Zen and the Art of User Experience Design

Occasionally I notice work whose design shows amazing integrity and purity in it’s attention to experience. Often, interactive design starts shallow and then tries to bully it’s way into cognitive acceptance. But while we as humans are diverse and use tools differently, the reasons we use them are surprisingly consistent. And the irony is that experiences that tap into the deeper human motivations and needs often appear quite simple on the surface. This is the paradox of innovation.

Apple’s Photo Booth is an inconspicuous little app launched with Leopard, and it is a premiere example of user centered experience design. When I use the term here, I use it inclusive of the conceptual process, where the best experience design begins.

Whenever my parents took my sister and I shopping downtown, we used to beg them to let us sit in the photo booth in the atrium below LaSalle Court. I have old strips of photos with girlfriends taken in photo booths, capturing moments of important relationships. There is such a microscopic attention to our human path in this act - it is almost a sacred act, a moment so defining we want to stop time. It creates an emotional point of reference. The lovely movie Amelie places the photo booth in a privileged role - it could even be interpreted as another character in the narrative of the story. The booth becomes a narrator and facilitator, marking and feeding the mystery of human relationships.

The metaphor of the photo booth is powerful enough to build an experience around. Before devoting the countless hours and dollars to creating an application, I’m sure the question was asked: why build another photo app? There are loads from which to choose. We have powerful photo tools already in place - why build another one? And the answer is simple: as useful as many of the photo applications are, none of them get so directly at the human motivations and desires underlying their use. This is precisely why Photo Booth is a brilliant example of deep experience design.

From a pure application standpoint, Photo Booth is extremely narrow in it’s focus. In fact, it is one of the few applications I have seen without Preferences to set. Using the booth metaphor, it casts away all superfluous features and functions, instead directly resonating with our desire for fun, our need to express love, and our need to share moments with those who we love.

This experience is directly related to the integration of the iSight camera into the MacBook; the two designs are symbiotic. Without a way to tap into our psychological framework, the camera becomes another engineering innovation without a human context, destined for a marginal life, followed by a series of convoluted attempts to realize it’s potential, and ultimately withering away into obscurity. With Photo Booth and Video iChat, the circuit is closed and the experience becomes a seamless part of our everyday lives.

When I sit down to work at home, my kids will jump up on my lap and I’ll take a Photo Booth break. We laugh and smile and make goofy faces, using the effects to contort ourselves into outlandish cartoons. Everyone enjoys it, it is an all ages affair. When I initiate a video conference with the Creative Director in our NY office, we always either begin or end the conversation with puckered faces, cyclopian tweakoids, or giant-necked monster men. The application changes how we work, allowing us to get lighter and dissemble our egos as we work (itself a highly recommended skill in collaborative design situations).

Photo Booth succeeds on nearly every level and without fanfare. It is people-powered and intimate. It embodies simplicity with it’s point and shoot functionality, providing the all-important “say cheese” user feedback in the form of a visual and aural countdown. With the Flickr plug-in, you can immediately upload and share your Photo Booth memories with the world.

Photo Booth serves us as humans, rather than targeting us as users. It is examples of deep UX design such as this that reinforce the potential for technology to enhance our lives by integrating with them, rather than by trying to change or manipulate our relatively immutable cognitive and emotional mental models - which haven’t really moved on the evolution-meter for the last 50,000 years. A lesson we could all do well to remember next time we’re sitting in a brainstorm or noodling on a white board.

I have recently upgraded to the new Firefox 3 browser, and it shows off some subtle but significant user-centered design innovation. One change in particular I noticed was the default address bar interface, that takes on the microcosmic engagement of the back/forward button. Who would ever question a convention that has become so standard and expected? The organic software creators on the Mozilla team did just that.

The change is based on simple visual hierarchy and task-based prioritization. Think about how often you use your own back button (come on now, you know what I mean) in relation to how often you use the forward button. The design reflects the use of the interaction, rather than vice versa.

Interestingly, a number of developers I’ve talked to about the new interface aren’t thrilled in general. And I am slightly bewildered by the proximity of the history interaction (it’s adjacent to the forward button rather than the back button). It turns out the reason they are turned off is because the display is different that what they are used to. As with any convention, adoption is a complex equation. Whether the button changes the way users feel about the interaction, or the way designers think about it is yet to be seen. But the fact that Firefox itself has built a nearly 20% share of the browser market by using an organic design platform shows that the masses are open to change. Let’s see how the 150 million Firefox users like the new back button.

My full presentation from the 2008 Flashbelt conference in Minneapolis was selected by the editors as a featured presentation on SlideShare. Check it out, you can find it on the features page somewhere between “How to Ride a Freight Train” and “Surfing.” An honor to receive a tip of the hat from the smart people at SlideShare - a company that is all about creating community and building meaningful user experiences. Thanks!