Representing User Experience

How do we represent and communicate experiences?

Such a seemingly simple question that hides a lot of complexity.

Bill Buxton has a great exercise that he has people go through when he gives a talk about design. He tells each audience member to pull out a piece of paper and a pen or pencil.

First, he asks everyone to draw their phone, just a quick sketch of the physical form of the phone in about 15 seconds. Pretty simple, right? Even if you can't draw well at all, it's not too hard to sketch out the rough form of your phone.

Next, he asks everyone to draw the user interface of their phone, again just taking 15 seconds or so. That's pretty easy, too, right? I have an iPhone, so for me it was just a bunch of boxy little icons that represent apps.

Ok, so here's the third, and last thing he asks everyone to do: In just about the same time, just 15 seconds, draw the user experience of your phone. Whoah...not so easy, right?

Why is this such a big issue...why is it so easy to sketch the form and interface of the phone, but so difficult to sketch out the experience? Buxton ends with stating how important it is for the future of experience design to have tools that make it as easy to do the third part as it currently is to do the first two.

One of the main issues is that the first two (physical form and user interface) can be easily drawn as static images, but the third, experiences happen over time, space, and even social structures. People have the experience, the technology doesn't.

 

So what are we to do?

My basic answer is to look to forms of storytelling to use to try and get at good representations of the user's experience, or what we call empathy. If I can't represent user needs from their perspective, how can I hope to design for their needs? I typically use a scenario-based approach to design, using textual stories, and subsequent storyboards to try to represent more of the user's perspective and experience.

Storyboards used in the film and animation fields are great ways to show main points of interaction, while also describing some of the temporal elements. There are many great books and websites out there on storyboarding. Some of the best examples come from early Disney movies, and Disney just released new books with archives of storyboards from early animation up through the most recent movies. I was amazed when I first learned how integral storyboarding is to the film process. For example, Pixar will typically spend at least two years just creating the story for a new film, just using low fidelity sketched storyboards. And their success has a lot to do with that...their films are all great stories. In a way, experience design is just like creating a great story for a movie, with the user being the main character.

I'm hoping that design tools start to support more of this type of thinking, better integrating early design representations like storyboards into the existing tools for wireframing, prototyping, etc.

Please comment, or send me an email...I'd love to hear how you go about representing interaction over time, especially capturing the user's experience.