Marc Hassenzahl is a professor at the Folkwang University in Germany.
Marc is doing research in the positive affective and motivational aspects of user experience and experience design.
Do you have any advice to companies who want to move in that direction? Which steps could they take in the beginning?
- Yeah. OK, I'm not a business guru, but I think it's very important to
think of the experience before the product, and that's the whole message.
So, you should consider – this business should consider themselves as *experience providers*
although they sell technology, but they're not manufacturing TVs.
They provide *TV-watching experiences*.
They don't manufacture mobile phones;
they *deliver communication experiences* or *relatedness experiences*.
So, and this is an important step I think you should take
because it means that you're more focusing on the actual consequences of using a product
and how you can influence that, and you go away from
this simplistic model of – you know – 'I have the technology!' then make a nice little shell around it,
and the designer can design it, and we have a nice interaction technique and then people will like it.
This transition is very important, and I think it's also very difficult.
- So, if you were to pay some advice to people working in industry as well as in academia,
what should they focus on in the future?
- I mean, if we take this experience design idea seriously,
then we need some methods and some processes
to make sure that we get experience into a product.
And I think there's a lot of stuff already there,
but the important thing for me is that people in industry and academia, that they try to forget
a bit about their background, because I think at the moment what you normally see is that people
bring a background like a discipline, computer science or psychology or sociology or something, to the table
and then they talk about methods, and the methods just reflect on what they – their upbringing.
And I think for experience design we need to do it differently – we need to focus on what we actually
want to achieve, clarify that and then come up – you know – collect methods
and come up with a pool of methods from various disciplines.
And we have to do that although we don't share that background.
You need to find ways of – you know –
enabling people in industry and academia to use methods they didn't *learn* in that sense,
make it *easier*, so, to get the crucial aspects into the experience design.
That's something that's very important for me because normally you see that people just do what they always did.
So, I'm a psychologist – I'm doing experimental stuff – you know – and others are ethnographers; they do ethnography.
And we have to combine these forces somehow to come up with a very
current and also convincing and useful set of methods and ideas to push that along.
And I think we have to focus a little bit more on the *consequences* of product use.
So, normally now evaluation means you have a prototype and you try to make it to improve it
and you're focusing on the interaction, the functions and understandability and so on.
But with the experience design, it becomes much more important to figure out *before* you release the product
what actually happens if you deliver that experience in that certain context,
to make sure that it really plays out the way you want it, and you can have all kind of adverse effects
if you provide something so close to people's concerns
that we need to take a little bit more care in evaluating or figuring out,
at least somehow, what these effects could be.
- What are *you* going to focus on in the future? - OK, yeah. I think experience design is
– for me, it's just a start; the whole thing is just a start, and try to figure out
'What does it actually mean if you develop these principles for design?'
And there are some very interesting implications, for me at least.
One, for example, is *automation*. I like to prepare my coffee with a coffee maker
– a small Italian coffee maker.
But also, at the office, we have a full automated coffee maker,
a very nice (inaudible) machine.
And I always found it very unsatisfying
to operate and work with that because automation is so much *outcome-oriented*.
So, you have this big black box;
it deprives you of all the things that *define the activity of coffee making*;
just press a button and then you will have the coffee, but it burdens you with a lot of extra things.
So, it gives you commands: you know – 'clean me', power – you know –
we have to fill this and that. And this is something which I have to do
– tasks – but which are not connected to the actual activity I'm doing: making coffee.
So, I would like to come up with a way, like an experiential automation
where you have the feeling that you did it yourself somehow –
it's all very transparent and visible, but it's still done automatically.
I know that sounds abstract, but I have an example, which I like very much. - Great!
- I think you will understand it.
This is actually a one-person tea-making machine.
- So, what you do is you have this thing – this sieve is normally up. - Yeah.
- You put the tea leaves on it, the water in the glass, and then you put it in there.
You tell the machine how hot the water shall be and how long the leaves should be in the water.
And then what happens is you put it in, it heats up the water and then this sieve moves down and up again.
So, it releases the tea leaves and catches them on its way up.
So, if you do nothing at all, it will just prepare, like an automaton, the tea.
And it will be perfect because it has exactly the right temperature and it has the right time in the water.
But everything which is *nice* is *also visible* – you see the boiling water,
you see how the tea leaves release the color into and how it colors the water,
and you can always interrupt it; so, if
although it's another minute to go, you want the tea now, you just stop and take it out.
- You participate much more than (inaud.) - Exactly, exactly; although it's a machine, it tries
to preserve the experience of preparing tea.
And I have a little project like this as well with making coffee.
So, where we try to get rid of all the stuff people don't like in an experience
and try to aesthetically improve a bit *the good parts*;
so, this should be glass because you want to see how the tea goes into the water and stuff like that,
but still have it like a machine that runs automatically if you don't want to care, so optimizing the results.
- Yeah. - Having an experience and optimizing results at the same time.
And I like this much better than – you know – the black boxes where you have the perfect coffee
but you're completely detached from the actual activity.
I think this is a view on automation that only can come from an experiential perspective.
It's unique to it. You wouldn't come across that,
you wouldn't ask that question if you didn't have an experience-oriented mindset.
At least, that's what I think.
And another example of what I really like or what I think I want to do in the future
is something I call *transformational products* or *transformational features in products*
but which is loosely in the field of persuasive technologies. Let me give you an example...
I guess you have a little computer at home, and I guess you also do your backup only irregularly.
- Quite regularly, really, but that's not normal! - OK, so...
Yeah, we questioned some people, and they say they also have personally relevant things on it. - Yeah.
- They do this backup only irregularly and they forget it and then they want to do it.
So, this student, he designed a very nice tablet PC
– before the iPad, by the way. - Oh!
- And this is the docking station, and this is the tablet, the slate.
And you put it in. - It looks very much like the iPad. - Yes, that's true, but it has an interesting feature
because it tells you the story of backup.
You know – you should do a backup. And it's included in that.
You see, this is the external hard disk, and to save, to do the backup,
and the more asynchronous your data on the machine is compared to the external hard disk
the more it has this visual clutter here – it's like a nose where you can throw out something.
- Yeah. - Like the nose at a bucket or something (inaud.) you can throw something out. - Like that, yeah.
- So, it gets cluttered here: 'I'm too full and I want to be emptied!' - Yeah.
- 'And I'm heavy, and this needs to get out!' - 'I'm overloaded!'; yeah.
- And the only thing you have to do to do the backup is press that down,
and then the data flows into the hard disk. It's just an interaction technique,
but it tries to tell the story – you know – 'You should do it.' - Intuitively.
'I care about it. I'm a computer. I care about it.' - Yeah.
- 'And you should care as well. I'm sorry; I need to do it because I'm technology,
but you have to do it.' And then it tries to use signals which are relevant to us
to tell that story. And we did tests with the prototype of that and suddenly – you know – people like to do
backups because it's so... and it's not – I wouldn't say 'natural'. - 'Intuitively', then, yeah?
- Yeah, but what is intuition? It's a story. You know, you can understand the story. - Yeah.
- This thing wants you to do something and you do it – you comply – because
the story is nicely told, and I think that's also the power of experience design.
At the moment, we can think of creating experiences,
but we can also use it to shape behavior of people but in a nice way. - Yeah.
- So, in a way where you get an insight and you understand what you're doing
and it's a dialogue between the object and you as a user
and it's not something loaded into the product and you don't know it;
like you're not manipulated, but this thing is just telling you: 'Maybe you should consider doing a backup.'
You can somehow relate to it, and I have... - Yeah. It's very different than demanding:
'Backup now! Backup now!' -Yeah, exactly. And for some people, I discussed that,
they don't see a difference, and I say it's a big, big difference if you have this warning sign. - Yeah.
- And compared to telling the story in that way, and I think that's also the power of experience design,
that you're more aware of that – that the differences in how you tell a story matter.
Yeah. It matters: how long it is, what the actual objects are in that
and how you tell it – the style of telling it, the rhetoric of it.
And this wouldn't happen if you think of it only as a technological feature.
Then it becomes a message and you have to respond to it.
And you wouldn't see the difference.
I hope that we can use experience design ideas to get even a little bit *even closer* to humans
in the sense of changing them, but not
as manipulating, but from their own wish, from their own motivation.
That's why I rather like to call it 'transformational', because it kind of implies that I want to behave differently
but I need something to help me to make that happen.
But it comes from my own – it's my own motivation. - Yeah.
- It's not something you want from me; it's something *I* want, actually. I mean, after a certain point you just
maybe make the statement – you know – 'Don't use that much water when you shower.'
or 'Close the refrigerator.' or something like that. But this only works if I really want to change myself. - Yeah.
- And then we can use experience design as a mindset, I think, to even
produce better products in this field of persuasive technologies.
- Thank you so much for telling all your stories and all your guidelines about how we can apply these principles.
- Thank you for being here and giving me the opportunity to do so.
- If you want to know more about user experience and experience design, you should have a look at the chapter
Marc has written at interactiondesign.org, and here you can also find more chapters,
all written by thought leaders and inventors.
And you can find more videos like this one as well.
Thank you so much for your time!
(Humorous outtake outro)