Designing for Vampires
Accessibility & usability brings more users to your apps. How about the undead?
I first started thinking about designing for vampires when HBO’s True Blood southern gothic fantasy series introduced a fictional product, Tru:Blood. In the story, the invention and wide distribution of this blood substitute made it feasible for vampires to “come out” and join human society. The product’s design and messaging made it believable, the story real. The True Blood marketing team launched an ad campaign with slogans like “Friends don’t let friends drink friends.” There was even a defictionalized product you could buy as a sugary drink in retail stores.
With that launching point, how should we apply design thinking to the crafting of goods and services for use by vampires?
In this first draft of design guidelines:
- For designers and product people: first principles, user research tips, and undead market sizing.
- Identity and identifiers for vampires.
- Inhuman factors and vampimetrics.
1. You are not the vampire.
First rule of design thinking: you are not the user.
And it helps to know not all vampires are alike.
- Some sparkle in daylight, others combust.
- Some are feral and will suck anything that bleeds, and many are discriminating connoisseurs of rare blood types.
- Some are loners, some tribal.
- There are many variations on vampire reproduction and parenting.
- Some pass for human, some can’t, and some don’t bother.
Clear your mind of assumptions and research the specific vampires your designs will serve. Dr. Bob Curran’s field guide to Vampires describes vampires from across the world and over time.
Tips for User Researchers.
Peter Szabo suggests being careful in lab settings.
Lee Duddel proposes observing focus groups and lab work from behind mirrored glass.
Ethnographic and similar in-person studies have been dangerous for researchers. [See Contextual Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice, 1976.]
Market opportunity
7 billion people alive today vs. 107 billion formerly-alive people, about “15 dead people for every living person.” [Population Reference Bureau, CNN, United Nations]
No nations currently report having ever conducted a census asking for residents to identify themselves as vampire or undead. I’m not sure if this is redacted since other sites cite the US Census of 2010 as having 580,000 vampires and a 1905 study put the world vampire population at one million.
2. Vampire Identity and Identifiers
Vampires challenge many assumptions about identifying and profiling users.
Date/Year of Birth
There are five considerations when using DoB with vampires.
- Did the vampire’s birth-culture use modern dates and calendars? Older vampires may have been born into cultures using Mayan, Hindu, Shinto, Hebrew, and other calendars.
- Was the vampire’s birth recorded? Vampires born in the last few centuries may have a defined birthdate. Older vampires may not have been born in a time, place, or caste where birthdays were noted.
- Recall? Did the memory of first birth date survive the transition to vampire? Survive a very long life? A human birthdate may be among forgotten details.
- A vampire has two birth dates. First, birth as a human. Then birth as a fledgling vampire. Be clear which one you’re using as part of the vampire’s identity.
- Second-birth is vaguely defined. Date “died” as a human? Date risen? Date first consumed blood?
So, designers:
- Tolerate missing birthdate or birthyear.
- Distinguish between first and second births.
- Use clarifying language for when they became a vampire.
First and Last Names.
Depending on culture, you may be designing for mononymous vampires. If you’re asking for First and Last name, you don’t know where they’ll drop their only name, or if the blank field was in error or intentional.
Do Names Survive Death as a Human?
No case law or codes say whether the undead must use the name they had as a human in legal matters.
Residence Privacy.
A persecuted minority, privacy matters to vampires. They don’t give up where they sleep. Don’t require Home addresses when a shipping address or a broader geocode will do.
Marital Status.
“‘Til death do us part.” It’s complicated.
Biometric identifiers.
Don’t assume cameras and scanners will show vampire fingerprints, retinas, facial structure, ear shape, or body movement. Some vampires don’t show up on camera. Others are too shiny to show up well.
3. Inhuman Factors.
Vision and Color.
Infrared. Some vampires see well into the infrared spectrum. If your product gives off heat, this may be visible. FLIR makes small systems that let you view your product as those vampires do.
Higher resolution and color depth perception. Your product may look fine to you. But if your vampire has superior vision, defects in manufacture or color may be apparent. Same with colors that look humanly identical but appear different shades to your subject.
Sunlight may be bad. Full spectrum light fixtures or natural sunshine may be harmful to your vampire. Use with care.
Red as a trigger. Hungry or immature vampires may be provoked by large quantities of blood-related red. You may choose to feature or minimize reds in your VUI depending on the outcome you seek.
Hostile Symbols as triggers. Proof your stock photography for posters or t-shirts with a Fellowship of the Sun logo. They were responsible for much vampire persecution until, well, um.
Time Perception, Body Speed.
Many vampires can move faster than you can perceive. To do that they have to be able to see faster than human vision or cognition.
Paul King, computational neuroscientist wrote “50 frames per second is the flicker-fusion rate — the frame rate at which the flashing of interrupted frames disappears and the image looks solid and continuous. This is why 50 Hz monitors look pretty good.”
For vampires, this is more than doubled, about 100 Hz. The iPhone 8 was vampire friendly on this score, with its120 Hz ProMotion display.
Key Times, Archaic Calendar/Time Systems
A few considerations when dealing with time.
Four times of day are more visceral with vampires. Sunset (when the sun falls completely below the horizon), End of Dusk (when there’s no longer any daylight refracted over the horizon), Dawn (when sunlight shows before sunrise), and Sunrise (when the sun first appears above the horizon).
Safety first. Google’s Waze Planned Drives feature looks up Astronomical Dawn time for where you are (when the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon) “so you make it home or to shelter with time to spare.”
Dawn Alerts. Block proposed events or set aggressive reminders about appointments that conflict with the next Astronomical Dawn or that don’t allow for extra time for transportation. Note: calculating dawn requires location information that may be blocked for privacy reasons. Do your best.
Fixed “8am–5pm office hours” don’t work. The start and end of night varies throughout the year. Sunlight keeps you from having an eight-hour shift that works in every season.
Archaic calendaring and time systems. Most human cultures use the Gregorian calendaring system and it’s the standard for most twenty-first century technology. Calendars from Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, and other religious traditions are still used. Most use lunar cycles for months. Many divide the daylight into equal “hours” of day and the night into equal portions of night. Depending on a vampire’s age and origins, many of their memories will be tied to non-Gregorian calendars.
Location (vertical depth)
Google Maps captures altitude in addition to latitude/longitude. Allow for subterranean (underground) and subsurface (underwater) measurements.
Error Messages
Don’t irk vampires with inept error messages.
Seriously. Don’t.
Non-Humanoid Forms, Shapes.
Anthropometrics quantify human body shapes, sizes, and motion. It’s what lets architects size doorways, furniture makers know how to scale a chair, car makers know where to position mirrors.
Sadly, we have little vampimetric data for non-human-appearing form factors.
Languages and Literacy
While many of us design for a multilingual world, acknowledge that older vampires often speak older versions of modern languages. Not English but Elizabethan English. Or dead languages, from Sanskrit and Old Norse to Coptic and Akkadian.
Speaking a language is not the same as being able to read and write. Many vampires were raised before public schools. Some remain illiterate.
Touch Devices
You touch with…
Look at Nosferatu’s claws.
Smaller devices are very difficult to grasp.
The wrap-around hands/claws also interfere with seeing a mobile/tablet screen.
Touch surfaces and mixed reality gestural interfaces were never designed for long, hard, bony fingertips.
If you want to cultivate empathy for this form, try wearing costume claws for a day.
You touch through…
Most vampiric touch screen use is in dirty environments. Dirt, dust, mold, spider webs, cobwebs, blood, mud, viscera and much worse. Being able to easily clean your touch surface and have it work despite the dirt and gore is the difference between occasional and addictive use of your gear.
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Thanks again to Skype for Vampires. This is part of my Designing for Vampires series at Product Hospice.
