I was lucky enough again to be able to present at MIX this year (you can see some slides from it scattered in this post and the video link is here). MIX09 for me was the first time I’ve really seen design be the major talking point and a key focus for the Microsoft organisers.
A lot of this boiled down to one man: Bill Buxton. Bill is Principal Researcher at Microsoft and a very well respected product designer. His book Sketching User Experiences was given away to the MIX09 attendees for free, and he hosted the keynotes for the conference.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a terrible reader. I happily read snippets online, but rarely dive into and finish an entire paper book! What this means, is that I save my reading up, and then discover whether or not I am in step with the people I am reading. The fantastic thing is that when I read Bill’s book, I discovered, that thankfully I’m in step!
Total Experience Design was a term we coined to encourage our teams and clients look at the user journeys that are outside of the media for which they were traditionally responsible. So if you’re designing a website, don’t be afraid to think through why people want to shop in the first place, and what their experience is when they unwrap the product you ship them.
In the early days, this was a mandatory for us for some projects. Particularly when we were doing projects that involved a specific physical context. For example, self-service check in kiosks at the airport. There’s just no way that a digital designer should work in isolation of an understanding of the context; the environment of an airport terminal (very distracting, thereby reducing the reasoning powers of even the most intelligent passenger to that of a 5 year old!), the kiosk housing and display (that can be used to help people focus more on the application by ensuring they don’t worry about their bags being stolen) and of course the operational factors of queuing and staffing in the terminal.
But we also started to do this when we had no specific idea what a user’s physical context might be i.e. “they could be anywhere”. When you do this, you uncover interesting things that you otherwise would have found hard to think of. In other words, you have an innovation framework.
The other philosophy that was reassuringly in step with the thinking of the designers that we admire (who mostly come from the industrial design space) was that ‘design’ is an integrated discipline. Some of the best innovations we have had, have been from sessions where developers are working with designers, and somebody technical says “hey I can do X…” where X is something that perfectly meets the problem we defined, and is very technically feasible.
The other factor that led me to this talk at MIX09, was that increasingly, especially since Microsoft Surface arrived in our offices, we are looking at digital interactions in the physical built environment; shops, galleries, hospitals, etc.
So if you put all those things together, you can see why i talked about how we should be collaborating more with the people who engineer the built environment. And also, how we have to think about user journeys that don’t begin and end in store, but almost certainly start on the web, or a mobile device, flow into a physical environment, and then back out again.
When you do this, you can see how a web user journey for example, researching product, or outlining your requirements for a mortgage, should be port able into the shop or branch, where you can work through it with an advisor, before taking it back to your home or office, where at your leisure you can think it through and go on to buy.
So this MIX talk was about thinking this through, to take people through the concepts of Total Experience Design, collaboration (the new new renaissance!) and experience planning, but also to see where this collaboration might lead. To do this, we did some very early stage thinking with some of the brightest minds in the Architecture world.
Anyway, that’s the history, and a rough overview of the talk. What I’d really like to know is what you think. I had some great feedback on the day, but I’d like to know more on where you think this is going, or anything you think we’ve got wrong.
Ok, without more ado, here’s the link. I’d love to see the comments on this page fill up…
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/C08F
And if you want to tweet your way through the video, please do using #mixpd just like it says on screen!
Thanks to all the guys back in the office who helped me with this: Hannah, Dean, Sari, James, Colm. You’re fab!
Addendum: Colm sent me through a link to this blog, which touches of some of the aspects of Total Experience Design, and the need to consider a wider context of use: http://www.thedieline.com/blog/2009/04/rethinking-package-design.html Obviously I had to go comment on it also, so read down to see my thoughts on it.