Push conference presentation
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Presentation given by Fjord Berlin's Service Design Lead Neil Calderwood at the Push Conference, Munich, on the 25th of October 2013. Abstract: The number of ways in which users can access services and information increases daily. So too does their expectation that their method of choice will work beautifully. How do we design to meet this challenge? Does it have to be an unending nightmare of proliferation and diversification, or can we turn it to our advantage and make things better? This talk looks at examples of designing for multi-screen and multi-platform patterns of interaction, and provides guidance as to how to approach projects of this kind.
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Notes de l'éditeur
- Ah, the coveted second slot. Free of the pressure of being first on, and comforted by the knowledge that you’re all mostly thinking about lunch. OK, let me introduce myself. I’m Neil Calderwood, and I’m a Service Design Lead for Fjord Berlin. Sorry about the terrible official picture of me - they wrote and said “Hey, what we’d really like is a picture of you, tried and straight off a plane, ideally mildly hungover. And what would make it even better is if it was a selfie shot into a mirror. Can you do that for us?” “Yeah, sure”
- Ah, the coveted second slot. Free of the pressure of being first on, and comforted by the knowledge that you’re all mostly thinking about lunch. OK, let me introduce myself. I’m Neil Calderwood, and I’m a Service Design Lead for Fjord Berlin. Sorry about the terrible official picture of me - they wrote and said “Hey, what we’d really like is a picture of you, tried and straight off a plane, ideally mildly hungover. And what would make it even better is if it was a selfie shot into a mirror. Can you do that for us?” “Yeah, sure”
- I offered alternatives, but for some reason they weren’t keen. And now a short introduction to Fjord.
- At Fjord we like to think of ourselves as a service design consultancy. That means that we’re all about designing things around the needs of people. We’re all about design for love - it’s not enough just to serve their needs. We believe in producing services that reach people’s emotions too. We know that if you do this, the other goals your business may have will follow naturally.
- We have offices across Europe and a couple in the US too. Although I’d have to say I question the positioning of the Stockholm and Helsinki offices on that map.
- We do work for some people you’ve probably heard of. There are many more household names than we could reasonably fit on this slide, and a whole host of other organisations you might be less familiar with.
- I’m here today to talk about cross-platform and multi-platform user experience. What does that mean?
- Well, it’s more than just responsive design, although that’s an important element of it. It’s also more than just designing experiences which work across different devices. Although that’s an important part of it too. No, it’s about making the most of what we’ve got. Not just in terms of the capabilities of the different kinds of devices themselves, but in the relationships between them, and in the ways in which users like to interact with them.
- We live in interesting times. Recently we’ve seen an explosion in the quality and availability of services and information. We’ve got high-speed wireless communications all over the place. We’ve got lots of affordable devices that can connect to these communications systems. And we’ve got easy-to-use and powerful software that opens up that technology to more and more people. But as well as this we’ve got good old people power. Crowdsourced information, sensors everywhere generating massive amounts of data. But the road that brought us here might be longer than you realise.
- In 1945, the director of the American Office of Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush, wrote an article in the Atlantic magazine. In it he envisaged a machine called the Memex, which was a bit like cloud storage. It collated information for you, and made it instantly available. Users could wear cameras and microphones and by using voice commands could send what they saw and heard straight to the Memex to be recorded. Sound familiar?
- You could even write annotations onto a screen and it would store them along with the information you gathered. Of course, this is totally unrealistic. The copyright authorities would come down on it like a ton of bricks.
- By 1963 we had something that did some of this stuff for real. What you see here is Sketchpad, which allowed the user to draw on the screen using a light pen. Just think, we persisted with stylus-based touch interfaces right up until the iPhone.
- By 1972 we were dreaming of computing on the go. Of course the Dynabook here was just a prototype, and far ahead of its time, but you could see where we were going.
- Eleven years later, and true to form, Apple came up with something very similar and tried to tell everybody they invented it.
- But they never stopped refining the concept, and you can see the line that runs through this stuff all the way up to the present day. Personally I can’t wait till folding screens are actually available.
- As for mobile phones, well, the first attempt at a connected computer in your pocket was a pretty long time ago now.
- And so here we are, when it’s nothing out of the ordinary for people to use a laptop, a tablet and a smartphone on a daily, or even hourly basis. And besides those we’ve got TVs and games consoles as well. We’re living in a multiscreen world, that much is obvious. But “ooh, aren’t there a lot of screens everywhere?” doesn’t really make an interesting talk for a topic. So before I go on I’d just like to offer up a definition for the term multiplatform.
- Not really. But I can’t talk about platforms without mentioning Mario, can I?
- Today I’m talking about single applications with multiple interfaces, one for each type of device.
- What does this mean for those of us who have to design and develop for this multiplatform world? On the one hand, you could see this as a total pain in the backside, having to redesign everything for every new platform that comes along. Certainly it’s common for people to want to design the complexity out of this as much as they can. Typically the first instinct of clients is to ask for everything to be available everywhere. What they want - or what they think they want - is uniformity. They come to me and say “How can we ensure a consistent experience across all devices?” And I say...
- This is a really bad idea for quite a number of reasons. Firstly, users simply don’t expect their experience to be consistent from one interface to another. Is there anybody here from Microsoft? Right, now might be a good time for you to go get a coffee, you’re not going to like this next bit.
- This is what you get when you try to make things consistent across devices. When you think familiarity is what’s important, rather than making the most of the capabilities of the device. Windows Mobile. Where some genius decided that what people really wanted was a mobile phone that acted just like their desktop. Meaning such masterstrokes as putting the most important control in the entire system - the start button - right up in the corner where you could barely get at it with a stylus, never mind your finger.
- Still, at least they’ve learned from their mistake. Now they’re trying to force a touchscreen interaction paradigm onto the desktop.
- All right, so consistency is not the way to go. What about mobile first design? People say this all the time too - start by figuring out the smartphone version, then design the rest. And it’s true, it helps in a number of ways. The smartphone screen is smallest, so it makes sense that it should have the simplest interface, which means that the basic experience is available on any device. Complexity can then be added layer by layer according to the ability of the interface to bear it. So in theory each device ends up with an interface that makes the most of its abilities. Is that the way to do it, then?
- I don’t think you should look at it this way. You’ll miss out on so much opportunity if you do this. It’s not simply a matter of taking the simplest interface and building on it. Yeah, it’ll work. It might even work pretty well. But I think we should try harder than that. Let me explain to you why this isn’t the way to go.
- For truly multiplatform design, mobile first design is based on a flawed initial premise, which is that people just need different takes on the same thing. A moment’s thought will show you this just isn’t true. The picture’s a bit more complicated than just different screen sizes, or even different interfaces. It’s not only about what device they’re using. It’s about where they are. It’s about what else they’re doing. It’s about how much time they have. It’s about who they’re with.
- For truly multiplatform design, mobile first design is based on a flawed initial premise, which is that people just need different takes on the same thing. A moment’s thought will show you this just isn’t true. The picture’s a bit more complicated than just different screen sizes, or even different interfaces. It’s not only about what device they’re using. It’s about where they are. It’s about what else they’re doing. It’s about how much time they have. It’s about who they’re with. Each platform has its own characteristics, of course. But each is also very distinct in how the user approaches it, and what the user expects to get from it. If you’re designing a multiplatform experience, it’s absolutely critical that you really understand and appreciate the implications of this. So before we start to talk about approaches we can take to designing systems, let’s look at each platform in detail.
- The mobile phone, our trusty companion. Always with us, always on. It’s a great way to look something up or perform a quick task. Users like to use their mobile phone to initiate actions which they may later finish on another device. So for example they might search for a piece of content and add it to a queue to watch later on the TV at home. It tends to be the device of choice for quick interactions, so it’s great for alerts and spontaneous planning of viewing. The smartphone is also a time filler and a boredom killer. Ideal for messing around with on the train so you don’t make eye contact with that weird guy opposite you. Great for watching bite-sized pieces of content. What it isn’t, of course, is the ideal device for watching a whole series of Game of Thrones. Although we all know it happens. But if you’ve got nothing else, which is true for a staggering number of people in emerging markets, well, it’ll do the job.
- The tablet can do that job of being your primary content consumption device much better. But as it turns out, 80% of tablet usage takes place in the home, and much of that in front of the TV, where there’s usually a better device available for watching videos and so on. So in fact it gets used for watching shorter pieces of content, and where portability’s useful, such as when in the kitchen cooking. The tablet is your companion device. It can be a sort of turbocharged remote control, or provide content to support and enhance what’s being delivered on the primary screen. Or you can just use it to muck about on Facebook whilst half-watching the TV.
- The TV rules the living room. It’s the biggest screen in a communal space and thus the modality is consumption. TV is all about the content. Keep the fuss to a minimum and just give the users what they want to watch. Complicated interfaces and sign-ins and so on belong elsewhere. TVs often have nightmarish control systems - such as this one - and it’s best to keep the user’s need for them to an absolute minimum.
- The TV rules the living room. It’s the biggest screen in a communal space and thus the modality is consumption. TV is all about the content. Keep the fuss to a minimum and just give the users what they want to watch. Complicated interfaces and sign-ins and so on belong elsewhere. TVs often have nightmarish control systems - such as this one - and it’s best to keep the user’s need for them to an absolute minimum.
- The TV rules the living room. It’s the biggest screen in a communal space and thus the modality is consumption. TV is all about the content. Keep the fuss to a minimum and just give the users what they want to watch. Complicated interfaces and sign-ins and so on belong elsewhere. TVs often have nightmarish control systems - such as this one - and it’s best to keep the user’s need for them to an absolute minimum.
- The other criticial aspect of TV is that it’s all about sharing the experience. Families and friends all gather around it and watch the same thing. And that’s how they want it. Yes, it’s great that we can all have our tailored, individualised recommendations, but sometimes it’s nice to do things together.
- The computer comes into play when there’s real work to be done. The tablet’s not great for typing on, so the serious business of searching and filling out forms and so on happens on the PC. This is where the service management should occur, the complex searching and systematic browsing. All the fiddly stuff that you don’t want to do on the touch devices or on the big screen 5 metres away can be done easily here through mouse and QWERTY input.
- Put them all together and what have you got? A mess! No! Multiplatform! Each device has a primary purpose in the user’s mind, as illustrated by the icons on the right. On the left, we have the different types of content and features which they might be interested in. And in the middle, the devices which bring that content to the user. So that gives you an idea of what people use their different devices for, and under what circumstances. Already we have quite a lot to think about. But it gets worse. Think about it, it’s not like they always choose the optimal device for their particular use case. There’s a lot of overlap. And sometimes their patterns of usage literally overlap. They use more than one device for the same thing, or even at the same time.
- In sequential usage, our users move from device to device one after another. So as mentioned previously, they might browse for a piece of content and queue it up for watching later. Or they might look for a hotel for a weekend away, but fill out the forms when they get home.
- In simultaneous usage, they’re on more than one device at a time. This very commonly means the TV and another of their choice, and sometimes the activities are related, and sometimes they’re not. So examples could be messing around on Facebook, idly sending emails, looking up at the other scores while they’re watching the football. One final thing to consider is their attitude. What sort of a mood is our user in? Some devices suit particular circumstances better than others.
- For example, one client of ours kept telling us they wanted a lean-back experience for iPad. They know that people love to sit and let the TV wash over them, and they wanted to offer something similar on a tablet, where you just consume what’s served up to you. But iPad is the complete opposite of a lean-back experience, and you go against this at your peril. A tablet is a very tactile thing. People like to play around with it just for the sake of it. There’s no point trying to get in the way of that or take it from them. And we’ve known and understood this for a very long time. Look.
- Here’s Stanley Kubrick demonstrating in 1968 that he appreciated how people would use a tablet. Over forty years ago. And yet still people think that we should force an experience from one type of device onto another. Thankfully, though, Kubrick wasn’t right about everything. That food looks TERRIBLE.
- So I hope that gives you a good understanding of the sorts of challenges we face designing multiplatform systems, and the things we need to think about. It all adds up to a pretty complex picture. There’s an awful lot to bear in mind.
- So what do we do? How do we avoid tangling ourselves up in knots? How do we make something focused out of all these diverse goals and constraints? Everybody naturally tends to want to race towards a solution. We think we know what we want to do and dive in with both feet. But to ensure we deliver the best possible experience, we have to resist this temptation. I want to propose an approach which should help you get this right. We go from the inside out.
- To show you how this works, I’m going to go through an example. Imagine you’ve been asked to design a video-on-demand system. As usual, the client has asked for the moon and the stars. They want it to be possible to do everything everywhere. And they want a consistent experience. Or at least, they think they do. But you know better, don’t you? You know that’s not the right way to approach this. But that doesn’t mean you just ignore your client and do your own thing. No, bring them in on this process and you should find you don’t have to battle them.
- I suggest that we start with something very simple. Just for a minute, forget about devices, forget about users, forget about content, forget about everything. Let’s get a bit more abstract. What is the essence of what we’re trying to do? How can we sum it up in the broadest possible way? Can we describe it in a sentence? For example, Coca-Cola can sum up the goal of their existence as to monopolise everybody’s lips. If you put a liquid to your mouth, they want to be the ones that sold it to you. Let’s try it for our hypothetical video-on-demand system.
- What are we trying to achieve here? What are we trying to provide our users with? Fun? Yeah, sometimes. But not always. It’s more abstract than that. And fun’s a bit meaningless anyway. No, in the same way that Coca-Cola wants to monopolise people’s lips, we want to monopolise their eyeballs. When somebody wants to watch something, we want to be the ones who provide it to them.
- OK, so we’ve got a concept. And our concept is our king here - it’s going to define everything we do. This is a really good starting point, but there is much to do. We need to start thinking about how to make this idea real.
- So now let’s take our concept apart. Work out what it really means. How are we going to monopolise people’s eyeballs? What are the pillars on which we can build such a monstrous monument to our arrogance? This might require a fairly involved discussion with the client. The aim is to come up with a few qualities which will define everything else we do from this point on. So what would they be?
- If we want people to come to us, we’re going to need good content, and lots of it.
- And we’re going to have to figure out how to reach those eyeballs anywhere we can. We’re going to have to make sure we’re able to take our content to them.
- And once we’ve done that, we have to enable them to find what interests them.
- But that’s not all. Even if we provide them every possible means to access our content, they aren’t going to do it if we don’t make something they want to use.
- Now we’re getting somewhere. From a simple statement - “monopolise people’s eyeballs” - we’ve been able to figure out the main principles of our service. Lovely. Now let’s break those apart, too. What does it mean to be comprehensive? I would say it means offering the widest possible range of content. I’m going to skip over the “comprehensive content” aspect of this and just pretend we can present everything in the world. Unrealistic, I know, but to talk about this for real would involve all sorts of boring legal stuff about rights and royalties and frankly life’s too short.
- Ubiquitous? Well for me that means it’s available anywhere, by any means. What are those means? TV, tablet, smartphone, PC, of course. We’ve been through this. Is that all? Well I can’t think of too many circumstances where one or other of those devices doesn’t cover you, so that’ll do me.
- Effective? That’s a pretty broad one, but it’s about providing mechanisms by which our content can be discovered. People need to be able to find stuff. How? Search is a given. Free browsing, too. But they’ll benefit from good organisation and signposting to guide them to what they’re after. Recommendations? That would be cool. Are they generated, or provided by friends or experts? Why not all three?
- And so our last principle, elegance. That’s a bit woolly, and arguably it’s in the eye of the beholder anyway. I’m not sure that we’re quite ready to figure out how to make it elegant yet. To do that, we’re going to have to understand our users and their needs better. This will require a lot of old-fashioned UX work, and it’s going to take a while. There isn’t really time to go into detail on this now, so we’re going to need... A MONTAGE!
- Wow, is there nothing a montage can’t do? Now we really understand the problem. We’ve looked at it from many different angles. We’ve taken it apart into tiny little pieces. What we need to do next is start putting those tiny little pieces together to make something new. Again, this is fairly standard UX practice, but this time we’re doing it for four different platforms. We’re going to need even MORE Post-Its.
- All that work we just did in the montage generated a ton of hopes and dreams about what this system could be. Now we really know what we want on each individual platform. Some of these things seem to belong together, so we can organise them into groups based on the sorts of behaviours they address. These groups might be related because they’re similar functionality. For example, you might want to group both searching and browsing under “finding content”. Or maybe you want to group all the actions that can be taken while watching content. So pause, volume, replay and so on, but perhaps also bookmarking and subtitles. Or the connection might be a more emotional one. Sharing might mean a tweet or a recommendation. But it might also mean easily moving something from tablet to TV so everybody can watch it together. While we’re grouping them by platform, we might as well start trying to group them by functionality as well. What seems to belong together? Of course, we by no means know it all at this point, and all these groupings are very fluid and may well change a lot as we get to understand the problem better. This is no bad thing. It’s why we use Post-Its.
- But hold on, aren’t we designing a multiplatform system, and not just a system on multiple platforms? Aren’t we supposed to be linking all this stuff up? Now’s the time to start that. For each platform, let’s look at all the functionality we’ve deemed necessary, and think about whether we should have that facility on other platforms too. For instance, we just mentioned the ability to send something from tablet to TV, so that it can be shared. But should we be able to do the same thing the other way round, from TV to tablet? Maybe it hadn’t occurred to us before. And at first maybe it seems less useful. But put yourself in the shoes of a teenage girl enjoying a movie on the big screen when her dad comes home and wants to watch the football. Now she can just shift it across and carry on. Small things like this make a massive difference in how people feel about what we design.
- So you see we’re building in the richness as we go. Our purpose is clear because we figured it out right at the start. Everything we do is scrutinised to ensure that it fits our vision. Each feature we add, each connection we make, enhances our system as a whole. Now while we’re here, we should try to revisit the question of what we can and should do. Is there anything else we can work in here? Any really amazing features that didn’t occur to us at first, but have come to light in the process of analysing the problem?
- This is really starting to come together now. We’ve organised all our tiny building blocks into bigger ones. We’ve worked out on which platforms those bigger blocks should appear. And we know in which order we’re going to do it. Now let’s start to figure out how to translate them into something real.
- OK, that’So here are our feature groups represented by pretty icons. You can probably figure out that they refer to things like sharing, shifting devices, parental controls, sharing, and so on.
- Problem is, we’ve got a lot of stuff now. Maybe we should break it out into phases.
- We’re almost there. We know what functionality we went to offer. We’ve made sure that what we offer makes sense across all the platforms. We’ve organised it in the way that makes the most sense. Now we can start drawing stuff. Figuring out how best to fit all these features into our different platforms, taking into account the strengths and weakness of each, and what we know about our users.
- So on PC, for example, knowing all that we do, we can determine which modules we need, and what priority we should give them.
- Which leads us to a layout something like this. Notice the user’s queue is at the top, because we expect them to prefer to manage it on their computer. But we’ve got plenty of space here, and we use it to suggest lots of content and encourage exploration.
- The phone layout is necessarily simpler, but again the queue is prioritised, because we know that people like to use their phone to set things up for watching later. The rest of the page prioritises what’s fresh, because that’s probably what you want when you’re just trying to pass some time.
- The tablet, our extension device, covers the things the others do too, but makes a bigger deal out of providing supplementary information to support and enhance output from other devices.
- Here, unlike the others, we prioritise the programme guide, so that users can browse through it while watching their TV, instead of wrestling with their remote control and taking up half the screen with an EPG.
- ...And in the end it might look a bit like this. So you see they’re all unified in purpose, consistent at heart basic look and feel, but divergent where it matters. Each provides an experience tailored to the user’s needs and attitudes. It all adds up to much more than just the same thing in different sizes.
- Ta-daa! A fully fledged, optimal multiplatform system, designed from the inside out. Wasn’t that easy? It’s easy to get the impression that all these different devices just make everything a nightmare of complexity. Maybe you long for the days when there was one website and that was it. Maybe a barely-related mobile site if you’re lucky. But I don’t think you should look at it like that. This isn’t something you should fear. And I hope I’ve shown that it doesn’t have to be an intractable problem, a tangled web. The way I see it, multiplatform design is a beautiful example of the positive benefits of the network effect. Each device you add enriches your service, of course. But if you do this right, every platform makes all the others better. Your users gain more than just different ways to do the same thing. They get what they need, when they need it, how they want it. And as a result, they love using your service. Which means it will massively exceed your clients’ performance expectations, and you’ll be a hero. And so we all live happily ever after. I hope this talk has been helpful for you. Thank you very much for listening.
- It’s easy to get the impression that all these different devices just make everything a nightmare of complexity. Maybe you long for the days when there was one website and that was it. Maybe a barely-related mobile site if you’re lucky. But I don’t think you should look at it like that. This isn’t something you should fear. And I hope I’ve shown that it doesn’t have to be an intractable problem, a tangled web. The way I see it, multiplatform design is a beautiful example of the positive benefits of the network effect. Each device you add enriches your service, of course. But if you do this right, every platform makes all the others better. Your users gain more than just different ways to do the same thing. They get what they need, when they need it, how they want it. And as a result, they love using your service. Which means it will massively exceed your clients’ performance expectations, and you’ll be a hero. And so we all live happily ever after. I hope this talk has been helpful for you. Thank you very much for listening.