More Than Usable

As Experience designers, we're interested in more than just products, services, and websites. But our toolkit looks remarkably like the toolkit product designers use: design for tasks, hope emotions will follow. But experience is big, and emotions aren't just the outputs from using something. We're going to need more than science to explain experience--we'll need philosophy, literature, poetry, and more.

In this talk, I explore how phenomenology (the branch of philosophy that deals with experience), metaphor, and frozen space urine can help us design better experiences for our library users by putting people and experiences first.

(This talk was the opening keynote at MD Tech Connect at the Universities at Shady Grove, Rockland, MD on December 6, 2018.)

Transcript

1. MORE THAN USABLE LIBRARY SERVICES FOR HUMANS MATTHEW REIDSMA GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY
2. Photo: NASA
3. Photo, Audio NASA
4. Photo, Audio NASA A MYRIAD OF STARS
7. TASKS EXPERIENCE
8. Names of the Sea, p.233 The stories told by numbers and research are quite different from the stories we tell ourselves and each other. This is not to say that either is wrong. “ Sarah Moss
9. We tend to talk about transportation as if the ultimate goal were mere movement, measured in speed, time and capacity. “ Emily Badger http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/04/29/cutting-edge-transportation-maps-will-change-how-we-understand-and-plan-cities/
10. The ultimate goal of transportation, though, isn't really to move us. It's to connect us -- to jobs, to schools, to the supermarket. “ Emily Badger http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/04/29/cutting-edge-transportation-maps-will-change-how-we-understand-and-plan-cities/
11. Your members don’t come to the library to find books, or magazines, journals, films or musical recordings. “ Hugh Rundle http://hughrundle.net/2012/04/04/libraries-as-software-dematerialising-platforms-and-returning-to-first-principles/
12. They come to hide from reality or understand its true nature. They come to find solace or excitement, companionship or solitude. “ Hugh Rundle http://hughrundle.net/2012/04/04/libraries-as-software-dematerialising-platforms-and-returning-to-first-principles/
13. [Libraries] let people transform themselves through access to information and one another. “ Andromeda Yelton andromedayelton.com/blog/2015/02/16/c4l15-keynote-transcript/ Photo: Molly Tomlinson photoclave.com/
14. PEOPLE YOUR LIBRARY IS
15. TASKS EXPERIENCE
16. Photo: Minneapolis Star Tribine, http://www.startribune.com/local/west/265401331.html
17. http://www.uscis.gov/mye-verify/self-check
18. Usability
19. Usability
20. Reducing friction is a noble aim. But remember that without friction, we wouldn’t have heat, speed, or sex. “ Cennydd Bowles Twitter, March 28, 2012
21. We just don’t know if [our designs] work or not until we evaluate the subjective experience of the people using them. “ Victor Lombardi Why We Fail, p. 10
22. No one should be interested in the design of bridges. They should be concerned with how to get to the other side. “ Cedric Price Price, Cedric, “On safety pins and other magnificent designs,” Pegasus, London, Mobil Oil company, UK, Spring, 1972.
25. TECHNOLOGY AS TOOL
26. TECHNOLOGY AS ECOLOGY
27. A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile, but the traffic jam. “ Frederik Pohl
30. BEING-IN-THE- WORLD
31. Instead of asking, “How can we know about the world?” Heidegger asked, “How does the world reveal itself to us through our encounters with it?” “ Paul Dourish Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. MIT Press: 2004.
32. Meaning provides a facet of usability that forces designers to think past function into the domains of culture, language, and everyday practice. “ Thomas Wendt Design for Dasein: Understanding the Desgin of Experiences, p.36
33. When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole. “ Lev Grossman qtd. in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, p. 473-74.
34. PRESENT-AT-HAND READY-TO-HAND
35. qtd. in Dourish, Paul. Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. MIT Press: 2004. As we act through technology that has become ready-to-hand, the technology itself disappears from our immediate concerns. We are caught up in the performance of the work. “ Martin Heidegger
36. BREAKDOWN
37. There is a constant movement between present-at-hand and ready- to-hand in everyday life, and designing with that movement in mind is the job of experience designers. “ Thomas Wendt Design for Dasein: Understanding the Desgin of Experiences, p.155
38. User-friendliness is not merely an issue of the number of errors made per unit of time. It is rooted in the confidence of being able to handle disruptions. “ Klaus Krippendorff The Semantic Turn: A new foundation for design.
41. Technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science. “ Paul Goodman Goodman, P. (1969). Can Technology Be Humane? New York Review of Books, Nov. 20, 1969
42. Glitches are the unintentional exposure of values. “ Angela Galvan From The Revolution Will Not Be Standardized
43. https://twitter.com/Nadaleen/status/730116596728012800/photo/1
44. Brooklyn Public Library Website
45. Brooklyn Public Library Website
46. Encore, by III.
47. Summon
48. Summon, again.
49. Again, Summon.
52. BEYOND TODAY
53. 1 2 3 4 5 PEOPLE OVER PROCESS
54. RETHINK USABILITY 1 2 3 4 5 PEOPLE OVER PROCESS
55. RETHINK USABILITY 1 2 3 4 5 PEOPLE OVER PROCESS TEST TO LEARN, NOT PERFECT
56. RETHINK USABILITY 1 2 3 4 5 PEOPLE OVER PROCESS TEST TO LEARN, NOT PERFECT DESIGN FOR BREAKDOWNS
57. RETHINK USABILITY 1 2 3 4 5 PEOPLE OVER PROCESS TEST TO LEARN, NOT PERFECT DESIGN FOR BREAKDOWNS KNOW YOUR VALUES
58. “The Space Between You and Me,” The Manual, Issue #1, 2012. Good technology makes us feel like we are inching closer to who we truly want to be. “ Frank Chimero
59. Junod, Tom. “Can You Say...Hero?” Esquire. November, 1998. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are, and who you will be, and I can’t help it. “ Fred Rogers
60. THANKYOU
61. THANKYOU