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Dave Jones
Experience Design
Spring 2010
Theory, Methods, and Games
Interaction design, experience design, information design, information architecture
– all terms used to describe overlapping interests and methods for studying, evaluating, and creating ways people engage with everything from physical objects, to computer software, to each other. And this doe sn’t account for all the terms applied to related subfields, like service design or interface design. If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. Defining what any of these terms means is a messy process. If any of the activities encompassed by interaction design, or any other of these terms, dealt solely with an object, inanimate and governed by rigid rules of operation, then these terms would point to a well-defined discipline, or disciplines. But, there is a catch to the design of anything, whether it is one of Don Norman’s teapots or a sophisticated piece of software: people. And, thankfully, people do not operate according to rigid rules of operation. That people are not bound by simple rules keeps our lives interesting. But it also means that our lives are complicated because people are unpredictable. Instead, people have things that object and (so far) software haven’t been able to But, it also means there is a need for people who make an effort to understand what they do, why they want to do it, and how they would like to accomplish it.
In their introduction to About Face 2.0
(2003), Cooper and Reiman offer a definition of interaction design, and they even take the time to design the interaction of

2 reading it: “Simply put, interaction design is the definition and design of the behavior of artifact, environments, and systems , as well as the formal elements that communicate that behavior…interaction design seeks first to plan and describe how things behave and then, as necessary, to describe the most effective form to communicate those behaviors” (p. xxix). See the design? I didn’t put the italics in the quote to emphasize what I wanted you to pay attention to. Cooper and Reiman used italics for their purposes -- to make sure their readers paid attention to something specific there, if they paid no mind to anything else from that passage. In other words, they made a choice to not only suggest meaning using language, but they designed that language on at least two levels. One level includes the factors most often associated with writing: rhetoric, style, grammar, and clarity, just to name a few. The other level is a visual one, seeing and using language not purely as a set of verbal symbols, or signs, designed to form words and sentences. By using italics, they are trying to communicate something visually that they feel might not be fully captured within the language itself. “Pay extra attention to this spot because it is important to understanding us as completely as possible.”
Cooper and Reiman are counting on an important aspect to reading, anticipating it and trying to design for it: “behavior.” This section of their introduction is titled
“Defining Interaction Design,” and it spans two full pages. “Behavior” is one of the words repeated most often, imp ortant because interaction design is a matter of “defining form of products as they relate to their behaviors and uses,” as well as “anticipating how the use of products will affect human relations hips and understanding” (p. xxix). Other words, like desire, emotion, sense, use, and goals are repeated here. What Cooper and

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Reiman are briefly developing here is that “interaction” is a sophisticated relationship between people and the stuff they use. It depends not only on the purposes an object was created for, but on what kinds of imaginative uses people decide they can put it to, like using a heavy book as a doorstop, or a soup kettle as a flower pot. Those jobs are not what those objects were intended to do, but people conceived of a different plan because they could imagine what was possible given the design.
In Don Norman’s (1988) words, these folks developed a “conceptual model” different than the one the objects’ designers intended. All they had to do was look at the object, figure out what its basic elements could be used for, and then consider scenarios or situations in which those elements and uses could be utilized beyond their original intentions. For Norman, this most likely happened through the objects’ “system image” (2004, p. 76), or what their appearances signaled to users about the objects’ capabilities and limitations. Those capabilities and limitations are the object’ affordances and constraints (Norman, 1988). A product designed with a good system image allows the owner to quickly examine it and figure out what the affordances and constraints are, their conceptual model. If designed well, the owner can quickly “map” capabilities to functions, both understanding the object’s purpose and developing possible further uses for it, a la the soup kettle flower pot mentioned earlier.
Cooper and Reiman establish model for interacting with computer software that is very similar to Norman’s. In it, computer software runs a complex set of calculations hidden away from the user, but represented in some way to them via an interface. From that representation, the person using the software should be able to develop a reasonably clear concept of its purpose and function (see Figure 1).

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Implementation │ Representation │ Concept
Figure 1. Cooper and Reiman’s (2003) model for representing software functionality to the user.
But, yet another set of components to design come into play here. How does the representation, or “system image,” get developed? How should it work? What should it do? S ince it is an “image,” what should it look like ? Answering these questions means forking the study of interaction out into different facets that account for both system behaviors and user behaviors. To perhaps oversimplify the definition of interaction design myself, bringing these two sets of behaviors into relative harmony is the goal for any design. Find a way to make something that helps people do what they want to do.
Once that happens, sit back and enjoy watching the ways they adapt those tools to do things you, as a designer, never imagined. Then, learn from those new, unanticipated behaviors because the user is the expert, not the designer (see Cooper and Reiman;
Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1998).
If the foundations of design are built upon the high level view of behavior so far described, design’s structure comes from much more sophisticated methods of modeling and theorizing behavior in specific situations. Thus, designers drill further into the contexts from which behaviors spring , developing complex understandings of users’ working situations, perceptions, feelings, actions, and goals.
In Moggridge’s book,
Designing Interactions (2006), he interviews Bill Verplank who describes the need to answer three questions: “How do you feel? How do you know? How do you do?” (p.
127). In his mental model (including a nifty hand drawing), these three questions

5 demonstrate the user's perceptual experience in an interaction. The UI, both on-screen and in-hand, should provide a way of answering these questions with the least amount of effort. Understand what drives the user and how they see the situation; discover what they think has to happen to finish a task; and provide a clearly delineated set of tools to do what they want (p. 131). Thus, the context for a given set of interactions is deeply important for developing a sense of the processes and purposes of users. It is in these contexts that the user’s experience with an object or software will emerge. That experience is a lasting one, determini ng the arc of an object’s usability, and hence its meaning, to the user.
Norman (1988) further models the user’s experience into a narrative experience, positing 7 Stages of Action that form the basis for research (see Figure 2). Trained in cognitive psychology, Norman seeks to explain user behavior in relationship to their perceptual experiences of environmental stimuli, and how they filter those experiences through a cognitive process to determine what they want to do and what they can do within the cont ext of the situation. At the head of this cycle are the user’s goals, informing her intent as she decides on a course of action and puts it into effect. What happens afterward is a kind of after-action evaluation that measures the outcome of that action against the goals she set for herself. Thus, Norman is describing a cognitive model that narrates experience, assuming the need for people to frame their experiences as a story they can examine at each of these seven stages. Users’ conceptual models begin to emerge from this framework once they set the story against what they thought would happen and what they wanted to happen.

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Intention
Goals
Evalutation
Secquence of action
Interpretation
Execution Perception
Figure 2. Don Norman’s progression of user experience from The Design of Everyday
Things (1988).
This narrative model is a framework with which Norman tries to understand, anticipate, and then design for user behavior. In Emotional Design (2004), he expands upon this framework by situating it within three different “aspects” of design: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. These three aspects situate the narrated experiences of the user against questions of visual appearance (visceral), pleasure from use (behavioral), and the development of the user’s self-image or personal satisfaction with an object or system (reflective). In Norman’s view, the visceral and behavioral responses of users are “subconscious [making] us unaware of our true reactions and their causes” (p. 82).
He suggests further that reflection is “influenced by knowledge, learning, and culture” (p.
87), making reflective design “all about message, about culture, and about the meaning of a product or its use” (p. 83). Designers are not designing purely for functionality.
Users’ narrated experiences are situated against specific contexts that attach meaning,

7 ethics, and personal values to those experiences, and thus the object or systems through those experiences were developed.
Design as Method/olgy
This sense of narrative is pervasive throughout the literature on interaction design. Moggridge, as well as Cooper and Reiman, all make use of the narrative metaphor as part of their research and design methods. However, while modeling a narrative of experience is a significant aspect of the design process, Norman does not elaborate on a specific design methodology, or more granular methods for either studying or architecting these narrative experiences in specific contexts. For that, we must turn elsewhere.
Jesse James Garrett (2003) puts forward a framework for understanding five levels of design for a user interface of websites: surface, skeleton, structure, scope, and strategy. Very simply, Garrett is formalizing the steps along the user-centered design path, while also acknowledging that the path is more of a series of loops rather than a linear walk.
Similar to Norman’s “system image,” the surface is the level most apparent to the user – the visual elements that indicate what a website can do and how. Digging through the layers to the bottom reveals higher and higher levels of requirements and implementation that must be analyzed with respect to a client’s goal (the company that owns the website) versus that of the user (the person that company is targeting as their ideal user). Each layer's full realization is dependent upon the other four, only solidifying once the final iteration of a web site is produced.

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Garrett discusses the need to understand user behavior, but only briefly. His major point is developing a design strategy for users as they operate within specific contexts. Cooper and Reiman (2003) go much further toward developing a comprehensive methodology of understanding and incorporating the user into a more structured design process that seeks, from the outset, to understand contexts much more fully. About Face 2.0
is offered as a kind of process manual for using ethnographic research methods in developing a comprehensive analysis of user goals as they relate to the software they use. They start with user research and goal-oriented design, outline the steps toward learning about users in order to create personas that guide the design process. Personas serve to offer short but clear narratives of users' by describing "who the users are, what they are doing, and what goals they have" (p. 13) in order to find
"exemplary types of behaviors along identified ranges" (p. 60). Design, then, stages out from this process by taking into account what the software needs to do in order to meet the user's needs. Thus, usability is a function of what needs to be up front and easily findable for the user versus what they will tolerate hunting for because it seems obscure or rarely relevant.
Methods of interview, observation, persona development, prototyping, and usability testing form the core of Cooper and Reiman’s process. The designer becomes a user-advocate within this process, constantly pressing for the software to be adapted to a target user’s needs. The target user is neither an expert nor a novice with software or the tasks they are asked to do with that software. Instead, the target user is one of many personas developed from qualitative data gathered during interviews and observations. By recording and analyzing users’ behaviors in specific contexts, learning

9 from those users what their goals are and why they have them, the designer can model potential users along a range of behavior and usage patterns. These models are
“personas,” or sketches of personality types that include brief narratives about “job or lifestyle,” and summaries describing “peeves, concerns, and interests that have direct bearing on the product” being designed (p. 71). Personas are prioritized by choosing the one that describes a software product’s anticipated primary user. The analysis necessary to develop personas develops a comprehensive understanding of the goals that motivate users of specific products. Narrative reappears as an integral function within the design process, but this time situated firmly within specific contexts drawn from researchers’ study of those who use software products in specific ways for specific reasons.
Instead of using cognitive science to theorize user behavior as Norman does, contextual research becomes the basis for very granular, integrated analyses of specific behaviors with specific products in specific situations. This strategy is what Beyer and
Holtzblatt (1998) have labeled “contextual inquiry.” Context-driven analysis tries to understand the gathered data in relationship to work, chronology, artifacts used by participants, culture, and workspace. Each of these five elements are analyzed individually, then in comparison to one another. The point of the inquiry is to identify best practices already in use and to identify "breakdowns" within the work process that might be improved upon. Thus, they do not see design as focused solely on a product, but on understanding the ways that product can fit into already established workflows, including the behaviors, habits, and cultures that define both individual workers and the organizations in which they work
– the context of work. Much like Cooper and Reiman,

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Beyer and Holtzblatt position the designer as a user-advocate, though they more explicitly describe the situation as a “master-apprentice” relationship in which the designer takes on the role of an apprentice learning from the user. This way, they argue, the researcher is much better positioned to gain a full understanding of the contexts in which tasks are performed.
Clearly, there is significant overlap between Cooper and Reiman’s approach in
About Face 2.0
and Beyer and Holtzblatt’s method in Contextual Inquiry . Yet, Cooper and Reiman offer a few crucial distinctions they contend improve upon Beyher and
Holtzblatt’s method. Among things like shortening interview times and deploying smaller teams for design, Cooper and Reiman also contend that Beyer and Holtzblatt are too taskoriented, potentially sacrificing an understanding of the user’s goals. Thus, they cut short a more comprehensive view of the ways system behaviors and user behaviors align.
Clay Spinuzzi (2003) offers a more robust critique in Tracing Genres Through
Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design . He criticizes Beyer and
Holtzblatt’s method as a “fieldwork-to-formalization” intended to “unearth the workarounds, innovations, and tacit practices” of users in an effort to develop tools for universalizing work patterns. In other words, their approach is “suitable for generalizing, standardizing, regularizing, idealizing, and managing work” (p. 11). These methods identify a problem and seek to insert the de signer as a “savior” working to valiantly protect the user-victim from bad software design or work processes. This is symptomatic of an imbalance in political power that generally ignores “locally grounded practices that can be adopted or rejected at the i ndividual worker’s discretion” (p. 15).

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“Local exigencies” that can define usage and work patterns in ways more relevant to localized contexts are discounted in favor of top-down perspectives that, while simultaneously portraying themselves as “saving” workers, also attempt to impose design goals that more reflect organizational interests than individual worker needs. In
Spinuzzi’s words, “Workers’ operations must be examined in their own right, as interactions
– often centrifugal, subversive actions – that coconsitute (reciprocally make up, shape, sustain) the cultural activities and goal-directed actions in which workers engage” (p. 27).
Patterns of behavior and usage need to be understood not only as goal-directed relationships between systems or products and those who make use of them, but also from within larger frameworks that see these products as sites through which power relationships among different organizational layers can be found. Cooper and Reiman, as well as Beyer and Holtzblatt, point to the needs of software designers to compare user goals with business or organizational goals. Spinuzzi’s warns that designers must always be wary of imposing the organization’s will upon individual workers, subverting or destroying patterns of behavior and usage that have been fruitful within the individual’s practice, but may not be accounted for in the organization’s goals. He is not criticizing organizational structure in itself, nor is he criticizing attempts to understand such structures. Instead, he addresses the issue by arguing it is more a matter of various methods being made to diverge when they, instead, could synthesize into a complete methodology for design. Whether contextual inquiry, user-centered design, otherwise, Spinuzzi argues that all are addressing the same problem, but doing so at
“different levels of scope.”

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Spinuzzi’s solution is an “intergrated scope” that seems to bridge some gaps between Norman’s cognitive perspectives, Cooper and Reiman’s granular methods, and
Beyer and Holtzblatt’s context-oriented methods. He sees all three as part of a larger picture, “coconstituting” each other along specific lines of influence that can be traced with this “integrated” scope, and also allowing for organizational goals to be met without undermining individual workers’ needs. At the “macroscopic” level, the designer looks to understand context as it emerges from within specific cultural or organizational spaces.
The “mesoscopic” level traces the co-development of goals and actions for software users, utilizing method of cognitive research and analysis such as those from Norman.
The “microscopic” level focuses on granular, material interactions between users and products, assessing the ways individuals do work with tools in specific environments, much like Garrett. This integrated scope of analysis sees all three levels as demanding different methods of analysis, but “they are ultimately intertwined” so that they mutually construct each other in ways that were, up to that point, barely discussed (p. 36). By
“integrating” these levels into a single framework, Spinuzzi is not so much arguing in favor of a unified theory of design, but of a rigorous, iterative methodology for describing work and interaction as comprehensively as possible. In different situations, one level may emerge as a more salient site for study or change, but all of them are important.
And understanding them as integrated is even more important.
To this end, Spinuzzi (2005) has also advocated “participatory design,” or a process by which “design is research” because the target user is empowered to take part in the design process (p. 164). Situating the user as a co-equal participant in the design process, one whose contributions are just as valid as design experts, is intended

13 to let workers “take control over their own work” (p. 167), something Spinuzzi argues is radically different than Norman’s view. Spinuzzi, echoing Grossman (2002), understands Norman “as arguing that the designer should be dictator” (p. 167). By involving the potential user in the design process, participatory design undermines this position in a systematic way. The user is not just consulted with respect to decisions made by designers, but is fully involved in the research, analysis, and design stages so that they are an integral part of the design team. Participatory design, then, might be understood as a major step toward Spinuzzi’s “integrated scope,” a bottom-up process originating in user needs and goals, not organizational ones, and thus allaying any potential disenfranchisement of information workers in favor of organizations.
What is apparent in discussing methodologies is a disconnect runs underneath the discussion, stemming from one contextual factor that is generally overlooked:
Where does the purpose for the product being designed come from? What is the origin of the initial needs and goals that design researchers are trying to uncover and synthesize? Broadly speaking, is the product a commercial one, intended for sale to consumers? Or is the product one tailored to meet a specific company’s or organization’s needs with respect to a particular situation? Or, even more challenging does the product sit somewhere in between? In these different cases, qualifying and aligning goals from all levels of scope take on different functions that determine the stakes for those involved very differently. In the case of commercial software sold to the general public, the goal-directed design of Cooper and Reiman emerges as a primary method of user research, identifying a “range of behaviors” and developing for the ideal user/customer. Spinuzzi, however, is taking on the task of the technical communicator

14 working within specific organizations who must develop solutions for very specific situations.
The key differences here center on motivations and stakes of all those involved, as well as the political differences among design participants that may shape the way the design process unfolds, and hence the final product itself. Nowhere is this issue more prevalent than in the computer games industry in which user-centered design practices are deployed to understand players across a significantly widening gap of behavior. While the design theories and methods so far describe tend to focus on productivity software, like word processing or information management systems, game present a unique challenge to designers and their methodologies. They are powerful software systems that derive much of their functionality from productivity software, and just as often are experienced through machines and interfaces originally designed for workplace productivity (i.e. personal computers).
Games and Design
However, games are generally seen as entertainment, built for the entertainment industry. The most generous arguments position games as pieces of narrative or visual art, built for the exploration or transmission of culturally important situations or meanings. In either case, the experiences they foster are understood very differently from the productivity systems that have typically fallen under the gaze of designers or professional communicators. This is not to say that user-centered design principles have been adapted for the game community. They have, most robustly in Tracy
Fullerton’s (2008) concept of “playcentric” design. But games present unique challenges

15 because there is a need to balance the desired expressive outcomes of developers against the player’s needs in order to engage with a game. Whereas productivity systems are often engaged out of a necessity to fulfill a goal or accomplish a task, game systems are engaged most often for leisure purposes, much like a book or movie. The player might want to simply spend some time doing something they find fun and mindless, they may want an emotional thrillride, or they may simply want to do something with friends. In any event, design as theory tends to hold firm, so much so that Norman’s cognitive, narrative model of interaction is nearly identical to Torben
Grodal’s (2003, 2009) proposed model for narrative analysis in games. Both grow from cognitive science approaches that see human experiences as neurological processes involving perception and interpretation of stimuli. Though this approach is limited, as
Spinuzzi’s critique about divergent scopes hints, it does point to some interesting problems with respect to game design.
As a model of narrative, the cognitive approach to human-computer interaction can be made to theorize simultaneously in two directions. One is the player’s experience with the game, as Norman originally intended. The other is in the direction of any storyline or character development that game designers might wish to include.
Isbister offers a theoretical framework for approaching the design of game characters through social psychology, arguing in favor of designing characters that reflect social and emotional motives that drive attachments among people in the everyday world.
Character design, in her work, becomes a complex amalgamation of cultural, social, and psychological facto rs, like attractiveness, “social equipment,” or the ways symbols of the body and expression work to build attachment between players and characters. In

16 her work, design must factor for psychological and affective responses that arise between players and characters.
Though clearly similar to Norman’s cognitive approach to design, Isbister differs in that such psychology is always explicitly registered against player-centered research.
Her general body of scholarship has, for a number of years now, focused on the emotional and affective experiences of playe rs as they play. While Norman’s work generally remains at the level of theory and personal observation, Isbister’s work in games always draws from ethnographic methods similar to those espoused by Cooper and Reiman, and Beyer and Holtzblatt. She, along with her colleagues, constructs methods of evaluating the affective and sense-based experiences of players (see
Isbister et. al., 2006; Isbister et. al., 2007; Laaksolahti et. al., 2009). One of the more interesting methods tests player responses to characters and scenarios by using tactile sensitivity to reflect abstract emotions
, what they term a “sensual evaluation instrument”
(Laaksolahti et. al., 2009). They designed small, plastic pieces to represent key emotions, defined from previous research. Then, player experiences with certain game types or game levels were studied, as players turned to holding these pieces while playing. The idea is that the pieces are “pre-verbal tool[s] that appeal to immediate felt experiences” (p. 168). Thus, researchers are aiming to gather emotional and sensual impressions before they are mediated through reflective thought processes, and hence, perhaps modified via such cognitive mediation. In Isbister’s work, social psychology is, in fact, applied in both directions to understand the design of fictional elements of games in relationship to cognitive and psychological processes, while at the same time

17 complimenting such theory with empirical research on the social psychologies of player as they engage with computer games.
Drawing from a usercentered design approach, Tracy Fullerton’s (2008) work adapts contextual design methods to game development, what she calls “playcentric design.” The “formal elements” of a game – the “objectives, procedures, rules, resources, conflicts, boundaries, and outcomes” (p. 49) – are measured with respect to player goals, which Fullerton suggests can be wildly different. In her terms, games situate players within certain roles that they either adopt or reject, drawing form cultural frames of refe rence (like a soldier or healer), and from player’s immediate desires that give rise to different play styles. Do players like to solve puzzles? Dominate an enemy?
Or be creative and expressive? (pp. 50-
51). She uses language similar to Norman’s, and Coope r’s and Reiman’s, when discussing ways that game systems and worlds are represented to players. Players’ “concepts” of how to interact with on-screen situations needs to involve some “intuitive knowledge” of the interaction so that play moves forward with little impediment (p 69). Designing the formal elements of gameplay depends on a contextual, user-centered approach that is iterative and rigorous, just like that espoused by Cooper and Reiman.
However, one major difference injects itself into the playcentric design process.
In this case, the goal structure from which to start does not necessarily involve the player, but is constituted from the goals of game designers. What do they want to accomplish in games? Fullerton’s (2008) framework starts with “conceptualization,” or the need to brainstorm and generate play ideas that reflect what developers want to accomplish (pp. 148-156). From there, the iterative process of prototyping and

18 refinement begins, involving player input all along the way. One benefit is that "play" in game design is reimagined as a function founded on emotional engagement rather than rule-bound design (Fullerton et. al., 2006). This seems like an obvious starting point, but is complicated by the fact that, as Isbister has repeatedly shown, emotional design in games must account for far more than game functionality and low-level motivation.
Instead, games are extremely sophisticated design challenges that engage players both as software systems and as explicit cultural representations. As aesthetic or narrative experiences, how do formal design elements mash with emotional responses to fictional representations? There is no easy answer to this, and thus the reason for a “playcentric” process that seeks to interpret game design goals against player responses.

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References
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