Last week I
visited Interaction ’14 which was held in Amsterdam. Interaction is the annual
interaction design conference built around a global community. As User
Experience Expert I attended several Computer Human Interaction conferences
before, but never this one. And I must say it was a very inspirational
experience.
Context influences perception
One of the
key takeaways was that context influences perception. This was shown in the talk
by Bernard
Lahousse (Partner
at Foodpairing.com). He stated that the perception of food changes by the
context in which it is served. To prove this, he asked a volunteer on stage and
let him rub a rough object and simultaneously taste a drink, a minute later
this subject had to taste another drink while rubbing a soft stuffed animal.
The subject stated that the 1st drink tasted sharp/bitter and the 2nd
drink more creamy/sweet. In fact he drank the same drink twice. So a tactile
context influences perception of food.
The same
goes for a bottle of wine you take home with you after a great holiday in
Greece, because it tasted so well in a Greek tavern after a day of sunshine in
Mediterranean air. Drinking the wine at home on a drizzling Saturday evening is
perceived totally different.
The message
of this talk matches very well with the talk by By Thomas Küber (Design
lead at Groupon) and Christian Drehkopf (User Experience Evangelist and
Mentor) in which they stated that we, as interaction designers, should not design
for devices but “we should deliver experiences that create superb value for the
users in their personal situation/context”.
Design motivation and curiosity
In order to
inspire users to use the applications or products we design, we have to
motivate users and make them curious. At Interaction ’14 there were 2 talks
which gave some insight in how to do this.
There was
Ellis Bartholomeus (Game- & Design consultant). She explained that
motivation can be designed via play. To play you need a game (= the definition
of the rules and goals) and a player (= the person interacting). To motivate
the player to play the game, the player needs to feel safe and trust the game.
The game should be hard to play, but not too hard. If the player barely
completed the level, he will be curious about himself in the next level and be
very loyal to play it again. A player will be motivated by a game if it
contains wonderment, engagement, frustration, reward, surprise, irritation,
freedom competence and joy.
Jan Willem
Huisman (founder of IJsfontein Interactive Media) talked about how “curiosity
and playfulness are deeply embedded in our mind and feed the urge for learning
and exploring”. Users need structure, and must always feel in control. By nature users also are curious and motivated
and these characteristics should be fed by the applications/product they use.
Curiosity is the urge to fill the information gap and curiosity can be designed
among others by:
- leaving room for experiments
- telling what to expect and then hiding it
- creating violation of expectations
- creating a sequence with an unknown ending
- introducing novelty
- introducing information that is possessed by others.
- creating collaborative curiosity
However, the
user should always be in control. “If we take control of the user, we kill
curiosity” says Huisman.
Onlyness & Design Loneliness
Tash Wong
(independent product designer) talked about Onlyness by which she means the
fact that “we all have our own perspective and own unique feminine or masculine
point of view from which we design. We are social engineers that design for
behavior and communication.” To be able to design products/applications for
others we need empathy and look at things from different points of view. Tash
Wong developed a method containing a set of 16 cards which is designed to help
UX designers better articulate their perspectives and priorities. The cards can
be used to communicate the direction for a project, figure out why we do, what
we do, or generate new ideas and then ‘Think Bigger to Make Better’.
Then there
was Christopher Noessel (Managing Director at Cooper) talking about Design
Loneliness and ‘Pair Design, Why You Need It’. In Agile developing software development
pair programming is common. In UX design working in pairs also leads to better
results. What you need is a pair of 2 designers: a generator (who generates
ideas and sketches) and a synthesizer (who analyses and connects). Co-working
like this results in a better design, a more efficient way of working and a
happier team. While co-working like this, 3 rules should be taken into account:
1. There can
only be one marker in the room
2. Ideas
should be visualized, not only talked about
3. Feedback is
given (mainly by the synthesizer)
- What’s good
- Questions?
- Suggestions
for improvement
At Vennster
we already work like this and from experience I can tell that it works.
Last week I
have been listening to many experts in the field of interaction design and I gained
a lot of inspiration which I definitely can use in the projects I’m currently working
on as a User Experience Consultant for Vennster and in the ones I will be
working on in the future.
If you want
to read more about the lectures given at Interaction ’14 just visit their site http://interaction14.ixda.org
