In every Germanic language, except for English, the word “experience” has two translations that are not directly translations but actually synonyms.
For example, in Danish, “Oplevelse” (German: “Erlebnis”) translates into “experience”. In Danish, “Erfaring” (German: “Erfahrung) also translates into “experience”
In Danish (and other Germanic languages) the meaning of “oplevelse” (German: “Erlebnis”) is the experience in progress or a recent event. On the other hand, "erfaring” (German: “Erfahrung) is more closely related to remembering, accumulated experiences - or simply to be skilled.
There are approximately 200,000,000 people in Europe who speak a Germanic language, of whom roughly 50,000,000 are native English speakers. They would therefore perceive the word “(user) experience” without problems. But the rest of this group (150,000,000) will often have to find and use synonyms to describe and understand a key concept in our industry. Imagine how hard that is, and just how many misunderstandings that can cause.
So, those of you who speak German, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian - how are you addressing this issue?
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This past year, I visited two strangely related museums: the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, USA, and the House of Terror in Budapest, Hungary. Both museums are in historically significant buildings. Both deal with human oppression. Yet the experiences couldn’t have been more different. Let me share them with you.
The National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis
The NCRM opened in September 1991 as an extension built onto the Lorraine Motel. The Lorraine was where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, 1968. The actual motel rooms used by Dr. King and his entourage represent the culmination of the museum's semi-chronological history of the civil-rights movement.
The National Civil Rights Museum built onto the Lorraine Motel, site of Dr. King's assassination.
The color scheme of the museum is drab – mostly brown and gray with dirty orange and a dusty blue for contrast. I was reminded of the colors perceived by folks who are colorblind. Perhaps this was a conscious decision. Nevertheless, the result is ugly. Worse still, the exhibits feature more flat paper reproductions of photos and newspapers, and more text than any other museum I have ever visited.
Because picture-taking was not allowed, please check out the museum’s own link:
http://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/permexhibits.htm
Oddly, the disappointingly few physical artifacts were hardly labeled at all. I guess that the gaudy uniform once belonged to Marcus Garvey, but, well, this is just a guess.
The physical layout created numerous bottlenecks for the visitors. At one point, the whole place seemed so claustrophobic that I just wanted to get out. Happily I stuck it out and saw Dr. King’s motel room, which was exceptionally moving.
Across the street, the museum has a second exhibition in the boarding house where James Earl Ray, King’s presumed assassin stayed. But since admission to the second section required going back across the street to check my camera (but not my phone), I decided I’d had enough and left.
Too monochromatic. Too many words. Too boring.
I’m a child of the 50s. I grew up in St. Louis where the civil-rights movement and desegregation played major roles in my world. Yet I left the civil-rights museum without any particularly meaningful feelings (except with regard to the hotel room), and didn’t feel I had learned very much.
Information overload, plain and simple.
I was accompanied by a friend who is younger and has a very different demographic background. Yet his impression of the museum “experience” was virtually identical to mine.
Here's a YouTube video with the Museum's director, Beverly Robertson. Apart from a few artifact displays (and two busses), notice the amount of text there is in the exhibits:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyxuAb_zlFE&videos=9dDJiUb9vH8
A brief description of video codecs
Video codecs compress television images so that they can be transmitted over great distances, on smaller bandwidths. The MPEG 4 algorithm takes the 24 frames-per-second of broadcast video and analyses the content. Unless movement is perceived, a codec will only refresh a pixel once every two or three frames.
What this means is, if you watch a football game, the pixels containing players and the ball will be transmitted almost all of the time. But the grass will only be transmitted a third of the time. Because players are important and grass isn’t.
So why do I mention this? Because the National Civil Rights Museum couldn’t distinguish between players and grass. The curators included every scrap they could dig up and they exhausted my cognitive bandwidth. A little MPEG 4 or feng shui would have gone a long way.
If it were up to me, I’d start over. I hope they will someday. How sad that such an important project was allowed to go so very wrong.
Terror Háza - The House of Terror, Budapest
Hungary had a disasterous 20th century. Most Central European nations did. But I didn’t really appreciate the plight of the Hungarians until I visited the House of Terror in Budapest.
Andrássy út (Andrassy Street) is Budapest’s finest avenue, leading from the center of Pest to the magnificent Hero’s Square and the city park at the other end. Of the street’s many notable buildings, number 60 is also the most notorious.
The House of Terror at Andrássy út 60 in Budapest, Hungary
In 1937, the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party (Hungarian Nazis), leased the building, which was dubbed the “House of Loyalty.” In 1944, when the Arrow Cross assumed control of the government, the House of Loyalty quickly became known as the House of Terror. After the defeat of Germany in 1945 and up to 1956, the building housed two murderous Communist organizations, the ÁVO and ÁVH. Both groups had offices above ground and cells and torture chambers in the basement.
The political persuasion of the occupiers - fascist or communist - made no difference whatsoever. Officers serving at Andrássy út 60 were masters of life and death.
In February 2002, the building was reopened as a museum, the exhibitions designed by the multitalented architect,
Attila F. Kovács.
Once again, photography was not allowed, but do check out the gallery pages on the museum’s questionably structured website:
http://www.terrorhaza.hu/en/index_2.html
The outside façade has been restored to its pre-war glory. But the roof has been equipped with a metal “eyebrow.” When the sun is high in the sky, the ominous word “Terror” appears as a black shadow along the front.
Inside, the metaphors continue – with barely a written word to be found, or indeed needed. Instead, a simple descriptive sheet can be taken from a holder in each room. I collected these and skimmed them during my visit, saving them to read in detail later.
One of the most moving rooms was a long rectangular space with rough-hewn planks along the walls. The rug on the floor was a map – I entered the room in western Hungary. Along the walls, video screens show black-and-white movies of Hungarians anno 1950. Soft music plays in the background.
As I made my way through the room, I suddenly noticed that all the screens had changed to show a desolate landscape moving past, as though past the window of a train. The music had changed to the clackity-clack of the rails. I was in a boxcar being transported to a Soviet work camp. The map on the rug showed my progress.
I think this room is known as the "Gulag Room." I found a brief clandestine video of it on YouTube, but unfortunately without the train effects:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqjfkmctuQ
The entire museum was one of personal discovery. It encouraged me to read more about Hungarian history. And it was tremendously frightening, despite the elegantly simple exhibits.
So why are these museums so different?
Only 11 years separate them in terms of age. Yet the National Civil Rights Museum is a catastrophe and the House of Terror is an artistic and educational triumph. Perhaps it’s because the NCRM tries so hard to provide a complete picture while the HoT lets our imagination do much of the work.
Could it be that we should be viewing more interactive media (e.g. websites) as voyages of discovery rather than merely informational repositories? Naturally, if we just want to know when a restaurant is open, the good experience lies in our ability to get this information fast.
But maybe we need to think about moving a little slower once in a while. For example at
http://www.wordsatplay.com
What do you think?
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At the recent IA Summit in Memphis, Tennessee, I was asked to host a luncheon table for a group of folks interested in project management/UX. Loay Alfi of the University of Indiana, who had attended a table I had hosted the previous day, suggested this topic as a natural extension of the first discussion - the business value of UX.
Loay's question was simple (although the solution is not): who "owns" user-experience on a project team? What is the role of the project manager? How does one manage effectively in an "agile" environment? What will happen when folks start working seriously toward creating user experiences that transcend the online and offline worlds? How do we keep egos from getting in the way? Who has the most clout - project managers or project owners?
The eight of us at the table, Loay, Wolf, Matt, Craig, Kathryn, Carrie, Sam, and myself, discussed the various ways in which we currently handled these matters. But we know that there are more (and better) ways to create effective UX integration and more efficient project management.
Hence, we agreed to use this blog to collect ideas that can begin to form a body of knowledge around these issues. We look forward to hearing your comments, solutions, war stories, and other goodies.
Loay Alfi and Eric Reiss in Memphis
As it seems to be a common pattern with me in recent times, this post has been long in the making and even longer in the thinking. And I'm not done yet, really, but since the 10th IA Summit in Memphis, Tennessee, seems to have expanded our horizons in novelty ways, I have a feeling the times are ripe for a first attempt at my tuppence on the subject. What subject? IA, IxD, UX, and where we stand, of course. And thanks to JJG.
Posts are in the numbers, but I'm not going to recapitulate years of “I think IA is this and UX is that”. Eric's
piece on this very blog is a good starting point if you want to look into the nuts and bolts of definitions, practice, and business. And it's a good one as well, with interesting comments, so read it. But I'm concerned with the bigger picture. I'm all for big pictures, you know: I'm a big rock, small rock kind of guy.
The Summit was a pivotal event in a number of ways, and comments are already online that capture this tension (Erin Malone
here, Cennydd Bowles
there), but I'm mostly interested in what our man Jesse James Garrett's said in his closing plenary. He was provocative, inspirational, and offered some strong arguments against the divisiveness, the factions, the current creeping tribalism. I hope you were there to listen to it. If you were not, I hope someone will post a podcast somewhere sometime. Let's recap a few things Jesse said, and as I'm calling this up from memory please correct me if I get it wrong.
Everyone listening to JJG
All rejoice in UX
Jesse wrote “
IA Recon” in 2002, and there he maintained that the role of information architect and information architecture were two distinct concepts and that the right message focused on the discipline. The role would follow. In the plenary, he said he was wrong, he changed his mind, and now can see the light. There is no such thing as IA. There. Small numbers and a bad economy have played their part, petty fighting for a place in the sun has helped along, and so forget about IA and its pal IxD: we should all rejoice under the larger, warmer UX umbrella and call ourselves user experience designers and be done with it. We cannot stand divided (hey, Eric).
Now there, hold your horses.
What are we talking about? The practice, the business? Then I as many others have no issues with this. A number of influential people have already expressed their view on this:
Chiara Fox, Richard Dalton on the IxDA Discuss ML. Fine. Businesses want to advertise for UX designers? Want to put a UX on your door? You want UX on your card? Fair enough, mostly because there is no preventing that. This has to do with the market.
Role, label, discipline
But if we are talking field of study, or discipline, I do have issues. You bet I do. And I have already argued in “
IA Growing Roots”, co-written with Dorte Madsen and Katriina Byström for the February ASIS&T Bulletin, that role, label, and discipline are different concepts we should handle separately, yet we continue to confuse them. Seems common sense enough but confusion is aplenty nonetheless, so let me make my point clear once again in the less formal context of this blog. And for the sake of discussion let's use discipline as a word meaning “the field”, no further connotation, no strings attached, as even that might be a matter of contention. Thank you.
The role has to do with what my duties are on my job: what my practice is, if you will. On one level there is no direct correlation between role and label, as I'm not changing the latter anytime I perform duties which are not strictly related to the core of the former (say invoicing a customer as opposed to analyzing the result of a card sorting), but of course on the other hand the association between the two is vast, especially when they touch on boundary areas, as it happens with IA and IxD for example. This association is usually the center of the debate: we tend to define everything from here. I do therefore I am, I am since I do. What I do is what I am. And labels vary wildly for a number of reasons: people get bored, love to come up with new funky definitions, companies organize and reorganize, IA is young and unsettled, and the times are fast.
Build the tools: they'll build us
But this continuous shifting influences our mindset as well: as Michael Wesch outlined in his keynote, we build the tools, then the tools build us. Chiara clearly illustrates this point in her post: she found herself describing her job as user-related, and not tool-related, and this helped understand it was time to reframe her 'label'. What strikes me is that she says nothing about her practice, she only talks about her mindset: I'm not talking wireframes anymore, I'm talking users. I guess her practice didn't change though: wireframes or whatever is part of her process are still there. It feels a lot like saying that my work is building houses, but since now I care more about the future inhabitants than the layout of the walls, I'm a UXD and not an architect, and you should do the same, as you should care about the “users” and not the bricks.
And even if she did change her practice to reflect this new mindset, well, does that instantaneously make every other different practice obsolete? I'm not sure of that. But my point is, we are still talking about labels. Names. Surface. We need to go deeper than this, as even the relationship between being and doing goes deeper.
Being and doing
I have a background in Architecture and Industrial Design and I'd be an architect even if designing window displays for shops. My label might say differently, especially if working inside a company, but that wouldn't change the fact that I would be doing window decoration as an architect would, and not as a painter or graphic designer. I'm sure Chiara's view on “the user” is radically different from mine, she coming from LIS and me coming from ergonomy and design. We need this common view, the body of knowledge Jesse was talking about, much more than another discussion on names, but if we want to go all the way with labels, here's my view in a nutshell: as much as a physician can specialize and become a cardiologist or a gastroenterologist, so can we.
Generic and specific
Physician or doctor is the generic term, cardiologist the specific term. If UX is a larger umbrella under which IA, IxD, and other fields of expertise live, that would mean that I can be labeled both as a UX designer practicing IA or IxD, depending on my current tasks or job position or specialization, or as IA or IxD
tout-court, much like a physician would.
Both of these are fine with me. What's important is that we do not loose focus on the big picture: as much as the current generation of IAs and IxDs is LIS people, graphic designers, anthropologists, biologists, whatever (in a '90s sense, I think), who have a working practice of IA, future generations of IAs and IxDs will also see practitioners who have Masters or Bachelors in IA or IxD. They are there now completing their courses, and will be on the market soon: shall they all be called UX designers nonetheless? I don't know. Might be, as far as that is a job title they might get on top of their academic skills. And we will see people with a UX degree as well, as Karl Fast anticipated in his closing comments, who will be UX2 then.
The discipline side of things
If this is the “profession” side of things, what about the discipline then. Well, let's say it again: this is not debatable, there is such a thing as Information Architecture, and it does not overlap 1:1 with what we call User Experience, as much as color theory does not overlap with painting (and sorry for the bad example). We still don't know much about it, and that's the main reason behind the founding of the Journal of IA, but it's definitely there. And if Jesse was arguing for a definitive get together of IA and IxD and whatnot even on the discipline side, I'm there with him, but I do not see this happening easily. Nor today. Once you draw lines, it's difficult not to see or follow them. Just check the number of books or academic courses on IxD to have an idea of what I'm talking about. We might have started the machine, but now it has a mind of its own.
So, profession, yes maybe, but careful about framing the future within the present; discipline, no thank you. It might be me, but I say this is still mostly DTDT. Jesse was brilliant, captivating, and I'm listening. But really interested? Sort of, but not that much.
A most important issue
And I'm afraid this is obscuring something much more important Jesse said at the beginning of his talk, one single vital observation the community should ponder upon with great care. He asked the audience who were the best IAs out there, and he got names. As his was one of them, he said well you all are taking my word on the fact that I'm the best, as you are not judging what I do, but what I say about what I do.
And he had a point: the community at large has a strange fascination for words and little interest in deeds. The top guns we all look up to might or might not very well be those who can talk the talk and walk the walk, as we seem to care little for facts and figures. It's true that any community or discipline normally has a fair share of doers (say Gehry) and a fair share of sayers (say Loos, whose writing largely exceed his practice), and some who are so talented to be both, great achievers with strong opinions (Le Corbusier comes to mind). But right now, as far as the IA/UX community is concerned, where are the works? And mind you, I don't mean they are not out there, as I think they mostly are, but do we know who did what and to what extent?
Pick a book on the history of architecture, and you'll see that it has to do with artifacts. Now pick a book on IA, and you'll find words, theory, propositions, manifestos, and grand visions. In the best of cases early stages or draft ideas. Where are the artifacts we can discuss? I see this as the one great divide we have to overcome in order to mature as a field and achieve a richer deepness. We need critique, and the tools to do that (Erin's piece is spot on on this). I also see this as much more urgent than how we should call ourselves.
Big rock, small rock, and chorizo sausage?
One final note for those still wondering what the hell is the title about. It goes all the way back to EuroIA 2008, Amsterdam, and an Argentinian restaurant. It was a fairly large crowd and conversations were abundant, and someone came up with how IA is tightly coupled with the digital domain. Eric, me, and someone else for sure, have some kind of naïve idea that once the first caveman decided to have a pile of large rocks for building and a pile of small rocks for hunting the roots for what we call today IA (whatever) were laid out. We were challenged on this, and since we had a couple of different cold cuts still in the plate, we kind of made the point by arranging chorizo sausages in groups and patterns. Big rock, small rock, chorizo sausage. That's it. And I'm sure Peter Bogaards will appreciate.
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The past month, I’ve been working on a revised business plan for FatDUX and realized that there weren’t any particularly useful definitions of “user experience”. Just yesterday, UX designer Whitney Hess, published a compilation of
10 things that UX is not. Interesting article but no clear description of what is meant by “user experience”. Our industry tends to preach to the choir, but not to either the client or the bank.
Having thought a lot about a definition (over a period of years), I figured it was time to get this beyond the confines of my journal and our business plan and launch it into cyberspace. Use it in good health.
UX = the sum of a series of interactions
User experience (UX) represents the perception left in someone’s mind following a series of interactions between
people, devices, and events – or any combination thereof. "Series" is the operative word.
Some interactions are
active – clicking a button on a website, giving a waiter your order at a restaurant, getting out of the rain at a picnic.
Some interactions are
passive – viewing a beautiful sunset will trigger the limbic system to release dopamine (a reward chemical). This applies to any and all of our five senses.
Some interactions are
secondary to the ultimate experience – the food tastes good because the chef chose quality ingredients and prepared them well. The ingredients are good quality because the farmer tended his fields. The crop interacted well with the rain that year.
All interactions are open to subjective interpretation – some people don’t like celery or sunsets. Remember, a perception is always true in the mind of the perceiver; if you think sunsets are depressing, there’s little I can say or do to convince you otherwise. However, this is why designers often fall back on “best practice” – most people react favorably to sunsets.
UX design = combining three types of activities
Designing a “user experience,” therefore, represents
the conscious act of:
•
coordinating interactions that are controllable (choosing food ingredients, training waiters, designing and programming buttons)
•
acknowledging interactions that are beyond our control (uncomfortable seats in a 100-year-old theater, lack of fresh produce in winter, low-hanging clouds that hide a sunset.)
•
reducing negative interactions (providing tents as emergency shelters at outdoor events in case of rain; making sure restaurant seating next to the noisy kitchen door is the last to be filled, putting in an extra intermission so folks can stretch their legs).
A good user-experience designer needs to be able to see both the forest and the trees. That means user experience has implications that go far beyond usability, visual design, and physical affordances. As UX designers, we orchestrate a complex series of interactions.
“Jack-of-all-trades” is not a bad thing
The old expression “Jack of all Trades, Master of Nothing” suggests that being a "Jack" is somehow less valuable than being a specialist. Or that a “Jack” has only slight knowledge of the individual subjects. I think both interpretations are faulty.
User experience turns this maxim on its head – good UX designers understand a lot of subjects to a fairly sophisticated degree, including business models. They are not dilettantes and they possess more than the rather cursory knowledge demonstrated by most project coordinators. Alas, many of today’s UX practitioners promote their individual specialties (information architecture, graphic design, usability, etc.) at the expense of others – often demonstrating a narrowmindedness that is downright counterproductive.
Jacks-of-all-trades unite. Our time has come!
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