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Design's Next Big Frontier? Shaping Behavior In Real Time

IF CES PROVED ANYTHING, IT’S THAT DESIGNERS FINALLY HAVE THE TOOLS TO TRULY INFLUENCE BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS. WATCH OUT, WORLD.

Other than Michael Bay’s already legendary meltdown, the hottest topics of discussion at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show are largely wearableand connected. In part, this is just an outcome of consumer expectations: a wearable device is the next step smaller than a smartphone, and we now have the tiny technology to make it work. But after a long morning examining smart bracelets, smart watches, smart headgear, and smart sporting goods on the CES show floor, it’s clear that there’s a much deeper potential hidden in the cracks. This is because small devices with embedded intelligence can do more than just measure; they’re showing their potential to change the way we act.

The idea of using technology to change behavior is something we’ve been hearing about for a few years now, in articles talking about the surprising effectiveness of “Your Speed” radar boxes on the side of the road, or the subtle tricks video games and social networking sites use to encourage certain actions. Whatever the medium, the conceit is the same: provide someone with fast, understandable feedback on something that’s clearly tied to an action he just took, and compare it with expected behavior. It’s a powerful way of shaping behavior, and small, smart devices are suddenly making it easy to apply, practically anywhere.

The obvious examples are the dozens of companies at CES this year, showcasing similar-looking wristbands designed to track your physical activity, and encourage you to do more of it. The Fitbit Flex, Jawbone Up, and Nike Fuelband are probably the best known, but they’ve been joined by competitors from a range of niches, like established fitness electronics brand Polar, gaming hardware maker Razer, and even a kids’ device calledibitz that games or TV time to reward exercise. This focus on physical activity makes sense in that there’s a large market of fitness-seekers out there, and the benefit is easy to convey.

SMALL DEVICES WITH EMBEDDED INTELLIGENCE CAN DO MORE THAN JUST MEASURE, THEY CAN CHANGE THE WAY WE ACT.

The potential, though, is dramatically larger, and a few hints are already in evidence on this year’s show floor. Just down the hall from the Fitbit booth, a company called 94Fifty has set up a basketball hoop, and invites passersby to take a few shots. The technology they’re demonstrating isn’t in the hoop, but the ball, which contains enough accelerometers and other sensors to know the difference between a dribble and a bounce, and to tell you precisely the angle of your last shot when it hit the basket.

The affable retired college basketball coach who explained the details of the Smart Sensor ball to us paints a vivid picture of practice sessions where every pass and every shot comes with instant feedback. It’s an approach, he says, that gives rookies a far quicker path to proficiency than verbal feedback and post-game analysis. Paired with a wearable device or smart fabric tracking shoulder and elbow position, for example, the system could make experts of anyone sufficiently willing. This ability to quickly alter a stubborn habit, whether it’s driving too fast or missing free throws, is what makes embedded and wearable technology worthy of being the Next Big Thing. The prevalence of such devices shows that we’re finally figuring out how to do them right.

THIS ABILITY TO QUICKLY ALTER A STUBBORN HABIT IS WHAT MAKES WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY WORTHY OF BEING THE NEXT BIG THING. 

Whether it’s a bracelet, a pedometer or a basketball, the real trick seems to be a striking a balance between unobtrusiveness, rapid access to feedback, and making sure you’re measuring the right thing. The newest member of the Fitbit family—a larger version of the Flex bracelet, called the Force—makes this balance clear. While the Force’s digital display lets it function as a watch while also giving an instant read on daily activity, the Flex is actually more popular, especially with women, according to the representative I spoke with; its slender profile and waterproofness allow it to be worn, and ignored, all day. The Smart Sensor ball’s biggest advantage over its predecessors, we were informed, is the fact that it looks, feels and plays exactly like any other basketball. Interfere with the core experience, and all bets are off.

This is what makes 2014 a watershed year for smart objects. For the first time, we have in essence a kit of parts—sensors, software, wireless protocols, an ecosystem of smartphones—that makes it relatively easy to balance unobtrusiveness, access and appropriateness in almost any device. The greatest obstacles now are figuring out what to measure, and ensuring that we use the tremendous persuasive power of these new feedback loops to encourage the right behavior.

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Can Experience be Designed?

Do experience designers shape how users feel, or do they shape with respect to how users feel? A small but important nuance. Did you catch it? No? Then let me ask you this way: Do architects design houses or do they design “inhabitant experiences?” The bullshit answer is “They design inhabitant experiences”. The pragmatic answer is: “They design houses”. The cautious answer is: Architects design houses that lead to a spectrum of experiences, some foreseen, some not. But they do not design all possible experiences one can have in a house.

People’s perceptions of user interfaces are too different to be precogitated by a single person. Yes, I designed this site. But no, I don’t know exactly how you experience it right now (but I do have sort of an idea).

Look at the Agenda

Con men: As in every other field there are con men that fool naive clients using experience design as a slogan. Some just make empty promises, some sell empty white papers, some use the slogan to pump up meaningless speeches, some just upsell naive clients with hot air.

Bullshitters: Bullshitting is not lying, it’s fooling people into assuming whatever suits your purpose. Bullshit in UX often comes in pretty funny colors: Unconventional meetings, esoteric brain storming and irrelevant chats at preposterous prices with arm-thick bullshit documentation (documentation is important, but just because it’s printed and time-consuming doesn’t mean that it’s worth thousands of dollars). Some invite programmers and secretaries to design user interfaces, others push management executives to engage in childish games, and some make you do really crazy stuff like eating soap in a handstand.

Wishy-washy managers: Insecure managers like anything that can be tested, because it allows them to avoid responsibility. The more insecure a manager is, the more he wants to ask other people. There is nothing wrong with serious user testing, but consulting your husband, wife, kids, secretary, cousin, or yourself is not serious user testing testing. Usability tests and user research need to be done by professionals. Not everybody can be as badass as Steve Jobs, but an exceptional product needs a clear vision, solid user research, an experienced designer, and a management willing to take some risks.

The Rhetoric

Sales-y Emptiness: User Experience Design as a tautology: The design of a product — voluntarily or involuntarily — defines the interaction between human and artifact. Interaction leads to experience. From this point of view, all design is experience design. Used like this, the term “user experience design” doesn’t mean anything.

Amateurish Exaggeration: User Experience Design as hyperbole: User experience design somehow suggests that a designer has direct control over how each and every user experiences their product. A massive exaggeration. The more experience you have in our field the more you are aware of how much the perception of a product varies from person to person. Design defines experience, it doesn’t control it. Used like this, “experience design” is a big promise that cannot be kept.

Technical language: User Experience Design as a synecdoche: The user experience of a product doesn’t start with the first hands-on contact, and it doesn’t end there either. It includes all contact points: business, technology. and design. Skilled designers use the term “user experience design” instead of “web design” to express that the visual design is a representative part of a far more complex construct. Used like this, user experience design is a valid term.

The Substance

So yes, some (but not all) that use the term “user experience design” are charlatans. So what do serious people say, when they use “user experience design” instead of just “web design”?

User Experience Design is not as easy as Dreamweaver: Everybody that publishes a website can call himself a web designer. Calling yourself a user experience designer suggests that you measure your designs with a substantial audience, and deal with a wide scale of user opinions on a daily basis. If not, you are not a user experience designer.

User Experience Design proficiency makes you feel small, not big: Traditionally, design is a hierarchical notion where the designer is King and the consumer pays designer taxes to get a spark of design genius. In the field of user experience design, that notion of a glorified, omniscient designer has been turned upside down. The experience designer tries to empathize with as many different users as possible.

User Experience Design doesn’t win ADC prices, it wins percentages: User experience design is the part of a design that can be measured in clicks, time on site, return on investment, return visits, and in direct feedback. User experience design is design where every opinion counts. User experience design is engineering — it doesn’t try to find the perfect solution, but the best compromise.

Everybody is a user, so is everybody a user experience designer, right?

Since everybody is a user, everybody has an opinion on how their experience should be. And many are very eager to utter their opinions really strongly. But that doesn’t mean that every user is a designer. Asking for salt doesn’t make you a cook. Each user has their own opinion, and the user experience designer deals with the many different opinions and tries to find the best compromise. Good compromises are not in the middle, they are higher than the initial options: good compromises are synthetic (If your options are cowardly or foolhardy, the synthesis is courageous).

You don’t need to be an engineer to find out that your car doesn’t start. But you need to be an engineer to fix it. As a user experience designer you need to know how things work. When it comes to use, all opinions are equal, but when it comes to engineering, they are not. The engineer collects the feedback and finds ways to deal with it. His opinions are not just based on personal experience. Like a scientist, he tests and validate his assumptions, he develops both theory and practice — not merely relying on his own perception, but by actually testing his products with his audience. And yes, designing interactive products for over ten years makes you more experienced about what works and what doesn’t. But it should never stop you from testing it in the field. By dealing with feedback you get proficient in “experience design”.

The more response you get the more you learn, and the better you can do your job in the future. It is not so hard to find feedback. What’s hard is how you deal with it: feedback always makes complicated things morecomplicated. And beware! If you do everything the user wants you end up with the car Homer Simpson designed.

Theory and Practice

You cannot claim to be an expert in interaction design without practical experience. Building things and dealing with user opinions is what makes a user experience designer. Being an active Facebook or Twitter user, a talented speaker, a winning salesperson, or a collector of UXD articles doesn’t make you an expert on user experience design. What makes you an expert in designing interfaces is building interfaces and dealing with the (often very angry) feedback. Actual user experience designers find pleasure in weird things like:

• Studying user behavior on a daily basis just for fun (Analytics, SE-logs)
• Usability tests and interviews
• Prototype testing and optimization
• Fixing mistakes after the launch by closely watching and evaluating angry user reactions
• Learning about new business processes
• Studying new technology on a daily basis

The bigger the audience the more stoicism you need. Relaunching T-Online ten years ago was a personal baptism by fire — the new design was ripped apart by the whole German tech community. Over time you get used to relaunch protest. Looking at the numbers, iA’s designs seem to improve (and for some reason the reactions are not all that angry anymore). But in every project, there are a lot of surprising feedback to digest and learn from.

Conclusion

Yes, a lot of agencies will abuse technical language to upsell, some more bluntly, some in a more entertaining way. But you can’t slam the bullshit hammer on an entire industry that employs some of the smartest and honest men and women in tech without looking like an amateur.

Amateurs don’t want to talk to and understand clients, they don’t want to discuss things with stupid users, they want to go right in and do it live, change it and improve it in the way they deem necessary. Their strategy is: “Let’s work until it works”. Amateurs are cheap at first but they often fail to complete the job. Because, simply put: without proper preparation and user research and user opinion you can’t make things work — for the user.

1. User experience design is not a magic method that allows you to foresee how people will feel about your design, but a design approach that is based on user feedback in different phases of the project.
2. The more experience you have with user testing, the better you know how to deal with the usually hard-to-handle feedback (feedback alone won’t make a good design), and only few are born Stoics.
3. The more experience you have handling user feedback, the more likely it is that you are going to find a higher synthetic compromise in your design development.

Okay, but… how can I discern the bullshitter from the user experience designer?
— Look at what they say and look at what they did. Then compare.
Well that’s just… like… your opinion man…
— Sure.

Written with Writer

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A little Friday inspiration via my [David B Anthony // Tech+Art+Light] Channel https://vimeo.com/channels/davidbanthony

What 'edits' would you want to make to the human body, given the choice?

What changes you would prefer to see and would that sustain over the period of time. What may be notice-able advancements in next evolutionary forms?

How do you propose the sustainability of the changes and physical impacts like tiring etc. ?

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Michael Baucum, I know absolutely nothing. 

1. Chocolate, sugar, and simple carbs would be superfoods.
2. Orgasms would last much, much longer than they do.
3. We would only need a few minutes’ sleep every day. And yet, the (good) dreams would still feel like they last for hours.
4. Genitals would be beautiful. That is, less… weird looking.
5. We would be furry enough to not need clothes. (Furry things are cuter, anyway.)
6. There would be various indicator LEDs across our bellies, showing when we need things like love, time alone, food, etc. This would help a lot with babies.
7. Wings. ‘Nuff said.
8. Babies are born as tiny, harmless little seeds. They then rapidly expand to normal birth size when held in your hands over the course of 3 minutes. That makes the birth process magical, painless, and exciting!
9. Upon death, you dissolve into magical water that gives drinkers all your memories and everything you’ve learned in life. This makes funerals more spiritual and bolsters the human race over time.

lol, if someone would draw me some concept art for this, that would be awesome.I’d especially like to see people’s takes for #4.

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Eivind Kjørstad, Nerd. Nature-lover. Penpal. Fitocrat.

The list is endless. People who think the human body is perfect, quite clearly haven’t thought about it very hard, or at all.

• Our teeth, and our lower back are both a disgrace. Huge fractions of humanity gets trouble with one or both of those in their first 50 years of life, that should be fixed.
• Current biology is that we’re fertile by default, but women can become sterile by taking a pill. I’d want this reversed. That is, I’d want us to be sterile by defauls, but able to conceive if we take a pill. Ideally the pill should be a simply and easily synthesized chemical, but one that does not exist in nature. The result would be that no child would ever be conceived unless both parents desire it.
• We’ve got really good machinery for hanging onto energy to survive the coming famine. Only to most of humanity, it never comes, and the result is overweight or obesity. I’d want biology retuned so that your appetite automatically aims for a BMI of 23 — instead of the current situation where “eat all you like” results in a BMI of 30 or 35 for most people. Ideally, we’d simply stop absorbing energy from food when we’ve gotten enough, so overeating still wouldn’t make you overweight.
• The performance of many subsystems is embarrassingly bad. Red blood-cells ? Are you kidding me ? Those things SUCK at transporting oxygen and CO2. Did you know that respirocytes would allow you to hold your breath for 5-6 *hours* ? Bones ? Is that a joke ? Have you tried comparing the breaking-strength of titanium with that of bone ? Nerves ? Moving signals at ~30 meters pro second ? That’s ridicolously slow — electronics are a factor of a million faster at signal-propagation.
• We should get conscious control over a few more things. Give my nerves a shunt, and allow me to dial the intensity of any input down by a factor of 100 when needed. Let me consciously decide which memories to store and which to delete.
• Let’s get rid of some old junk legacy-hardware. Appenditis anyone ? What do I need toenails for again ? For that matter, why do I have more than 2 toes ? It’s not as if I’ve been gripping anything with my toes for millenia, and only the large-toe is muscular enough to be helpful for balance.
• Some of our emotional machinery causes more trouble than it’s worth. Yes I get it, it’s useful for spreading our genes, but that’s not a top priority for most people alive today, so let’s reduce some of it. I vote for an order of magnitude less xenophobia and less jealousy, for a start.

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illuminated Grids

夜間走行時、路面の凹凸をエンハンスする格子型ランプ「Lumigrids」

Lumigrids is an LED projector for bicycles that hopes to improve safety during night riding. It projects square grids onto the ground and by observing changes in the grids, the rider can easily comprehend the landforms ahead. Lumigrids can be fixed onto the bicycle’s handlebars and the power is supplied by either an internal battery or by the rotation of the bicycle’s wheels.

As the designers explain, on a flat road surface, the grid will consist of standard squares. On a rough road surface, the grids will deform accordingly. By observing the motion and deformation of the grids, the rider can intuitively understand the landforms ahead. In addition, the luminous grids can make it easier for nearby pedestrians and vehicles to notice the bicycle, reducing the likelihood of collision.

Lumigrids has three modes with different grid sizes that can be used to adapt to different situations: normal mode (140x180mm), high-speed mode (140x260mm), and team mode (300x200mm).

Designers: Prof. Gan Jing, Xun Zhang, An Pengcheng, Sun Yan, Jiang Cong, Li Ke, Du Tao, Zheng Yuemei, Cai Jing & Liu Zhenghao

http://www.yankodesign.com/2013/05/21/lumigrids-while-cycling/

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Bakers’ Christmas Lights - Jingle Bells 2013. Bakers’ Christmas Lights sequenced to Jingle Bells. Source

Sound Architectures, Sculptures & Installations by Zimoun

Fantastic kinetic sound sculptures from Studio Zimoun via prosthetic knowledge:

“Using simple and functional components, Zimoun builds architecturally-minded platforms of sound. Exploring mechanical rhythm and flow in prepared systems, his installations incorporate commonplace industrial objects. In an obsessive display of curiously collected material, these works articulate a tension between the orderly patterns of Modernism and the chaotic forces of life. Carrying an emotional depth, the acoustic hum of natural phenomena blends effortlessly with electric reverberation in Zimoun’s minimalist constructions.” bitforms nyc

50 prepared dc-motors, filler wire 1.0mm, 60cm

“The sound sculptures and installations of Zimoun are graceful, mechanized works of playful poetry, their structural simplicity opens like an industrial bloom to reveal a complex and intricate series of relationships, an ongoing interplay between the «artificial» and the «organic». It’s an artistic research of simple and elegant systems to generate and study complex behaviors in sound and motion. Zimoun creates sound pieces from basic components, often using multiples of the same prepared mechanical elements to examine the creation and degeneration of patterns.” Tim Beck

200 prepared dc-motors, 2000 cardboard elements 70x70cm

See more at zimoun.net

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