Create the world, the interface will follow

by Paula Wellings

August 26, 2008

In user experience design, there is a growing emphasis on starting projects by creating robust descriptions of the prospective users. Through contextual inquiry and persona development we gain insight into people’s needs; ascertain their desires; and illuminate their behavior, wishes, hopes and dreams. But in an attempt to create archetypal descriptions of people, the specificity of the environments people inhabit are often times diminished—research is conducted across broad cross-sections of markets to ensure that common experiences are identified and explored.

At its best, people-focused research leads to innovative products and new approaches to supporting people’s accomplishments. At its not-so-best, these descriptions lead to long lists of problems people have and long lists of ways to solve these problems, often manifested as features and requirements.

An interesting disruption to this process is to pull back for a moment to consider what tenable and creative role the environments occupied by people might bring to the experience design process. How can we move from a purely descriptive representation of the people themselves to an approach that explicitly recognizes design as facilitating participation in particular worlds?

My own design career began at a company that created imaginary worlds in which people learned, worked and played. The origins of the company were in play, initially focusing on creating video games and then extending game design approaches to learning and business applications as well.

Core to the beginning of each project was a focus on defining the world of the game. What kind of environment empowers people to participate in the experiences they yearn for, such as conquering, collaborating, nurturing, collecting, competing and questing? Questions we would ask about the imagined world included:

• What are the reoccurring themes of the world?
• What does the world look and sound like?
• What does it feel like to be in the world?
• What tools and artifacts can be found in the world?
• What creatures/characters live in the world?
• What is the culture and history of the world?

Answering these questions in words and pictures was the first step in defining the possibility space of the game world and giving depth and meaning to every subsequent interaction. World descriptions gave us a method to tell the story of places that people implicitly seek to inhabit. See the world description for Viva Piñata to see an example of complete game world description.

Like the worlds of video games, our real world is a possibility space that gives depth and context to our interactions. For the most part, people live their lives in environments that provide structure to activities, relationships and opportunities. Changes of environment reveal the power of the world to enable and diminish our possibilities. Both dramatic environment changes such as living in a foreign country, going to jail, and surviving a natural disaster as well as small changes such as moving from a sunny climate to a rainy one can affect people in powerful ways.

As part of our experience design practice, what might happen when we take time to consider both the specificity of existing environments and to imagine, invent, and describe future real worlds that people yearn to inhabit?

Recently, I conducted contextual research with people in public spaces. We learned a great deal about what people found valuable and challenging in their current world and we were able to advise our clients accordingly as to approaches for particular technologies within existing physical environments. This was good and meaningful work, for both our client and for ourselves, but we also left something quite interesting on the table—the opportunity to go beyond the real and bring imaginative substance to an entire world that people more implicitly yearning for, beyond particular service or technology experiences.

As a post-hoc exercise, what might a world be like for people yearning to connect, learn, and make decisions in shared public spaces? Maybe like this:

The World of TogetherSpace

• What are the reoccurring themes of the world?
  • Optimism, connection, delight, empowerment
• What does the world look and sound like?
  • The world is a mixture of old style bookstore, neighborhood cafe and children’s museum—the look is both modern and cozy with natural materials and high tech materials side by side. Contained within a large dome-like building, the world is bright and airy, with high pale blue ceilings specked with clusters of star-shaped skylights. The sound of slow moving water can be heard throughout the world and it is surprisingly quiet even when filled with people.
• What does it feel like to be in the world?
  • The air of the world is cool and fresh. It is easy to breath and to relax in this world. The open design enables people to see their loved ones at a distance and the floors give extra bounce to the step.
• What tools and artifacts can be found in areas of the world?
  • Exhibit areas: Interactive exhibits supporting exploration and learning. Large tables at varying heights provide surfaces for adults and children to combine materials and create their own inventions.
  • Café: At the center of the environment, a cafe with healthy foods, drinks and digital table surfaces. People come here to talk, rest, and collaboratively explore ideas on digital table surfaces.
  • Exploration areas: Studious spaces where people browse unique components of the exhibits in greater detail and talk with guides.
  • Quiet alcoves: At the perimeter of the building a series of alcoves surfaced with hardwood floors and Persian rugs. The alcoves are filled with mismatched armchairs and digital tables arranged for shared conversation. Here people sit, discussing, planning, and negotiating.
  • Personal technologies: Mobile devices used by people in the world to capture and share experiences with other people and across exhibits.
• What creatures/characters live in the world?
  • Explorers: New visitors to TogetherSpace who have not yet developed additional identities as connectors and guides.
  • Connectors: Repeat visitors and staff that help people connect to each other and to the areas and features of the environment.
  • Guides: Repeat visitors and staff that help people develop personal, meaningful, and relevant connections to the content of the exhibits.
• What is the culture and history of the world?
  • In TogetherSpace all people are seen as creative participants. Failure in this world is celebrated as an opportunity to invent new solutions and share current understandings. This world came into being when people realized that past approaches of competing for knowledge and obscuring understanding left many people alone and isolated. 

While the world of TogetherSpace is not real and may never be created by a single client, the act of imagining and describing worlds for people does impact what we create.

Inventing a world creates a possibility space aligned with the kinds of environments people want to inhabit, as opposed to the worlds they currently live in. The world description brings value to designers and clients as a method and as a metric for considering if our isolated designs for interfaces, products, services, and devices have a coherent, integrated part to play in an optimal environment for desired experiences.

Inventing worlds for people is not a familiar or easy task. Expertise in world making is found in disparate creative fields such as architecture, set design, game design, comic book and fiction writing, and, historically, imagineering. The practice is quite subjective and certainly not definitive. Imagining places for real world experiences is harder than imagining fantasy worlds because many of the constraints of culture and history are already determined. But as we seek to design richer experiences and multi-channel products and services, we are inherently moving in this direction. As we extend our focus and skill sets from usability and validation-type research practices to more culturally-oriented ethnographic practices, we are attending to the desire to describe the world that our designs are part of. The opportunity before us is to move from a purely descriptive representation of the people we design for to an approach that explicitly recognizes design as the world-creating and world-changing activity that it is.

Paula Wellings is an experience designer at Adaptive Path. She is a strong believer that our designs define who we are and who we will become; she is passionate about designs that illuminate our best human qualities: Kindness, respect, honesty, courage, humor, charm, integrity. One of her strengths as a designer is showing her clients the worlds they can create and the people they have the opportunity to influence when they make great ideas become great products and experiences.