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Experience-Enabling Design: An approach to elearning design (I) - 29 June 2006
by L. Ravi Krishnan and Venkatesh Rajamanickam
Read this article in Chinese (translated by Ying He, proofread by Christina Li).
Translated and reprinted with permission from the authors.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- What is Experience?
- Experience and elearning Design
- The Experience Disabler – Layout Thinking
- How to Design Experiences
- 1. Embrace experience as an outcome
- 2. Narrow the gap from idea to outcome
- 3. Create a shared Language
- 4. Drive constituent parts towards a total experience
- Conclusion
- References
Editor’s notes: Part one of this article includes Introduction, What is Experience?, Experience and elearning Design and The Experience Disabler – Layout Thinking.
Read the second part of this article
Abstract
This paper draws inspiration from diverse media to understand what constitutes experience. In doing so, it seeks directions for building experience into design of elearning products.
By exploring other media, one discovers that building experiences is not about doing complex things. It is about doing simple things that will impact the eventual experience.Experience is the point of emotional engagement with the consumer. Today, experience drives consumption of both products and services. Products and services—irrespective of what segment they operate in—sell experiences rather than features. To achieve this, the scope of design has to extend beyond functionality, to satisfy the experiential need.
For example, a logically well-laid building plan might fulfill a functional need but not necessarily the experiential need. The functional needs could be space, plumbing, electrical etc., and the experiential need could be privacy, character of a space, mood it evokes, ambience etc. For elearning to fit into today’s consumption, its design too needs to be crafted for experience.The paper contends that thinking only about the functional aspects of elearning hampers our experience outlook. It identifies strategies to overcome this conflict and to successfully engage today’s learners. Through a range of examples from diverse areas such as print, documentation, presentation, and elearning, the paper illustrates how deliberate attempt to think beyond mere functionality, makes an obvious difference to the experience of the output. The cues from these examples provide directions to build elearning products that are functionally sound and experientially engaging.
Keywords: Layout thinking, experience design, elearning.
INTRODUCTION
Every time we use a product or a service, we essentially consume the experience it enables. The product is not a thing. The service is not an act. They are vehicles for the experience that their designer intends to bring about. Thus, when a designer creates a sharp, safe, and well balanced cutting knife, she is not only putting metal, plastic and rubber together, but also setting the stage for an experience of pleasure of using a good tool effectively, and a feeling of skilled accomplishment, on the part of the user. In an Internet forum, an impressed guest recalls checking into Four Seasons Hotel to find TV Guide on the bed, with a bookmark placed on the current date. What appears to be an easily attainable minor detail has resulted in a disproportionately large measure of good experience and goodwill. Likewise, compelling elearning is not about navigating content, but about staging experience.
WHAT IS EXPERIENCE?
Experience is a way in which the self relates or connects emotionally to the world. Experiencing something involves a complex set of psychophysical processes: sensation, perception, apperception, cognition, affection, and sometimes conation. Added to this, is the interplay of psychosocial factors like expectations, attitudes, needs, desires, etc.
Experience plays upon the part-whole relationship. The experience of a faulty part can affect the experiencing of the whole and vice-versa. Experience can be rich or poor, depending upon the variety of senses it plays upon and the variety of meanings it can generate.
Between 1998 and 2000, leading interaction and experience designers met under the leadership of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) to discuss the nature of design responsibility in a networked economy. They concluded that design is increasingly less about creating objects and more about creating conditions that support user experiences (Davis, Meredith & Dubberly, Hugh 2001).
Creating experiences is a challenge for any industry. There was a time when market was governed by selling and buying of commodities interpreted as simple products or things to be used in a certain manner. Today, experience is the differentiator that drives the consumption of both products and services, irrespective of the segment of industry. It is experiences that are sold or bought rather than the features of a product or a service. Features acquire relevance or irrelevance based on the way they shape experience. The product is no longer a thing but a transaction that enables experience.
Creating experience is the art of emotional, behavioral and cognitive engagement with the consumer. For example, Hollywood blockbuster movies use spectacular special effects and beautiful movie stars to emotionally engage movie audience. Many movies often cross cultural and language barriers to become hugely successful at foreign markets. That is because they exploit our primitive, biological reaction to beauty, shock, fear, sexuality, desire, danger, etc.
A well-designed product such as the knife we saw earlier, offer satisfying experience at the behavioral level. Such products provide feeling of pleasure during, and a sense of accomplishment, after the use. The experience enjoyed at the cognitive level is as a result of reflective thought. However, cognitive experience does not operate in isolation, but feeds off of the emotional and the behavioral, while at the same time biasing the behavioral (Ortony, A., Norman, D. A., & Revelle, W. 2003).
EXPERIENCE AND ELEARNING DESIGN
For elearning to be successful, it needs to be crafted for experience at all the above three levels. Psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues have shown that positive experiences are critical to learning, curiosity, and creative thought. She discovered that people who felt good were more curious, better at learning, and were able to come up with creative solutions (Isen, A. M. 1993). The scope of design therefore, should extend beyond functionality to fulfill the need for experience.
The engagement that a learner has with the elearning material is spread out over time. It has implications for both the immediate mood at the time of ‘engagement’, as also, the long-term impression of the learner. Experience enablement is critical to this engagement. But experience is problematical if approached in a general way. What constitutes this experience is elusive. Its elusiveness can only be anchored in another concept ‘’Trust’’.
An elearning course can create a satisfactory experience only if it commands trustworthiness in the way it is designed, the content it presents and the user perplexity it prevents. How do I trust the elearning product when I open it? What are the cues that generate trustworthiness in those who experience the course? An experience-centric view of trustworthiness is different from a content-centric one. For example, when Phenyl is used, its strong pungent odor inspires the trust that it will kill germs. Sure, germicides can be odorless, and all pungent things need not be germicidal. But strong associations about the germicidal power of pungency are built into the experiencing body over a period of time, and deeply entrenched in the persons’ mind that any anti-germ activity is an incomplete exercise without the smell.A common mistake while working through a concept or an idea is missing out on such consistent or conflicting experiential cues that emerge during implementation. This leads to the gap between the idea and the final experience.
THE EXPERIENCE DISABLER – LAYOUT THINKING
The constraints on the designer and the expectations of the learner create a gap that is difficult to bridge. A designer thinks a great deal about what his product will be like, but the environment in which his product is consumed might change. Likewise a designer cannot control the development of expectations in the learners’ minds. The designer can only control the product.This difference often leads to a layout-experience gap. A brilliant design fails because of a failure to pay adequate attention to small but decisive details that shape the final experience. To elaborate on the point, let’s consider a parallel example from architecture and understand what it implies for elearning. A logically well-laid building plan might fulfill aesthetic and functional needs but may not necessarily fulfill the experience-needs. The needs that may be taken care of by an architect might be things like space, services, etc. But the architect might still miss on experience needs like privacy, lighting, ambience, etc.When a building-plan is thought of as a layout-plan one sets a certain standard for building-design. But when this layout is translated into experience, it can get far away from the expected standard. Design should be understood not as layout, but as the translation of layout into experience.The following is a case from an apartment complex. It illustrates the gap between the design of the building and the experience of living there.
Layout—The Promise
The apartment complex as seen from a layout perspective is well conceived and impressive too. It promises to be a quality construction, made out of quality material. The documented instances that follow establish the gap between this layout promise and the living experience.
Layout – The Experience
Stepping out
You step out to a world of conspicuous drainpipes and the collection ground. The landing place outside the lift is small and makes stepping out a delicately balanced act. Here one encounters the bluntness of functional thinking. Exiting from the lift is a transition from private place to public place. Such a transition is best if it is smooth, unlike the example here. The physical treatment of a building has to permit the possibility of a smooth transition between the different worlds of its dwellers.
Getting in
The void deck is the first contact with the building that outsiders have. Visitors can only find their way to the exact lift points by moving around through the deck. One can see here the sheer absences of structural orientation cues. Added to this, is the confusing maze of open and closed spaces and a gloomy and rugged floor to traverse while finding your way out of the confusion.
Moving about
There is a transition space between fully concrete flooring and the pathway. The protruded blocks of masonry accentuate the plausibility of tripping and getting hurt. This masonry work exists to fulfill the functional need of drainage. Such bad transitions stand justified from a functional perspective but considered from an experience perspective they are at all the wrong places, making transition from void deck to pathway very bumpy.
Moving below
There is no clear demarcation of covered and uncovered area. One may encounter unexpected water or other debris thrown from the top. One has to always negotiate the walking on the alert of such eventuality.
Looking out
Viewed from the layout perspective one is likely to conclude that each flat is independent as no common wall is shared between any two flats. The word independence has been translated to mean ‘not sharing a common wall’ which is a layout-centric interpretation. A flat that promises independent walls falls short of securing privacy of the inhabitants by permitting an unasked for mutual relationship of neighborly observation.
Walking and meeting
How people and vehicles meet is an important experience-pattern for living. In this case, what distinguishes the car zone and people zone is just the use of material – one is concrete and the other is grass with stone slabs. The pathway discourages walking with its undulating surface and edges forcing reliance upon the car-path for walking around, thereby accentuating the risk of speeding vehicles knocking someone down.
Read the second part of this article
This paper was presented in May 2004, at the Global Conference on Excellence in Education and Training, Singapore Polytechnic.
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