Interaction Design: Take 2

Why moviemaking is a better source discipline than industrial design

Premise :

We live in a world of flow — Uber, AirBnB and Collaborative Consumption. We care less about objects and more about what they can do for us. Experience, not objects is the dominant logic of our times.

Emphasis has moved a while ago,
from objects to connections between objects.

Designing for this environment is arguably, the job of interaction design.My submission is, the grammar and methods of this discipline are outdated. Borrowed from industrial design, the current methods are rooted in the design of forms, not flow.

The final experience for the consumer is simply not there as a part of the design process. Yet — Uber, AirBnB and countless services are all about the experience. Forms are meant to mediate a larger experience, not draw attention to themselves. That’s reserved for the all important Experience.

I believe interaction design is due for a redefinition of the grammar and process of interaction design. Interaction design needs to :

Keep the final experience front and centre, work backwards from the necessary flow
and then integrate objects .

In other words, the organising metaphor for the discipline should be flow and not form. I take moviemaking — scriptwriting in particular — as my start point for this redefinition. Moviemaking is entirely about flow — narrative flow. My submission is that interaction design today, is also fundamentally about designing a narrative flow.

Further, we’re learning from a more complex discipline with well established rules for creating flow. Writing screenplay has the lowest barrier of entry and the highest level of skill required of any discipline I know. All it takes is a pen and paper and anywhere between 7–15 years.

In actual practice as well, I have been seeing increasing references to cinematic language in interaction design. From storyboards in xCode and interaction design in general to emphasis on tranisition these days. This is simply meant to wrap this into a coherent approach.

History :

Very briefly — interaction design, the term was invented in 1984, was marginal in its use till mid 1990's and became well known during 2001–2005 the period during which Interaction Design Institute, Ivrea existed till its endowment ran out, becoming common place in 2007 when the book Designing Interactions, by Bill Moggridge appeared. It was originally conceived as “industrial design for software” or “the shaping of digital things for people’s use”. Here is Bill Verplank’s explanation of the process from the book :

Interestingly, the very first service design company Live|Work and Arduino came out of Ivrea, giving us a clue that service design, physical prototyping, and interaction design and very closely linked. Yet all I see are overlapping circles wherever I look.

My view is that comparing and contrasting sub-disciplines is not a useful exercise. Arriving at an integrated discipline which prescribes other disciplines should be the goal. It would be ironic if we as designers, who understand the value of and-ing end up or-ing disciplines.

Redefinition

Here’s an alternative definition, keeping the experience front and centre :

Interaction design is the discipline of designing an active experience.

My emphasis on active suggests that you can design passive experiences as well. You can depending on the stance of your customer.

If you expect your customer to take a passive stance —lean back — like in theatres and amusement parks ( holding on is still a passive stance), you are designing a for passive experience. I call this experience design. Here your customer is only expected to turn up and be open to experiencing.

If you expect you customer to take an active stance — lean in — like in applications or services — e.g. Hang gliding ( where just holding on could be, well — harmful ), you are designing for an active experience. I call this interaction design. Here your customer is expected to take notice and actively participate.

This definition does not characterise the experience as active or passive. In both disciplines you could be designing a hair raising experience but would take different approaches.

Before I get to that, what is an experience ?

Experience

An experience has two attributes that matter, for a designer:

1. An experience evoke feelings ( more accurately the experience business charges for the feelings it creates in its participants )
2. An experience is memorable ( i.e. it is remembered after the original feelings fade ). See Experience Economy by Pines and Gilmore for more.

This means, as a designer we need to be explicit about the feelings we intend to create in the customer and how we intend to make them memorable.

Moment of Mediation

Cognitively an experience is encoded as moments. When we recall an experience, we narrate it at a series of moments which made an emotional impression on us. Some moments stand out over others. These are the “moments that mattered”. One moment matters over all other — where your customer felt the most helpless. This is the Moment of Mediation.

This moment contextualises the design and creates the necessary empathy to fuel the process.

A first task of an interaction designer is to find and design for the Moment of Mediation.

To give an example, you’re headed home in the evening, and run into an almighty gridlock. Suddenly you’re locked in, helpless, with no place to go and nothing to do. This is the moment of mediation — dead time — where you decide to pick up your phone and check mail. Ditto for that boring meeting. Think of it as the Valley of Helplessness. We all fall into this valley in situation when we feel powerless. Find and design for these moments.

The Valley of Helplessness

Here are some 60 odd moments of mediation we identified when researching the patient experience.

Note that, if we designed only for the first attribute, we would be practicing experience design. Performing arts for example, focused exclusively on evoking feelings. You don’t go back for the movie, play or stand-up show a second time.

It is the second attribute — making the experience memorable — that differentiates interaction design from experience design. Interaction design the customer will return very often to the experience.

The second task of an interaction designer is to design for a progressively deepening experience.

Job To Do

It’s useful to think of the discipline as having a job to do. It’s certainly why we are hired an designer. Here then are the jobs an interaction designer is hired to do :

1. Job 1 : Ensure the experience evokes a desired feeling.
2. Job 2 : Ensure the experience is remembered after the original feelings fade

These are also success criteria. If it doesn’t achieve both, the design has failed. Seem this way, there is no difference between interaction design or service design. The type of media you design for is irrelevant. You design for an experience — that’s the organising unit — which determine which forms of media are relevant.

Job 2 also expands the job of the interaction designer to include methods of persuasion and repetition. The concept and design for the getting your customer to return to the experience had return sufficient number of times for it to become a habit becomes a part of the designing process. Designing for Tiny Habits is an integral part of the job of the designer.

Design Principles

To do so, interaction design follows a few key principles, adapted from the design of cinematic experiences :

Principle 1 : Design from the Experience Backwards

The ensure we keep the experience front and centre, the experience is made visible and discussable very early. The experience is the differentiator in this economy and cannot be left up to the lone genius of a designer. The entire business machinery rides on this.

Also, unlike screenplay writing, where the writer can craft the experience in isolation for months and then narrate the story to a producer or actor, designers do not have that luxury. They need to be able to explain what is the quality of the experience they intend to build as early as possible.

The good news is we as humans are highly tuned to experiences and don’t need elaborate visuals to understand it — in the beginning. Often, a simple line graph sufficient to indicate this. This can later be elaborated into rich narratives.

Principle 2 : Form follows Function. Function follows Flow

The next step is to slow down the experience to understand the flows involved. So first design the flows — linear as well as circular. From this determine the function necessary to support the flow. And then finally the objects needed to support the function.

The example is how marathon tracks might be designed. First a few runners find or agree on a interesting route. Over cycles of running (flow )— straight, zig zag, circular they determine where they’re likely to dehydrate and need what and where they need start and stop ( functions ) . Eventually they place fuel stops and the start-stop lines at these places ( forms)

Design for flow.

In this section I define core attributes of interaction design, contrast it with experience design and define the grammar I will be using later for problem solving. If you wish to skip this, please go straight to the end, where I articulate the design process.

Interaction Design vs Experience Design.

I feel a short comparison between experience design and interaction design would be useful to show where the concepts are similar and transferrable and where they different and require completely distinct approaches. This is a compression of the art and craft of narrative, so if you’d like a deeper reading please read Story by Robert Mckee ( thanks Kusum )

As an analogy, experience design is a line, interaction design a circle.

Interaction Design vs Experience Design

The key difference then is the presence of feedback loops in interaction design.

This is a significant difference: experience design as a discipline sculpts in time, while interaction design sculpts in space and time . Experience design puts all its energies to pulling the customer through a single-use crafted experience, with no intention of expecting the customer to return. Interaction design puts its energies into pulling the customer through a mutiple-use, gradually intensifying experience that the customer will want to return to time and again.

Core Attributes

This leads to it own unique grammar, mental models and systems, as well as differences in the attributes of the final experiences. Briefly, here are what I see as the core attributes of each discipline :

In experience design, the customer is only required to turn up and be open to feeling.

• Passive Customer Stance: The customer is in experience design is a recipient. Customers take a more passive stance, as she is guided through the experience. Here, customers pay for the experience.
• Job 1: The job of the experience designer is to evoke the desired feelings in the customer at the right moments, as she journeys through the experience.
• No Repeatability : experiences are bullets — they’re designed to be single-use and achieve maximum impact in the first time. By necessity, these experiences “grab hold of your feelings, from the word go”
• Heavyweight Intensity : experiences are designed to evoke a range of specific “heavyweight” emotions : e.g. laughter, anger, sadness, fear — for a short duration.
• Examples : A massage, stand-up comic acts, theatre, movies, and amusement parks are examples of designed experiences. Correspondingly a masseuse, a standup artist, theatre director, movie director, amusement park designer are all experience designers.

In interaction design, the customer is required to take actions in order to evoke the desire feelings.

• Active Customer Stance : The customer in interaction design is a participant. Customers take a more active stance in this experience, as they interact in order to experience. Here, customers earn the experience.
• Job 1 & Job 2 : The job of the interaction designer is to get the customer to take action, at the right moments, which then evokes feelings within the customer, as she journeys through the experience and ensure the experience is remembered long after the feelings have faded
• High Repeatability : experiences are spirals — they’re designed to evoke a specific “lightweight” emotions — e.g. calm — and become deeper as your revisit each time.
• Example : Design of apps or services are examples of interaction design. Correspondingly, service designers and “digital” designers are both interaction designers. The distinction is superfluous — from the perspective of a discipline both have the same job to do.

Experience design has developed a special grammar to evoke the feelings necessary within the customer. It uses objects — nouns as it primary tool to do this. Interaction design has a grammar that borrows from experience design, but uses action — verbs as its primary tool to achieve the same results. While both design systems of experience designed to make you feel, they achieve it differently.

Grammar : Experience Design

Experience design is about sculpting in time. The master discipline for experience design is filmmaking. It’s quite an achievement to make humans sit in a dark room for anything from 90 to 120 minutes without wanting to run out. To do so, filmmaking — specifically screenplay — has developed a unique grammar to make it possible. See Story by Robert Mckee for more.

Here is the essential grammar for experience design, from moviemaking :

• Protagonist — the primary character with whom the viewer or recipient empathises. If the writer is unable to get the viewer to empathise there is no connection and the design has failed. We say we “didn’t feel anything” for the story.
• Inciting Incident — the moment the protagonists life is thrown out of balance. The trigger for the story.
• Beat : The basic unit of action — an action reaction cycle involving the protagonist. This is chunked up into Scenes, Sequences and Acts.
• Scene : The basic unit of storytelling — Beats add up to a Scene ending in a turning point where something significant happens. We remembers scenes, depending on the emotional impression they make on us.
• Narrative System (The Gap ) — action taken by the protagonist leading to an unexpected reaction from the world. The surprise creates the window for emotions to enter as the recipient asks “why” and is hooked.
• Through- line or Spine — the major narrative arc taken by the protagonist in pursuit of achieving his goal.
• Experience : Also the system behaviour. Its behaviour falls into a pattern called the Dialectic or boom and bust cycles — increasingly intensifying action and reaction cycles leading to a final state completely different from the start state. The behaviour is processed internally by the recipient as an experience with its unique emotional graph and narrated as a story. When narrating recipients recall key scenes where they experienced strong feelings.
• Experience Archetype : Meta patterns of journeys. Hero’s Journey and many others. These are the few kinds of journeys human being respond to well.

These are a bunch of principles within them which make up the art and craft of experience design. Obviously this is a radical compression of the discipline — but for the purpose of this conversation, it’s sufficient.

Grammar : Interaction Design

We will adopt and extend this grammar for interaction design.

• Participant : The consumer takes an active stance and is open to taking action in order to feel. The participant is the protagonist here. If the designer is unable to empathise with the participant, the participant feels the experience is “broken” or worse — blames himself.
• Moment of Mediation — the moment the participant’s life is thrown out of balance, because she feels helpless or powerless. The trigger for the interaction. ( see article on Moment of Mediation here )
• Beat : The basic unit of interaction — an action reaction cycle involving the participant. Beats gets chunked into a Moment. Moments into Phases. Participants recall Moments, not Beats.
• Moment : The basic unit of experience — Several beats make up a moment. A moment creates a significant emotional impression on the participant because it led to an outcome important to her. Equivalent of a Scene in experience design.
• Interaction System : A system which models all possible actions the protagonist can take over time. Involves feedback loops and systems thinking. Interaction systems are usually goal seeking system which exhibit stable behaviour unlike narrative systems which exhibit naturally dynamic behaviour.
• Through-line : There are many possible pathways the participant can take through the interaction system, depending on the system settings. The pathway taken most often is the through-line. This accounts for most of the impression, good or bad about the interaction system. This is the pathway we want to optimise the most in interaction design.
• Metaphors: We do not understand actions unless they are encoded as metaphors. The coherence and suitability of metaphors determine how well we understand what we are expected to do. This has to be explicitly designed. e.g. The desktop and it supporting metaphors for your laptop.
• Experience : The journey through the system, taken by the participant. This is processed internally by the participant as an experience with its unique emotional graph and narrated as a story. When narrating participants recall key moments where they experienced strong feelings, because of the useful outcomes it created for them. We want this to be a smooth experience, typically for interaction design.
• Experience Archetype : the meta-pattern of the journey. These are the few human being respond to well and remember to come back to. e.g. Learn-Use-Remember

Process

Here is the process in summary. I don’t mention iterate since it happens in every step. (why mention “don’t forget to breathe” ?)

1. Find the Moment of Mediation | Contextualise the participant
2. Graph the Current Experience | Empathise with participant
3. Analyse the current System Behaviour | Analyse verbs
4. Graph the New Experience | Imagine a new experience
5. Synthesise the Problem System | Synthesise existing “verb system”
6. Design the Solution System | “Get the verbs right”
7. Design the System Pathways | Visualise system “settings”
8. Discover Suitable Metaphors | Encode actions
9. Design the Narrative | Visualise key moments
10. Design the Forms | Visualise forms

You’ll notice that Interaction Design pre-places rather than replaces form based disciplines like graphic or product design. These skills are still just as essential. They just come in a little later in the process when forms are relevant.

This address something I’ve seen often. Interaction design which feels “broken” or premature where it feels like the designer “went to the form too soon”.

In the next post I’ll illustrate the application of this process using an example :

I recently switched to Inbox from Gmail on my phone and loved it. It cuts noise,make it easier to reach the mails that matter to me, the metaphors feel natural, and there is more flow in the experience compared to Gmail . I will use this example to explain the process.

Thanks for reading !