Emergent UX

Leisurely reading some fiction today, I stumbled upon a passage from the Tom McCarthy’s latest novel, Satin Island, that humorously captures me and my transition from academia to UX pretty well:

“We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”

“The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.”

- Donna Haraway

For Haraway, we’ve been cyborgs at least since the mid-80’s (no, not Transformers). In fact, there are good arguments that all pieces of technology become part of the person that uses them. They become appendages.

The way a person is embodied changes they way they think about things. The way I  conceptualize and approach a jar of salsa varies significantly if I don’t have thumbs. Thinking is a bodily activity and it changes when our embodiment changes.  In the same we we think through our body and the way it works, we think through the tools and technology that are a part of our lives. Technology becomes a part of our embodiment and and we bodily enact the functions and processes our technology make possible.

An example might make it more clear. When I spend too much time in the the Adobe suite and then  go out into the real world and  make a mistake, I will actually think ctrl-Z. Well, “think” is the wrong word, its not that I think about the words or even the typing motion, my thought process is actually trying to enact that function as if it were a bodily capacity. It’s like a phantom limb that I lost when I stepped away from my machine.  

This is part of the reason  I’d prefer to move away from the term “User.” If technology is embodied then the relationship is much more mutual than just using. Don Norman wants to just use the term “people.” I think that’s a step in the right direction, but it still doesn’t capture the idea that the tool will become a part of those people. That said, I’m still unsure of what might work better.

Some people talk about “off-loading” cognitive needs and capacities. For example, storing phone numbers instead of memorizing phone numbers. However, when we think about embodied technology what we really want to talk about is increasing capacities. So, in terms of phone numbers, it more than just offloading. One needs to take into account how memory and recall work and enable those processes to recall more things.

For example, you had one or two too many, met someone attractive, got their  number and then proceeded to forget their name. However, you do remember where and roughly when you met them and input their number into your phone as well as the topic of conversation. Unfortunately you don’t have anything to help you find that number in iOS ( though people sometimes get around by inputing a first name and a conversation topic as the last name, e.g. Taylor Beach House).

But that is how memory works. Pieces of important information are stored through various types of sensory data that help reach the stored memory. As an item of data storage, the alphabetical list of names might be fine, but as a piece of my memory processes it is inadequate. I need it to be able to accept the information input I am capable of providing.

A nonspecific step that can be made in this direction is making things as open-ended as possible while still being useful. I was recently introduced to the Amazon Echo. Unlike other voce command modules, Echo makes it easy to put in your own commands. By doing this, voice commands become way less clunky, more natural, and telling Echo to dim your lights begins to become an embodied capacity rather than an inert tool. (Thanks to Scott  M. Cullum’s talk at Tech insight DC for bring my attention to this).  This also begins to point back to my discussion of what “intuitive” might mean in the UX space. 

At the extreme limit, the idea that humans might not be discrete and separable from their environment and the things with which they interact, is the idea that there might be quantum entanglement connecting a person and their devices on the most ontologically primary levels. I’ll play with this idea a bit more in a post in the future.

In the UX field, user-centered design isn’t just universally acknowledged as the optimal method, it is Dogma. If the user experience designer does nothing else, she at least puts the user first throughout the design process.  So, it’s extremely surprising to find anyone that pushes back against this, but Betti Marenko does just that in her piece “Digital Materiality, Morphogenesis, and the intelligence of the Technodigital Object.”

…Right? Don’t worry about the jargon. This piece comes out of Deleuze studies where an esoteric lexicon is used as a minor language to deterritorialize a multiplicity of machines in the hopes of producing emergent lines of flight to be reterritorialized though nomadic trajectories that smooth striated spaces. But in all seriousness,  I’ll do my best to avoid the jargon.

Marenko’s bold claim is that design and especially UX/UI need to push away from user-centered design because it is, overly anthropocentric. User-centered methodology fails to take into account the real nature of interfaces. A human does not just use an app for example. Instead she comes in contact with it in a much more mutual engagement of agencies. What then takes center-stage, instead of the human is the event (jargon!). In other words, the connections, interactions and mutual changes between all the things and forces at play.  According to Marenko, a focus that takes processes and events, rather than things and objects as the primary mode of existence in our world implies that “as objects become open-ended, relational, intelligent events, so the user subject is shifting accordingly” (109).

More simply,  the processes that make up our technological objects are evolving to a point that their complexity and capacity for change - their adaptability - rivals complexity ad adaptability of the processes that make up the human users. Technologies are no longer inert pieces of flint to be used to create fire for warmth. I generally think there is a lot of value in this line of thinking. Digital things/processes  are complex agencies that function in our ecosystems. They are no longer things to be mastered, but things to with which we enter into mutual engagement. Living in a time of ecological crises does a pretty good job showing us that when human’s try to master complex ecosystems of which they are a part, they are more likely to fuck it up, and one of the kernels of the such behavior is the belief that humans are outside and above everything else. That there is us, and then there is the environment. Perhaps the idea that we are fully separate from technology we use isn’t far off.

So what does this mean for Users? I think there is  a weak claim and a strong claim, both of which have consequences for how we go about design. The weak claim is that the user is one bundle of processes amongst many bundles that enter into an interaction. Each bundle of processes has its own specific capacities, but no bundle generally has more agency than the others. When interacting, bundles connect to share with each other, enable each other to do things they could not have done alone, and provide each other feedback on the fitness of recent adaptations. From this point of view, design is then a matter of facilitating the connections and directing the flow of interaction. It is a matter of taking the strengths, weaknesses, capacities for connection and adaptability and patterns of behavior into account, not just for the user but for all the bundles of processes involved. In a way, it is an extension of empathetic design - a principle of stepping into the shoes of each of these bundles of processes in order to design the interaction. Additionally, connections end up taking center stage as opposed to the user. The right types of connections and interactions enable the capacities and adaptability of the various bundles of processes. In the same way that social media can be extremely useful by connecting humans, connecting other sets of processes, and creating more useful feedback loops amongst them has the same type of potential. Marenko gets at her idea when he says, “design as a problem-finding activity has to do with an increase in complexity, problematization of the existent, and development of a material sensitivity via design.”  

The stronger version of the claim that processes and events are more critical than users is that we have to take each process in into account on its own instead of thinking of them in terms of bundles. This would lend itself to a much more fine grained analysis - to the point of considering how particular algorithms interact with the ecosystem of bacteria in our guts. This is probably too fine grained for an industry leaning in toward lean UX, but it might be worth considering the how particular features of an app affect certain processes in a user . For example, some music has been found to increase the production of particular white blood cells. Perhaps an app used for self-diagnosis could be improved with music that will help the user fight off the disease or infection that prompted him to open the app in the first place. It can go the other way, too. User reviews are biased by mood, this is can be a problem that for places that provide experiences that put people is less happy moods - like an indie theater that specializes in heart wrenching documentaries. Connecting ticket apps, movie data, GPS, and Yelp could result in expectation of being in a lower mood when about to write a review. There could then be funny funny prompts or pictures to lift the mood of the user for the sake of a fair review of the business.  

Walt Whitman has become popular recently in certain areas of academia as a Philosopher rather than a poet. Some, such as Jane Bennett see him as (amongst other things) a philosopher of sympathy. While I thin he does have some thoughts along those lines, I think of him more as a thinker of empathy. Song of Myself is a great example:

“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”

“I am vast. I contain Multitudes.”

Whitman has me thinking about the difference between sympathy and empathy and its relevance to UX design.  

About a year ago I moved into a large apartment building in Northeast DC about half a mile away from Gallaudet University, a top university for the deaf and hard of hearing.  Before moving here I, like many people, had only encountered a few deaf people in my life. That has changed quite a bit recently because there is a robust deaf and hard of hearing community in the area and there are several deaf residents in my building.

In part because of my limited encounters, my initial visceral response to deaf persons before my move was that of sympathy - I recognized they had a some what of a burden to bear, that certain parts of their life were more difficult and I assumed it was trying and I felt bad for them. However, as my interactions with deaf persons have become much more common, my perspective has shifted to one of empathy. Instead of feeling bad for someone differently abled, I have a tendency to put myself in his/her shoes and think about the encounter from their perspective. From there I naturally start problem-finding. What defines the interaction/experience, and how could it be be different? What is is enabling everyone involved in the interaction and what could do so better? What is hindering the meaning-making process in the experience and how could it be worked around? What kind of repertoire of actions lead to initial confusion or interruption of the flow of experience and how could they be designed otherwise?

Faz, a GA instructor for the UX Design Immersive caught me off guard yesterday by jumping into a passionate monologue cautioning against the term “intuitive.” His main point: “nothing is intuitive.” I took this to mean that he doesn’t believe in the power of “intuitive” to do much for designers and design thinking. What he was getting at, I think, was that there are no innate types of knowledge designers can and should appeal to. (My apologies to Faz If I’ve misinterpreted him for the sake of a foil, but i think I’m on the right track).

While I generally agree with the constructivist point, my past research into Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze leads me to believe that there is a productive use of the idea of intuitive that might yet be useful to UX design. I won’t get to a full definition of what intuitive might mean in UX, but I want to take a first stab drawing out three ideas that come out of Deleuze, Bergson, and Heidegger (via Thomas Wendt), in turn.

Elizabeth Grosz does a good job defining intuition for Bergson and Deleuze: “A mode of sympathy by which every characteristic of an object (process, quality, etc.) is brought together, none is left out, in a simple and immediate resonance of life’s inner duration and the absolute specificity of its objects. it is an attuned, non-categorical empiricism, and empiricism that does not reduce its components and parts but expands them to connect this object to the very universe itself” (Grosz, 2009). That’s a mouthful, but generally  It’s a mode of interaction with things that does break down individual functionalities, but instead takes the thing as a whole. An intuition is where things resonate and are grasped in ineffable ways.

Neither for Bergson or Delueze is intuition a fully autonomous faculty. It is mode of thinking and interacting that is rarely experienced in isolation. It is almost always enmeshed in other processes, other forms of thought, and more mindful/conscious interaction.  

That Birthday Suit Feeling

This idea of ineffability made me think of Thomas Wendt’s new book on Heidegger and UX design (Design for Dasein: Understanding the Design of Experiences). In particular, he brings up Heidegger’s notion of tool interaction that is ready-at-hand. Readiness-at-hand is a mode of acting through a tool so naturally so that it feels unconscious, as though it is just another appendage. An individual does not actively think about using a mouse. This act feels very natural and is done rather unconsciously. But more than just the physical mouse, it is the GUI, and being used to navigating 2-dimensional flat space, which, here, is the fact things stay still on screens rather than move around. It is a nexus of components with which the user enters into a relationship. The ability to plop yourself down and interact with these things in a ready-at-hand, natural feeling mode begins to point to what intuition is for UX. It is a capacity that must be enabled by the designed things (mouse, computer, interfaces, etc.) of the user to be fully enmeshed in a system.

Muddle Muddle Muddle

However, Wendt points out that in the moment the mouse slides off the table, there is an interruption in it acting as an extension of the body. Here, the user becomes intimately aware of the movements she is enacting with the mouse. The relation of ready-to-hand is broken. This shows us two things: First, the material table is also a part of the system, and just as critical to the intuitive use of the mouse as the it’s connection to the computer. Second, an ability to muddle through these breakdowns and interruptions is just as important to something being intuitive.  In this case, the materiality of the mouse makes it rather easy to get it back on the table and working well, thus allowing the user to sink back into that “ready-at-hand”.  This brings up the second point, an intuitively designed user experience is one that enables “muddling through” in these moments where what feels most natural breaks down.

Autodidact

To Faz’s original point: the capacity to “muddle through” requires a broader understanding (or familiarity) of the system. It is a matter of understanding a basic logic of how all the pieces functionally fit together. Unfortunately, such understanding is highly dependent upon the immanent conditions/the users’ socio/cultural ecology. While nothing is innate, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be intuitive, or that certain things cannot learned more easily or made to feel more natural. UX should optimize the ease of learning. So, in a moment in which the user cannot immediately and “intuitively” grasp the system, they can move from any point of understanding to a broader functional conception of the whole. From the single connection to the system, the user can work through to the “ready-at-hand” point of the tool.

I’ve now completed a whole 24 hours (3 days) of coursework at GA. I’m still pretty new to and ignorant about the UX field (not for lack of effort by my instructors, of course), but my future posts might be a little more likely to have glimmers of insight. 

As for User Experiences I like a little less, one of my least favorite sites I visit somewhat regularly is the site for Baltimore City Adult Soccer. It is set up through a host called LeagueApps, but I’ve seen leagues (such as District sports in DC) set up through this app that are much much better, so the problems are particular to BCAS.

The first problem is that its URL is tedious and it is difficult to find. When I initially started looking for a soccer league in Baltimore I had to search through several pages on the google search page to find this league. Once I started playing however, I had a fair amount of difficulty getting back to the page because the URL is: http://baltimorecitysoccer.leagueapps.com/. I know for a fact that LeagueApps offers the option of a more streamlined URL because District Sports uses Districtsports.com.

Once you arrive at the site, the next problem is that is rather ugly and sloppy looking. Believe it or not it has been updated in the last 6 months to look a little more aesthetically pleasing. The biggest problem, however, is just how hard it is to find the relatively simple information that one needs form such a site.

Based on my experience as a user of the site, the most important bit of information that it offers is the schedule of the games. To do this, it seems straight forward to click on the “Schedule” Button on the banner. On the other hand, when I was new to the site I remember being a little tripped up by the “League” button, thinking it may contain most the information about the currently running leagues (Men’s, coed, 11v11, 7v7, etc). It didn’t help that it is the first button after the “Home” button in a series that is left justified. In fact, the “Leagues” button is only for leagues/seasons that have not started yet, and for which one can still sign up.  Before moving on to finding schedule information, it is worth noticing that in addition to the “Leagues” button, there are also a “Register” button and a “Indoor Registration” Button. All three buttons enable the same registration capacities, but in slightly different ways. Ultimately, they are just confusing and superfluous.

Back to issues finding schedules. After the user clicks the “Schedules” button, one is confronted with this page:

If the user is looking for the schedule for 2015 Fall Outdoor Mens @ UTZ field, then the next step is rather easy. However, there are 11 league options on this page, and they are not always easy to navigate. The way the information is presented, makes it rather difficult and the logic of organization is hardly sensible. The first issue is that leagues that are currently underway are mixed with leagues that have not started yet. Beyond that the way the leagues are titled makes them difficult to navigate. For example, the least important information - the year - is the first thing presented. Beyond that, superfluous information - such as the location or length of the games is made prominent because it is (usually) put at the end of the title.    The meaty information - gender, season, division, outdoor/indoor - thus gets sandwiched in the middle where it is most difficult to scan.

Once the user does navigate that page and finds her league, she is taken to this page:

While it is rather straightforward - organized by date and time - it can be a hassle to scroll through hundreds of entries before finding when one plays in the latter weeks of the season, and with the separation between weeks indicated by font smaller than the individual game font, its easy to get lost in the continuous vertically arranged schedule.  Not to mention the schedule has its own scroll bar along with there being a scroll bar for the page as a whole. The double scroll bar is clunky, not obvious at all, and annoying to use even for someone used to the site. From a more aesthetic point of view, it also seems unnecessary to have the beige box at the top of some of these screens which provides a mix of generally useful information - how much money to bring to games for refs - facility rules, and league rules. All of which, seem arbitrarily placed and better positioned elsewhere on the site. That said, because of the difficulty navigating this site in general, one may never find the page where it makes sense to have this information.

Well, I was planning on breaking down several other flaws in this user experience, but seeing as I have not even touched on how I would fix the couple of problems I have pointed out thus far, perhaps it best if I start to get to my solutions for these issues.

Home Page:

In terms of the issue of finding schedules, I rearranged and consolidated the links on the banner. There is now only one link for signing up for leagues, “Schedules” is directly next to the “Home” button, and I center justified the links to make it look a little better. Beyond that, the crowded, and overly busy picture section of the original page has been replaced by a picture carousel. Then, the poorly organized bottom section has been replaced with a section that extols the virtues of league and more prominently displays a “Join a League” button. I have moved the less important league contact info, and social media connections to the bottom of the page. I have done away with the Updates section insofar as it seems it is rarely used. If there needs to access to updates I suggest making them league specific and having a place for them on each league page.

General Schedules Page:

In order to simplify finding the right league and schedule, I have tried to partition the page so that it is easier to visually locate the right one for the user’s purpose and it reduces scrolling. Towards this end, I have two main sections: 1) current leagues, and 2) upcoming leagues. I have then divided each of those headings into boxes for Co-ed and leagues and Men’s leagues. Within each box I have a list of the relevant leagues and links to the league home page, schedule page and standings page.

League schedule page:

When the user clicks on the schedule link to a particular league she is taken to this page. I have not changed as much about this page, but have followed a visual logic similar to the general schedules page. instead of just listing the games in a continuous vertical list, a form of organization that makes it difficult to tell which week one is looking at, I have given each week its own section with a row of boxes - one for each time slot. Additionally, I have pinned the coming week’s game up at the top so that users don’t need to scroll and search for their most immediately relevant game time.

As a first pre-work assignment, I will explore couple of user experiences I like. The first one I chose is the DC Bikes. In terms of the general concept, I love being able to pick up a bike within a couple of blocks of wherever I am in the city and then not have to worry about it once I drop it off just a block or two from my destination. The app though is really useful, as well.

The App is simple. When one opens it up it provides you with the information you are most likely to need in any one moment: where the nearest docking station is located, how far it is from your current location, and the number of bikes and open docks there are at that station. There are two primary buttons on the bottom that initiate the other most necessary functions of such an app. The button on the left pulls up a map that displays all the stations in one’s vicinity. Each station is marked with a logo that gives an easy visual indication of how many bikes and docks are at each, and one can click on them to learn the specifics (including how far that station is from one’s current location).

When the button on the bottom right is clicked it starts a 30 minute timer that warns the user when it gets down to five minutes. This is for those people with the yearly DC bike pass who are allowed to take a bike out for 30 minutes for free. The timer is an extremely handy feature for longer rides, because one can find a station near the 30 minute mark, dock the bike, and take another to restart the 30 minute clock.

Beyond giving me all the information I really need. I can pull it up very easily. So If I forget the dock I am going to, or I need to decided between two stations based on which has openings, I can pull up the app and find that information very quickly, even while stopped at a red light.

The only thing I would add to this experience is that capacity to type in an address or business and be told which docking station was closest.

A second experience I enjoy is the app Sprig. It is a food delivery app that focuses on healthy organic foods, which isn’t necessarily all that exciting in itself, but it is designed beautifully.  Each day there is a different menu. To search through the menu for the day one just scrolls up, and each menu item is appealingly pictured in the background with a minimal white title above and an obvious, but not intrusive “Learn more” button. The thing I really appreciate about this is how it gets my mouth watering, all the pictures look so delicious, that its hard for me to open the app and NOT order something.

When the user clicks the “learn more” button a semi-transparent black box comes up with a description of the dish and its qualifications as organic, sustainable, and/or local. Titles above the description make it obvious that swiping to the left once will provide the user with nutrition information (including a button for allergies). Swiping again offers a complete ingredient list.  On all three of these information boxes there is an aesthetically consistent “Back” button that will return the user to the menu.

Beyond just looking at the menu for the day, users can click on a calendar button at the top right of the screen to look at future menus. If there is a dish that really catches one’s eye, the user can click a heart symbol to favorite the dish. The app will then notify the user when that dish is next available. 

Part of my initial desire to switch to a design field revolved around the idea that when I was given something to design it would effectively be a well delineated problem (at least in comparison to work on philosophy) and I would work on finding the concrete solution. However, as I have been doing my research I have been finding that more and more people seem to be thinking about design as primarily problem-finding as opposed to problem-solving. (In this way design is much closer to philosophy, especially the way that Deleuze thinks of it, than people normally assume). 

In terms of UX design, a usability test might let a designer know what isn’t working, but it doesn’t pin point the actual problem. The issue might be simple or it might point to something more fundamental with the site or app. Either way actually finding the problem will be the difficult part, while the solving becomes rather easy. This is because once the problem is properly and fully defined it will actually imply the solution. Because of this, the most creative part of the process might well be in determining the problem rather than in finding a solution.

Well the 2015-2016 school year has started and I’ve decided not to go back to my political theory doctoral program in favor of pursuing UX design via the immersive program at the DC branch of General Assembly. 

At the moment, I am still one week out from the start of the program and that means that I have had a lot of free time since the beginning of the academic year. To fill this free time, I have been doing what I have been doing for the last 7 years - reading and researching. To some extent the subject matter has changed, but I am trying to make a smooth transition between the work I was pursuing in academia and the design work I will be doing in the near future. So, I’ve been doing a lot of reading that puts my favorite philosophers and science and technology studies, and design into conversation.  

In this phase of posting I am entirely without formal training in UX design - or any type of design for that matter. So, while my posts may not be the most informed things, I hope to start exploring some of these new waters before I dive in. 

Before I start though, I’ll give a short introduction. The work that has been occupying my mind for the last several years has been an attempt to mix process philosophy from thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers, with some ideas from the STEM community, especially from complexity theory, systems biology and quantum physics, and then apply the resulting concepts to the political realm. While I had a lot of fun playing with these ideas, I’ve come to a point where I’d like to have a hand in something a little more concrete. 

Through my research one thing I found is that the inbetween is more important than the end points. More simply, the connection between things and people matter more than the things and people that are being connected. For this reason, the whatever mediates or shapes that connection or the event of that connection can make a rather big difference. This is one of the reasons user experience design appeals to me so much. Designing experiences, making things usable, and directing usability is a matter of shaping that interaction space that matters so much.