UX Cocktail of Cultural Context

Picture byUser Intelligence

On May 6th, User Intelligence was hosting an entertaining & educational UX cocktail hour at their light and airy premises in Amsterdam’s historic downtown. The event proved very popular; only limited spaces were available, unfortunately, and they had filled up within hours. Nevertheless, as always, the cocktail hour was a great opportunity to catch up with many familiar faces, as well as make new intriguing contacts.

After a private tour of their usability lab and facilities, Mark Kassteen gave a short overview of User Intelligence and their services. I was particularly interested in the team’s extensive user research experience, including traditional usability testing, explorative user research, and web analytics. Amongst other accomplishments, User Intelligence developed a web traffic map to visualize and analyze usage data of web sites and applications, which has won several prices, and will be presented at the upcoming Chi NL conference in Leiden.

Marc also shared several examples of user research in practice, including a recent project on target audience definition for a health services portal. Initially, the clients had identified several distinct types of users that they thought would require different variations of the portal: patients, volunteers, and donors. However, closer inspection established that all patients were also volunteers or donors, and thus a different and more effective homogeneous user interface strategy could be chosen.

Next Steve Portigal (the evening’s guest of honor, who happened to be on vacation in Amsterdam with his charming partner) kindly agreed to share some observations on cultural context and its importance within design research. Rather than a traditional usability or design firm, Steve’s expertise lies in research, support, and cooperation with designers, engineers, and marketers to generate ideas and concepts.

For example in a recent project for Belkin, explorative field research on user context and behavior was conducted. The aim of this blue sky project was to identify unique demands of various environments and settings (e.g. while jogging, shopping, walking a dog, on the beach, at school, at work, etc) in order to provide sketches of unmet user needs and thus identify product opportunities for IPod accessories. However, the research showed that the assumed premise of “sylos” did not apply; instead users moved fluidly from one “bubble”(i.e. environment and situation) to another, often in parallel (e.g. social calls while shopping, working while walking the dog, etc.).

In particular, Steve’s interest lies in the observation of cultural context. Cultural norms can be crucial for the introduction of new products that require, encourage, or enable new types of behavior. To be considered and accepted as “normal” behavior, it needs to fit within the unspoken rules of a (sub-) culture, as expressed for example in media, product offerings, advertisement, street culture, trends and fads. In user research, people will often have the urge to “normalize” themselves by talking about perceived end points (“I might do …, but I’m not like some whacko who does …”), thus providing valuable insight into barriers that restrain user behavior, believes, and acceptance of products and concepts.

Steve shared some amusing and insightful examples of his observations on cultural differences and idiosyncrasies around the globe (see also Steve's pictures). For example, at MacDonald’s in Bangkok, uses are greeted by a Ronald MacDonald figure with Asian features, bowing to guests with politely folded hands, thus merging pervasive global fast food culture with strong local customs.

Steve also noticed that in the street culture of Amsterdam, a thinner edge is evolving, for example concerning sexuality, but also other “bodily functions” and advertisements for toilets. In contrast, in North American culture it is generally considered taboo to talk about “pooh” in polite society, and in Japan successful product offerings have been identified and developed to provide “camouflage sound” on public toilets (raising the interesting question whether it is considered more embarrassing to hear or be heard in this situation). By understanding these hidden “problems” or issues of different social locations and settings, potential solutions can be identified and translated into concepts and products.

Steve finished his excellent presentation with the call to “keep exploring”!

Finally, Elio Tagliola shared some of his thoughts on integration of user research within a multi-channel process, including several examples on how this has been applied at GroupM for large multimedia projects such as Simyo, to ensure that consumer needs are put first in multi channel processes. For this purpose a model of “circle of contacts” was developed at GroupM to serve as a trigger to start discussions. In multi-media marketing departments and agencies there is often still a lack of understanding and insight into customer’s context, needs, motivations, and emotional state. Elio argued for more analysis, integration, and communication across all channels.

concept visualization - take three

I've often been praising the strength of visualization techniques to define, communicate, and refine technology and business concepts. As Adam Greenfield points out in Everyware, a good example how powerful a tool concept visualization can be is the development of Raytheon's Common Tactical Blackboard for the US military after seeing the animation of John Underkoffler's original concept in Minority Report (see e.g. demo at CeBIT '08, Jeff Han's presentation, and Microsoft's vision demo).

Addition (Nov '08):
Another neat example on the art of concept visualization is The ambient life by Buro Knapzak. (though the story line is unfortunately not very original) .

warped reality on mobile monday

This week, at the Mobile Monday in Amsterdam, Joseph Pine provided a fascinating, if slightly mind bending overview of his work on 'multiverses' in the experience economy.

In his book "Technology and Media in the Experience Economy", Joseph Pine argues that just as goods have become commodities in the past, so by now have services. Thus increasingly companies do not only have to compete on availability, cost, and quality, but by staging experiences - memorable personal events - where authenticity (i.e. how real / genuine it appears) is the primary distinguishing criteria. Examples of this are the trend for natural foods, corporate social responsibility, and products such as handmade soaps. But the same criteria can also apply to virtual products.

Joseph Pine suggests in his book "The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage" that this can be achieved through use of dramatic structure: Plan the user's experience along the lines of a theater play, where initially the scene is set, then increasing action and complication lead to a climax, after which the action subdues and sees the visitor off gently. He illustrated this with an amusing anecdote of a visit to see Rembrand's night watch at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The challenge for modern companies, according to Jospeh Pine, is how to successfully apply this principle across the entire range of media, from real life to virtual worlds. For this purpose he introduced the context of a three dimensioal matrix he calls 'multiverse' (= multiple universes).

Inspired by Franklin's book "Future Perfect", introducing the concept of fiction as an intangible reality shifting consciousness across time, Joseph Pine reasoned that the axis time, matter and space can also have negative dimensions. Thus in his matrix he opposes matter (atoms, real objects) with no-matter (bits, virtual objects), time (linear) with no-time (non-linear), and space (physical, geographic location) with no-space (virtual). Within this framework, he defines eight 'universes':

1. Reality, the physical world
2. Virtual Worlds, such as Second Life
3. Augmented Reality, digital enhancement of the real world (e.g. military use of overlay on glasses, TomTom location based services)
4. Augmented Virtuality, adding physical aspects to virtual experiences in real time (e.g. Startrek hologram transmitter, Nintendo's Wii)
5. Warped Reality (e.g. teleportation, interruption of experience by for example entering the alternate world of subways during a sightseeing trip of NY)
6. Mirror Worlds, virtual worlds mirroring reality in real time (e.g. life projection of sport events or weather maps in Second Life, projecting mobile user's current location on Google Earth)
7. Alternate Reality (e.g. telepathy)
8. Physical Virtuality (e.g. Startrek replicator, Lego Factory allowing users to order real instances of virtual models)

Using this multiverse framework to think about different ways of adding value to a business proposition, Joseph Pine argues that a rich user experience should reach across multiple dimensions, leading to "transversal storytelling" (i.e. across multiverse, not just multiple media).

In general, the Mobile Monday session was very much aimed at marketing and overall I found it rather disappointing. Some interesting initiatives were presented, such as the Roomware Project, an open-source framework for interactive spaces. Authenticity as important criteria for (virtual) services and overall user experience emphasizes once again the general move towards design for emotion. However, the concept of multiverse in particular was quite mind expensive and could be a great tool to stimulate innovative user experience concepts. Certainly a line of thought worth while following!