. What we have been seeing is that UX has followed a path that is too close to Usability studies, evaluating principles that contribute to the design review. Even in the most UX-friendly processes, in which initial stages of listening to users are carried out, the data has been used more to inform thematic or aesthetic content, serving less the formal understanding of the interaction.
An example of this UX approach is the evaluation model in Figure 2, which is a broad model, capable of responding to questions at different stages of development. In the first layer, we have the traditional usability, which can begin to be analyzed before the design, in the sense of the specific requirements of the case. However, when we start to test the domains of satisfaction and meaning of the experience, we enter the domains of subjectivity, which ends up making the reading of generalizable patterns very complex.
That is, the evaluation methodologies serve well in deconstructing and describing the artefact, in understanding how users receive the works, but they are not the best help for the processes of ideation and invention of the interaction. That is why we need a model to support interaction design, a model that presents a formal basis capable of sustaining the creative processes of interaction, without the immediate dependencies of the subjectivity of the experience.
The Approach
In the book “Engagement Design” we purposed to move from the overall idea of Experience, the larger all-time conscience of reality, to the emergent sense of dialogical process between artefacts and subjects. The work was developed following the general idea that one feels engaged when the activity is meaningful. That conceptualization was developed through a transdisciplinary approach between interaction design theory and media communication, with the support of a large toolbox of theories and concepts from other disciplines — psychology, informatics, sociology, aesthetics, literature, film, game design and graphic design. Looking then at Experience as something produced in the relation between “subject”, “artefact” and “context”, we moved into the specificity of the meaningful interaction — restricted by “know”, “do”, “feel” (Overbeeke, 2002, Verplank, 2006) — following Hassenzahl (2010) proposition of understanding interaction through users “needs and motives”.
This approach allows reducing the complexity of the Experience to Engagement Streams, eliminating subjectivity, to attack more concrete flows of interaction, focused on motivation and meaning, be it in the order of facts, actions or feelings. This would then be supported by the major factors that define human personality.
Understanding the Streams through Personality
The Engagement Streams are summed up and characterized in Chapter 6 after the presentation of their internal components in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of the book, but just to present a quick overview of the modelling, we used the lives of three of the greatest minds of our history: Descartes, Da Vinci, and Shakespeare.
Descartes dedicated most of his life to searching for answers in patterns and abstractions that could help him solve the rational puzzle of being alive, for which he achieved the response “Cogito ergo sum”. During his interrogation of variables, he developed a method to guide him in the problem-solving process, which became known as “cartesian doubt”: he felt the need “to know”. Da Vinci didn’t like books everything for him needed to be tested and experimented. He was an avid explorer of the world, conducting empirical studies into painting, sculpture, geometry, engineering and botany, as well in many other fields. To understand reality, Leonardo preferred the enactive approach. He dissected dozens of bodies and even opened a pig while its heart was still beating to see how the blood was being pumped and to understand the internal functioning of a heart. Da Vinci used the world as his playground, following no playbook, using his full free will and autonomy to push the boundaries of existing knowledge, following his thirst “to do”. Shakespeare invested all his life in dramatizing lives, in trying to understand how people act and react, putting them inside virtual dramas to test their emotions, motives and competences. We can see this approach working through the words of Hamlet “We know what we are but know not what we may be” (Shakespeare, 1600). However, Shakespeare knew he could only attain knowledge through social affinity: all his work, all his ideas, were performed live, opening his knowledge to society to learn from the feedback they would provide. In the end, he contributed highly to innovating language, drama and narrative (Hardy, 1997), which he learned by “feeling”. All these three icons of our history lived all their lives doing these same activities, day after day. They were so engaged in experiencing it that nothing else would matter; their particular process of interacting with the world counted even more than the goal of their creations. Their mind models affected their interests and defined completely their engagement modes.
This is not a new idea. In the scientific literature we can find some tentative works around these human traits to analyse many types of action experiences: playing (Caillois, 1958), tooling (Strauss, 1962), drawing (Gardner, 1980) programming (Turkle & Papert, 1992), socializing (Baron-Cohen, 2003) or learning (Resnick, 2017). From all the conceptualizations discussed around human action traits, we realized the existence of three great types of interactors:
The Abstracters: worried about patterns, structures and causation, interested in universal rules;
The Tinkerers: moved by new sensations and experimentation, willing to build, create and make;
The Dramatists: attracted to humans and their stories, interested in all manners of socialization.
These three profiles were analysed in-depth making use different empirical studies made around the world, not only on personality, through the Five-Factor Model (McCrae & John, 1992), but also vocation models (Holland, 1997) and finally with all the data on Players Motivations, gathered throughout the last ten years by Yee (2009, 2015, 2019).
From Profiles to Engagement Streams
Bearing in mind that the issue was not to define profiles, but rather to use these profiles to build meaningful approaches in designing user actions, we focused on the triad of elements that form the meaning of the experience: subject, context and artefact. Therefore these elements of meaning were our main access to define the engagement streams, having dedicated to each of them one full chapter. From each chapter, we extracted the fundamentals and patterns of the interaction design for engagement, which gave us the model below (figure 3).
The model consists of three streams linked to the three profiles. However, the core design, like the classification of the streams, are not confined by profiles, the model aimed at defining engagement flows, at understanding and defining the actions of interaction. In other words, each stream presents a pair of interactive elements to support the definition of Profiles, Contexts and Artefacts, which then drives the interaction design through one of the three streams: Progression, Expression or Relation.
I must say that the greatest complexity faced in the development of this model was due to two distinct issues: transdisciplinarity and cognitive bias. At first, the need to summon and involve theory from multiple disparate disciplines. As for the second, the struggle was to work on each of the engagement streams and define them, for which it required cognitive modelling through deduction and intuition. Whenever moved into thinking and understanding the world from one of the stream modes point-of-view — progression, expression or relation — it was like following a specific flow of making meaning. When I needed to move between modes it was very difficult, due to the biases that each one present. After starting comprehending the world through Progression, it was difficult to move back into comprehending it through Expression or Relation, and vice versa, the readaptation of mental models is not immediate.
That is why Jeffrey Bardzell words, in the Foreword, are even dearer to me:
“[the book] offers a readable yet authoritative synthesis of the art, science and design of engaging experiences. It offers both the foundations of engagement design across a range of disciplines and a highly original synthesis of them. The book demonstrates that despite their vast terminological and methodological differences, the various theorizations of engagement can be integrated.”
How to Use the Model?
Interaction design is, by its behavioural nature, a human-centred design. So, to develop our interactive media projects, we start by investigating in detail the scenario we need to work on (e.g. diabetes management; language learning; fictional entertainment; etc.), to build a set of information that will support the entire work. To better understand the process, I’ve created a new graph that reorganizes the model presented above, in the applied logic of the goal-directed process.
We move forward with the distribution of target audiences in three groups, for which personas should be created that will correspond to each of our three interaction profiles: abstracters, tinkerers and dramatists. To carry out this first division, we need to use the Five-Factor Model and its evaluation tools, to find people who fit the personalities of Conscientiousness (for abstracters), Openness to experience (for tinkerers), and Agreeableness (for dramatists). After defining the groups, we need to work on their preferences, tastes and orientations, to start densifying the personas of each profile.
Following are the contexts, created from the scenario universe together with the preferences of the users of each profile. Here the designer starts the first ideation process, conceptualizing the contexts, modelling the content according to the needs of each user profile, thus advancing the definition of the engagement stream.
Finally, the artefact itself, the final step of the invention process, takes into account the profiles of the users as well as the contexts in which the design will be applied. Here the aim is to design artefacts that respond directly to the motivations of the profiles and are adapted to the contexts.
In approaching any scenario, we always need to understand whether the construction of the three streams is a necessity, or whether we can choose only one of these to develop. As I demonstrate in the last chapter of the book (“The Engagement Design Model and Applied Cases”), there are artefacts that work only in one of the streams, just as there are dual or multi-engagement artefacts. However, it should be noted that the design and implementation of the three streams in one single artefact requires complex and extensive work.
Zagalo, N. (2020). Engagement Design: Designing for Interaction Motivations. Springer Nature: Berlin. DOI: 10.1007/978–3–030–37085–5. URL: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030370848
