Crafting Next-Generation Experiences — Forging Impact Today AND Tomorrow
“With great power, comes great responsibility,” is a timeless quote that resonates with many. As new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and many more become readily accessible to the public, we as UXers must find the best way to create pleasant experiences with them.
SDXD’s March meetup, Crafting Next-Generation Experiences — Forging Impact Today AND Tomorrow, was centered around this— and it is what I’ll be covering in this article.
The event started off with an inspiring talk by Amish Desai, VP of Design & Experiences at Moonshot by PacteraEdge, and was followed by an excellent workshop facilitated by Stephanie Krell, Director of Experience Design at Valtech. The goal of the event was to provide a practical ways to apply Design Thinking to solutions that involve emerging technologies.
Thanks to American Specialty Health Inc., the event was held in one of their spacious conference rooms, which provided an excellent environment for the ideation workshop led by Stephanie Krell. To make it even better, pizza and materials were provided by Tiled, and there was a special giveaway sponsored by Sandbox VR.
Screenless Experiences
Amish began his talk by presenting a picture of Tony Stark from inside his Iron Man suit (above). At first glance, I was wondering how an Avenger could possibly be relevant, but Amish quickly explained how Tony’s suit seamlessly functioned using his AI J.A.R.V.I.S., AR, and other means to read his vitals. This was an accurate portrayal of how screenless interfaces should function, or so we think.
Amish boldly pointed out the main issue with screen interfaces — we’re all addicted to our phones!
The cursor is the drug dealer for us to give input for a quick dopamine fix — Amish Desai
While our smartphones can be extremely helpful, they have also caused users to become dependent on them. The question for designers is how to create truly pleasant experiences with this in mind. Yes, we may be able to create enticing experiences, but at what cost?
Every tweet, every status, every message you send is designed to give you a release in the form of likes, comments, and reactions. Because of this, we constantly find ourselves serving our computers, when they should be serving us. Unfortunately, due to how productive these devices make us, or how productive we perceive them to make us, we become dependent on them. Here are some reasons Amish stated for this dependency:
- Entertained
- Productive
- Connected
- Social
- On-the-go
- Informed
The issue here is not that we are being productive, but that we are a slave to our computers. With the rise of emerging technologies Amish proposes that designers begin focusing on screenless interfaces, where we:
- Provide technologically elegant solutions
- Put the users first
- Create the best possible outcome
- Transition from a reactive approach to a proactive approach
[Examples: Amazon Echo, military training, the Nest Project, the Tesla door handle, Phillips hue, and the Ford Focus]
Amish alluded that these screenless interfaces will remedy our dependence on technology, while simultaneously having technology shift to the role it was always meant to play, an assistant. In order for this to be accomplished, we need to learn how to properly leverage emerging technologies. In order to properly leverage emerging technologies, we need to strive for them to take in input in a similar manner as humans do, observing all the senses. This will be a shift in technology where we no longer measure the IQ of a device, but also humanize it to the best of our ability and measure it’s EQ as well. This will be the ultimate Turing Test.
In order for these technologies to have an EQ equivalent, they must be able to take in three categories of input according to Amish; Movement, Eyesight, and language.
Movement focuses on the interaction and tangibility of an object. A good example of this would be the screens you constantly see Tony Stark pull out of thin air when he’s analyzing data. Another interesting and more relatable example is the Reactable DJ Software, which Amish showed us during his talk.
According to Amish, when you’re focusing in on tangible interaction you want to focus on 5 things:
- Tangibility
- Materiality
- A physical embodiment of data
- A whole-body interaction
- An interaction in space and context
These all allow for the perfect tangible interaction and are what make Reactable such an excellent example.
Eyesight primarily focuses on spacial detection of where your eyes are at any moment. So if you’re focusing on a device it is aware that you’re looking at it and can respond.
Language is providing commands to a device like you would with Google Home or the Amazon Echo and it return it verbally delivers results to you.
Screenless = more crossfunctional thinking — Amish Desai
When executing these design criteria you always want to keep in mind how much input goes into any sort of task, according to Amish. This allows you to properly assess how you should utilize any of these emerging technologies which take advantage of your other senses. Without keeping this in mind you can make a screenless interaction too cumbersome for the everyday user.
A perfect example is the Ford Focus and how you can simply kick the bumper and the trunk pops open. Now imagine if you had to execute that task via language. The engineers would probably design it so you can audibly open any door, thus meaning you would have to specify the trunk. This can be a lot especially if you’ve just walked back to your car and are carrying groceries in both arms. The user experience for these screenless interactions is decided by focusing in on micro-moments. By focusing on micro-moments you can understand what is truly needed in the context of these scenarios and figure out how to have it executed most efficiently.
“Explore typical processes that exist with your primary and secondary users to find solutions — Amish Desai”
In short, with the rise of emerging technologies, we as designers need to translate “how can we accomplish that in the least amount of clicks” to the real world.
The best way to go about this, according to Amish, is to understand the user’s typical process. This allows you to get see what the user is already familiar with. Once you understand how your user group usually goes about executing tasks you can then ideate how to leverage technology to assist in executing these tasks in an even more efficient manner — leverage computers, don’t serve them. Now that you have some ideas on how you can leverage them, you want to individualize each technology for specific aspects of the task so that it doesn’t become too convoluted, confusing, and the user doesn’t have to assist the technology to accomplish the task. Remember the goal of the screenless interface is to have the technology assist the user to a point that they can simply be.
Now the challenging part in all of this, which no one has quite mastered yet, is making users develop trust with inanimate objects. This is something you must keep in mind when designing screenless interaction, especially since as technology has gotten more and more advanced humans have come to fear it. The obvious answer to this conundrum is to make them as human-like as possible, but how can we do that? Even at this point, it’s hard for people to trust Amazon Echo or Google Home, cause, well, we know you’re listenin’.
Emerging Technologies Ideation Workshop By Stephanie Krell
The second half of the meetup consisted of an ideation workshop ran by the magnificent Stephanie Krell. For this workshop, the meetup broke up into groups of 6, where Stephanie provided us with a topic that needed a solution that consisted of emerging technology [AI, AR, VR, Robotics, etc].
But First Energy Ball
The workshop began with Stephanie having each group doing an exercise that was called energy ball. During this exercise, you mold your energy ball [which is just air] with your hands and then share a few facts about yourself, followed by you tossing the ball to another one of your teammates and repeat until everyone has participated in the exercise. The goal of the exercise was to get everyone comfortable with each other and feel energized. This induces creative expression between teammates since you feel more open to share your ideas, but I couldn’t help but notice the resemblance between the exercise and many moves I witnessed while watching Dragon Ball Z as a child…
Being Assigned a Purpose
Once we had the energy ball out of the way, Stephanie assigned each team a purpose. It was either social or environmental. This was the category your team would ideate within.
Designers understand human behavior. That’s our job. — Stephanie Krell
Once we were assigned a purpose, we then had to ideate as many human behaviors we could think of that within that purpose. Once each team had finished writing down as many ideas as they could on sticky notes [within a 2-minute time frame] we began to create an affinity diagram with them.
Being Assigned an Emerging Technology
Once the affinity diagrams were complete, Stephanie gave each group a field they would focus their ideation session on.
Stephanie then went through a list of emerging technologies AI, AR, VR, and Robotics. We were given 2 minutes to ideate on as many ways that these technologies could be leveraged to ease are previously noted human behaviors.
i.e. If you were given the purpose “social”, assigned the field “tourism”, and had previously written down “humans eat together as social behavior”. Then when you were working on the AR technology portion you could ideate that you have an AR that when you’re traveling could give you the whole menu of a restaurant by simply looking at it. That way you know whether or not something sounds good before you’re seated, and trapped.
The Final Stage
Once we had ideated through all the technologies we then had 2 minutes to come up with a solution for our field using our previous ideations.
As you can see below, my group came up with an AI that looks at your likes and then creates an itinerary for you. You can then use VR to test out the vacation and see how the people you’re traveling with will react to your itinerary so you can fix any kinks in the trip. Once this is done you have a drone take you to your destination and then when you arrive Alexa acts as a travel guide, while you travel around in a bubble suit and a robot watches your kids.
Yes, very practical, we know.
Overall this ideation exercise was extremely eye-opening. What I really loved about it was how it made you stretch your imagination with technologies you may not be completely familiar with. This is an extremely useful skill when working on solutions for a product that does not exist yet that needs an excellent user experience.
Main Take-Aways
UX’s Final Form is to allow is us to just be
With the breakthrough of emerging technology, users will no longer be inconvenienced with deviating from their current tasks. They will now be able to provide and receive input from all of in various forms [movement, eyesight, language, etc], and their devices will be able to do the same. With the advent and proper application of these technologies, users will be able to simply be. This is extremely important, because not only does it simplify executing tasks, but it helps mitigate the likelihood of users becoming dopamine-dependent on tools that are simply meant to enhance the human experience. While I’m sure there will be some intervention in Silicon Valley to try and make sure this is not the case, we can hope that this will be the result. I mean we are advocating for the user after all.
Always think ahead when creating experiences
Seeing as these technologies will soon become extremely prevalent it is just another scenario where we as UXers need to think ahead of how our work can be applicable not just to present technology, but also future innovations as well. Doing this ahead of time can save you and other designers a lot of work in the long run, although it may get backlogged for the time being.
A classic example of this is the rise of smartphones. As smartphones became heavily adopted “Web Designers” as they were called then had to begin focusing on how to translate their current designs to mobile.
Teamwork is essential for providing the best solutions
This is something that is a soft skill and obvious to most if not all people, and while it is something I always strive for, it was extremely emphasized during Stephanie Krell’s workshop. While we had all ideated on the same thing and came up with various solutions for using individual emerging technologies, our final solution was a synthesis of each of our ideas. If I had worked through this workshop on my own, my final solution would have been vastly different than what we presented, and I believe that was the most valuable lesson that could’ve been taken away from the workshop. Yes, we ideated on solutions using technology we may have had little to no experience with. Yes, we created affinity diagrams to group these ideas and concepts. But what set everyone apart was their team and how they combined the solutions each of them developed.
You don’t always have to utilize new technology to it’s fullest extent to come up with the best solution
While working through the workshop different teams were more dependent on different technologies to back their solution. We didn’t even have to use every single emerging technology as long as we provided a sound solution, and I think this is something that a lot of people don’t focus on as much as they should. Our job as a designer is to not utilize technology to its maximum capacity, but minimize the cognitive capacity users must exercise to execute a task.
I got involved with SDXD because I believe it is one of the best design organizations in San Diego. SDXD holds some of the most informative events and always attracts an excellent crowd to network with. This combination results in events that truly resonate with designers from all aspects of UX ranging from research, design, development, and content creation. This is why I decided to volunteer and would encourage anyone who is interested in UX to do the same!
If you enjoyed this article and would like to get in touch you can reach me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or my website.
About SDXD, San Diego Experience Design is a catalyst for a vibrant San Diego experience design community. A professional networking and education organization, they serve primarily UX research and design practitioners but welcome anyone who works in, or is simply interested by, the various experience design disciplines and techniques (UX, IxD, usability, prototyping, HCI, service design, industrial design, etc.).
Find us at: http://www.sdxd.org/ |http://www.meetup.com/s-d-x-d/
Volunteer, sponsor, or just plain get involved in this community. Find out how by visiting us at: http://www.sdxd.org/ These events are made possible by great people and by the companies that put us to work. If you or your company would like to sponsor us, we’d love to talk. Download our one-pager about SDXD and the type of events we host. http://www.sdxd.org/sdxd-community/
