Emotional Design and Rich Interactive Applications
Last week, we considered the need to derive UX differentiation by deploying RIA technologies (Silverlight, WPF, Flash, AIR and the likes) to address real user aspirations. We also took notice of the fact that very often; these user aspirations are about making the digital technology around them more life-like.
This week, let us dig a little deeper to understand why the users aspire for life-like interactive experiences; and how this has helped us identify the key principles behind ALIVE Design approach.
As eloquently explained by on Don Norman in his brilliant book, Emotional Design –
“we are social creatures, biologically prepared to interact with others, and the nature of that interaction depends very much on our ability to understand another’s mood. We have a tendency to read emotional responses into anything, animate or not. We have evolved to interpret even the most subtle indicators. And we use the same source or faculty to interpret inanimate objects as we use for interpreting animate objects like people and even animals around us. This might seem bizarre, but the impulses to interpret inanimate objects come from the same source as used for animate world!
We interpret everything we experience. Much of this interpretation is in human terms. This is called as anthropomorphism, the attribution of human motivation, belief and feelings to animals and inanimate things. Examples of this are all around us. We treat tennis rackets, balls, hand tools, computer hardware as well as software as animate beings, verbally praising when they do a good job and blaming them when they refuse to the job.
We cannot control those initial interpretations for they come automatically. It is extremely important that designers (particularly the designers engaged in building rich, interactive applications) keep in mind the human predisposition to anthropomorphize and be guided by how it works. The principles for designing pleasurable, effective interactions between humans and products are the same that support pleasurable and effective interactions between individual humans.”
RIA technologies are uniquely positioned to deliver pleasurable interactions because of their technical prowess,. But for pleasure to be a reality, the technical prowess needs to deliver interactive experiences very close to effective interactions between individual humans. This is the core idea driving ALIVE design methodology.
There are three overarching principles, rooted in anthropomorphism and associated with human behavior that ALIVE design tries to focus on and deliver against. They are Connectivity, Responsiveness and Natural interactivity.
Connectivity: Connectivity is critical, even just to begin the interaction. It is the first stage in getting engaged. In our social interaction with animate world, we ‘connect’ well with certain people because in their behavior we get all the right clues that make us think that the person is ‘sociable’. Same is true for inanimate, interactive objects. We will look at these clues and their relevance for design in more detail in upcoming articles. But for now, we will define connectivity as that set of qualities in an interactive artifact that makes it as easy to connect, and stay connected with - just as you would with an individual you find easy to ‘connect’.
Responsiveness: Responsiveness is what sustains interaction – mainly by sustaining the interest. When something interacts with us, we ‘interpret’ that interaction. The more responsive it is to us through its body actions, language, taking of turns and general reciprocity, the more we treat it like a ‘social actor’. Therefore, responsiveness is an essential ingredient to make an interactive artifact more like an individual we look forward to interacting with. We will look at more details on how to build this level of responsiveness in the follow up postings.
Natural interactivity: Natural interactivity is about judiciously leveraging subtle or direct real life metaphors for semantic communication. Metaphors like ‘Desktops’ and ‘File Systems’ have helped enormously in making daily computing tasks accessible to novice users. This is because users have a clear mental model of ‘how this works’. Natural interactivity takes this approach further and applies it to interactions. Designers can build clues, feedbacks or mappings that evoke a strong feeling of ‘having positively experienced this before’. While connectivity and responsiveness feed and arouse our basic anthropomorphic tendencies, natural interactivity affirms those very tendencies. It makes the interactive experience ‘engaging’ by reinforcing our tacit belief that we are interacting with something real and sociable.
If Rich Interactive Applications (RIAs) on new platforms like Silverlight and WPF are designed with these principles in mind, we may be able to break away from stereotypes about how user experience should look and feel. For example, take the case of ‘Help’ user experience. Flashy Help systems that still rely on users reading though a bunch of ‘Help’ documents fall way short of real potential of platforms like WPF and Silverlight. Why not build video based support materials that users can better connect and interact with?
Such innovations, driven by ALIVE Design principles, could lead to meaningful differentiation – differentiation that users would appreciate. We will look at more potential areas for ALIVE Design driven user experience innovations in follow-up posts.
