Adaptive Path Blog

There’s been a lot of talk about “total experience design”, service design, et cetera and how these point to the changing nature of design generally. There is a growing realization that we are no longer designing products, web sites, or monolithic centralized systems. As the internet and digital networks in general become more ubiquitous, more distributed, and more integrated in our lives, we’re finding that it’s better to think of our projects in terms of services and systems rather than products. As Adam Richardson of frogdesign puts it, his new mantra is: “The system is the product.” Our projects generally involve multiple touchpoints (i.e., the web, mobile devices, and physical spaces) and the need for consistent or complimentary experiences across them. These kinds of projects require design that understands and integrates well with the aspects of people’s lives that have nothing (or very little) to do with the things you are designing. Meaning and culture play ever bigger roles.

Of course, focusing on services means having to deal with a much messier set of issues related to human behavior than in traditional interactive design. This is fundamentally changing the way we all go about doing design. In particular, I’ve been thinking that we may need to move away from a framework of tasks, goals, and states in favor of a framework focused on behaviors, motivations, and contexts. (This change is already under way in the fringes of HCI research and design, but I say it’s time for it to take root in mainstream design.)

Essentially, I am calling for an end to the decades-old framework that HCI, information architecture, and interaction design have been using for understanding users. That’s right, I say take a hike, task analysis! Good bye, user goals! These concepts are insufficient for the new kinds of systems we are designing. People do not live their lives in terms of tasks and goals; most behavior is not task-oriented nor goal-driven. The drivers for action are often complex, subtle, and closely tied to culture, meaning, and context. But it’s nearly impossible to talk about meaning in terms of tasks and goals.

Focusing exclusively on tasks and goals means that you tend to ignore or de-emphasize all of the activities that people engage in that are specifically not goal-oriented. It also means that you will often ignore the messy jumble of activities that take place around but are not oriented toward your system. This is not always problematic but it quickly becomes so when you are designing for multiple contexts and mediums. When it comes to designing for the total experience, the activities that have little to do with the system you are designing are often just as important as those that are central to it. More than ever before, people switch from one context to another rapidly and often. They were in the outskirts of Cleveland mowing their lawn then the cell phone rang and suddenly they’re planning a trip to Thailand.

Now I want to make sure that I’m being clear. This is not just a semantic or linguistic game I’m playing. I’m not just substituting one set of words (i.e., behaviors, motivations, contexts) for another (i.e., tasks, goals, states) while maintaining the underlying structure. Rather, I’m trying to take the insights of the last 40 years of social science and bring them into our way of thinking about designing interactive systems. (Note: I’m using the broadest definition of that term “interactive systems”.) The role of culture, meaning, and context in human life is undeniable. Every field of social science has been integrating culture and meaning into their theories and methods—some more than others—and we as designers should be doing the same. To do that, we need a framework that takes these things into account as well.

The reason I’m making such a big deal out of this is that the models we use to understand and talk about people greatly influence how we can understand a problem or situation. If your framework doesn’t explicitly account for culture and context, then it is unlikely that you will be attuned to these things when you do your research and design.

Practically, this means that simply incorporating “ethnographic” methods into your current process will NOT get you to where you need to be. You can spend six months “in the field” or interview 150 people. But none of it will matter if you don’t have a conceptual framework that actually allows you to incorporate the subtleties of behavior, motivation, and context that led you to use these methods in the first place.

Of course, as a result of these changes in approach, our jobs become much more complicated—but also much more exciting. More importantly, our designs will also be more effective and successful.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Interaction Design, Service Design, The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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