There’s something that I can still find valid on that User Experience title, and every time it gets closer to what I always felt Architecture was about: creating experiences. (I won’t talk directly about the ‘experience creation’ paradigm validity, as I already explored in a previous article, and I would assume to an extent it is what we web/experience designers, and architects, do).

As anyone that has sat with the dare intention to create a set of rules that try to satisfy a wide possibility for mindsets, the most crucial point is to maintain credibility within the user. Credibility in this case is often conveyed by repeatedly signaling directions in a concise way, for the user to be able to read them as signs, like in motorways and hotels, and be able to decide which paths will stimulate or satisfy their own experience.

In order to create these directions, anyone that is involved in the project needs to be pointing at the same goals, and, moreover, be talking the same language, not amongst each other, but with the user, the persona, the customer, you name it.

Lately I’ve found the biggest potholes in this road to fulfilling a coherent, unified user experience framework to be a lack of agreement from various team members on the project’s main goal.

Our (the company I work at) structure, as many others I’ve seen, is divided into disciplines each tackling a different piece of the project. We have executives, visual designers, media strategists, interaction designers, developers, testers, marketers, account managers, technical producers and project managers.

All of these departments have a different history that trails and defines their approach to the project. Thus, oftentimes, each of these departments have a different personal objective: social media wants people to connect and share value, interaction designers want to make it easy, visual designers want to engage and enjoy, developers want it to work, testers want it to be bulletproof, marketers want it to sell, account managers want it to please the client, and executives want it to stand out and bring more clients towards a company that delivers and satisfies every possible need the best way possible.

After a thorough look, one can realise those agendas don’t necessary collide. A great project might satisfy each and every one of those premises. So then why sometimes (oftentimes) too many do not?

I’m inclined to think there’s lack of an overall vision that unifies them all. Or to put it in geek enough terms, the lack of  ”One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them”¹.

Oftentimes, what projects lack is an unified, agreed upon main objective. It is here where I see the user experience being brought out and exposed to the user. There has to be a place in the process where a goal, a set of objectives to be met by every proposition have to be defined.

I know by experience in the architectural world, that role is covered by the head architect for the project. This person takes care of the group bringing the project under one solid unified vision (in the best of cases, of course). However, in the architectural world, any head architect is a laureate of architecture that has made his road up through the architectural ladder. I know this head architect is a person that roughly knew how to lay pipes, calculate structure and place standardised windows and doors, define parking lot spaces while deciding column situation, and define how the façade should look like. This person knows the trade enough to assert a continuum of all these disciplines into a unified vision for a project, while being directly advised (and admonished) by a team of experts in each category and industry.

I know by experience that in the nascent conglomerate of what we humbly call web design, all the concurrent disciplines come from different realms and backgrounds, and were circumstantially summoned. Hence the differing agendas.

That explains to me the (scaled) success of small shops and studios in tackling better than anyone else the complexity of the task with a most coherent vision and delivery.

There comes now the point where I’m utterly jaded about this line of thought, as I don’t find myself but in the position to state that what we need is more web designers in an unifying, strategical position. Unfortunately, even by being a fine extrapolation from architecture, it doesn’t seem as the right strategy, as it is retrograde and propelled by hindsight.

If you have an opinion, I’d love to hear it.

1. This quote from The Lord of the Rings is particularly fit as “in the darkness” well exemplifies what user experience design might be about: a shot in the dark at what people will enjoy and use.

Experience does not equals to perception, though perception informs it. Experience is about doing something (and learning from), which requires a path, which we design, e.g. by creating a scenery path through a forest or canyon, we can optimise flow and goal achievement, thus enhancing the experience.

As gothic cathedrals emphasised a sensation of “smallness”, design can emphasise an intended experience, with a goal in mind. Thus, though experience cannot be determined, perceptions, paths and collection of them, and consequently the creation of a memory for a site (in both meanings as space and web property) can be guided.

If we visit the Sixtine Chapel, in Rome, and we decide to hire a Guide, we’ll end up with much more information, given to us in the proper context, that if we just roam the space by ourselves, depending only on perception and memory to map all the information the space offers. Similarly, we can provide the proper cues, inflections and comments, and even the right turns, in order to inform and enhance comprehension of the vast, complex amount of artwork the chapel offers us.

In web design, there’s also the notion of goal, or what the person intends to achieve, guided by their current desire or need (e.g. “learn about the artwork of Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, and Sandro Botticelli”), and to do, guided by their mental model (e.g. “by visiting the spaces and viewing the real artwork in context I can understand it better”). These goals and processes can be guided and informed by a contextually-aware strategy that maximises contact and absorption of information, thus satisfying the goals better while enhancing the process.

By defining it so, we can thus conclude (I presume) that the experience (the “visit”) has been elevated to a different level, as two persons, one with the guide and another without it, could argue.

Is that what I refer as to “designing the experience”.

facebook, twitter, last.fm, the new york times online, google buzz, the guardian, venturebeat, techcrunch, the huffington post, chatroulette, tumblrs, the myriad of blogs we follow, foursquare, gowalla, and even im, email, sms, calls, have become open channels of data, and their model is that of throwing as many bits as they can physically produce. no wonder people still decide to keep themselves to the outskirts of the web.

it be stated that when i say people i mean all people from all the corners of the world, not the sleeve of internet-savvy geeks or the information-thirsty folks that don’t have a problem being attached to a monitor for hours, perusing screen words and photos posted by others like them.

the web is an overwhelming world of stuff thrown to our faces, and everyone and their mothers are trying to make a living on creating more, or as they’ll say, better content to be hosed to you, every minute of every hour of the live of the servers that will pump the data blood all around the open arteries of the internet.

i’d risk to say that the huge success of facebook was (and might not be anymore in a short while) that of giving a concentrated, aggregated way of consuming that huge amount of information, but even facebook, can becomean unsurmountable amount of other people’s lives.

even with the success of some services like twitter and foursquare can be calibrated against our incapacity to digest more data: the former making that data so ephemeral and transient it does not transcend but the glimpse of casual browsing on a lost, idle moment for one too many a user; the latter promising a physical encounter in the best of cases, or channeling it through the idea of it related to our movement through cities and spaces, thus describing something less ethereal than just a thought.

if that was not enough, recently facebook announced a scheme where it’ll support the totally indiscriminate sharing of everything online. it has received many critics, and most of them of a very high level of harshness. i personally see it as an eye opener: the one fact that will show us one factor, one side, one missing perspective about the web: we own the internet, but it is not of much depth, and sometimes even use for us, as like a tsunami of diluvian proportions it might, it will wash us away from all we could grasp, get, understand and process, and will substitute it with just more status, more quizzes, more lines of shared articles and photos and rubbish and pics of what i’m eating right now; just more information.

i say there has come the time for one thing i’ve been thinking, envisioning for a while, one thought i’m sure i’m not alone in fostering and hatching, one thought that has to make sense for once and for all: the internet of mediation, or much better: the mediation of the internet.

then 45 minutes later, i had the need of a cigarette. i did not have any, so i felt like going out, for one. so i did get out  in search for one. i had to walk 5 blocks since it was past midnight. so i did.

while i was walking towards the convenience store, i thought of convenience. why not, it was a matter of convenience. i thought of the fact that i did not get cigarettes before, and i could have, but i did not feel like. a bad experience.

then i got to the store, got me a nice mozzarella, to go with the convenient vodka i had. and the cigarettes, sure.

on the way back, i thought of a story of a rabbit in a fence that felt alone, and for being alone, without friends, he felt lonely. he decided to have fun by himself. and he did. and suddenly he had some other rabbits jumping outside the fence, asking him to let them in to play. by being alone and playing with himself he attracted all the fellow rabbits, which became friends soon.

the united states are the land of opportunity, sure. but for anyone that has lived here, coming from abroad, and mostly from europe, canada, australia, it is not because opportunity happens. it is because opportunity can happen.

after living in europe, i found myself restrained, constrained, suffocated while being here. recently i discovered it was because my quality of life was inferior to my expectations. how can that be if i was doing the same as before, as when in europe? it happened that when i was in milano, wien, london, i used to do exactly what i do now. it also happened that once out of the door, life would happen to me. any corner hold the fact of a new wonderful experience. no matter what. life in the outside was guaranteed as good, as vivid, as adapted and great.

here in new york city, life is not guaranteed. your pocket is the measure, and your imagination, and search capabilities, the thermometre. life is what you make from it here, in the united states. the land of opportunity is so as long as you make those opportunities happen, every day, every minute, every second. nothing is for granted, and nothing is for free.

i then thought about the whole story, the diatribes i just told you. they made sense on my mind, but once written, it was just pieces, like a giant puzzle in the table, with lovely, colourful pieces around, untied together.

i couldn’t make sense of all those thoughts.

...

once my father told me the quality of a garment is not only on the fabric, but mostly on the sewing, on the seams. it is the seams that make the garment stand well for years, stand against wind and rain, stand against the weather, what a garment is for.

like garments, stories are not only the pieces we all find in life that by themselves make sense and are beautiful. a story is not the happenings, the diatribes of mundane life, the assessments  of now and then on a busy day, no matter how interesting, incidental and colourful they are. a story builds from the seams sewn together among those pieces, those bits of fantasy and quotidian, the chunks of information, of happenings to come and to go.

a story is not the pieces, but also, and foremost, the way those bits are sewn together, patched into a story that transmits the integrity of it, a perception of life, an idea, a moment, a human condition.

a story is not only what happened, but how it happened, and the difference is in the unions. it might be in the details where god is, but it is in the threads where the story of god comes alive, for us.

1. Work harder


2. Work harder


3. Work harder


4. Learn from the masters


5. Stop reading “5 ways to…” articles

I was in charge of designing an interface for a java mobile service called Fluidtime (www.fluidtime.com). I did so and while in the makings I was proposed to explore the possibility of using a then IDII faculty member Casey Reas’ project called proce55ing to deliver a working prototype.

I gingerly and obtusely said “yes”, and embarked on a journey of Java-programming learning, that at the beginning, fearfully daunted but enticed me. As I had some knowledge of the already obsolete-driven Macromedia Director’s Lingo, this was a proper programming language challenge, and I decidedly took it.

Some months after, I was, to my utter astonishment, able to fulfill creating a working version of what later will become a java developer’s proper version of a Fluidtime mobile java applet. It came to life from my tiny prototype, which could humbly run on a desktop and let you be aware of the bus traffic around your location in lovely Torino, Italy.

I can still look back to those days where, thanks to proce55ing (later Processing) I was empowered to create what has became my first Java working application, and the starting point to years of indulgent, delightful programming, the very hands-on base to my Interaction Design passion.

Thanks to Ben Fry and Casey Reas for letting me envision and produce what my designer’s mind created, and for letting me know that I could be part of that previously elusive world of Software Programming that Processing so easily put into my naïve designer’s hands.

1. Helping other people helps me.


2. Having guts always works out for me.


3. Thinking that life will be better in the future is stupid. I have to live now.


4. Organizing a charity group is surprisingly easy.


5. Being not truthful always works against me.


6. Everything I do always comes back to me.


7. Assuming is stifling.


8. Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.


9. Over time I get used to everything and start taking for granted.


10. Money does not make me happy.


11. My dreams have no meaning.


12. Keeping a diary supports personal development.


13. Trying to look good limits my life.


14. Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses.


15. Worrying solves nothing.


16. Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.


17. Everybody thinks they are right.


18. If I want to explore a new direction professionally, it is helpful to try it out for myself first.


19. Low expectations are a good strategy.


20. Everybody who is honest is interesting.

i guess it is a good place from where to start, stealing other people’s methods and implement them religiously. eventually I’l find my own, like painters trained by copying the masters, or jamal copying that first two paragraphs to then continue with his own words.

afraid of the increasing num of unread posts, i have been postponing catching up w/ rss for so long, it is 6+ months already, so there it goes.

one not-so-obvious reason is that rss feeds forces us to read all the articles on a writer’s mind, while twitter and other social networks mediate by decanting and broadcasting the best articles, so you just get la crème de la crème. it is similar to getting CDs, which force you to have all the songs, compared to just buying the songs you like from iTunes.

next step would be to delete RSS lnks from our blogs, aintcha freddy boy? hehe

Some complex systems require complex interfaces and steep learning curves for users to acquire an adequate state of mind (air controllers, train controllers and operators, jet pilots), and simplifying them might “seduce users into shallow cognitive behaviours,” but this might not be the case at all levels, where sometimes there’s no need for any learning and fulfilling an activity might suffice.

So for example, the process of sending an email might be enhanced by a step by step wizard experience (reminding the user to select a sender, write a message, append an attachment, etc.) while the driving of a train or an airplane might benefit from a steep learning curve that assures and enhances the attention and modal cognitive approach of the user, as train operators and air controllers can prove.

Learning an interface is a process affected and mediated by context, and so is any cognitive approach, I would argue.