The Experience of a Tangible Interaction

Interaction design is the craft of forming the intangible into the tangible.  It is the stitching of complex disconnections in order to mold those connections into engaging experiences that involve human, object, and environmental relationships.  When successful, a tangible experience is the process of having an experience.  John Dewey writes that “...experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship.  The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts...” (1934, pp.37).  This unity is the clay of interaction design and can be comprised of many different elements.  Johnny Holland defines the intangible property of interaction design as motion, the “...aesthetic regardless of perceived or real audience...” (Holland, 2010).  He also writes that this aesthetic is made up of three original elements: time, metaphor, and abstraction.  

Time is both the context, and the sequence of an experience.  Time allows an experience to be anticipated, and for the user to be “gratified by the sequence” (Winterowd, 1975).  In literature, form is the arousing and fulfillment of desires, and the the design of the intangible to tangible can be said to be the same inducement.  Further attributes of time include pacing, rest, duration, frequency, and attention (Holland, 2010).  

Metaphor is using “...language as symbols in a variety of modes of expression” (Buchanan, 2001).  To build the the user’s mental model to the inherent intangible complexities of a system or abstract service.  The user’s understanding of the design metaphor is through a synthesis of existing knowledge, senses, and experiences.  Many times, the delightfulness of an experience stems from the synthesis and actuation of metaphor to realization.

Abstraction relates to the “combined physical and cognitive activities that takes place to initiate an activity and when it is perceived to have been occurred.” (Johnny Holland)  Abstraction serves to relate a design to the context and objectives of the design.  Abstraction is the process of designing meaning into a system, and subsequently for the user to generate the same meaning through their experience.  In order to achieve this, the interface is the communication tool for the designer.

Interaction & Interface

We are beginning to develop an understanding of tangible interaction by dissecting the elements that pertain to the development of an experience.  The use and acknowledgment of these elements can be applied and shifted depending on the nature of the design artifact.  For instance, lets apply these elements to the design of a graphical user interface, which can be defined as representing “...information in the form of pixels on bit-mapped displays.  These graphical representations are manipulated with generic remote controllers”  (Ishii & Ullmer, 2001).  Information, which is both the content and the design of the interface, is represented and can be manipulated by the designed metaphors and abstractions delivered by the interface.  These metaphors and abstractions build the basis of understanding for an interface.  If we take the graphical user interface of Mac OS X as an example, we can say that each application window acts as a metaphor for a piece of dynamic paper that can be moved and organized on the screen.  The acts of using the operating system and its intricacies allows the user to abstract the metaphor into an experience which is further understood by the elements of time and sequence.

Let’s examine the tangible user interface, which is different from a tangible interaction.  The tangible user interface is a communication tool used by the designer in order to promote a experience to the user, a tangible interaction.  Just like the graphical user interface, a tangible user interface still relies on time, metaphor, and abstraction in order to achieve this.  Hiroshi Ishii defines a tangible user interface as one that gives “physical form to digital information, letter serve the representation and controls for its digital counterparts.  TUIs make digital information directly manipulatable with our hands and perceptible through our peripheral senses through its physical embodiment” (Ishii, 2008).  An excellent example are the shape-shifting mobile concepts produced by Fabian Hemmert and his team.  In one of his subsequent papers about the product, he writes that “...while shape and weight-based displays are less accurate than the GUI-based variant, they may be suitable for simple directional guidance and beneficial in terms of reaction times to visual cues” (Hemmert et al., 2010).  Suitable and beneficial are both terms that relate very closely to tangible interaction.  Interfaces that gratify and inform, such as a mobile device that changes its shape to provide simple navigation, whereby the shape becomes a the interface, and a metaphor for the user based on an abstraction, may provide a tangible interaction, as well as being a tangible interface.  However, not all tangible user interfaces are also tangible interactions.  Those that use metaphor’s that are not understandable to a user’s mental model, abstractions that may confuse, and/or sequences that mystify will be interfaces that are intangible to users.  

References 

Electronic mail, or email, has traditionally been known to be “...a method of exchanging digital messages across the Internet or other computer networks.”(“Email,” 2010, “Introduction,” para. 1)  For many, it as is a daily habit, a vital tool to communicate to friends, acquaintances, and strangers around the world.  Although many conversations have shifted to various social networks and instant messaging services, email still serves as a primary communication tool on the Internet.  Being such a versatile service and with so many access channels, email has evolved to not only be a primary vehicle to exchange messages, but a daily organizer, notebook, reminder tool, and more.  It is important to note that email is used for more than just communication.  It has become one of the many tools people use to navigate their life.  But despite the usefulness of the email service, many people suffer great stress when they open their inbox and see a page full of unread emails.  Or when they need to find an important email from three weeks ago.  Or when they feel compelled to respond to all their important emails before they forget.  With this in mind, I wish to discuss a recent feature addition from Gmail by Google, named Priority Inbox.

Priority Inbox in Gmail

Priority Inbox is Google’s attempt to rectify some of the anxieties that email gives to users, as well as further support the diverse uses of their Gmail service.  Before I start, I want to acknowledge that Google has been designing Gmail from very early on as a hub for people to store their daily activities and tasks, evidenced by such a tight integration with services such as Google Calendar.  But what I would like to specifically discuss are some of the design decisions made by the Google design team in respect to Priority Inbox.   

Stress

Information overload is a key proponent of stress online, and email is usually a source of such overload.   As a solution, Google has developed a sophisticated algorithm to predict what emails are deemed to be important to the end-user.  With this development, they are able to highlight and bring forth the aforementioned emails to users as so called priority emails and give them prominence in the interface, as per figure 1.  By trying to serve users emails and conversations that are the most important first, through grouping and hierarchy, they have potentially greatly reduced the stress and information anxiety people get when they open their inbox.  

Figure 1  Quick Guide of Priority Inbox (2010).  Copyright 2010 by Google.

Time

Within the Priority Inbox interface, Google ranks emails in three distinctive groups.  “Important and unread”, “Starred”, and “Everything else”.  Gmail has always had the ability to star emails, but to sort through starred emails required an extra step, and most of the time additional steps in a UI results in less user interaction.  By showing starred emails on the front page of priority inbox, Google has redefined the usefulness and purpose of starring emails.  For example, users can respond to emails later by starring them, without the worry that an influx of emails later will push their starred emailed off of the front page.  Or users can star emails that contain various tasks to complete, to serve as reminders or to-do’s. There are many other possible uses, but the point I am trying to make is the flexibleness of the design to allow users to interpret the service and manipulate it to suit their needs.

Flexibility

The real strength in Gmail and Priority Inbox’s interface design is the intended flexibility afforded to users.  As with most Google products, Gmail is extremely customizable allowing power users to design their own systems to suit their needs, but even for casual users, Gmail and Priority Inbox is structured in a way so that its use can be interpreted and optimized by the user.  This is in sharp contrast to many UI designs, especially online, that try to force casual users into a certain process of accomplishing tasks.

Conclusion

Gmail and Priority Inbox is far from perfect and many points can be made from a critical point of view, but for this short discussion I focused on positive impacts from some of the design decisions made with Priority Inbox and Gmail.  Google has designed Priority Inbox as a sort of personal assistant for the user, imbuing the interface with a sense of flexibility in order to support the real world uses of many different people.

References

Email. (2010, September 17). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved September 19, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email

Quick Guide of Priority Inbox. (2010), from Retrieved September 19, 2010, from  http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/email-overload-try-priority-inbox.html

Was reading this and got thinking:

http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2009/11/farmville.php

Key Quotes

"FarmVille players outnumber actual farmers in the United States by more than 60 to 1"

"FarmVille Freak, a blog, has a simpler slogan: “I can’t stop watching my crops!”"

Now if only there was a way to create an addicting game where people could help farmers look after their REAL crops...as part of a a game.

Crowdsourcing can learn a thing or two from game design.

This is EPIC.

Core77 just blogged about a list of Design Manifestos dating back 100 Years posted by John Emerson of Backspace, a design consultancy focused on public interest.  Also check out his blog called Social Design Notes.

I noticed my favorite manifesto missing from here, so I want to post this one personally

Manifesto of Futurist Architecture by Antionio Sant'Elia

The rest of the list is here:

• 1909   Futurist Manifesto

• 1922   Taller de Grafica Popular Manifesto of the Painters’ Union

• 1923   Topology of Typography, El Lissitzky

• 1923   The New Typography, László Moholy-Nagy - a call for design against the bourgeois, in support of the proletariat.

• 1959   The journal "New Graphic Design," though not explicitly a manifesto, called for a radical rethinking of design along more scientific lines.

• 1964   First Things First

• 1971   La coscienza del designer, by Albe Steiner

• 1978   Atlante Secondo Lenin - not so much a design manifesto, as a designed manifesto. The innovative infographics visualize theories for gaining power.

• 1979   Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development

• 1983   The Free Software announcement, later clarified in 1985’s GNU Manifesto

• 1987   Design memorandum. Dall’etica del progetto al progetto dell’etica.

• 1989   Carta del progetto grafico

• 1991   The Social Role of Design, Pierre Bernard

• 1996   Viewer's Declaration of Independence

• 1998   Ne Pas Plier statement

• 1998   People's Communication Charter

• 2000   First Things First update - not just about advertising this time, but setting new values.

• 2000   Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth (though I thought Dean Allen did a tidy job ofdemolishing this.)

• 2001   AIAP, diseno etica e comunicazione

• 2001   Socialist Designer's Manifesto - a series of ideologically driven limitations along the lines of Dogme 95.

• 2002   First Declaration of the St. Moritz Design Summit

• 2004   The Free Culture Manifesto

• 2006   The Public Role of the Graphic Designer

• 2006   Owner’s Manifesto, The Maker’s Bill of Rights

• 2008   Metahaven, White Night Before A Manifesto

• 2009   The Repair Manifesto from Platform21

Original Link : http://backspace.com/notes/2009/07/design-manifestos.php