The following is a transcript excerpt from the Interface Design Panel at South by Southwest Interactive 1996.
(Rick) "Good morning, and welcome to the interactive content design panel. My name is Rick Ligas, my company here in Austin is Jawai Interactive and I would like to welcome you this morning. We have a distinguished panel of experts in their field. I'll begin with some introductions. First, myself, Rick Ligas. My company here is Jawai Interactive. We do products for multimedia producers and interactive design.
Immediately next to me here is Eric Gould. Eric is a principal of MONKEYmedia which is a San Francisco based design and production studio. He is also a dancer and a musician. Multimedia means "many media" and most of us it seems have experience in art, design, industrial engineering, music, dance -- many disciplines. has degrees in cognitive science and interactive telecommunications. You might not recognize him but he writes the interactive design column for Interactivity magazine. I think he's gotten a haircut. If anyone reads that column, you might not recognize him; but that's him. He's also on the faculty of San Francisco State University, and he's here in Austin with us for this semester on sabbatical at UT as a visiting professor."
(Eric) "It's really good to be here in Austin. This panel is suppose to be about interactive content design and already we've been doing this little coup here, talking about how the problem is not the content. The problem is everything else but the content. I'm going to continue on that path, and suggest that the trick to making the content meaningful is ripping the content out of your product for long enough to look at what is actually there. What you have when you pull the content out is the information structure. You have the interaction, what people are doing, you have the actual interface which sits in between the information structure and the interaction.
Wherever you are, interaction is. And this is what we often forget as designers of interactive pieces, as interface designers. We tend to think that the interaction is the clicking. That that's the part we need to design. But, it's really the space in between. We spend most of our time working these boxes, NOT clicking. That's what we need to focus on -- the balance between the not clicking and the clicking.
People who use computers are affected by them. We see this in traditional media. You go to a film, you read a book, you look at a painting, watch performance art. You take it with you -- in your body, in your mind, in your heart, and out into your everyday life. The devices people use - computers, cell phones - these things affect people as well. Interface is the point of contact between the person and the content. It's the boundary and the bridge between those two. So it shouldn't be surprising that people not only take multimedia content with them into their everyday lives, but they take the interface metaphors and the interaction styles with them in their bodies out into the world.
Who is your audience? What do you call them? Are they users? Edward Tufte pointed out that there are only two industries that call their customers users. The trick is looking at what the people are actually doing. Are they reading? Are they watching? Are they viewing? Are they playing? Are they participating? And these terms -- what they're doing -- these verbs can tell us what we should be calling them. We want to call them a viewer, a reader, a participant, a player. What you call these people, your customers, affects the kind of design you do. It affects the way you think about them. It affects the shape of your product. So think carefully about what you want to call them in design sessions, and notice how that affects your products. Notice you biases, where those come out.
People come from and embody a variety of perspectives and personal histories: culturally, gender-wise, age, disability, race, handedness, economic position, and personality. As a result people act in the world using a variety of techniques, and holding a variety of perspectives. So it's nearly impossible to come up with and make a product that is universal -- an interface that works for everybody, interaction techniques that work for everybody. Who is your audience? It's very easy to get caught up in the mentality that, "It's for everybody." "Everybody will benefit from this. It will be useful for everybody. Everybody could have fun with this." But if you look at these differences, these are the places that you are going to find the holes in your product. So target your product. Choose who you want to hit, who you are marketing to, who you are designing this for. And then look at these other areas. Where are you falling short?
As different as people are, there are a lot of things that we can assume that are base qualities to all people. Assume that people are intelligent. You'll have a really different product if you assume that people are intelligent than if you assume that they are bozos. Assume that people are intelligent. Assume that people are curious. Assume that they're intuitive, physical -- everybody has a body. Remember that when you make your products. Everyone is creative, perceptive, emotional, and everyone can maintain contradictory beliefs. You may want to argue with some of these things. People have differing levels of all of these. But, what I'm going to suggest is... pretend, just pretend, that everybody has these qualities and its going to change the nature of your product. It's going to bring the level up.
People process the world on many levels simultaneously -- emotionally, spiritually, physically, pheremonally, aurally, visually, verbally. So use as many of these channels as you can in making your titles. It won't just make the product more engaging to more of the person, but it will actually make it easier to use. For example, sound. We put sound into interactions not to make it cute, but because it makes it easier to use. If you start engaging with an interaction element because you've been attracted to it, the affordance is visual, you start the interaction ... and you can finish it using the audio. You can let your eyes move elsewhere. We can use our bodies. We use all these senses simultaneously doing different things. So leverage off of that.
It's easy to get caught up in saying, "Well if we are going to leverage off of all of this, and use all of these senses and use all of the body, then we have to wait. We have to wait. The technology isn't there yet. We've got to wait for VR. We've got to use head sets, and all kinds of body sensors and these things." But, I would argue that you can do all of this with the everyday desktop computer.
The trick is rethinking what this box is for. We tend to think of it as a productivity tool because, historically, it has been used in business. In the office, computers help you do tasks. And what we want to do is maximize the amount you can get done in as small amount of time as possible, at the same time as keeping the amount of cognitive overload down -- you don't want it to be difficult. Rick pointed out that you want to keep the interface transparent.
In the productivity domain we have the computer, which is static, the person which is fairly static. The data comes in, it gets changed and moves out. In entertainment we have a different situation: people come into the theatre, they experience the film and THEY go out changed. So we have a different vector. We are looking at taking an amount of time -- not trying to minimize it, we're actually trying to push on those boundaries -- and maximize the amount of engagement that people get during that time. At the same time, keeping the cognitive overload down, it shouldn't be hard to use or to engage with. So you have this new vector of usability. And if the goals of interaction are going to change, the interactions themselves need to change.
We can use standard operating system tools and techniques -- like buttons, and menus, and scrollbars -- if we want to. But we don't have to. It should be a choice, not a default. Cursors: we don't have to use cursors in multimedia products. If you get rid of the cursor, you increase the chance that the person is going to have a more direct connection with your media, your content. You can use a cursor if you want to, but it should be a choice, not the default. And, if you are going to use a cursor, you don't have to have a direct one-to-one correlation between the (x,y) coordinates in the physical space with the screen space. You can play these things. You can say things with that.
If we don't have to use standard OS widgets, what are we going to use? There are at least 5 styles of interaction, and I'm going to go over these really quickly. You can go into the back issues of Interactivity magazine, where I go into these in more detail. Discrete is what we see most of the time: chunked media, state based changes, the interaction happens when we move from one place to another, one type of content to another. "Play" / "Stop", for example. Continuous interactions: there's a flow-like relationship between the person and the content. There's a continuous relationship. Concrete interactions are where we have media that has physical properties. You can do things with it. You can grab it, and put them in relationship to each other. The Macintosh Finder is an example of a concrete interaction space where you can grab files and put them in folders. Even though the cursor is a pointer and not a hand, the interaction itself is concrete. Character interactions we see a lot in games, where it's a second-person kind of vicarious experience through that second party. And resonant interactions are more flexible, malleable -- not a direct interface element that is present, but a deeper algorithmic relationship between the participant and the content.
You can look to the body for clues as to what kind of interaction to use. Take, for example, the difference between browsing and searching. Both of those are very similar goals. What we're doing is information retrieval. But if you look at the body, look at the spine... what's happening there? Search is a kind of, "I know what I want. I'm going to specify it, and say 'Go get it, give it to me.'" So we are in this kind of active position.
Browse is a completely different animal. It's this kind of lounge: "I don't know what I want. I'm kind of curious. Oh, look..." I see what catches my eye, see what's coming my way. If we look at the body, we find this out. What are we trying to do? We say, "Search, targeted search = discrete. Browsing what's going on here? Things are flowing = continuous."
People like to be engaged on many levels simultaneously. So integrate form, function and content of your product. We know how to this with traditional media. We know how to use audio and visuals to work together to have emotional impact. What we need to do is now align that with the interaction styles and the information infrastructures. What we do at MONKEYmedia is take these five styles of interaction and we cross-pollinate them with different visual looks, so we can instantly get twenty-five different treatments. Take five different looks, five different interactions, and grid them. And then you can say, "Where is fruitful cross pollination? What direction do we want to go in?"
Interface design is really this amorphous word. It keeps changing. And I like to break it down into three basic areas of focus in doing design, so we can keep it separate. They overlap a lot, but if you keep them separate you can choose what message you want to give each of these domains. Information design, interaction design, and the actual interface-that-sits-between-them design.
Information design is about the organization. It's the architecture. It's the navigational space that your content lives in. Take a museum that's got pictures in it. Rip the pictures out. What do you have left? You have the walls and you have the space that people are moving through. What does that say to them? What does it feel like to be in a space that moves this way versus this way? You can choose that.
Interaction design is what people do with their bodies. How are they moving the little pieces of plastic on the desk? How are they moving the things around on the screen? What does that feel like? Notice how that affects the way they perceive your content.
The interface sits smack in the middle of these two, and it lets you know what you can do and it lets you know where you are. How did you get there? Where can you go?
If we look at this another way, we've got the person, the content and all these things going on in between. The person acts through the interface, navigating the content, which is organized by the interface and attended to by the person. If we take the person and the content as a given, we have this big hole -- all this stuff in the middle to do. That's where our work needs to be. It's not the content.
In summary, I want to leave you with three questions to take away and ask yourself when you're doing design. What kind of interaction messages do I want to give? What kinds of relationships can I be forming between multimedia content and form... and function? How can I be designing interactive titles that cater to the wholeness of the people who use them?
Thanks."