Design ethnographer Kelly Goto challenged the audience to consider the spaces between the experiences you’re creating, create connected experiences that have meaning and consider machine to human experiences
Do you love your phone itself or the experience it brings? Do you keep a device even though it doesn’t work? Products and devices have memories and through those memories an emotional connection is created.
Empathy is key – we’re trying to become connected to the experiences we create and are better designers because of it.
Overarching Challenge
Kelly presented a couple of challenges during her session – but essentially as a designer it’s crucial to think about the spaces between the experiences you’re creating.
Challenge 1
How do we ‘devolve’ back from walking around hunched over a pc or phone to walking tall, bringing back connections with other people and looking each other in the eye. How do we create real experiences with real people to get connected experiences that mean something?
Although you can’t really create addiction you can control the understanding of people’s rituals. If you understand the rituals that people go through you can create seamless experiences that connect people to their rituals. What are the first things you do in the morning? Do you check Twitter? What do you log in to? We connect with people through storytelling, understanding how people that buy your products are living their lives and what rituals they live by.
We can understand how people are living their lives but too many companies don’t understand the lives of the people who are buying the products or the rituals people live by.
Mood is key to understanding experiences. The mood people are in or stress levels will change their whole experience. Context is everything.
Challenge 2
We’re now at the time when we’re designing machine to human experiences, Web 2.0 was based on friendly interfaces, letting people know the web is fun, not scary. Now we have to fulfil that promise and make sure machine to human experiences are actually fun and pleasurable. The first challenge is to encourage that emotional connection and help people stay upright, but now we also need to think about machine to human communication and how we design those experiences.
Contextual research is important to understand not only what people think they do (focus groups) but what they actually do (observation).
Experiences can be broken down into elements – what is an emotional experience versus a practical one. For example the home button on an iPhone is comforting. It has to be discoverable, has a tactile nature so gives satisfaction and is easily customisable. Breaking down experiences to figure out why is something so popular? If you love something, what is it about that thing that you actually love?
Take a look at our other posts from dConstruct here.
