Safe
I’ve been wrangling with something for a while. I was hoping the wrangling would end and I’d reach a logical conclusion to this all. And then blog about it. But that’s not happening so I’m resorting to a splurge. Maybe the conclusion will come later?
Some context: One of the principal reasons, I work at Clearleft is because we get to work with leading-edge companies and ideas. I like this; It challenges me and most of the time, gives me an opportunity to deliver work that I’m proud of. But one of the criticisms I’ve recently faced is that my work has been too ‘safe’. What do I mean by safe? Well obviously that’s open to interpretation, but you’d be forgiven for interpreting this as a compliment as opposed to a criticism. Afterall, safety offers protection and reduced exposure to risk, which from a business perspective, is something most of us would welcome.
But in this particular case safe wasn’t being used as a compliment. It was in fact, a term of disapproval and would be more accurately read as conservative or even unenterprising.
No, I’m not about to launch in to a rant about a client. In fact, I think the client’s criticisms were — on many levels — fair. The reason I mention this is because I see this type of criticism increasingly directed towards traditional approaches to user-centered design and this post is my attempt to try and understand why.
Allow me to generalise: As an Information Architect, my toolbox contains a host of tried and tested methods, many of which focus on the derivation of users’ goals. It can be hard work, but I know as long as I use the tools appropriately, they provide me with the ability to extract the basis of a solid proposition: a set of goals which if met, can form the essence of a successful product or service.
The problem is that goals exist in several forms and while I can rely on traditional IA tools to derive what Cooper termed End Goals, the Super-Best-Friend’s web (that’s Web2.0 to marketeers) has created an ever-increasing demand for their less tangible, more subjective counterparts: Experience and Life Goals (I’ve blogged about these previously). Within this space, a proposition has the potential to move beyond the realm of safe, even defensive design and in to the domain of delightful, meaningful experience.
Stephen P. Anderson captures this tension superbly, describing the jump from task-driven to meaningful experiences as crossing the UX chasm:
“With rich interactions, the Social Web, and other recent web application advancements, we are reaching the point where it’s finally appropriate to discuss things like ‘joy of use’ and ‘pleasure’ in interface design. This is also the point at which we must stop designing only to support tasks and begin designing to support experiences…I dub this difficult transition the UX grand Canyon. This is the chasm between designing to support tasks (with a focus on products and features) and designing to support experiences (focusing on people, their activities, and the context of those activities).”
Stephen P. Anderson, Getting from Tasks to Experiences: What’s Next in Interface Design
Substitute tasks for End Goals in the previous quote and hopefully you can see where I’m going. In case not, I’ve ruthlessly stolen Anderson’s pyramid diagram and then scrawled on it to demonstrate what I mean.
The base of our pyramid is built on the solid foundations of functionality, reliability and usability. All coveted attributes, that can typically be met via the fulfilment of user’s End Goals (and should in no way should be ignored). But in order to create experiences that lift users towards the peak of the pyramid, we must also pay attention to their Life and Experience Goals as well.
In hindsight, the project I alluded to earlier probably focused too heavily on End Goals and left little room for anything more ‘meaningful’. Budget and time was certainly a factor (isn’t it always?), but I also believe this was symptomatic of the persona-driven approach I adopted. This resulted in a thorough collection of End Goals which in my opinion was both necessary and worthwhile, but not enough.
The question is how? In my opinion, there’s huge scope for innovation in this space. Lots of smart people are interested in doing the same and it’s certainly something I’m focusing my 20% time on at the moment. It’s also something I’m intending to blog about as I explore different approaches. But for now it just feels good to get this stuff down.