Stereotypes

Sometime ago, I watched a video of a Microsoft developer conference where one of the speakers was discussing the Expression Blend applications; tools to help the designer/developer workflow. When it was time, the presenter turned around, put on a beret, turned back around, and pretended to be a designer. Referencing arrive to work at 10am, doing 15 minutes of work before it was time for an espresso and a break before lunch. The talk and subsequent online video infuriated designers at Microsoft [and other companies], who accused Microsoft of not understanding design; what we did, how we worked, and ultimately our value to the company.

Three years later I saw a talk from a design group at a software company with several other people from Microsoft. The presentation discussed how the group worked separate from the rest of the team (Project Management, Development, QA). How they had a cool office with coffee makers, Eames chairs, and different spacious layouts with designer desks. They talked of taking funny pictures of themselves with mustaches and goofing around with each other at work. They noted it was a “designer” culture.

The irony of the two talks seemed to escape most people…

All the designers at the second talk were enamored and wanted to be part of that team… except me. Perhaps I was the odd man out. It’s not that deep down I wasn’t slightly jealous of the cool space and fancy presentation, but I’ve found that creating a separate culture in a team can create animosity between internal teams and can separate the desired outcome (what design wants) from the real outcome (what the team can build).

All-inclusive teams

The best teams I’ve worked with have been inclusive of all disciplines. In the case of my company, we’re all here to raise the price of our stock and we do that by making great products that sell. In that way, I look at myself as a designer who ships things, not just creates them. Steve Jobs once said “real artists ship.” I’m not surrounded by Eames chairs and typographic magazines. It’s not that I don’t want those things, but I don’t require them to be creative. Great creativity comes from a great team, not great things. It comes from great partnerships, and with those, it determines the quality of the product and experience. It’d be great to have a creative area for my team, but it’s also be great to have a creative building for the entire product team. Why limit it to just a few people?

Great creativity comes from a great team, not great things.

My ask to fellow designers is simple. For those of you who work in software companies, or any large corporation where there is more than a design team. Think of your success measured for what you do with the entire team. Don’t state success as the coolest concept you can make, how much design furniture your office has, or how the design team in particular has a great culture. Don’t segment yourself or think you somehow deserve something special because you’re creative. Create a culture that focuses on the creative and experience. Create that atmosphere, that feeling, for the entire team. Measure your success on bringing great products to market and creating amazing experience. Get creativity from great partnerships. Give other people a chance to be creative, give other people a chance to share ideas and inspiration. Let in the ideas from the developers, from the marketing team… don’t worry that you’re not creating it all. Yes, we are unique, but so is everyone else, and we need to leverage that. A lot of people have really good ideas, and sometimes we miss them because we get so wrapped up in where the idea comes from. Use everyone around you to be more creative. Form those great partnerships, and change the culture.

An Approach to UX Strategy

The goal of the strategy phase is to ensure that all stakeholders are similarly focused and aligned around project goals, i.e there is agreement in principle about the purpose of the project and the priorities for implementation.  A high level agreement to what the project is, why we are doing it, and how it will be achieved reduces the risk of budget blow outs or conflicts in the design phase by ensuring that all project stakeholders have similar expectations. In addition, it is only through an understanding of the scale and complexity of the project that the design team can accurately, or at least confidently produce a budget or estimate for the project.

Our approach to the development of a UX Strategy is motivated by three interrelated, pragmatic and theoretical drivers:

1. Firstly, getting the client team on board and in agreement during the strategy phase relies on these stakeholders having a shared understanding and vocabulary. Tools like scenarios and prototypes help to externalise issues and make them available for shared conversation.
2. Secondly, they also allow the project team to collaboratively and rapidly investigate options and expose constraints. The tangible and visual nature of these tools allows us and the client team to think, explore and discuss the potential project in a more concrete way by grounding conversations about the project in its context of use. This ensures decisions about approaches and priorities contained in the strategy are appropriate to the opportunities, boundaries and constraints of the particular project.
3. Finally, the third and perhaps most important reason is that tools like user stories, scenarios and paper prototypes frame the discussion about the project strategy from the perspective of the user experience. Doing this collaboratively is an opportunity to expose, explore and align the various agendas and perspectives of stakeholders and work through how they might come together in design. As a result clients are better able to understand the implications of project objectives and priorities, and refine them based on the impact this will have on the potential user experience.

From User Stories to Scenarios

Any of the high level user user stories generated as part of the early strategy phase could be implemented in any number of different ways. Different approaches to implementation will require different levels of investment and be more or less appropriate given the project context and constraints. So, once a list of user stories has been developed (as described in the first article) the next step is to identify the key scenarios. The intention is that by fleshing out a few specific key scenarios (combinations of user stories) during the strategy phase, it is possible to expose enough detail about the nature of the website that we can agree in principle to an approach with a shared understanding of where we are investing our time and why. In our experience fleshing out 4-6 scenarios will allow us to explore enough of the key aspects of the site/application. If not, then this is a sign that the project may need to be divided into smaller phases.

The intention of doing this work is not to find the solution or define the architecture per se, but rather to explore possible approaches and agree on an appropriate UX Strategy. We also hope to expose risks or contradictions between expectations and constraints (e.g budget).

… by fleshing out a few specific key scenarios (combinations of user stories) during the strategy phase, it is possible to expose enough detail about the nature of the website that we can agree in principle to an approach with a shared understanding of where we are investing our time and why… to explore possible approaches and agree on an appropriate UX Strategy.

Selecting Key User Stories

The user stories fall, more or less, into two categories. The first are that those that are simple, familiar or unambiguous enough that we can feel confident about budgeting them and resolving them as part of the design phase. These might include user stories that use common UI patterns that we are familiar with or that we have resolved many times before. The second group are more like ”black holes”. By that we mean ambiguous, complex or particularly unique to the project; if not better understood they will pose a risk to meeting deadlines or timelines in the design phase. Our goal is that by the end of the strategy phase we can a) be sure that they can be implemented and b) put a cost against them.

The process of fleshing out this latter group in more detail allows the scope and nature of the project to emerge through a focus on user experience. At the same time it exposes and challenges some of the assumptions and expectations held by stakeholders, or embedded in existing documentation.

The following is an example of a key scenario from the redesign of a university website:

As a potential student I can find out about the application process, find an available supervisor and apply.

This scenario is derived from these user stories:

• As a potential student I can find out about the application process
• As a potential student I can find an available supervisor
• As a potential student I can apply to study

The example scenario above was chosen because it represents a complex pathway that would be completed by a potential student over several weeks or months. Walking through such a scenario forces us to explore and confront a number of strategic, political, technical and user experiences issues.

Mapping out scenarios as user pathways

Once the key scenarios have been identified and agreed upon with the client, they are mapped out as user pathways.

Initial pathways are generated using a walkthrough process represented by post-its. We take each scenario and ask ourselves what would we would need to provide in order for that scenario to be achieved. We have to hand personas, business objectives, content examples, accessibility guidelines, and any relevant technical specifications to assist our decision making about how people might proceed and what they might need to do so.

Each step gets a post it/sketch to represent it, as shown in the image below. We aren’t working at the level of pages yet, just creating a trail of things that would need to exist in order for it to be possible to fulfill that particular scenario. This process allows us to think about the experience as a dynamic thing that happens over time.

Mapping Pathways

Analysing pathways

All the scenarios are mapped out in the same physical space and in relation to each other. If there is some cross over between the scenarios then that is shown physically by an intersection in the pathways.  It is likely that the pathways of earlier scenarios may have to be adjusted in response to what emerges out of the later scenarios. It is an iterative process and depending on the scale of the site, might take a few days to complete. In the image below, intersections in pathways were exposed via clusters of different coloured post-it notes.

Identifying Pathways

Rather than exploring or defining the approach to design or user experience from the perspective of features, this process allows the shape of the site to emerge through an exploration of user activities. Particular patterns about potential use can then be identified, which feed back into the strategy development process. For example, we are able to see that particular areas of the site, or pieces of content contain information relevant to most stakeholders, while others have value for only a small number. These patterns can inform decision making about priorities for the site and help clients to come to agreement in principle on approaches to various aspects of the project, including where time and money is best spent in the short term.

Drilling down through prototypes

Visualising the user pathways also reveals underlying technical and content needs and raises questions around feasibility, content and functionality. In some cases the issues and questions raised are better understood at a more granular level, i.e how they impact on specific interactions via the interface. Paper prototypes or mock ups are then used to rapidly drill down into these “high risk” areas. The image below displays an example of a paper mock-up used to explore possible ways of supporting a searchable index of university scholarships.

Sketch Prototypes

Seeing the potential user experience mapped out in this way provides the client with a different perspective on the project and this allows them to discuss the project the different ways. For example, this process will  expose how a scenario or user story, currently prioritised by the client team translates in design into a potentially very complex requirement, or requires the availability of a certain set of content not currently available. It can expose tension or conflict between a priority objective and what it would actual take to make that happen.

Often at this point, project realities begin to sink in and project teams are forced to realistically assess what could be achieved in the allocated time frame and budget. The visual pathways, mock ups and paper prototypes become visual and tangible aids to explain the issues and options, and support discussion, negotiation and resolution about appropriate approaches and priorities. We have found this technique is very effective for generating and supporting constructive discussions with the client when decisions about priorities are needed. The client has the opportunity to understand the impact of various decisions and requirements about technology or content in relation to the user experience. This supports the development of design principles and guidelines, and helps clients come to an agreement on approaches to particular aspects of the site or application. It can also lead to a revision or shift of emphasis for the project objectives.

The process of thinking through actual prototypes provides these stakeholders with a new way of seeing and new language for describing what is most important. As a result the client team is better placed to decide and describe the most valuable outcomes and confidently direct resources towards the most important elements of the project.

Summary

Creating an effective User Experience Strategy requires the alignment of perspectives such as technical, business, content and brand with that of the user experience. In this article we have described how we support clients to develop a User Experience Strategy that takes into account all these perspectives, based on an understanding of how it will translate into design.

We believe that a core part of developing a design or User Experience Strategy is about interpreting how ‘abstract’ business goals are translated into a specific design project. Scenarios and prototypes are light weight, visual tools that can be used to assist clients to rapidly envision the potential experience for users. They bring a tangible quality to conversations that can otherwise be ambiguous, allowing team members to collaboratively think through project goals and approaches to implementation. They force us to deal with the concrete issues of use in situ, provoking and facilitating critical conversations about overall strategy, opportunities and constraints prior to moving into the design phase. Most importantly they frame questions and decisions about functionality, brand, content and technology in relation to the impact this will have on the potential user experience.

As designers, we deal with users perspectives and the concrete situated issues of use as part of our daily practice. These collaborative tools enable the user perspective to sit at the centre of the discussion and decision making for our clients as well.

Acknowledgments
The reflection on methods outlined in this article was largely made possible through project work completed on behalf of Digital Eskimo, a social design agency in Sydney whose Considered Design methodology makes embracing these methods and approaches possible. We would also like to thank our clients UNSW, Melbourne Journal of International Law and Inspire Digital and our project partners Zumio and Redrollers for their generous commitment to sharing the design experience and process, and to all the participants who give time to our projects.

Usability as Commodity

Usability, as a practice, has evolved over the years with the primary goal of understanding the product use by ‘representative users.’ Around the same time our field shed its more academic title of “Human Factors” to eventually become User Experience.  We started focusing on the overall experience a person had as a result of their interactions with a particular product or service.

The term User Experience for the most part has been adopted as the operational title for many firms and other in-house teams encapsulating interaction design, user research and visual design. In some organizations the groups evolved to include other peripheral groups such as audio-visual designers and in rare instances brand & marketing. Nonetheless what is evident is that field as practice has become a commodity.

We aren’t rare anymore

A working definition of commodity means “a good for which there is demand.” But these goods are produced without qualitative differentiation across a marketplace. I will take creative liberty to also add to the definition and include “service” as well.  Today across the board, it seems, that “anyone can do usability” – harkening to Chef Gusteau’s motto from the movie, Ratatouille, that “anyone can cook.”

Like usability, UX is also slowly becoming commoditized. As a practitioner the evidence is blatant and often disturbing. As companies add visual and interaction design to their stable less attention is being paid to the the quality of the designs. For proof of this only look at the mobile field where it seems that every mobile phone is slowly beginning to look the same in aesthetic appeal. The absurdity of this is more evident when seen in analogy to plastic surgery where the surgeons craft of redesigning body parts has evolved into a store front where someone can ask for a J-Lo behind and a Halle Berry nose. But perhaps this is the nature and end game of design as we know it. Or is it what happens when Right Brainers are thrust into a Left Brain environment with the only goal of design production.

And we wonder why Designers are often of a melancholic nature… I feel the sudden urge to scream back at Gasteau that in fact: “not everyone can do it!”

From Clicks to Sexy

Incidentally in the last year I have had four different job titles as my peers and I continued to remold and refocus to stay relevant in the technical space. This fluidity of titles signals the ever-present lack of comfort we feel, where we constantly have to justify our collective existence as necessary appendages to development teams. And if you are a UX professional who has never had your value questions, I stand corrected and ask: “How can I join you in this mystical world?”

Today UX is once again on the verge becoming as institutionalized commodity of the technological landscape. Earlier our focus shifted from purely functional to both functional and aesthetic. But is that the end? When the first iPhone was released in the US in 2007 – the technological design space was like “Whoa.” Apple brought sexy back in stroke of creative genius by turning a little box into the most desirable piece of metal and plastic on many minds. Time magazine even went on the name the iPhone “Invention of the Year” in 2007. With the debut of Apple’s iPhone just about everyone in the industry started wondering how they could also make technology sexy.

A friend of mine, then working at Microsoft, called me wondering if I knew any designers who would be interested in working on new server designs. They wanted to make the products more desirable. “Servers?” I asked, just completely puzzled and blown away by the impact one little sexy device was having. Designers had arrived. We had entered the age of Aesthetics in Technology. Usability and UX in all its sentience had come a long way…Baby!

What had happened was that UX morphed to understand, not only the functional aspects of product use, but also the more aesthetic and experiential parts of product design. A few years back the most critical aspect of user experience was lessening the number of steps in an interaction. “How can we be faster and more efficient?” was the prevailing question of the day. In the post iPhone launch CEOs everywhere were hushed up in boardrooms using the “S” word, asking questions like “How can we create a sexy solution?”

But now we have reached the point of aesthetics, and there’s already the feeling that it’s a commodity again. So we have to keep on evolving. Fortunately the next traveler on the way to design paradise has arrived, but more about that in my next column.

Today I’d like to introduce some conventional (and not high-tech) gadgets that that are facing extinction. One is a gadget for sharpening your pencils, while the other is a CD player that brings back old fashion tactility.

Glassy Pencil Sharpener

The reason why I love hand pencil sharpeners is that I like the feeling of sharpening a pencil. A delicate adjustment of how hard you press a pencil, how fast and how long you screw it all decides the sharpness of the lead, which an electric sharpener could never do.

I made this concept because I wanted to find a good way to improve the visibility of the point of the pencil while sharpening. The dome shaped convergence lens on top helps you clearly see the pencil lead. Also, wanting a user to enjoy the sharpening process, I thought by using a glass container, you can see the pencil crumbs gradually piling. I’ve heard some people love pencil crumbs, so a ball shaped dent makes the crumbs like a ball when seen from outside, which will be pleasing to look at. Usually the crumbs become just trash and make it filthy if not disposed regularly, but this way, I guess you can enjoy seeing it as sort of art on your desk.

Rolling CD Player

I just don’t want to lose the feeling of the volume dial and other switches of a record and CD player. Clicking and sliding the volume tab of iTunes just don’t make me feel that I’m really changing the volume. The comfortable touch of a beautifully designed dial will never be experienced on a desktop. (Am I being too analog?) By the way I’ve always wanted to own a Hans Gugelot by Braun. I’m wondering how I feel when pressing the neatly arranged buttons.

Anyway, I’ve come up with this CD player to get back those feelings. It’s really just a CD player with functions of only “play/pause”, “next”, “previous” and volume adjustment. You click the round speaker once to play, double-click to go next and triple click to go back to the previous song. The funny part is adjusting the volume. After you set a CD and make the player’s “mouth” open by rotating the whole body. The more you open the mouth, the louder it plays. Make the mouth shut to turn it off. This way, you can enjoy the comfy feeling of rotating the dial. I wouldn’t stop changing the volume for a while if I had this. And your kids would love this, too!

The Interpretation Phase

This next stage in the shared storytelling process is being able to interpret the data visualization. The purpose of this stage of the proposed interface design is two fold; users need a way of shifting and reformatting a data visualization so that they can make sense of the whole data set by understanding how it responds to dynamic changes. Users also need to comment on, or draw attention to specific elements of a visualization without compromising legibility of that visualization.

The point of interpretation is that users within a visualization environment can alter a data visualization so that it conforms to their understanding of the data; and thus allows them to have opportunities and tools for making their own sense of the data and consequently make contributions to the shared story.

Gapminder allows a user to dynamically tweak a dataset through the interface of a visualization

Underpinning this process are specific ideas about knowledge management and sensemaking, and how these relate to one another. This process is specifically about providing an interface that enables users to see structure in the data visualization they are working on by ‘tweaking’ it. This is a particular example of information use that defines one of the behaviours of sensemaking – what people do to make sense of the information in their world.

Sensemaking

Sensemaking can be described as a process of creating situational awareness and understanding in situations of high complexity and uncertainty in order to make decisions.

Sensemaking arises when we change our place in the world or when the world changes around us. It arises when new problems, opportunities, or tasks present themselves, or when old ones resurface. It involves finding the important structure in a seemingly unstructured situation. It is an activity with cognitive and social dimensions, and has informational, communicational, and computational aspects.

So an important aspect of the interpretation process is implementing an interface that allows users to take part in sensemaking activities.

Tweaking

In the first part of the interpretation phase, users should be able to tweak the visualization parameters, such as when there is a variable that can be changed to something else (eg. When the value of profit margin can be changed to the value of unit cost). Either that or it can be offered to the user when one or more of the visualization parameters is ordered either ascendingly or descendingly (eg. Time, scale, amount, location). Essentially what occurs through the interpretation process is that rather than the visualization becoming a snapshot of the interface, it becomes an interface that allows the dataset to be explored by the user in an interactive and playful manner. This should encourage them to make greater sense of the dataset and uncover insights.

The ability for users to be able to tweak a parameter value and see how it affects a data visualization helps communicate the relationship that the parameter has to the whole visual analysis. This approach can help people see trends and make sense of complex datasets more quickly than with static visualizations.

Visualization to Interface

In order to specifically turn the visualization into an interface, controls should be built into the data visualization interface that enable users to perform actions such as resorting the date, excluding certain parts of the data, or changing a variable that reflects the outcome of the data. This implementation can be achieved through the use of interface objects such as drop down menus, radio buttons, check boxes and sliders.

The only usability issues that exist in implementation of a data visualization as an interface are clearly communicating which parameter is selected, and what visualization element this affects.

Communicating Insights

Once this has been achieved, users need to comment on, draw attention to, or in other words annotate specific elements of a visualization without compromising legibility of that visualization. This ability has been developed out of research into how people collaborate; and into collective intelligence principles that drive the social web. This ability that is built into the interface works on collaboration and collective intelligence principles. Collective intelligence assumes that everyone knows something about the subject they’re contributing to, and that combining all this knowledge together creates an object that contains a better overall presentation of the subject matter than any one person could hope to come up with. However it is a chaotic process due to the differences of opinion that people may have about a subject.

Example of different users' annotations of a visualization in Many Eyes

How can an interface be designed to support this behaviour?

Consequently to promote the annotation process and guard against the chaos that is a byproduct, this works by creating tools within a collaborative visualization interface that give everyone a chance to contribute something to the original visualization, but at the same time try to avoid the chaos that may ensue. This is achieved by preventing users from drawing freehand over the visualization to make their contributions to the process, but instead provides a type of marker that is in keeping with the visualization that was chosen. This once again aids people’s sensemaking processes by providing a common visual language for people to use to work on the visualization, making the transfer of knowledge from person to person easier as well.

The reason for allowing this process to exist within the interface is to promote discussion of visualization details and sub-elements. This can be achieved by giving users a set of drawing, arrow and box tools as can be found in some desktop software, which provides users with a single method of annotating a visualization that is in keeping with the visualization approach used (eg. Such as using highlight bars in a bar chart, or showing the height of ranges in a flow graph). The only issue with this design choice is that non-disruptive annotations limit the types of insight users can show in a visualization, whereas drawing tools might have allowed users to show other patterns and insights in the data.

Conclusion

This part of our series has discussed why its worthwhile to allow users to explore and re-interpret a visualization, and how setting it up as an interface to a dataset allows them to achieve this. We’ve also explained how you can go about designing an interface to support this type of behaviour. In our next article on Johnny Holland we’ll discuss the final stage of the shared storytelling process which we’ve called capture, and is about creating an interface that supports the preservation of insights into the visualization by individual users and allows these to be communicated back to others within the community.

Background

In 2008 the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID) was approached by Deloitte Digital for their expertise in data visualization which was being developed through the Loupe Project. Deloitte Digital was preparing its accounting firm in Australia for the introduction of XBRL (eXstensible Business Reporting Language) which would see a significant change in the way business reporting was conducted. Rather that sending multiple reports to different agencies, XBRL would produce one set of data that agencies could draw upon for their own purposes when needed. As part of this change, Deloitte has released an online accounting platform called Accounts IQ which will change the relationship between accountant and client to become an ongoing conversation online. This process needs visualization to make complex business data more easy to understand for the client, and an interface to make this conversation process a good user experience. The Social Life of Visualization is the outcome of our research into this solution for Deloitte.

Which is really a matter of paying attention at the same time, more than of being together, for the medium only connects across our individual spaces and times. The Germans have a nice word for the sense of being with others: “Mitsein.” “Being with” is contrasted with contiguity, or being “next to” or adjacent to one another. We’re not in one another’s stream of consciousness when we are just next to one another; we are when we are “with” one another.

There is no “Mitsein” online, but there is a sense of something that approximates it. But it comes not through being together. It comes through talk. Talk that indicates we are here and now, paying attention. The response is its signal flare.

In a medium so perfectly suited for a kind of self-talk, or talking aloud in front of others, it might be strange that there are occasions when we get a sense of Mitsein. Approximated, of course, in the medium’s own peculiar kind of proximity, or proximate intimacy. An “approximity” perhaps. A blend of the real and the imagined, of memory and expectation.

Verbal communication, not the language of bodies sharing space as in Crowds and Power, produces this approximation online. The kind of talk that appeals for a response. The kind of talk that runs out a line with hooks.

Hooks are important for conversation. I much prefer dialog to monolog. Hooks, in the form of “and you?” strung out along the thread of a good conversation are what call me into the world of people. I listen, I pay more attention, when conversation is drawn by the two of us. I like interruptions and clipped sentences, finishing one another’s thoughts, and mutual effort of threading out a good line together.

I wonder if the brief moments of simultaneity that pass now and then across our webbed social spaces will result in stream convergence. If the community of talk media might lie not in distributing messages but in the sense of sharing time. And if the point of doing more to make streams — of messages and update and activities — more interesting is also to create more hooks by which to connect them. If streams, like people, not only want the greater flow of the river but also the shared flow of time.

Top image by Demi Brooke

Mark Baskinger teaches industrial design with an emphasis on form and interaction and conducts Drawing Ideas workshops

Note: the first minutes of the interview we had minor problems with the audio. No worries, this will go away…

In Johnny TV Features we’ll share with you interesting videos that we come across, enriched with our healthy opinion. This time we have ‘The Domestic Gubbins’, a video by Microsoft Research.

At first glance this video by Microsoft Research seems a bit whimsical or silly. But if we dig a bit deeper, we find there is a lot more to it, and there are some useful things that we can take away from it.

What is the video’s purpose?

The first thing to consider is what the video was for. What was its purpose? Once we understand this, we can go on to consider what the researchers got out of it and how this helped them in specific area that they were investigating.

So what was the video for? First, a bit of context. The Domestic Gubbins are part of a project called Objects Incognito (subtitle: Rethinking Machine Intelligence), which is “an ongoing enquiry into everyday ideas of intelligence”. We are promised a plethora of “intelligent” devices and technologies in the near future. But what is meant by intelligence, exactly, and what will it be like to live with these ubiquitous intelligent technologies? That is the question that this video attempts to answer.

Interviewing people

Why video, though? Jain and Taylor originally wanted to create the Gubbins as actual devices that they could give to people to live with and interact with. But this proved too challenging, so they decided instead to create this video, which shows how people might interact with the Gubbins. Then they showed it to people and interviewed them to find out what their thoughts and reactions were.

These interviews (excerpts of which can be seen here) provided the researchers with new insights and led them down new research paths.

How can we use this?

So how can we adapt and adopt this approach for use in our work? This research is very high-level and conceptual, whereas in our day-to-day work we usually deal with matters that are much more concrete. However, there are many situations where we would like to be able to put a product in users’ hands so that they can play with them (especially for products that are radically different from those currently in use or that address as-yet-unmet needs), but where we do not have anything close to a working prototype. In cases like this, we can use this approach to show how our new product might function and how people might use it, and then see how potential users react. We can then use the insights that we gain to guide the direction of our product.

What are the weaknesses of using an approach like this? The video itself has to strike the right balance between showing realistic scenarios of use and keeping things ambiguous enough to make viewers think and use their imaginations a bit. And when interviewing the viewers, a certain degree of finesse is needed to avoid drawing interviewees in a direction favored by the interviewer.

In conclusion, this is a very well-made video that we can borrow ideas from for certain situations (though definitely not all).

Johnny TV

This and many other UX videos are posted on Johnny TV. Should you come across a video that you think should be there, please contact us via mail or Tweet me @martinpolley.

Social media’s two audiences

Social behaviors are shaped and informed by design, but not explained by design. The obvious reason that none of us can see each other’s twitter usage (groups, or subsets of followers actually viewed and paid attention to) is that if designed into twitter, activity would change instantly and radically. This is not just a matter of privacy, but a deeply social matter.

Reflecting on this last night led me to thinking about the social and public space constructed across all social media. There are, in mediated social contexts, always two audiences.

• There is an audience we’ll call social, and which we describe in terms of proximity: it’s a internalized social world of friends, peers, colleagues: known individuals.
• And there is a second, anonymous public, which is not internalized but is imagined.

Any person known belongs in the social and is potentially present. Any anonymous individual, because we don’t yet know them (as soon as we do, they move to the internalized social world), is possibly present.

Potential and possible relations

Potential social relations become active relations, or interactions, when we communicate. Possible relations become actual relations, based on the action of following, when we are seen and found.

I think the doubling of audience could go far in explaining the power of social media.

We know, for example, that the probability of actually having a conversation is less in social media than it is face to face. There’s simply a lot more at our command in face to face situations by means of which to have conversation. However, face to face situations limit us, of course, to those in our presence. Social media may reduce the probability of having real conversation but increase the opportunities for creating conversation.

This seems, to me, the main reason we use social media. Not mass, but mini media. Or, “me”-dia, in the context of social, not mass audiences. The distinction between social and mass media being that relations are possible in the former, not so in the latter. (This is changing as mass incorporates social.)

The medium’s three modes: mirror, surface, window

Back then to attention, and the veil of nondisclosure from behind which we engage in social media. I like to say that the social interface has three modes: mirror, surface, and window.

• We see ourselves reflected in social media: this is it’s mirror mode.
• We consume content of all kinds off the screen — sites, apps, communication — all using the screen as a presentation layer: this is its surface mode.
• And we talk to each other through social media: this is its window mode

Modes of attention

Social presence, proximity, and attention are then each implicated in a mediated social context that has ways of seeing and ways of being seen.

Consider this, for example. We enjoy accumulating followers, seeing ourselves referred to, commented to, and otherwise being made visible. Doesn’t matter whether this involves acknowledgment, recognition, or validation; the point is that the medium does create a kind of social visibility. Call it, for simplicity’s sake, “being paid attention to.”

Well, attention doesn’t correlate with actually engaging in conversation. Many of us sometimes ignore a request for communication, for whatever reason. It’s part of daily life; in real life it’s called “civil inattention,” and is handled by acknowledging others in ways that also indicate to them “I see you, recognize you, but I’m not available to interact.” Simply put, politeness.

Now, consider the social media space. Attention paid to others may not be visible to them. But if it’s given, such as by taking any action recorded and captured by the medium and surfaced by design, then this action can have two social outcomes, not one. This is the power of the medium, and the net effect of the doubled audience mentioned above.

Social actions, social relations

One translates as the potential for further social action. The other translates into the possibility for social relation. For the social world already has relations but has activity only on the basis of user actions. And the public world has activity but lacks the connection until a relation is established.

• A social action has been made which can be picked up by any user who sees it: potential for further action
• A social action increases the user’s visibility: the possibility of being seen

The possibility of being seen is motive enough, for some. While communication is no more probable, the possibility is there. As they say of the lottery: your odds of winning increase dramatically if you buy a ticket.

The power of this second audience, the public, which creates infinite possibilities and which is motivation for much of what we do, explains a lot of how the attention economy works.

Perceived and transactional influence

Attention, interestingly, is described in economic terms: paid, spent, given, taken. Note that the first two are zero sum and involve the temporality of attention. Paying attention takes our time. The second two are non-zero sum and transactional.

Giving and getting attention is the simplest social action. Nothing yet has to be said or communicated verbally: attention can be given a person, and that in itself, is socially meaningful.

Now consider how we attend to the attention economy in social media. Brands, as well as users, watch and attend to it. Brands, as well as users, transact in it.

• Social capital, the perceived value of a brand or individual, collects attention paid and spent on that brand or person. Call this perceived influence.
• Social currency, the transacted value of a brand or individual, is attention given and taken by the brand or person by means of social actions. Call this transactional influence.

Unfortunately, perceived influence, which is just social observation, is grossly under-rated. It’s much more difficult to measure because there’s no action taken. Brands can’t see the value in it for it’s not in the numbers provided by metrics and analytics tools. For it lies behind the veil of personal social media use, in the activity of paying attention to twitter, or more specifically, to the users we actually follow.

I say this is unfortunate because i think much social action is preceded by long periods of social observation. Consider the difference it would make, to brands and to users, if all social media were split screen interfaces: what I see and what you see. Real life social situations are like this: I see you looking at me, and can see reflected in your face something of how you see me (what you think of me).

Motives explained by the social and the public

The dual public also helps to explain many of our motives in using social media. Again, our actions can lead to potential further action, and if not, are at least possibly seen. Tweets, like comments, reflect these motives.

For example:

• Tweets or comments intended to get attention from the author
• Tweets or comments soliciting or appealing for direct response
• Tweets or comments that are a direct response
• Tweets or comments that continue a conversational run or thread
• Tweets or comments intended to garner attention to their author

We could break each of these down and show that for each, the user’s motive may be to appeal to the author’s attention, to get visibility in front of the public, to solicit a response, or to respond. Tweets and comments, in other words are not just that: (Nothing is explained if we describe social action by its form of content.)

Summary

To conclude, then, I think that the fact that any use of social media can have outcomes in two distinct audiences may explain its uniqueness as a medium, and its use by brands and individuals alike. That the attention economy involves both looking and being seen, posting and responding, would explain why motives for participating in social media reflect to the “presence” of two audiences. These are properties particular to the sociality of the medium, and to the sociability of its uses.

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What can you win?

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An example:

In the end we want to end up with a huge collection of brilliant UX tips.

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The contest starts on October 25 and ends November 8. The winners will be informed before November 15. You can send in as many UX tips as you want. Everybody can compete, except for the kahunas and dudes.

Special thanks to Rosenfeld Media for sponsoring this contest. Don’t forget to follow them on Twitter: @rosenfeldmedia.