Adaptive Path Blog

I recently sat down to talk with Raphael Grignani who leads the Nokia Service and UI Design team here in San Francisco. I spoke with Raphael about his involvement in Homegrown, an umbrella project whose goal was to create sustainable, ethical, and desirable communication solutions for Nokia. Raphael shares the journey of this grassroots project that started out as ten inspired individuals within Nokia looking at the topic of sustainability evolved into product and service concepts and eventually found it’s way to Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the CEO of Nokia, and the Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona.

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A recent post by John Kullman on Mobile Crunch highlights a study that speculates by 2011, 25 million Americans will use their mobile phones as mobile wallets. The report states that the ease and convenience of mobile phone commerce is hard to resist.

While I can appreciate the value of mobile wallets, there is something about this prediction that makes me slightly sad.

In a fast-paced and stressful world, who doesn’t need ease and convenience? It’s seems perfectly natural to want to make life a little easier and more efficient. It’s that desire for efficiency that’s inspired countless products and services like automatic bankteller machines, self-serve gas pumps and the revered Octopus and Oyster cards. I’ve used all these systems and services and yes, they have saved me time and made my life easier.

But lately I have been thinking how the systems and services we design in the name of ease and convenience are actually coming at a steep price.

It’s said that people are defined by their relationships to others. Given that, it’s probably easy for most of us to make a laundry list of all the important people in our lives. If one unpacks all the moments of interaction with human beings on any given day, it’s clear a good share of our time is spent reinforcing those important, explicit relationships – a phone call to the parents, conversations with work colleagues, dinner and drinks with friends and family.

The thing is, there are tons of tiny interactions we have throughout the day with people we hardly know – a conversation about organic produce with a clerk at the grocery store, commiserating with folks standing in line at the DMV, a wink from the bus driver while fumbling for bus fare. Somehow those interactions while seemingly less important, have significance in our lives.

They’re important because they give a richness and texture to our daily experience. They add an element of unpredictability and surprise to our lives. They provide us with opportunity to practice skills like striking up a conversation, thinking on our feet, joking, and flirting. Most importantly, I believe the cumulative effect of these interactions feed into the holy grail of human needs – the need to feel connected to the world around us and be part of something bigger than ourselves.

As we clamor to create systems and services like mobile wallets that streamline our lives and make things easier, unbeknownst to us, we’re actually slowly eliminating the opportunity for these types of tacit interactions to occur.

I’m not suggesting that we abolish convenience and efficiency as design principles because that seems crazy. The momentum of the modern world won’t allow it. However, if we simply approach design problems from a task/goal/efficiency perspective, we lose the opportunity to create systems that honor our need for these tacit human interactions and leave in our wake a society of people who enjoy convenience yet feel lonely and disconnected.

How do we change that trajectory? I’m not exactly sure. However, it seems like an interesting place to start would be to think about how mobile technology can “grease the skids” of social interactions. Instead of placing a premium on the accomplishment of a task or a goal, privilege mobile systems that enable the subtlety, elegance and grace of tacit human interaction.

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The schedule for UX Week 2008 (August 12-15, San Francisco) is complete, and we think it’s the best conference we’ve put together yet. I thought it would be helpful to relate what I call the narrative of UX Week, as each day is a particular chapter as we go from the aspects of UX practice today, to preparing ourselves for what will come.

On Day 1, we focus on the fundamentals of user experience kicking off with legendary Don Norman, and following that with presentations on the intense redesign of Microsoft Office, and workshops covering a range of essential UX techniques, from prototyping to storytelling to sketching.

On Day 2, we look at the next step in user experience, the emerging field of service design, which aims to address the design of experiences across multiple platforms and touchpoints. Carsharing company Zipcar’s CEO Scott Griffith will explain the wicked design challenges of providing their service, from online reservations to what happens if something goes wrong with the car. We’ll hear from representatives of TheDailyShow.com and Current TV, both pioneers in bridging the television experience to the Web. The workshops on this day will give you tools to succeed in this emerging world, looking towards the future with topics such as information visualization and designing gestural interfaces. We’ll end the day with an inspiring session from Milkshake Media on their work designing the brand experience for Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG foundation.

On Day 3, we immerse ourselves in real-world experiences. We begin with alternate reality game designer Jane McGonigal, who is taking gaming off the screen and onto the streets, and continue with sessions on the institutions that are leading the way with immersive experiences: museums. We then leave the hotel for a field trip to the Exploratorium, perhaps the nation’s premier hands-on science museum, where we’ll immerse ourselves in their lessons on designing complete experiences.

For our final day, Day 4, we look toward the future of user experience. We begin with Michael B. Johnson from Pixar, who will share how the famed studio pulls together its work to consistently create the best animated films on the market. We’ll then look towards designing for the post-PC world, designing for mobile, large-scale multitouch, gestural interfaces, physical computing, and even designing for robots. We will have an expo space for attendees to use Microsoft Surface, ThingM’s WineM, Johnny Lee’s Wiimote Hacks, and other new interaction paradigms. We’ll also look at work we’ve done at Adaptive Path on the future of the Web browser, and finish with design visionary and science-fiction author Bruce Sterling, who will send us out with his rousing message.

We can confidently say that no user experience event points the way forward like UX Week. You’ll walk away with techniques and ideas you can use immediately, and also with a mind for the future of our field.

We’ve extended our discounted registration through June 30. And use the promotional code BLOG and get an additional 10% off! Go to UXWeek.com for all the details on the program.

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It’s a sad but common sight in modern society – a person walking around in the world, utterly disengaged, head buried in a mobile device – a victim of the visually greedy mobile interface.

Sure, one might argue there’s more to blame than the interface, like our growing Pavlovian response to phone calls and messages and the “always on” expectation, or our strange and ravenous human need to consume more and more information and media.

But as designers, how much control do we really have over those issues?

What we do have some semblance of control over are interfaces and it is curious that we rely so heavily on the sense of sight to guide users through technology experiences. Ask anybody with a vision impairment who uses a computer or a mobile phone, visually-driven interfaces dominate the technology landscape.

On the PC, we can get away with it. But the dominance of visually-driven interfaces become especially problematic in the mobile context. Design principles and conventions like WYSIWYG and GUI become brittle and broken on small devices. The screens are simply too small and the requirements of the mobile context too great to support interfaces that are visually demanding. Even the lauded and successful iPhone demands we disengage with the world and worship it’s visual luster during use.

The thing is, humans are actually pretty good at knowing where things are even when we can’t see them. The sound of the fire truck, the smell of the garbage, the vibration of an earthquake… our senses are tuned to innately tell us about the world around us. Unfortunately, these instincts haven’t been finely tuned with regard to our behaviors around information and technology. We rely heavily on sight.

How do we break this pattern?

Swing for the fences when thinking about senses. Leverage context, gesture, haptics and sound to convey information.

Admittedly, thinking about interfaces that engage our sense of touch, smell, and hearing can feel wonky, weird … preposterous even. It’s largely unchartered territory without the guideposts and maps of the typical, visually-driven approach to interface design.

However, it feels like letting ourselves explore the land of the senses is the only way to start to break the dominance of the greedy, visually-driven interfaces and deliver mobile experiences and interactions that - as Adam Greenfield says - dissolve into behavior.

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As Roland mentioned in an earlier post, last week we had a lunch time visit from Andrew Blau, the Global Business Network’s head of practice. It was a great talk, and the team started sketching all these ideas they had in relation to what was discussed.

GBN is best known for their scenario planning practice, wherein they work with a client to create a set of stories (usually 3 or 4) about the client’s business 10 years out. These stories are purposefully diverse, so that they can help the business prepare for any number of possible futures.

It made me think about the role of futures in our experience design work. Design is an inherently futurist activity — planning and sketching things that don’t yet exist. We’ve begun to engage directly with futurist notions in our work, whether it’s tangible futures (designing the poster that will trumpet our success), concept videos (what will it be like to interact with mobile devices in 3-5 years), prototypes, and more. What I realized is that, in our practice at least, our application of futures thinking pretty much stops 3-5 years out. I scrawled the following on a whiteboard, as I considered how our experience design work and GBN’s scenario planning work complements one another. Be warned, it’s barely half-baked!

I found myself wondering if experience design is in it’s nature limited to crafting futures no more than 3-5 years out (what we generically call Visioning). If you get out much farther than that, your ties to designing for actual human engagement get pretty thin, because there are so many variables that you’re needing to design for multiple possible futures, which is quite taxing.

Now, I don’t know if I believe that experience design is limited in this fashion… Even we are working on a concept video for 2018. But I wanted to get this out there because I think there’s a lot of opportunity to explore the intersection and integration of experience design and futurism, the role that experience design can have in charting paths for organizations. I’d love to hear what you think!

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