Published: December 19, 2005

Personal computing is in an awkward adolescence right now. On one hand, we are rapidly moving into ubiquitous computing environments that let people constantly interact with the omnipresent network; on the other, the devices and interfaces we are using to enter these new frontiers provide woefully inadequate user experiences. Let’s take a look at one of the key technologies that will take mobile user experiences to the next level: holography.

Holography and the State of Input

The primary reason why the BlackBerry® became such an enormous success is its miniature QWERTY keyboard, which lets people rapidly enter information and, in the process, made easy-email-while-on-the-run a reality. Earlier devices such as cell phones and Palm® PDAs provided a substandard means of communicating with a computing system, but the BlackBerry took the well-established and long-practiced QWERTY keyboard interface and employed it in a practical and portable form. This allowed people to engage in a more natural human/computer interaction.

Unfortunately, while it is our accustomed way of entering information into a computing system, even in its most optimal state, using the QWERTY keyboard is an unnatural and awkward activity. Shrinking it down to fit on a handheld device may have allowed mobile computing to leap far forward, but this remains a poor and ultimately temporary solution to the problem of mobile data input. While more people—particularly people in east Asian cultures—are embracing an active mobile-computing lifestyle, the modes of input mobile devices offer have not advanced much. Components that behave like a mouse and miniature touch screens cannot replicate the speed and power of desktop computing environments.

The potential of mobile computing is enormous. Indeed, despite clumsy input devices, the mobile computing market is taking off and will only continue to get bigger—even if input devices do not get demonstrably better. Yet, unlocking a superior user experience for mobile computing begins with the development of more sophisticated modes of input. Soon, more effective voice recognition will drive input, in part. And, eventually, modes of input will evolve into what we have come to think of as science fiction—controlled by our eyes, our gestures and body movements, and ultimately, perhaps the holy grail of direct mind-to-machine interaction. But in the space between, we need a better, yet technologically practical way of entering data.

Most people who use computers know and are accustomed to using the QWERTY keyboard. For all of its faults, it remains both the primary and the most rapid, yet robust way for people to communicate with computers. That is why incorporating it into BlackBerry devices was such a success. However, miniaturization and thumb typing compound the issues of a full-size keyboard. There are already reports of heavy usage of the BlackBerry causing physical problems in users’ hands and wrists—the new repetitive stress injury BlackBerry thumb.

The obvious opportunity might seem to be a mobile device with a larger QWERTY keyboard. But others have done this before. Palm has long offered a fold-up, peripheral keyboard that somewhat conveniently fits into a coat pocket. But it is just one more thing to carry, among an ever-increasing cache of personal gadgets, and ultimately, lags in performance compared to a standard, full-size keyboard. At the same time, notebook computers might seem to be effective mobile devices—most sporting a full-size QWERTY keyboard, along with full desktop-computing power. Unfortunately, notebooks are just too big and bulky to function as truly mobile devices. While portable enough to carry around, they remain a far cry from a cell phone or PDA-sized device that a user can slip into a pocket, without being noticeably encumbered in any environment—short of a nudist colony.

So there is a tension between our desires for usability and mobility: the QWERTY keyboard is an effective and well-practiced input device, but is too large and bulky for use in a truly mobile user experience. Enter the holographic keyboard—virtual save for a small component that is part of a mobile computing device. A holographic projector could place a full-size keyboard anywhere, giving us a computer input experience that is similarly robust to that of our desktop/place-bound computing stations. A holographic keyboard synthesizes the essential usability problem of providing desktop-quality computing with seamless and always-available portability. Now, I’m sure the early versions of such a technology will not deliver on the promise of the idea, but this is the likely technology to take us from the awkward fumbling of today into the powerful mobile computing environment of tomorrow.

Holography and the State of Output

But input is only part of the problem. One of the biggest challenges facing everyone in the mobile space today—on both the hardware and software sides—are the device outputs, particularly their displays. The screens are incredibly small. The resolution is poor. The output of even the most remarkable devices of today pales in comparison to the standard 14-inch desktop monitors of some 15 years ago—a monitor that today is essentially obsolete. Indeed, for desktop computing environments, we are rapidly moving into the world of large LCD flat-screen displays—some in excess of 30 inches. Why bigger? Because when it comes to visual output, bigger is almost always better. More pixels. Higher definition. Improved usability and a more natural interactive environment. This is what makes the “Baby Faces” of mobile devices—as Aaron Marcus so cutely and appropriately calls them—so inadequate for displaying computer output.

The primary constraint is again one of portability. Notebook computers offer relatively effective visual output, but as I mentioned earlier, are not truly mobile devices. They do not integrate well into our on-the-move lifestyles. So, how can we provide a large, high-resolution display that is truly portable—small enough to fit in a pocket?

Nothing even remotely close to such a technology exists today, but as with the virtual QWERTY keyboard, we could once again use holographic technology to create a projection of a computer display or even a virtual 3D environment. Holography would enable us to project a large—even full-size—virtual object with next to no physical space requirements. It might take some time to develop very high-resolution holographic displays, enabling this technology to achieve display quality that is comparable to that of a desktop monitor. However, the sheer size of such a display would, to some degree, make up for any deficiencies in resolution. Just in their being much larger than the mobile output devices that are now standard, holographic displays would exceed the current mobile user experience—to say nothing of their potential for three dimensionality, which would open up entire new frontiers of interacting with our machines.

Privacy Concerns, and How to Solve Them

Implicit in next-generation interface technologies—holographic output displays as well as rich voice-enabled inputs—are problems relating to privacy. And these are significant problems. For users, the confidential information that is a normal part of living a digital lifestyle—from banking and purchases to password entry and communicating secret personal information for account verification purposes—becomes dangerously public in these new contexts. This is to say nothing of the personal privacy we prefer to have when communicating with a lover or getting dressed-down by our boss or playing a computer game. These more effective means of interaction bring with them very real challenges to our personal security and comfort.

At the same time, there are also privacy concerns for non-users. Already today, people complain bitterly about others talking on cell phones in public spaces. What if voice inputs were extended beyond voice communication and became the driver for most human/computer interaction? What is now a relative annoyance would become an unbearable cacophony. Then consider the physical space requirements of holography: even though these are virtual objects, the reality is they fill space just as real objects do. Others would need to walk around a projected computer display just as they would need to walk around a physical one. The problem will amplify if and as more and more people adopt and use the technology. The next time you go into your local Starbucks® during the morning rush, imagine half or more of the people seated inside with 15-inch computer monitors on tables a few feet in front of them. What impact would that have on the experience? How would that change the very personality of Starbucks? After all, if these technologies work, people will use them. The relatively modest number of notebook users today would undoubtedly be replaced by an ever-increasing number of rich-mobile-device users.

As is often the case, technology will need to solve the problems that technology creates. I saw a great example of a possible technology solution in practice recently, in a government R&D environment: a device that looked something like a DirecTV®-style satellite dish, focused and directed music in a specific and completely unexpected way. We started in one room, where music was very lightly playing on iPod® speakers. Then we went outside the room and walked down a really, really, really long hallway. Our colleague took the device, stood outside the office, and tilted it in a way to create triangulation. Suddenly, we were able to hear the music at approximately the same volume level as we had while in the office! If we moved a few feet to the right or left, we couldn’t hear it at all. But if we stood within the correct field, we were able to hear it. No one else outside the room in this busy work environment was able to hear it at all. It was really an amazing experience.

Whether or not that technology in particular will ultimately be the one to solve some of the privacy problems next-generation interfaces create, it underscores the essential truth that there is already technology out there that is well ahead of anything we are seeing in mainstream use today. Historically, technology has been successful in solving the problems it creates. With every gain come inevitable challenges. If we are to enjoy the power and freedom of robust mobile user interfaces, we will need to develop technologies that can help keep our computing experiences somewhat contained and, therefore, private.

Filling the Space Between

Yes, the more distant future will be one of entirely digital environments, in which inputs and outputs are all around us, and it is only a device containing our personal data—or a key into our personal data—that serves as our mobile computing device. But in most parts of the world, we are a decade or more away from realizing that degree of integration. In the meantime, we are dealing with ubiquitous computing experiences that are painfully low resolution in every way, presenting a real opportunity for a technology or company that can change this very tepid paradigm. Holography is one technology that very nimbly addresses issues of both input and output. Whether applications of the technology will reach the point where they are both sufficiently effective and affordable to the mass market—as well as relatively private and secure—remains to be seen. But this is certain: the trend that digital computing technologies have started—transforming elements of the physical world into a virtual existence—is one that will continue in the decades ahead. Holographic technology is an early technology that could serve an important role in not only the short-term improvement of the mobile user experience, but also in changing our very mental model of the relationship between the real and the virtual.

Published: January 1, 2006

Many software programs provide access to, and let users work with, large amounts of information. In addition to interactions that allow users to create, edit, and expand massive data sets, these information-rich applications must also support effective data interpretation.

Published: December 19, 2005

Many software programs provide access to, and let users work with, large amounts of information. In addition to interactions that allow users to create, edit, and expand massive data sets, these information-rich applications must also support effective data interpretation.

Data monitoring, reporting, and modeling applications require people to makes sense of large amounts of information quickly and easily. It should come as no surprise, then, that for such applications many interface design problems are actually information design problems. As a result, we can leverage information design solutions when tackling such problems. Using small multiples is one such solution.

“Small multiple designs are graphical depictions of variable information that share context, but not content.”—Edward Tufte

Defining Small Multiples

In Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte defined small multiple designs as information slices that repeat a common design several times within a user’s eye span—with each instance showing different data values. In other words, small multiple designs are graphical depictions of variable information that share context, but not content.

The small size of each presentation of data is necessary to allow viewers to “make comparisons at a glance—uninterrupted visual reasoning.” Their consistent design “puts the emphasis on changes in data” and visually enforces “comparisons of changes, of the differences among objects, of the scope of alternatives, of a range of options.”

In the storm cloud animation shown in Figure 1, small multiples illustrate the change in variables over time.

Figure 1—Redesigned animation of a numerically modeled severe storm by Edward Tufte & Colleen Bushell

Each multiple maintains a consistent frame of reference—size, color, fonts—with changing data—cloud shape, number of minutes. The resulting information provides a complete narrative of how the storm changed over time.

Applying Small Multiples

“For a wide range of problems in data presentation, small multiples are the best design solution.”—Edward Tufte

In 1999, I teamed up with Colleen Bushell—co-designer of the storm visualization shown in Figure 1—on a project to redesign a financial transaction software package. Users on the receiving end of these exchanges were faced with the task of potentially coordinating multiple transactions at once.

My first iteration of the user interface design utilized cascading windows to stack incoming transactions within the user’s workspace, as seen in Figure 2 . However, it quickly became clear that these windows would hold little value for our users. They did not provide enough context to help users locate the appropriate window—only the title and time left—and because users often had just seconds to react to incoming transactions, the short title bars did not provide large enough targets for quick mouse movements.

Figure 2—Initial design of multiple transaction windows

Colleen suggested we utilize a small multiples design. In the redesign, shown in Figure 3, a small pane represents each transaction and shows enough data to support quick identification. The colored bar at the top of each pane gives a high-level indication of the status of a quote that a user can quickly interpret, and the timer bars provide detailed information—the exact amount of time left to fill a request. When a user mouses over one of these small multiples, the application brings the full information for the corresponding transaction to the foreground.

Figure 3—The small multiples design

Not only do these small multiples provide quick access to important functions, they also help differentiate sets of information and options. These qualities become even more useful as the quantity of information increases.

In the data monitoring application depicted in Figure 4, small multiples visualize the current status of traffic at individual sites. The consistent visual presentation of each of the small multiples enables users to quickly scan a dense information grid for important differences.

Figure 4—A set of small multiples within a radar traffic monitoring application

Like other forms of information design, small multiples have a place within user interfaces for complex information systems. As we continue expanding the amount of digital information that is available to people, expressing data as small multiples is likely to become even more useful.

Bibliography

Baker, M. Pauline, and Colleen Bushell. After the Storm: Considerations for Information Visualization. Urbana-Champaign, Illinois: National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois: 1995. Retrieved from http://vis.iu.edu/Publications/Storm.pdf

Tufte, Edward R. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press, 1990.

Published: December 6, 2005

This article is the first in a series of articles on eyetracking that will appear in UXmatters. Over the coming months, I’ll use eyetracking to evaluate a lot of world-renowned user interfaces—including Web sites like Amazon.com®, Google™ News, and eBay®; Rich Internet Applications (RIAs); and desktop applications—and analyze quantitative eyetracking data to provide best practices for designing user interface elements like navigation systems, menus, and forms, and for effective ad placement.

For some time, usability professionals have evangelized the term discount usability testing. Discount usability testing was a product of the early years of the Internet. Its techniques promised to provide a simple, fast, and relatively economical way of conducting usability studies and improving users’ experience of the Web and other software user interfaces. However, such studies are mainly qualitative and subjective. The data reflect users’ conscious thoughts and feelings as well as the observers’ impressions. Some think this is the best, even the only method of conducting usability studies, but there are other—in some situations, perhaps better—ways of evaluating user interactions. Eyetracking offers unique benefits and provides a practical alternative to conventional discount usability testing.

As John Elvesjo—founder of the firm Tobii Technology, which produces eyetracking technology—said, “The eye is the mirror of the soul, and the soul is the mirror of our thoughts.” This quotation expresses wonderfully the magic of human sight and the manifold possibilities that the study of users’ eye movements makes possible.

Adoption of Eyetracking Methods

Usability gurus have written little on eyetracking, which is odd considering what an effective technique it is. Back in 2000, Jakob Nielsen wrote an Alertbox column about an eyetracking study of readers’ behaviors when reading news on the Web, and Jared Spool’s User Interface Engineering published an article on using eyetracking to test the usability of Web sites back in 1998. These early articles came out before recent advances in eyetracking technologies and techniques. The near silence of usability gurus on the subject of eyetracking since then is quite surprising to me. Eyetracking is not rocket science. It is a simple and effective means of evaluating Web pages and user interfaces.

Fortunately, things are now changing. If you take a look at Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think, you will see a graph that resembles a gaze plot. He derived that graph from years of experience observing user interactions with Web pages. Eyetracking now makes it possible to accurately measure the kinds of gaze patterns that Krug observed. Eyetracking can show which parts of your user interfaces users see and which parts seem to be invisible to them—not just by observing users and gathering qualitative data, but also by analyzing their gaze plots and other quantitative data.

What You Need to Know About Human Sight

Human sight has a visual field of about 120 degrees, encompassing three degrees of visual acuity: foveal, parafoveal, and peripheral vision. We primarily take in visual data from the outside world through the fovea, which provides the greatest visual acuity. We move our head and eyes to focus the fovea on objects of interest that we want to see.

Eye movement has two states:

• saccade—A saccade is the fastest movement of which the human body is capable—taking only about 30 milliseconds—and centers content within the foveal area.
• fixation—A fixation occurs when this movement stops, permitting the eye to acquire content.

During saccadic activity, we cannot see at all. We perceive the world visually only through fixations. The brain virtually integrates the visual images that we acquire through successive fixations.

How Eye-tracker Works

The Tobii Eye-tracker, shown in Figure 1, is an instrument that is capable of capturing data about both saccadic activity and fixations of the foveal area.

Figure 1—Eye-tracker

To accomplish this, it uses an infrared light source to illuminate the eyes, a CCD (Charge Coupled Device) sensor to capture a reflection of the user’s eyes, as shown in Figure 2, and eye-gaze analysis software to process the data.

Figure 2—Eye-tracker in operation

By using a remote, digital eyetracker, we can record saccades and fixations, the length of each fixation, the distance to the eye, the pupils’ diameter, and a lot of other useful data within an accuracy of half a degree. Thus, eyetracking can, for example, tell us what a user is looking at and for how long.

Eye-gaze analysis software produces various graphs that are useful for data interpretation, as follows:

• Hotspots—Generalize the behavior of a group of test subjects. They’re very similar to heat maps, as shown in Figure 3.
• Gaze plots—Provide a comprehensive image of all the eye-gaze data from a single eyetracking test. Figure 4 shows a gaze plot.
• Gaze replays—Provide both real-time and slow-motion replay of the paths a user’s eyes followed during an eyetracking test.

Figure 3—Hotspots

Figure 4—Gaze plot

Both gaze plots and gaze replays are much more informative than hotspots. They permit an evaluator to see through each individual user’s eyes, displaying the gaze path a user’s eyes followed while exploring a Web page or interacting with a user interface.

To facilitate analysis of a user’s interactions at a deeper level, you can export all of these data to an Excel® file, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5—Data exported to an Excel file

Analyzing the angles between saccades or the distance between two fixations can reveal a lot of information about a user’s thoughts while interacting with a Web page or user interface. Eye-tracker provides a powerful set of tools that lets you define areas of interest, or boxes of content, on a Web page such as an ad, then determine a user’s attentiveness to them by evaluating the percentage of time the user spends viewing each area of interest relative to time spent viewing other areas of a page during normal page browsing.

Evaluating Usability Using Eyetracking

A very effective test methodology combines standard usability evaluation techniques—such as the think-aloud protocol—with the latest eyetracking capabilities, as shown in Figure 6. Eyetracking introduces quantitative measurement to the field of usability evaluation, which has typically provided mostly qualitative data. Whether you are videotaping or logging data during a usability test session, the think-aloud protocol lets you collect qualitative data such as a user’s mood through tone of voice and facial expressions, while Eye-tracker gathers and records quantitative data such as pupil diameter, fixation coordinates, fixation length, saccade angles, and more. The combined data of these two methods provide a broad overview of the problems a user encounters in a user interface while performing a task.

Figure 6—Combining the think-aloud protocol with eyetracking

We can now leave expert evaluators’ interpretations and de facto standards behind and instead determine things like the optimal position for the labels of fields in a form, the best placement for a navigation bar, or the most visible location for a logo or an advertisement by evaluating gaze data that shows the percentage of users actually seeing them.

Eyetracking technology lets us observe the behaviors of users and provides quantitative, objective data that lets us develop a deeper understanding of how users interact with Web pages and user interfaces. Armed with this knowledge, we can improve the usability and usefulness of Web pages and software products.

Eyetracking in New Interaction Paradigms

Usability and marketing studies are just two of the possible applications for eyetracking technology. In addition to using eyetracking to analyze Web pages and software user interfaces, through my research at Consultechnology, I am exploring how we can take full advantage of eyetracking capabilities and working to discover better interaction paradigms. For example, by capturing the screen coordinates of a user’s gaze, eyetrackers

• allow people to use their eyes as input devices, thus creating new and more natural and ecological ways for them to interact with systems
• can provide the means for a system to know where a user’s attention is focused while reading or interacting with a user interface and even to anticipate what a user wants to do next
• can analyze a driver’s level of attentiveness while driving and prevent drowsiness from causing accidents

What’s Next?

Eyetracking provides a relatively quick and straightforward way of conducting studies of any kind, making it possible for me to present reports on eyetracking studies every month in UXmatters. Through these studies, I will evaluate specific user tasks and interactions with Web pages and user interfaces. My reports will demonstrate best design practices through the analysis of quantitative test results.

Next Month—Eyetracking and Field Label Placement in Forms

Bibliography

Krug, Steve. Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. Indianapolis, Indiana: Que, 2000.

Nielsen, Jakob. “Eyetracking Study of Web Readers.” Alertbox, May 14, 2000. Retrieved from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000514.html

Shroeder, Will. “Testing Web Sites with Eye-Tracking.” User Interface Engineering, September 1, 1998. Retrieved from http://www.uie.com/articles/eye_tracking/

Published: December 6, 2005

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), how they work, and how to choose the appropriate RIA technology. Unfortunately, so far, we’ve had few discussions about the value of RIAs to users and how RIA technologies let us create better, more usable Web applications.

This article addresses two questions:

• What is wrong with traditional, pre-RIA Web applications?
• How do RIAs remedy their problems?

What Is a Traditional Web Application?

A traditional Web application is heavily dependent on the metaphor of the page. A page presents a single set of information in response to a user request or query and provides limited interactivity. Bob Baxley, in his book Making the Web Work, discusses various page types. A page might be a form—allowing limited user input—a view of a single dataset or media object, or a list view of aggregated, or summary, data. Without adding richness, you cannot really break away from these three basic page types. Each page type has an infinite set of variations and, depending on the level of richness that you add, can provide a certain amount of intrapage interactivity such as the selection of options, drag and drop within a page, and even business rule validation.

No matter how much interactivity you add to a single page in a Web application, there is one overriding limit. When a user navigates to a page, the Web server sends both the information that the page presents and all of the code that supports user interactions on the page. Interactions on the page do not trigger another get from the server to obtain further information that would support a greater degree of interactivity. Doing so would initiate a page refresh, which downloads a new page.

Why Is the Metaphor of a Page So Apt for the HTML-Based Web Experience?

This question begs the further question: Why does the page metaphor even matter? The page metaphor defines the user experience of the traditional Web, because following a hyperlink initiates a change that is similar to the experience of turning the pages of a book. As I turn to the next page of a book, there is a moment when neither the previous page nor the next page is available or readable. I must pause for a moment before I can continue reading. The same is true of Web pages. I must wait while the next page loads.

On content sites, the page is an appropriate metaphor, because most Web pages let us view narrative content that is similar to the content in magazines, books, pamphlets, and other print media. Traditional Web sites often have site maps, which are analogous to the tables of contents in books, and index pages, which have the same function as the indexes in books.

Prior to the introduction of Web versions of applications, this idea of a page was not the primary metaphor for applications. Windows and panels were the primary containers of functionality, and the transition points when users requested new data did not lead to such stark differences in context. The only transitions that placed users in a new context were those that denoted a complete change in task or a different step in a task.

The cultural effect that the page metaphor has had is quite strong. This metaphor permeates not just our Web applications’ behavior models, but also the artifacts that we, as designers, use to communicate our ideas such as wireframes and site maps. This legacy is an issue that we must deal with as we move forward. Beyond the Page, a presentation by Gene Smith at the IA Summit in 2005 addressed the issues relating to moving beyond the page metaphor and its design repercussions.

What Is Wrong with the Page Metaphor and Is It Wrong for Everything?

First, let’s re-examine the primary reason for the use of the page metaphor. The original purpose of the Web was to distribute content that was most closely analogous to printed articles, abstracts, and other similar documents. The Web’s primary task flows involved information distribution and consumption.

But even from the early days of the Web, people have done more than just consume information. Web sites have also let users complete transactions such as purchasing items on e-commerce sites and paying bills online and perform collaboration and content management tasks. While these early Web applications fit nicely into a page metaphor, because of the step-by-step nature of their interactions, some of their more complex transactions could benefit from the use of protocols that are not subject to the limitations of the page metaphor.

The problem with traditional Web applications is that they often require users to either send data to the server or send a new request to the server to obtain more information. In either case, the Web browser must display a new page, regardless of whether the submission of or request for data occurs at a natural stopping point in a user’s task flow.

This interruption, in some circumstances, leads to a significant wait and, thus, causes a significant and seemingly unnecessary break in a task flow. This unexpected delay is an opportunity for thought, contemplation, aggravation, and remorse—probably in that order—and can lead to

• negative brand experience
• premature use of browser options such as back or refresh
• a user’s clicking again, resulting in further delay
• a user’s giving up and abandoning calls to customer service, entailing costs for the company providing the Web application

The limitations of the page metaphor have tremendous impacts on the user experience of Web applications, for example:

• It is difficult to manage the display of information in different areas on a page without refreshing the entire page.
• Web pages serve as the equivalents of dialog boxes in desktop applications, resulting either in the loss of context or in window management problems.
• Web applications often do not handle validation exceptions well. Web applications’ use of animation to communicate transitions with contextual cues is very limited. Generally, there are fewer opportunities for providing contextual dynamism.
• Web applications offer limited capabilities for tracking user interactions. While some feel that the opposite is the case, the reality is that we can track only clicks in a traditional Web application. In an RIA, we can track mouse movements.

What Makes an Application Rich?

With the distributed processing of an RIA on a networked computer, it is possible to send more data from the server to the client computer and use more of its processing power to handle complex user interactions in real time. RIAs offer richer interactive behaviors and more functionality that works within a single screen. They require fewer returns to the server—conserving both network and server CPU bandwidth—and therefore, require fewer arbitrary interruptions of a user’s normal task flow.

Another valuable feature of most RIAs is the addition of a messaging layer that can communicate between the client computer and the server without the user being aware of it, and most importantly, without any arbitrary interruption of a user’s task. Because an RIA can request information and display it on the current page, there is no loss of context—as there would be with a page refresh—and it is clear how any changes to the content have occurred.

The oldest and most famous example of such a Web application is the reservation system for the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs.

Figure 1—The iHotelierSM reservation system for the Broadmoor Hotel

While you might criticize its design, this Web page demonstrates the possibilities of having three distinct interactive areas on the same page. More importantly, if you use this system, you will experience what it is like to complete transactions without loading a new page. While it is important to view the calendar and the room descriptions at the same time, one might consider making a reservation to be a separate step in the task flow. However, this RIA lets the designer keep all of this functionality on the same page. This RIA also provides better contextual transitions between pages.

The RIA’s messaging layer not only overcomes the limitations of the page metaphor, it also supports real-time communication between the client computer and the server. While the implementers of many traditional Web applications have figured out how to hide the asynchronous behavior of the browser and give the perception of real-time communication, there are limitations to such solutions. They are hard to maintain, are limited in scale, and still allow the browser to process only one HTTP request at a time. Yes, the browser can manage more than one connection at a time, but it can handle only one HTTP request at a time per connection. Many RIAs use server extensions that further enhance their real-time messaging layer.

The aspect of RIAs that people most often discuss is their use of graphics, animation, and sound to bring user interfaces to life. Some would like to ignore this aspect of richness in favor of the more serious programmatic side of RIAs. However, I believe we would be doing RIAs a disservice if we didn’t explore the very real value to the user experience of their capabilities for displaying graphics and text and their use of animation and sound.

With the cross-browser/cross-platform realities of traditional HTML-based solutions, it is almost impossible to get text to appear exactly the way you want it to look. Some RIA solutions allow a designer to be quite precise in designing a visual interface. For example, they allow you to embed the precise fonts that you want to use. This is especially important when text is a major part of your brand. Why should we all have to use Arial and Verdana because Microsoft® says so?

RIAs can use graphics formats that conserve network bandwidth—usually vector-based Flash® or SVG graphics. These graphics formats provide greater efficiency in animations and when reusing a single image across many instances on a Web site. However, they do require more CPU processing power, so you could say you are exchanging network bandwidth for CPU bandwidth.

Animation is underused in almost all software design. Mac OS® X uses animation well as a means of teaching users and re-enforcing the lesson of context. Microsoft Windows® XP attempts to do the same, but its animations are not as satisfying. You can also use animation to provide a more subtle alerting mechanism. In general, movement tells a better story and engages users better than refreshing a page.

Sound is even more underused than animation in Web design. It is very effective as a feedback mechanism and provides another means of engaging a user’s senses. While it is possible to use sound in HTML, many RIAs offer better sound manipulation than HTML does.

Would users ever ask for animation, sound, or perfect rendering of text and graphics? Probably not. But these extras make a proven difference in users’ total experience of not only a Web application, but a company’s brand image. Consistency in branding engenders trust and credibility, as the research findings of the recent Stanford Web Credibility Project demonstrated.

The most important aspect of network-distributed applications is that they are distributed. Traditional Web applications are not wholly distributed. Either the client computer’s operating system, the browser, or both determine their form widgets, fonts, and many of their behaviors. The ability to dynamically distribute basic and complex user interface elements makes distributed applications invaluable platforms—regardless of their degree of richness.

To summarize, a Rich Internet Application

• places more behavioral logic and captured data on the client machine
• allows communication between the networked client and the server without forcing page refreshes
• provides better control and use of various media, including text, graphics, animation, video, and sound
• supports distributed content, widgets, and logic

So, What Is the Problem?

For me, there aren’t really problems with any of the suggested solutions for RIAs, network-distributed applications, or other means of enriching Web applications. Other people, however, find problems in

• the immaturity of the technologies
• their development environments
• security concerns
• the lack of flexibility in design criteria (Okay, this one is mine.)

Security is probably the largest single problem. Over the last three years, the need to protect yourself and your enterprise from bad people and bad programs on the Internet was probably the number one obstacle to the adoption of rich, network-distributed Web applications. Most large corporations do not allow employees to enable ActiveX® or install Java™ applications on their computers. While many new RIAs work around these challenges, there is still a fear of their use. Some basic forms of RIAs still don’t work in a corporate environment, including Macromedia® Flash, Sun™ Java Web Start technology, and Microsoft .NET™/ActiveX. For the consumer market, there are fewer obstacles, but many users are afraid to install anything new, unless it comes from a very trusted source. Unfortunately, many formerly trusted sources have become untrustworthy. (For example, AOL® Instant Messenger™ installs a WeatherBug® application without asking users if they want to install it.)

The other problems with RIAs may concern some, but they are more like excuses rather than reasons. Technological change is a cultural reality, and I never accept resignation to the status quo. Lack of control over design criteria is a concern of mine, as I noted above, but I’d rather work under such constraints than be severely limited in the kinds of interaction models Web applications can support.

What About Desktop Applications?

While few, if any, RIAs can match the capabilities of a network-distributed desktop application, I didn’t pose this rubber-meets-the-road scenario as a problem with RIAs. The main reason for the small number of desktop applications in this arena centers on security. Any software that can access the desktop can do way too much to a user’s client computer without him knowing about it. If getting approval to install an RIA is hard, installing one that connects the desktop to the Internet is almost impossible within many organizations.

That said, there are good examples in the consumer market. Here are some of the ones I like:

• Google™ Desktop™—which allows you to search both your desktop and the Web at the same time
• almost all of the photo-sharing services, including Flickr™, Picasa™, Kodak™ EasyShare Gallery, and Snapfish™
• good instant messaging clients, including Trillian™, Adium X, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo!® Messenger, MSN® Messenger, and Paltalk.com™

How Will These Design Considerations Impact You?

In all likelihood, RIAs don’t present new design considerations for experienced application designers. However, they do present challenges for people who are moving to Web application design from more content-oriented, or page-oriented, design. Making this switch is similar to moving from designing books to writing screenplays. Most good software designers write scenarios, because their narrative form provides the best way of making a software design come to life. Actors, settings, and plot all come into play in the narrative of a good scenario for a software product just as they do in a screenplay.

As Gene Smith expressed in his presentation, Beyond the Page, we need to start thinking differently about our deliverables. My personal leanings lie somewhere between the position that the design is the product, and you can just create a working prototype of your design for a Web application, and the more traditional, rational method of creating detailed design documentation. I find that, while modeling a prototype is fun, a prototype is not actually a great communication tool for complex designs. The problem is that each person who needs to work with your design will look at the prototype from a different point of view. While they will see certain details in your prototype, they may not see the details you intend them to see. There needs to be some means of annotating a prototype. Doing this at a sufficient level of detail within the prototype itself is very difficult, because you end up with the annotations completely overwhelming people’s experience of the prototype. In the end, design and documentation are not necessarily the same thing.

Concluding Thoughts

While new technology options are letting us move away from the page metaphor, I have not focused on technology in this article. However, in my view, Macromedia Flash provides the best RIA technology. Without going into a comprehensive comparison, what I see in Flash—including its Flex™ engine—is a complete platform for both the front end and back end of an RIA that provides all of the aspects of richness that I’ve described. Its only negative is that it can’t communicate with the desktop—though Macromedia Central™ can.

The advent of Web applications has distracted us from the ongoing work on network-distributed applications. While using the Web browser to present types of content that are analogous to various types of printed documents makes sense, transaction-heavy applications do not quite fulfill their potential in this medium. It is now time to step back a bit and consider which technologies provide the best platform for particular classes of Web applications.

I look forward to engaging fellow software designers in discussion of this topic and to thinking even more strategically about Rich Internet Applications.

Bibliography

Baxley, Bob. Making the Web Work: Designing Effective Web Applications. Indianapolis, Indiana: New Riders Publishing, 2003.

Smith, Gene. “Beyond the Page.” Paper presented at the IA Summit, Montreal, March 2005. Retrieved from http://atomiq.org/archives/2005/03/beyond_the_page_the_return.html

Stanford Web Credibility Research. Retrieved from http://credibility.stanford.edu/research.html

Published: November 25, 2005

To all of the bloggers who have written about UXmatters and people who have sent email messages and comments, thank you for warmly welcoming UXmatters to the UX community. We’ve been gratified by the high level of interest in and enthusiastic response to this Web magazine. There seems to have been some pent up demand for a publication that covers the breadth of user experience for digital products!

Are you thinking about contributing an article to UXmatters? We’ve so far been fortunate to have some very well-known UX professionals contribute columns and articles to UXmatters, but what you have to say matters more than whether you’ve made a big name for yourself. If you have something important to communicate to the UX community, this is a great place to do it. We are particularly interested in connecting with industrial designers who would be interested in contributing articles or a column on industrial design.

Please help us to ensure that UXmatters meets the needs of the UX community by contributing articles, volunteering to work on the UXmatters team, and joining in the discussions of user experience matters on our blog. Let’s make the UX community and the UXmatters community one and the same! Join us, because user experience matters!

Published: November 21, 2005

Everyone I spoke with at DUX seemed pleased by the quality and diversity of the tutorials presented on Day 1 of DUX2005. I really wanted to attend the Studio Tours that day, but was too busy launching this Web magazine, so missed them. Maybe next time….

The DUX Conference began brilliantly with an interactive performance by J.Walt Adamczyk and an opening plenary address by Bill Irwin. Beautiful ambient music accompanied J.Walt’s live animation performance. He took us on an odyssey following a convoluted path through an evolving 3D landscape. It was mesmerizing. Next came Bill Irwin’s performance, which was both very amusing and highly educational. Irwin, shown in Figure 2, is an actor, dancer, and clown who has made body language both an art and a science. He’s a wonderful, versatile performer, and I enjoyed his performance immensely. Comedienne Heather Gold hosted the entire conference and added just the right amount of levity to the proceedings.

Following the opening plenary, a reception sponsored by BayDUX and its participating organizations concluded the events of World Usability Day around the world and provided a great opportunity for everyone attending DUX to get together and talk. The hall in which the reception took place was too small to accommodate everyone, so the overflow crowd was in a tent, shown in Figure 1, that was buffeted by a chill wind carrying a spray of raindrops. (Thanks Yahoo! for those umbrellas all attendees received! They came in handy.) The great company made up for being a bit cold, and it was wonderful to be part of this World Usability Day celebration.

Figure 1—The opening reception

The opening plenary set a standard of creativity that was difficult to uphold. The conference sessions on Days 2 and 3 of DUX comprised panels of speakers, each of whom had only five or six minutes to present papers covering often disparate topics. The emphasis was more on ethnography than design and on the practical techniques with which most people are already familiar rather than on envisioning new paradigms. Presentations ranged from great to ho-hum. Some speakers were very engaging and used their minutes effectively, making one wish they had more time; others were boring and seemed to go on interminably. The organizers of this event tried to cram too much content into too little time. As a consequence, coverage of topics was generally superficial, and there were few insights or revelations that might have stimulated thinking among the cognoscenti. I would have preferred to have heard the best speakers—for instance, the very amusing Jared Spool—talk for half an hour and read the rest of the papers on the “Proceedings” CD-ROM. Discussions with many other attendees both during and following DUX echoed this viewpoint.

Figure 2—Bill Irwin at the opening reception

While there’s not a bad seat in the house at the Cowell Theater, there is nowhere comfortable to sit and talk or eat outside the theater—just long, cold, concrete hallways. San Francisco weather was at its most beautiful on Days 2 and 3 of DUX, so it felt good to spend some time outdoors when the conference broke for lunch. Fluffy clouds dotted bright blue skies and fresh breezes created whitecaps on the bay. I completely missed the poster sessions, which took place at lunchtime, when there seemed always to be conflicting events.

Though it took place at the very cool 111 Minna Gallery, the DUXBash was a bust. The art on exhibit was eclectic and interesting, and many enjoyed the gallery experience. However, while the blaring music made talking very difficult, it didn’t inspire many to dance. The DJ wasn’t right for the crowd. Since there are two rooms at the Gallery, it would have been so easy to disconnect the speakers in the bar, where people gathered to try to talk. There were a lot of people with hoarse voices the next day.

Edward Tenner, author of the book Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, delivered the closing plenary. Considering he read from a prepared text, his talk was surprisingly engaging. His presentation focused on the progress of industrial design since the late 19th century. Heather Gold interviewed Tenner following his talk. I couldn’t helping wishing that someone with great interviewer/moderator skills who actually works in UX—like Richard Anderson or Aaron Marcus—had taken on that role. Throughout DUX, I’d wanted to hear people talk about visionary design and innovation, and Tenner delivered. He left us with some great thoughts to take away from DUX:

• On innovation—“Innovation promotes unwelcome surprises, but also positive unintended consequences. … How do we make positive unintended consequences happen? … Design for unintended consequences by creating new opportunities for modification and innovation.”
• On design idealism—“There’s a tendency on designers’ part to think that a well-designed world would be a perfect world, but great design can embody and promote the greatest social ideals.”
• On intuition—“In a great client, there has to be a certain degree of irrationality. … Money is not the focus from the beginning. … [People like Steve Jobs] are intuitively brilliant. My sympathies lie with the intuitive person who hits on something users will love.”
• On industrial-strength Zen—“When people calculate too much, they can close themselves to unintended consequences.”

The DUX Conference attracts just the right mix of people, representing the diversity of UX professionals. With a format that encourages interaction and dialogue among attendees, DUX provides a great opportunity for meeting professional colleagues and online acquaintances face to face. Kudos to the organizers of DUX for the many things they’re doing well. Next time, I hope they’ll tweak the format of the conference sessions to allow presenters to explore their topics in more depth. DUX is definitely a worthwhile and unique conference.

Photographs by Keith Instone

Published: November 21, 2005

People from the UX community came together at DUX2005. I had eagerly awaited this second Conference on Designing for User eXperience, which was held November 2–5 at Fort Mason, in San Francisco, especially since I’d had miss the first DUX Conference in 2003. The conference lived up to my high expectations, providing fun and insight in equal measure. The surprising blue skies and sparkling vistas of the Golden Gate bridge didn’t hurt the experience either.

For me, the insights started with the two tutorials I attended: Layers of Experience, which Marc Rettig taught, and Whose Line Is It Anyway: Improv, Ethnography, and Innovation, which Steve Portigal taught.

Marc Rettig’s focus was on the different aspects of people’s experiences that we can study through ethnographic research. These aspects of experience included activities, environments, objects, people and their relationships, and interactions. Opening your mind to understanding people’s true goals exposes the key elements of an experience and reveals those “dimensions of meaningful variation” that let you produce a properly tailored design for a product that truly fits its target audience.

One curious thought I had at the end of Marc’s tutorial was whether it is possible that someday we might reach the point where our superb understanding of people—that is, the UX designer’s deep understanding of target users—would let us deliver a single, optimal experience for each category of product, service, or experience. Would different sets of highly trained ethnographic researchers focusing on the same subject deliver the same set of insights, leading to the same set of design solutions? If so, how could we avoid creating a homogenized, monopolistic universe filled with “idealized” experiences? Would we use corporate concepts of brand and ephemeral ideas of quality to differentiate our solutions? This possible future merits further thought—or perhaps I should read less science fiction before bedtime.

Steve Portigal’s tutorial brought the fun to bear, taking a more esoteric approach to the performance of ethnographic research by discussing improvisation techniques. Improv is more than a form of comedy. Common in theater training, improvisation is a group activity that emphasizes spontaneity within a clearly defined set of rules. Steve quickly pushed the class into improv exercises. For the first one, eight of us stood in a line at the front of the room and began to tell a story involving the randomly elicited dog walker and blender. We each spoke a single word when our turns came, developing the story together, one word at a time. I was soon stammering “noodles” when my turn came and blushing along with my fellow participants in discomfort at the oddity of this experience.

After more immersive improv exercises, Steve helped put the concepts together for the class. Successful improv involves taking an idea thrown to you by another participant and turning it into something else—something greater and maybe even something funny—and then tossing that idea along to the next participant. Improv is a group activity wherein listening is essential. Also, as in ethnographic research, experiencing empathy for your fellows is an essential key to gleaning and processing information. We can’t move from an analytical, or etic, point of view to an internalized, or emic, perspective that interprets the true meaning of things without engaging our hearts, minds, and bodies in the activity.

I was struck by the focus of participants’ questions toward the end of the tutorial, which turned upon whether ethnographers bring bias into their research and whether we can validate the work of ethnographers. I personally believe that the ethnographer—cum designer, anyway—must bring bias into the research work, in order to guide the activity toward the extraction of essential information from research subjects. I also think that ethnographic research gets validated by the analysis and synthesis that follows, which should either yield new, helpful insights or confirm existing insights. All in all, however, the group’s questions made me think that we’re a long way from understanding other people so well that we’re in any danger of living in some brave new world.

Because the tutorials and Studio Tours occurred on the same day, I unfortunately missed touring the local design studio offices. However, whether conference attendees attended tutorials, visited San Francisco design studios, or attended only the DUX Conference itself, Thursday evening was time for DUX2005 proper to begin. More than 400 attendees gathered in the Cowell Theater for the opening plenary. (DUX2005 organizers had deliberately limited registration, and it was a sold-out event.)

J.Walt Adamczyk gave an extraordinary live-animation performance, shown in Figure 1. He conjured giant alien plants from nothing, bringing to life a desert landscape with flicks of his pen on a Wacom tablet, tweaks on a sound board, and swirls of a joystick. This phenomenal and unique performance set a suitably creative tone for the opening plenary speaker, Tony award-winning actor Bill Irwin.

Figure 1—J.Walt Adamczyk’s alien landscape

To the crowd’s amazement, Irwin performed and dissected a classic “baggy-pants” shtick, demonstrating his sheer mastery over the language of the body. Pulling his head down into his shoulders or dropping his knees over his ankles or spinning his limbs around his body in a rolling dance to the quirky sounds of Peaches, Irwin evoked clown characters that told sad and funny stories. His amusingly self-deprecating presentation spoke to the variety of human experience as well as to our common humanity. My jaw really hit the floor during his performance of #11 of Samuel Beckett’s “Texts for Nothing.” Beckett’s stuttering characters and their vainly striving language always give me a visceral charge, making me feel more empty and more full at the same time. I am still wondering if Irwin performed it as the opposite of shtick, with its idiosyncratic, poetic rhythms, or as the epitome of shtick, with the funny familiarity of one’s own stream of unconsciousness.

Thursday evening concluded with a buffet dinner reception sponsored by BayDUX, where I got a chance to talk one-on-one with some of the fascinating people in the field of user experience that I’ve met over the past few years—not to mention many I’d met that very day. Friday evening also concluded with a social gathering, at the 111 Minna Gallery in the South of Market district of San Francisco. Unfortunately, the extreme volume of the music and limited space made this event more an awkward crush than a true socializing opportunity.

Friday and Saturday, the unique format of the DUX2005 conference gathered all attendees in the Cowell Theater for 90-minute panel sessions, during which participants presented the papers that the Program Chairs had accepted. These sessions were more or less loosely organized around these themes: “User-Steered Content,” “Common Sense and Reason,” “Design Education,” “PG13—Designing Games,” “Out in the World—Experiences Beyond the Desktop,” and “Harnessing User Needs and Insights.” Following brief presentations from each of a session’s three to seven participants, volunteers roved the auditorium with microphones to solicit questions.

The presentations varied widely in tone, from relatively academic descriptions of research or problem-solving work to a hilarious send-up of the super-brief five-minute allotment for each presentation by Jared Spool. I personally believe that Spool was making some meta-point about people’s need for humor, as his presentation ostensibly dealt with what users really want. Notable highlights of the panel sessions that left me hungry for more included:

• a beautiful direct-manipulation interface for selecting diamonds on the Web
• the need to deliver tools that encode best practices, since nobody follows guidelines
• the challenges of establishing and measuring concentration, and how to support the creation of desirable states of flow
• the need to love our target users to succeed—it helps if you think of the user as a human being
• Stanford’s neat HCI class that uses theater to explicate design problems (Where would I be if I’d discovered this career when I got my bachelor’s degree there a decade ago?)
• at least four flavors of fun in gaming—just one of which is “easy fun”
• people’s tendency to become eerily uncomfortable when considering the special needs of the elderly
• presentations achieved without bullet points rocked the house
• a presentation achieved without using PowerPoint enthralled the mind—especially when it charmingly dissected the grammar of movement involved in southern Indian coffee-making rituals

The only session that fell flat for me was the invited panel session. Its failure to come alive was noticeable amid the other lively exchanges.

A few of the questions directed at panelists were challenging—the proposition that each design we deliver is more like a death rather a birth especially stands out—but mainly attendees were simply curious and engaged. Since all of the panelists were also attendees of DUX2005, as shown in Figure 2, the person blogging in the auditorium seat next to you might be a panelist. The format invited an active, synthetic engagement with the material, especially since we broke regularly for coffee and lunch breaks, which encouraged conversation and further speculation. With everything else that was going on, though, I must confess that I barely experienced the posters, and unfortunately, I had to miss the closing plenary, because personal interests trumped professional ones.

Figure 2—Blogging at DUX

Until this conference, I have always identified myself as an interaction designer. Over the years, I’ve become increasingly involved in professional organizations, especially the recently-formalized Interaction Design Association. In Los Angeles and, more recently, in Portland, Oregon, I’ve organized IxDA Face-to-Face gatherings of professionals practicing—or at least interested in—interaction design. After participating in DUX2005, however, I must self-identify as a user experience designer. The scope of my involvement in technology product planning activities is as broad as that of any practitioner I’ve met. Somehow, the user experience designation has broken through the consciousness of corporate management and society at large in a way that interaction design and usability alone have not yet done. Internationally, people working in all of the user experience design disciplines are standing up and asking for recognition more seriously than ever before.

On Friday evening, standing in for the Portland UXnet local ambassador, Bill DeRouchey, who couldn’t attend the conference, I was glad to attend a dinner with UXnet and BayDUX people, some of whom are shown in Figures 3 and 4. The UXnet folks are a remarkably altruistic bunch. They are dedicated to helping the many organizations that serve the interests of UX professionals to cooperate and collaborate with one another. ACM SIGCHI, a sponsoring organization of DUX2005, is one of the largest organizations of the bunch, but ACM SIGGRAPH, AIGA, HFES, IAI, IDSA, IIID, IxDA, STC, and the UPA represent other UX specialties. We’ll need a lot of cooperation and collaboration to achieve unity among this scattered constituency! Coming together in a spirit of amity at events like DUX2005 helps lift all of us up toward our common goals.

Figure 3—UXnet and BayDUX folks at dinner

Figure 4—More people from UXnet and BayDUX at dinner

Overall, for me the DUX2005 conference was an inspiring event that revealed an extraordinarily consistent set of practical concerns that we UX professionals share, as well as the strong commonalities among the body of best practices we are busily creating. Affording a valuable opportunity for UX professionals to meet and speak with colleagues who they may know only by name or reputation, DUX2005 brought together an open-minded gathering of thoughtful people who are committed to improving the human condition—one silicon-enabled experience at a time. Hope to see you there next time!

Photographs by Elizabeth Bacon and Keith Instone

Published: November 21, 2005

Within the corporate world, the clash between marketing and IT teams is a well known, but little discussed subject. Often, the marketing or corporate communications team owns the vision for online efforts, while the tech team owns their execution.

The stereotype of the suits vs. the geeks is too simple to capture the situation. Still, there’s no doubt the conflict has often boiled down to two polarized positions.

On the one hand, we have marketers who feel that technologists don’t understand the value of brand communication; on the other, technologists who feel that marketers don’t understand the practical and architectural implications of technology decisions.

In a very real sense, this divide prevents the enterprise from bringing all available expertise to bear on decisions that affect user experience. Marketers must often sit on the sidelines, reduced to the role of policing the visual design of an online presence.

Meanwhile, technologists and software engineers must make decisions without the user insights that a stronger partnership with marketing might provide. The success of the enterprise depends on these worlds coming together, yet often conflicts drive them further apart.

One of the great barriers to bridging this gap has been the absence of a common language between marketing and technology professionals. Chief marketing officers speak of brand value, multi-channel marketing initiatives, demographics, and target markets. CIOs and CTOs speak of enterprise architecture, platforms, extensibility, scalability, and integration.

Goodbye, GUI—Hello, UX

At one time, the concept of the Graphic User Interface (GUI) held great promise in connecting marketing to technology, and there was much talk of the importance of user friendliness. Yet over time, the term GUI lost its meaning, devolving to technological window dressing—just an aesthetic veneer without much substance. Somehow, the user at the center of this concept began to vanish from the picture, in favor the graphics and the interface.

Thankfully, the ideas and practices of enterprise UX design are gaining mindshare, succeeding where the GUI paradigm failed, and creating a shared tech-marketing domain. Companies are beginning to realize that UX professionals bring positive solutions to the table. Today, we see savvy technologists and marketers starting to embrace the enterprise UX concept because both camps stand to gain much in doing so.

User experience is a deliberately broader concept than GUI. It may take some time for it to fully penetrate the product design and development world. But it’s the right term to help create an approach to product design and development that incorporates the way people really perceive design, use products, and make decisions.

The term user experience communicates the reality that the success of a digital product doesn’t end with its technology or the design of its user interface. It must extend all the way to users’ perception of that design and their experience of interacting with it.

Before a product ever comes to market, we must involve users in a feedback loop throughout the cycles of product design and development to make sure that the technology reaches its target audience and that the design theory aligns with user reality.

“The Street finds its own uses for things—uses the manufacturers never imagined,” wrote William Gibson, in his essay, “Rocket Radio.” And this, of course, is true. One of the biggest design challenges is accurately predicting the perceptions and usage patterns of future users. A new product can fall quickly into disuse, because the street finds it insufficiently innovative, useful, usable, or engaging.

This user judgment day occurs not only for consumer products, but also, in the case of enterprise UX, for internal products as well. For example, employees may fail to embrace a new intranet, extranet, or business application, because it doesn’t really connect with the way they do their jobs. The UX approach moves product concepts through iterative cycles of progressive optimization by letting real live users road test more and more refined models of a product. By involving users in the product design process, UX professionals bring to their teams the benefits of foresight and insight into “the street” before a product even rolls out.

Enterprise UX design can have a positive impact on all aspects of a company’s business, from their customer-facing Web sites to their digital products to their internal Web applications and communications platforms. And UX professionals have developed a toolkit for visualizing and enhancing business processes in a way that both marketers and technologists can appreciate and embrace.

A Tech-Marketing Toolkit

Enterprise UX design operates between the marketing and technology worlds, creating practical tech-marketing deliverables that the enterprise can plan, map, prototype, test, refine, develop, and finally roll out to internal and external end users with great success.

For CTOs and CIOs, enterprise UX design offers

• a way to prioritize competing projects and finite resources in light of business strategy and user needs
• a practical commitment to building technology that works for users
• a chance to discover and prevent usability problems before incurring major development costs—or at least, before a project requires major retrenchment
• an approach that can keep developers focused on real-world use cases and prevent their getting lost in endless preliminary work, building tools to build tools

For Chief Marketing Officers and brand advocates, enterprise UX design offers

• input into business-based technology decisions
• a practical way to translate user input into technology reality
• a chance to drive the quality of the user experience while still allowing technologists to consider the best deployment path
• a chance to help technologists succeed in reaching customers, rather than being perceived as impractical or as pie-in-the-sky visionaries.
• a platform for learning about and humanizing technology

But Who Really Owns Enterprise UX?

As the term user experience rises to prominence, there is much debate, and even naval-gazing, about the category of professionals within an enterprise who should own the user experience. Is it designers? Usability professionals? Information architects? Ironically, the term user experience is meant to unify an excessively subdivided digital product infrastructure and culture.

But a variation of this debate is dawning within the culture of the real owners of user experience—the businesses that fund the creation of UX strategies for their operations and UX designs for their products. Clearly, UX professionals must share ownership of user experience. But what does it say on the organization chart?

In a growing number of cases, corporations are creating new UX positions such as VP, User Experience or User Experience Director. Where this is not the case, tech-savvy marketers or marketing-savvy technologists will likely lead user experience. In either case, enterprise user experience is a cross-discipline practice in a world where old categories are breaking down and agility and dynamism are taking hold.

Published: November 3, 2005

When Don Norman’s most recent book, Emotional Design¹, hit the shelves in early 2004, it sent a ripple through the user experience world. Norman introduced the idea that product design should address three different levels of cognitive and emotional processing: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. This idea seemed like old news to some and a revelation to others in the UX community. In either case, Norman’s ideas, based on years of cognitive research, provide an articulated structure for modeling user responses to product and brand and a rational context for many intuitions long held by professional designers.

Norman’s three levels of cognitive processing are

• visceral—The most immediate level of processing, in which we react to visual and other sensory aspects of a product that we can perceive before significant interaction occurs. Visceral processing helps us make rapid decisions about what is good, bad, safe, or dangerous. It is this level of processing—or something quite similar to it—that author Malcolm Gladwell discusses in his latest book, Blink.
• behavioral—The middle level of processing that lets us manage simple, everyday behaviors, which according to Norman, constitute the majority of human activity. Norman states—probably rightly so—that, historically, interaction design and usability practices have primarily addressed this level of cognitive processing. Behavioral processing can enhance or inhibit both lower-level visceral reactions and higher-level reflective responses, and conversely, both visceral and reflective processing can enhance or inhibit behavioral processing.
• reflective—The least immediate level of processing, which involves conscious consideration and reflection on past experiences. Reflective processing can enhance or inhibit behavioral processing, but has no direct access to visceral reactions. This level of cognitive processing is accessible only via memory, not through direct interaction or perception. The most interesting aspect of reflective processing as it relates to design is that, through reflection, we are able to integrate our experiences with designed artifacts into our broader life experiences and, over time, associate meaning and value with the artifacts themselves.

In the first three chapters of Emotional Design, Norman presents his three-level theory of cognitive processing and discusses its potential importance to design. However, Emotional Design does not suggest a method for systematically integrating Norman’s insightful model of cognition and affect into the practice of user experience design. It is my hope, in the remainder of this article, to

• suggest some deeper implications of Norman’s ideas for the design of user experience
• provide a method by which UX professionals can incorporate his ideas into a way of developing a richer understanding of users
• show how UX professionals might begin applying his ideas to the design of products

Designing for Visceral Response

What does it mean to design in a manner that takes advantage of what we know about visceral processing? Designing for the visceral level means designing what the senses initially perceive, before any deeper involvement with a product or artifact occurs. For most of us working in user experience, that primarily means designing visual appearance and motion, though sound can also play a role—think of the now classic Mac power-up chord. Those of us designing devices may design for tactile sensations as well.

A misconception often arises when discussing visceral-level design: that designing for visceral response is about designing beautiful things. Battlefield software and radiation-therapy systems are just two examples where designing for beauty may not be the proper focus. Visceral design is actually about designing for affect—that is, eliciting the appropriate psychological or emotional response for a particular context—rather than for aesthetics alone. Beauty—and the feelings of transcendence and pleasure it evokes—is really only a small part of the possible affective design palette. For example, an MP3 player and an online banking system require very different affects. We can learn a great deal about affect from architecture, the cinema and stage, and industrial design. Affective aspects of design deserve further attention and offer great opportunities for analysis from a holistic, UX perspective.

However, in the world of consumer products and services, where many of us work, attractive user interfaces are often appropriate. Interestingly, usability researchers² have demonstrated that users initially judge attractive interfaces to be more usable, and that this belief often persists long after a user has gained sufficient experience with an interface to have direct evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the reason for this is that users, encouraged by perceived ease of use, make a greater effort to learn what may be a challenging interface and are then unwilling to consider their investment ill spent. For the scrupulous designer, this means that, when a user interface promises ease of use at the visceral level—or whatever else the visceral promise of an interaction may be—it should then be sure to deliver on that promise at the behavioral level.

Designing for Behavior, or Interaction

Designing for the behavioral level means designing product behaviors that complement a user’s own behaviors, implicit assumptions, and mental models. Of the three levels of design Norman contemplates, behavioral design is perhaps the most familiar to UX professionals, especially those working within the spheres of interaction design and usability.

One intriguing aspect of Norman’s three-level model as it relates to behavioral, or interaction, design is his assertion that behavioral processing, uniquely among his three levels, has direct influence upon and is influenced directly by both of the other two levels of processing. This would seem to imply that the day-to-day behavioral aspects of interaction design should be the primary focus of our design efforts, with visceral and reflective considerations playing a supporting role. Getting behavioral design right—assuming that we also pay adequate attention to the other levels—provides our greatest opportunity for positively influencing the way users construct their experience with products.

Not following this line of reasoning can lead to the problem of users’ initial impressions being out of sync with reality. Also, it is difficult to imagine designing for reflective meaning in memory without a solid purpose and set of behaviors in place for the here and now. The user experience of a product or artifact, therefore, should ideally harmonize elements of visceral design and reflective design with a focus on behavioral design.

Designing for Reflection

Reflective processing—and, particularly, what it means for design—is perhaps the most challenging aspect of the three levels of processing that Norman discusses. What is clear is that designing for the reflective level means designing to build long-term product relationships. What isn’t clear at all is the best way to ensure success—if that’s even possible—at the reflective level. Is it chance that drives success here—being in the right place at the right time—or can premeditated design play a part in making it happen?

In describing reflective design, Norman uses several high-concept designs for commodity products as examples—such as impractically configured teapots and the striking Phillipe Starck juicer that graces the cover of his book. It is easy to see how such products—whose value and purpose are, in essence, the aesthetic statements they make—could appeal strongly to people’s reflective desire for uniqueness or cultural sophistication that perhaps may come from an artistic or stylish self-image.

It is more difficult to see how products that also serve a truly useful purpose need to balance the stylistic and the elegant with the functional. The Apple® iPod® comes very close to achieving this balance. Although the its click-wheel navigation is perhaps less than optimal in some respects, users’ visceral reaction to the product is tremendous, because of its savvy industrial design. Its reflective potential is also huge, because of the powerful emotional connection people experience with their music. It’s a winning combination that no competitor has been able to challenge.

Few products become iconic in people’s lives in the way that, say, the Sony® Walkman® did. The iPod is quickly ascending to that status. Clearly there are some products that stand little chance of ever becoming symbolic in peoples lives—like Ethernet routers, for instance—no matter how wonderful they look or well they behave. However, when the design of a product or service addresses users’ goals and motivations—possibly going beyond the product’s primary purpose, yet somehow connected to it via personal or cultural associations—the opportunity for the creation of reflective meaning is greatly enhanced.

Understanding Users’ Goals on Three Levels

We clearly need good ways to understand users’ needs at each of the three levels of processing, translate that understanding into clear requirements, and finally, translate those requirements into clear directions for developers. Luckily, at least one such method already exists and is in relatively widespread use—though to date, usage of this method has focused primarily on the behavioral level.

We can readily apply Alan Cooper’s goal-directed design methods³, which include personas, goals, and scenarios, to the problems of visceral, behavioral, and reflective design. Most UX practitioners are familiar with the concept of personas—composite user archetypes that we construct from behavioral data that we have gathered during user interviews and field observations. We give our personas realistic names, faces, and personalities to foster user empathy within a product team. However, practitioners may be somewhat less aware that a critical element of personas—beyond capturing typical user behavior patterns and roles—is capturing user motivations in the form of specific goals. In fact, the three types of goals that Cooper’s methods⁴ enumerate largely anticipated the concerns of Norman’s three levels of processing.

Experience goals help describe how a persona wants to feel while using a product. These goals provide focus for a product’s visual and aural characteristics, its interactive feel—such as animated transitions and the snap ratio of a physical button—and its industrial design by providing insights into persona motivations that express themselves at the visceral level. For example:

• Feel smart or in control.
• Have fun.
• Feel cool or hip or relaxed.
• Remain focused and alert.

UX practitioners must translate persona experience goals into form, motion, and auditory elements that communicate the proper affect, emotion, and tone. Mood or inspiration boards⁵ are a useful tool for defining the tonal expectations of personas.

End goals describe what a persona wants or needs to accomplish. A product or service can help accomplish such goals directly or indirectly. These goals are the focus of a product’s interaction design, information architecture, and the more functional aspects of industrial design. Because of the influence of behavioral processing on both visceral and reflective responses, end goals should be among the most significant factors in determining the overall product experience. For example:

• Clear my desk before I leave for home.
• Make good business decisions based on my data.
• Find problems proactively before they become critical.
• Buy what I need and get out of here.

UX practitioners must translate end goals into a product’s behaviors, tasks, look, and feel. Context—day in the life—scenarios, and cognitive walkthroughs are effective tools for exploring users’ goals and mental models, which facilitate appropriate behavioral design.

Life goals describe a persona’s long-term desires, motivations, and self-image attributes, which cause the persona to connect with a product. These goals form the focus for a product’s overall design, strategy, and branding. For example:

• Live the good life.
• Succeed in my ambitions to….
• Be a connoisseur of….
• Be attractive, popular, or respected by my peers.

UX practitioners must translate life goals into high-level system capabilities, formal design concepts, and brand strategy. Mood boards and context scenarios can be helpful in exploring different aspects of product concepts, and broad ethnographic research and cultural modeling are critical for discovering users’ behavior patterns and deeper motivations.

Using Scenarios to Explore Users’ Goals

A product’s UX team can use context scenarios to help bridge the gap between personas and their goals and create a design that meets their needs and desires. Context scenarios describe the broader context for persona usage patterns, behaviors, and reactions to a product design, including environmental, organizational, and cultural factors. These scenarios establish the primary touch-points a persona may have with a new or redesigned product over time, illuminating modes of use, user mental models, and user attitudes toward the product.

Two related scenario-based techniques do a particularly good job of addressing all three types of goals—experience, end, and life goals—because they help recast the problem as designing an ideal experience rather than a technology-based solution.

• Pretending it’s magic—If a product were magic, how would it do X, so a persona would be perfectly satisfied? If, technically, we can’t do it that way, how close can we get?
• Pretending it’s human—In a similar situation, or context, what ideal response would a persona expect from a human?

Remember, understanding goals is about understanding human motivations more than it is about understanding specific tasks, which can change as technology changes. In line with Norman’s model, top-level user motivations include

• visceral motivations—how a user wants to feel
• behavioral motivations—what a user wants to do
• reflective motivations—who a user wants to be

Using personas, goals, and scenarios provides one potential key to unlocking the power of visceral, behavioral, and reflective design, and bringing them together into a harmonious whole. While some of our best designers seem to understand and act upon the interrelationships between these aspects of design almost intuitively, consciously designing for all levels of human cognition and emotion offers tremendous potential for creating more satisfying and delightful user experiences.

Endnotes

1. Norman, Donald A. Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
2. Dillon, Andrew. “Beyond Usability: Process, Outcome and Affect in Human Computer Interaction.” Paper presented at the Lazerow Lecture at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, March 2001. Retrieved from http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~adillon/publications/beyond_usability.html
3. Cooper, Alan and Robert Reimann. About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Indianapolis: Wiley, 2003.
4. Goodwin, Kim. “Perfecting Your Personas.” Cooper Newsletter, July/August 2001. Retrieved from http://www.cooper.com/newsletters/2001_07/perfecting_your_personas.htm
5. Wong, Stephanie. “Mood Boards.” Life+StyleMaven. Retrieved from http://www.lifestylemaven.com/styleboard1_intro.htm

Published: November 3, 2005

“When you design an interactive product, you are creating the setting for thousands of conversations, which will be spoken between product and person.”—Marc Rettig

Though carefully structured organizational systems and well architected interactions are key components of effective interface designs, it is ultimately the presentation of an interface—layout, look and feel—that tells users what a product has to offer and how they can make use of it. As a result, creating usable and engaging interactive products is dependent on our ability, as designers, to communicate with our audience. The better at communicating we are, the easier it is for our audience to understand our messages and intentions and the easier it is for them to use and appreciate the products we design.

Interactive products, by their very nature, tend to be complicated. They allow us to create and control large amounts of information and enable many unique interactions. As a result, there’s a natural tendency for interface designs to over-communicate, or establish multiple forms of dialogue and vocabularies within a single application or interaction. Complicated concepts require more explanation, right? Not always.

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”—Hans Hofmann

Consider the simple table in Figure 1. It’s telling you about a certain set of data points and their corresponding values. The problem is that excessive visual noise and redundant content obscure the values themselves—arguably the most important elements within the table. It’s hard to concentrate on the values, because the background color and the thick borders continually compete for your attention. The varying thicknesses of the table and cell borders actually make them even more distracting. In other words, the table itself is talking louder than the data it’s trying to communicate.

Figure 1—A simple table

Our first inclination, therefore, might be to reduce the table’s volume by removing its background color and dark borders. This gives us the table in Figure 2.

Figure 2—The table without its background color and borders

The values and their labels are now clearly the focus of the conversation, but this design requires a lot of bouncing back and forth between the labels and the values to understand what the table is telling us. We’re not being told anything about the relationship of the values until we take the time to read each one. We’ve also lost the message that this is a unified set of data. Once we remove the border, there’s no visual grouping of the elements in the table, so our table may blend in with other items on the page—depending on their visual treatment, of course.

In order to communicate the relationships among the labels and the data in our table, let’s bring back some of the visual elements we just took away. This time, however, we’ll use only the minimal amount of visual contrast necessary, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3—The redesigned table

The light, single-pixel border we added has just enough visual weight to group the content in our table, without being visually distracting. The light background color meaningfully groups related content within the table—such as the numbers of admissions and numbers of discharges over various time spans—without introducing multiple visual elements like the borders between the rows of the table we had before. We also reduced the contrast of the table header, which was getting undue attention.

Things are looking pretty good, but we can do even better. By eliminating redundant content—such as the repeated phrase Number of—and putting the visual emphasis on the values we care about rather than on their labels, we can simplify the design of the table even further, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4—The redesigned content

In our final table design, the visual elements are just noticeable enough to group related content without distracting from it. We’ve made the labels within the table easier to scan by removing redundant content and emphasized the values through the use of bold type.

Through this rather simple example, we’ve seen how we can reduce both visual design and content elements to the minimum amount necessary for effective communication. Clear, concise design is a key factor in the success of all user interfaces, especially when you consider the amount of information we’re all required to parse in today’s digital world. Design so that the necessary may speak.