archive.Joe Lamantia.com

I’ve posted the slides from my tutorial / workshop Design For Goals at JBoye 09 on slideshare: they’re embedded below.

The structure for this tutorial is part method review (on how to understand people’s goals in a structured way), and part sharing of re-usable patterns found after researching goals.   Since the context of origin for both the goals and patterns was complex international finance, some translation of the raw materials and examples and the synthesized patterns into a realm closer to home for ordinary people is likely in order.

As you’re going through the slides, I suggest using your own activities that involve information finding and making substantial financial decisions as a reference.  Not all the examples that I selected as the basis of exercises during the tutorial made across the cultural barrier between North America and Northern Europe: I was surprised at how many people (in a professional audience) have never bought house or car…  Which proves yet again that this is one of the areas for user experience design to work on as a discipline.

And as we had a small, noisy, and rather warm room right after lunch, I should say big thanks to all the participants and volunteers – everyone – who made an effort to engage.

Even design education is a work-in-progress, it seems.

The most important question facing the augmented reality community – one whose answer will shape the future of AR – is content creation. Put simply, it’s a question of Who can create What kind of content, and How they will create it.  At the moment, a noticeable gap separates those who can create AR experiences from those who cannot.  High barriers to entry in the form of skills, technology, or expense like those in front of AR are acceptable for a new medium at the early stages of development, but in the long run, making it easy for all those people who don’t know a fiduciary marker from fiduciary trust to easily create valuable experiences for themselves and others is far more important to the viability of AR than resolving any of the many conceptual, design, or technological challenges visible at the moment.

In fact, unless the AR community makes it easy for ordinary people to create and share meaningful content broadly, I wager augmented reality will remain a marketer’s overworked dray horse in the near and middle term future. And in the long term, augmented reality experiences will become at best an interface lens [as Adam Greenfield suggests here] supporting specialized visualization needs and a limited range of interactions (with correspondingly limited value), all built around resources originating from elsewhere within the ubiquitous digital experience ecosystem.

I think this is a ‘negative outome’ for AR only because I see so much potential. As a class of experiences, augmented reality has the potential to change our understanding of the world we are immersed in at every moment, but only rarely apprehend in a way that makes informed interaction with people and the environment possible. As Tish Shute noted in her recent interview with Bruno Uzzan, I see the collection of tools, technologies, and concepts affiliated under the banner of augmented reality as the leading ambassador for ubiquitous computing and the weird world of everyware that is rising around us.

Recent developments show progress towards bridging the gap. First is Mobilizy’s proposal of a common markup language – ARML [Augmented Reality Markup Language], based on KML – to the Augmented Reality Consortium.  Setting aside all other questions about ARML, the primary content creation problem I see with this approach is the explicitly geographic frame of reference in KML.  Most people simply do not think in the same terms used by geolocative schemes.  When I ask how far it is to the market, and someone replies “4 minutes north”, they’re not thinking in minutes of latitude….  But rather than attempt to reorient the GIS / GEO location worldview to one that’s more natural in human terms, I think the pragmatic solution is a translation layer in the creation experience that avoids coordinates or other non-natural lcoative schemes, much as domain names overlay or broker IP addresses.  As an example, recall how the travel service Dopplr prompts you to enter the name of a place, suggests likely matches from a library of defined and managed place names, and only then addresses the coordinates associated with that location.

In addition, ARML will need some sort of ability to capture markup that is *not* dependent on geographic reference.  This may seem counterintuitive for a medium that aims to augment reality (which is, after all, a place), but remember that people also orient themselves in terms of other people, time, activity, identifier, etc.  Hanging everything that augments reality off of the geographic skeleton will result in instant reference scheme hackery on an immense scale.  At the least, AR content creation experiences based on ARML will need some means of invoking other reference schemes.

The second development is Layar’s launch of buildAR.com, a public web-based content creation tool that supports map based interaction that extends the model for creation experiences beyond coordinate tagged text data.  BuildAR.com is an early stage tool, but it marks a step toward the evolution towards the goal of reflexivity; the stage of maturity wherein it is possible for people who are unaware of the structure and concepts that define the medium to easily use tools provided within the medium to create experiences.  In McCLuhanesque terms, this effectively entails making provision for using the medium to extend itself.

I’m talking about both direct and indirect creation pathways for augmented content, though the emphasis is on the direct end of the continuum.  Indirect creation could take many forms, such as translating existing geolocative tags or appending ARML metadata to existing digital content items; perhaps social objects like photos, tweets, hotel reviews, or recipes.  Or content that is created as a result of Google Wave, or the instrumentation of urban settings, and our basic economic processes.  (A deep dive into the question of direct vs. indirect content creation pathways would require mapping out the potential augmented content ecosystem of linked data, and assessing each type of data from the cloud of apis / services / sources using tbd criteria.)

Addressing the content creation gap is critical because enabling broad-based creation of augmented experiences will speed up experimentation for all the supporting models that need to evolve: business and revenue, data ownership, technical, conceptual, etc. Evolution is needed here; the early models for content creation include advertiser only (a default in the experimental stage for media where marketers and advertisers are pioneers), subscription based, open source, and nonprofit (academic and otherwise).  None of these yet offers the right combination of convenience and context, the implacable twin giants who rule the domain of value judgments made by digital consumers and co-creaters.

Guidelines for Content Creation Experiences

So what should the AR community offer to close the creation gap?  We’ve learned a lot about what works in broad-based content creation from the evolution of blogging and other mainstream platforms for social interaction.  Without considering it extensively, the guidelines for a content creation experience (mind, I’m not discussing the technical enablers) are:

• No cost of entry: Creating content cannot require spending money (at least for basic capability), as the effort involved is already an investment.
• No cognitive overhead: Creating content cannot require understanding new abstract concepts, mastering tools with low usability, learning complex languages or terminology, etc.
• No maintenance: Creation tools must act like self-maintaining services, i.e. tools that do not require effort or attention
• No accessibility barriers: For global adoption, content creation experiences need to be accessible, which means low-bandwidth, multi-lingual, cross-media, and platform agnostic.

This is a starting list, but it captures the essence of the offerings that have been successful in the past.

In addition to the experience, the content that people create needs to follow some guidelines.

• Addressable: Including findability and searchability, AR content must be fully addressable by a broad spectrum of tools and protocols.  AR will fail at bridging the real and digital if the content people create for augmented experiences  cannot – at least partially – be addressed across this boundary, which is what makes AR an enchanted window rather than a simple browser / UI lens.  This seems like the simplest of these guidelines (after all, what isn’t addressable in a digital space?), but I think in the end it will be quite challenging to realize.
• Interoperable: Content must work across platforms, formats, and browsers, in terms of creation, sharing, and management.
• Portable: Content must be movable or portable for people to make the effort of creation; it cannot be confined to a single storage location, service, tool, owner, etc.  This touches on the familiar questions of data ownership and the commons.

The goal of these suggestions is to push AR toward maturity and broader adoption as quickly as possible, using lessons from the evolution of the Web.  What suggestions for guidelines for content creation experiences and the nature of AR content do you have?

If I am off base in thinking the creation barrier critical at this early stage of augmented reality’s rise above the experimental waterline, then what is more important?

Since I wrote about the user experience of augmented reality less than two weeks ago, the most important development is the arrival of augmented iPhone apps (unofficially for the moment, officially in September).

Why is this so important, when Wikitude and other AR Android apps have been available for almost a year?  Bringing augmented reality to the iPhone changes the cultural assumptions made about AR experiences as a class of offering. Endorsing AR experiences for iPhone users moves augmented reality from the geek realm of Android and Google, to the chic world of Apple.  Culturally, the assumptions we make about the new products and services from Apple and Google are driven largely by the differences in way we perceive the two brands.  Apple is chic, while Google is geek.

Looking Ahead

Connecting the Apple brand to augmented experiences will persuade many people to try out AR.  Yet as I’ve said, and many others as well, getting the user experience of augmented reality ‘right’ is absolutely the critical element to the long term viability of this new class of experiences.  This entails two efforts.

First, designers must refine the experiences offered by all those AR applications based on the four classic interaction patterns known so far – Head-Up Display, Tricorder, Holochess, and X-ray Vision.  Two factors make refinement essential: competition from other AR offerings that reduces the novelty value of your experience, and increased ‘load’ on the UX in the form of actual use for everyday purposes in the complex setting of real life.  Think about trying to choose where to get lunch for the afternoon by sorting through 1500 listings for coffee shops and restaurants while standing on a street corner in the rain in London holding your phone aloft.  The functional aspects of AR experiences just aren’t refined enough to handle the interaction design, visualization, and contextual sensitivity challenges implied. [Prediction: AR usage cases will naturally settle on a set of common scenarios that balance the strengths and weaknesses of each of the four classic patterns.  More speculation on that in a later post.]

Second, designers must address the gaps in the set of concepts now used as the basis for imagining new augmented experiences.  I flagged six ‘missing’ patterns in the range of experiences offered so far; Loner, Second Hand Smoke, Pay No Attention To the Man Behind the Curtain, The Invisible Man!, Tunnel Vision, and AR for AR’s Sake (see the article for details).  I’m sure the very savvy readers of this blog can identify even more.

I hope all the AR innovators, designers, and entrepreneurs working hard on the crest of this breaking wave of technology find ways to take on both of these tasks.  If they can’t refine the existing models and fill in those experience gaps, then neither Apple chic nor Google geek cred will suffice to make augmented reality viable in the long term.  And what could literally be a new way of seeing the world – one with legitimate potential for changing our behavior with regard to urban spaces, the environment, social structures, play, and economics, among just a few spheres of human activity – will remain little more than a camera obscura style curiosity.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb links to Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality (the latest Everyware column) in two recent stories tracking the fast-moving augmented reality space; Augmented Reality: Five Bariers to a Web That’s Everywhere and, and RobotVision: A Bing-powered iPhone Augmented Reality Browser. 

Thanks, Marshall!

And as a bonus, Tim O’Reilly tweeted about Marshall’s article.  I doubt that Tim reads this feed, but it’s always nice to be recognized, even indirectly.

A quick rundown on my fall speaking schedule so far.

First up is BlogTalk 2009, in Jeju, Korea on September 15 and 16. There I’ll be talking about ‘The Architecture of Fun’ – sharing a new design language for emotion that’s been in use in the game design industry for quite a while.  [Disclosure: While it’s a privilege to be on the program with so many innovative and insightful social media figures, I’m also really looking forward to the food in Korea ]

Next up is EuroIA in Copenhagen, September 26 and 27.  For the latest edition of this largest gathering of the user experience community in Europe, I’ll reprise my Architecture of Fun talk.

Wrapping up the schedule so far is the Janus Boye conference in Aarhus, November 3 – 6.  Here  I’m presenting a half-day tutorial titled Designing Information Experiences.  This is an extensive, detailed tutorial that anyone working in information management will benefit from, as it combines two of my passions; designing for people, and using frameworks to enhance solution scope and effectiveness.

Here’s the description from the official program:

When designing for information retrieval experiences, the customer must always be right. This tutorial will give you the tools to uncover user needs and design the context for delivering information, whether that be through search, taxonomies or something entirely different.

What you will learn:
•    A broadly applicable method for understanding user needs in diverse information access contexts
•    A collection of information retrieval patterns relevant to multiple settings such as enterprise search and information access, service design, and product and platform management

We will also discuss the impact of organizational and cultural factors on design decisions and why it is essential, that you frame business and technology challenges in the right way.

The tutorial builds on lessons learned from a large customer project focusing on transforming user experience. The scope of this program included ~25 separate web-delivered products, a large document repository, integrated customer service and support processes, content management, taxonomy and ontology creation, and search and information retrieval solutions. Joe will share the innovate methods and surprising insight that emerged in the process.

Janus Boye gathers leading local and international practitioners, and is a new event for me, so I’m very much looking forward to it.

I hope to see some of you at one or more of these gatherings that altogether span half the world!

I’m very happy to announce that Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality – the latest installment of my column Everyware @UX Matters –  is live now.  (Timing is sometimes the writer’s friend, as I was at the Layar event Monday night here in Amsterdam just the day before, and had the chance to talk with some of their team.)

AR is more of a perspective and class of experiences than an instance of new technology, so I wanted to approach the subject from the specific perspective of user experience and interaction design.  Reactions from the augmented reality community are positive so far; Claire Boonstra of Layar, and no less than the inimitable Tish Shute of UgoTrade, have all been kind enough to recommend it.  Thanks to them and to everyone who’s tweeted and posted this one.

As we explore the role augmented reality will play in our gigantic experiment with everyware, we should keep in mind that the map is not the territory.  But there is no denying an effective map will surely help point the way as you try to find your way around a strange new country.

I’ve joined the Johnnies!  The good people at Johnny Holland Magazine just published Learning From Games: A Language For Designing Emotion.  This article is a introduction to the ideas I talk about under the heading ‘Architectures of Fun’, which is my perspective on the great research and design framework built by leading games consultant Nicole Lazzaro, of Xeo Design.  Check it out, and let the rest of the Johnny community know what you think about this powerful language for designing the emotional elements of experiences.

So many good books come out every year – even in the design and technology fields – that it’s hard to ‘make a selection’ as they say in Europe. To help through the difficult choices, let me suggest two new user experience books worth adding to your library.

Modular Web Design: Creating Reusable Components for User Experience Design and Documentation, by Nathan Curtis, of eightshapes fame. Components, frameworks, and modularity are near and dear to my heart (when applied in the right times and places for design purposes), so I can say with confidence that Modular Web Design is the best exploration of the what, how and why of modular design currently available. It should change the way you think about architecting experiences of all kinds, and – if you’re on board already – help you put this approach into practice with clear examples, advice, and guidance.

Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, from the good people at Rosenfeld Media. Card Sorting is a thorough treatment of one of the most flexible, affordable, and lightweight methods in the user experience toolkit. Use my tool, but for chapter and verse on card sorting, read Donna Spencer’s book.

Buy both, and enjoy!

I just posted slides from my talk at the recent Enterprise Search Summit in NY “Search Me: Designing Information Retrieval Experience”

Here’s the abstract from the session:

This case study reviews the methods and insights that emerged from an 18-month effort to coordinate and enhance the scattered user experiences of a suite of information retrieval tools sold as services by a major investment ratings agency. The session will share a method for understanding audience needs in diverse information access contexts; review a collection of information retrieval patterns, look at conceptual design methods for user experiences, and review a set of longer term patterns in customer behavior called lifecycles, and consider the impact of organizational and cultural factors on design decisions.

This session will presents reusable experience design tools and findings relevant for contexts such as enterprise search and information access, service design, and product and platform management.

Thanks to everyone who came by!

Two quick updates on things happening other places.

First, the latest installment of Everyware: Designing the Ubiquitous Experience (my column for UXmatters) was published back in March. It explores the world of Vernor Vinge’s story Synthetic Serendipity from the experience design perspective. Vinge is justly reknowned as an SF author, but what makes Synthetic Serendipity worth reading closely is the dense collection of ideas it shares: augmented reality, wearable computing systems, a network-based co-creation economy open to all participation by people of all ages, the games vs. reality inversion, generational differences in adaptation to technological change, etc.

Mostly, I like Synthetic Serendipity as an entry point into the ubiquitous computing space because it presents a picture of the future from the viewpoint of an ordinary kid, who has ordinary concerns; go to school, play video games, stay out of trouble with friends.

In the companion piece in draft now, I look much further ahead, exploring scenarios that consider what happens when the boundaries separating humans from the environment blur and dissolve, and humanity itself becomes an object of design.

Second, and related, Jeff Parks just posted the podcast of a group discussion on ubiquitous computing that he organized at the IA Summit in Memphis. You’ll hear me along with Jeff, Steve Baty, Will Evans, Matthew Milan, John Tirmandi, Joe Sokohl, Todd Zaki Warfel as we share examples, ideas, and questions about the intersection of user experience and ubiquitous computing. Thanks to Jeff for making this happen – it was a fun session, and I hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed recording it.