While conceptualizing the wire-frame for the office Intranet, I was always confused with regard to the amount of complexity/ease-of-use I should build into the user interface. Should it be amazingly simple or should I make it extremely techie. Should I go according to the textbooks just because they enumerates rules? When will I do something new then? Conventions say I should make sure all hyperlinks are blue because all over the Web they are blue. Conventions say that tagging works for blogs, Flickr, and Youtube; it would be of no use for enterprise content. Conventions say that my navigation should be extremely simple. What new groundbreaking feature do I build into my site so as to make it stand apart from the rest?
On doing research for solutions to this problem, I came across this foreword to the book “Steps to an ecology of mind” by Gregory Bateson. While discussing games, Gregory Bateson makes this important observation:
...there are important emotions that we feel and go through and enjoy and find in some mysterious ways to enlarge our spirit.
So, is solving Rubick’s cube even remotely sensual to our brains? Is formulating strategies sexy? Absolutely. This is what is referred to as “cognitive seduction.” While most of us do not refer to the word “seductive” in non-sexual contexts, game designers do. They are experts at the art of “cognitive arousal,” and I am looking for ways to build these type of features that ensure “repeated playability” of games in a Web model. I am not talking about the use of sex and imagery to keep users/readers interested. I am talking about the type of “experiential pleasure” one might derive out of solving a puzzle, finding something new in an existing framework, interacting with someone in a social networking model, discovering something new about themselves, etc. The premise here is people derive pleasure by having to work something out or to engage cognitively in a challenge.
How does one go about doing this?
Lets try to establish a sort of list of different types of user experiences in conjunction with cognitive seduction:
- Discovery: user experience as the exploration of something new
- Challenge: user experience as overcoming an obstacel in achieving something, going past previous individual thresholds and knowledge levels, etc.
- Narrative: user experience as a story
- Self-expression: user experience as self-discovery and creativity
- Social framework: user experience as interaction with colleagues or someone unknown in an Web model
- Cognitive arousal: user experience as a brain teaser
- Thrill: user experience as risk-taking in presence of a safety net
- Triumph: user experience as an opportunity to kick ass
- Flow: user experience as extreme concentration, extreme focus, lack of self-awareness
- Fantasy: user experience as alternate reality
- Learning: user experience as an opportunity to grow and improve
No. Its not possible to build a model equipped with all these features. An excellent example of the implementation of the above features would be game design. But even the best game designers do not, and cannot, build a game to mirror all of these requirements. The idea is to make sure that whatever you build—be it a game or, as in my case, a social collaborative tool—incorporates some of these features into its basic model. Or at least it should be tuned to realize a few of the above mentioned user experience types. In simple words, I do not want to make a site extremely simplistic, I do not want to provide just excellent usability; instead, I want to provide a user experience. I want to make sure that every time I design a site, I keep in my mind that my users are smart. I want to give them some credit and reward them if they use my system in an innovative way I had’nt thought of before. I want them to surprise me. I do not want things to get boring very fast!
Am I on the right track here? Or is convention the only way?