“If you really don’t want to share….DONT PUT IT ON THE NET!”

I am not a technological determinist, but we are crazy if we don’t realize that there is a lot of pressure to put things on the Internet. And we can’t just blame people for being uninformed. People do it because they don’t feel like they have much of a choice due to the impending social pressures of being “on Facebook.” Of course they do have a choice, just like how we have a choice not to fill out every single field when we create one of our hundreds of profiles in the digital sphere. But there are a lot of people who happily fill out every single field, unknowingly giving away lots of information that they don’t have to, because that is what the interface is telling them that it wants. Of course we should try to inform ourselves about these things, but we can’t really expect every person to become “Facebook literate.”

Think back to filling out doctor’s forms when they used to be on paper. Their officialness and connection to our personal health told us that we should fill out every box and not skip anything. In remediating the fill-in-the-blank form onto the computer screen, many people still feel the same way when they are presented with things to fill out on profiles. I can’t tell you how many people I have seen fill out every field when they created a profile for Skype, MySpace, Facebook, etc. Sometimes they go back and eliminate things from the profile, paring it down because they wished they hadn’t included some of that information, but not everyone does this and sometimes it is too late anyway.

We should stop blaming people for being “stupid enough to put things on the Internet that they don’t want known” and acknowledge the role that the design of the interaction itself plays in this. We have finally gotten away from interactions that force people to provide information by at least allowing people to opt out (even if this is still poorly done with an asterisk or a buried drop-down menu somewhere). However, interactions as simple as filling out fields in profiles or engaging with a variety of interactions on Facebook are still telling people that they should provide the information. As designers it is our responsibility to critique and question this status quo – and stop assuming that filling that database with as much discreet information as possible is in some way adding value to how people experience technology.

Ultimately, the profile fill-in-the-blanks is just one example out of many where we blame users for making bad decisions, when the design itself was telling them that it was ok to do so. It is like putting an “OPEN” sign on a locked door, and then blaming the person after they bumped into it when it didn’t open.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not angry because I am naive about virtual worlds and their economies. As matter of fact I am fascinated by real money trade in virtual worlds, and I understand economics well enough to see that real money trade is not only an inevitable facet of virtual worlds, but is in some ways a beneficial one. Having attended Indiana University, I have even had the pleasure of sitting down with Edward Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, and who was mentioned several times in Dibbell’s book. And I agree with both of those guys that the production and trade of virtual goods should be viewed more seriously as a legitimate economy. However, because of this I also think that people who hack and exploit code in order to make money should face harsher consequences that just having an account banned.

But when it comes to this book I am disappointed in Julian Dibbell. Sure, he spent a lot of time learning a lot of very interesting things about virtual economies and working to shine a light on the whole phenomenon. Now I am not trying to crucify Dibbell here, and if he ever reads this I don’t mean for this to sound offensive towards him. But during his self-experiment with learning to make money in Ultima Online, he made partnerships and deals with dishonest people, and engaged in activities that negatively affected a lot of people – glorifying them for reasons I can’t understand. The fact is, for all the heralding of this grand new virtual space where currencies and economies are more democratic and we inch closer to bridging the digital divide – the people who end up at the top of the food chain do so by breaking the rules and negatively affecting other people’s experience. When I say rules, I am not talking about “user agreements” – we all know that the logic and fairness of these are shaky at best. I am talking about real money traders who hack the code, exploit unintended game mechanics, and run bots to create their product.

Dibbell even mentions that virtual world economies don’t work on the same rules of supply and demand that “real world” economies do. However, the main reason for this isn’t because of some new branch of economics that the world has been blessed with now that technology has given us virtual worlds – it is because of people who break the integrity of the game world for their own monetary gain. What would we do in the “real world” if someone actually figured out a way to turn lead into gold? I bet we wouldn’t let them set up a website and hire young people in China to dig up lead for them.

And this is the main reason why I will never play MMORPGs again: Currently, real money trading ruins the integrity of the game space. I remember back when I played Final Fantasy XI, and my friend and I loved going around and farming for resources to sell on the in-game auction house. However, because the real money traders in the game had so successfully figured out how to generate income they inflated the economy to a point where it took us months to farm enough money to buy the items we needed to proceed. We couldn’t hunt a monster or farm for resources without running into gold-farming bots. I don’t mind if someone is making money off of the game, but when gold farming bots are preventing players from making any money in the game, that is wrong. When a gold-selling company holds 90% of a virtual economy’s currency, that is wrong. When players must compete with trained employees of gold-farming companies who don’t care about interfering with the game experience, that is wrong.

I know the gaming industry is concerned about this stuff, but I don’t think they are nearly concerned enough. The websites that sell gold, items, and accounts only make money by exploiting things in the game to the detriment of the game economy and the experience of people who actually want to play the game and interact with other players. The mafia-style business antics detailed in Dibbell’s book loom on the horizon, providing a very disenchanting vision of the future of our digital lives. It will be interesting to see if eventually the IRS, law enforcement agencies, and the game companies that provide these games will start treating the trade of virtual goods seriously – and criminalize resource production methods that disrupt the integrity of the game space.

It has taken me a long time to figure out what I think about Facebook, and I have read enough articles to make me yearn for a nice 20-page End User License Agreement. In this post I will respond to the Schrage article from my perspective as a human-centered designer, in the hopes of shining a light on why Facebook never seems to get it right.

For many people, Facebook represents the way they define their lives, and I mean that to be as profound as it sounds. Because of this, Facebook should seek to cultivate a better understanding of society and culture – Facebook as a social space in 2010 is a far cry from its origins in 2003′s Facemash. I may be wrong, but it seems that Facebook understands people and culture with all the nuance of a 19 year-old Mark Zuckerberg illegally accessing student information and photos in order to evaluate students based on if they were “good-looking.”

I don’t mean to suggest that Mark or Facebook haven’t matured since then, but I do think that Schrage’s response conveys a Facebook that doesn’t acknowledge its social and civic responsibility. It is absolutely true that Facebook has created a social space that adds a lot of value to people lives, but it is clear that the service and company still have a lot of growing up to do. One might make the case that Facebook has no responsibility to “do the right thing,” however that is not the message that Schrage delivered. Not to mention that a non-attempt to do the “right thing” is essentially a conscious choice to do the wrong thing.

I think the first step is to stop assuming so many things about people based on “user data” and “user activity.” It is good that they care about their users, but they seem to only see them as “users of Facebook” instead of individual people. No amount of digital data in the world will tell you why someone “liked” something, it will only tell you that they clicked a button. No amount of options, drop-down menus, or “Facebook Site Governance Pages” will provide the transparency and user-centeredness that Schrage claims to have.

Here are a few suggestions that I think would work, although this is hardly an all-encompassing solution. They should 1) bring in some designers who are trained in real empathic research methods (not just developers and graphic designers), 2) allow them to carry out qualitative and quantitative research about users, culture, and society, and 3) actually incorporate the findings about what people as a culture (not just users) care about into a long-term plan to make Facebook a social space that enhances our lives instead of complicating them.

Also, here is the poster for my final design:

WoW Capture: HCI/d Master's Capstone

“If you consider Human Computer Interaction Design to be “designing the relationship between humans and technology, then to do it well you need nothing less than an understanding of the depths and expanses of the human condition, and the ability to work in situations of co-creation. To understand the human condition you need to understand experience, language, culture, and emotion. To understand co-creation you have to understand how to enable, educate, and empower others to design.”

“When attempting to teach someone something new, it is better to say “We aren’t here to change you, but to challenge you.”

“The principles of design thinking are the keys to organizations solving problems that arise from disruptions.”

Interaction Design is about:

• thinking critically
• making something from nothing
• getting stakeholders to evaluate their own risks and goals
• focusing on people, understanding them while you navigate the process and learn how to listen
• knowing your process, making it transparent, and creating a situation in which everyone takes part
• designing for the user to promote inward-facing dialog in the organization

Here are 3 different levels of what human-centered design could mean, each of which is important:

• looking to the user for inspiration of design instead of the technology
• looking to the user for the evaluation of good design, usability, and “rightness”
• cultural theory and cultural critique methods to “humanize” the process

“HCI/d relies on understanding people. You can’t design or do anything of value unless you understand people first. Get the right design before you get the design right.”

That was actually quite enlightening for me to put all that here. I think I actually synthesized a bit for myself. And I got some Twitter fodder.

“Some people read books, some write or share their experience or thoughts on blogs or by simply reading some famous author’s blogs to upgrade their knowledge. Share your most preferred blogs or books to improve and update latest trends on User experience.”

This is a common question to find on LinkedIn or on forums like IXDA. However, I typically find that these are the wrong kind of questions to ask, especially since the question is concerned with “the latest trends.” Also, responders almost always view user experience or interaction design as web design, software usability, or graphic design (a dilemma that isn’t likely to go away anytime soon). Indeed it does include these things, but I feel to do it well one must take a broader perspective of what it means to design technology. In any case, I thought my response to this question was decent, so I decided to re-work it here.

I am about to graduate with a master’s degree in HCI/d from Indiana University, and from what I have learned during my education, work, and research is that the key is to first define what you mean by “experience” and “design.” Admittedly this is a bit biased by my education, but without evaluating how you are defining these two words, it is easy to be at the whim of whatever flavor of design that IXDA or boxesandarrows is tossing around at the moment. There is a lot to read or listen to with regards to both of these concepts, and the definitions of the two could fit on a spectrum with “build a GUI interface in Photoshop” on one end, and “understand the fundamental components of what it means to be a human being” on the other.

For me, I view experience as holistic, all encompassing of culture, language, and people. Design I view both something fundamental to being human, as well as a way of approaching complex problems. It is something that when understood can be a powerful tool for creating meaningful works.

To be a good interaction designer, you need to be able to navigate multiple perspectives, and walk the philosophical line between natural science and social science. And it isn’t easy. If I have to point out some people to read, then Jon Kolko’s Thoughts on Interaction Design, Bill Buxton, and Elizabeth Churchill are a few good reads for a rounded intro to interaction design. Erik Stolterman and Elliot Eisner are perhaps my favorites for design in general. For understanding experience, I recommend Heideggar, Gadamer, and McCarthy & Wright.

But ultimately, it isn’t the reading or the fancy philosophy talk that leads to understanding. Reading can help us to fine-tune our perspectives and the lenses that we see through. It is up to us to put our knowledge to practical use, because only in doing do we truly start to understand.

So how does someone improve or update their knowledge on user experience design? Read anything that blows your hair back, but don’t think that you can passively take it in and “gain” the knowledge you need. Start with yourself. Learn to think beyond yourself, don’t be at the whim of trends, and be humble. Then get out there, practice designing, and be reflective about it.

Most designs are the result of a process of co-design, involving several stakeholders and people directly involved in the creation of something. In this process, there is a constant state of exchange between the people involved. Effective communication is important at all stages, but this isn’t easy to accomplish. There are many things to consider, including the different roles, perspectives, and communication skills of people, as well as how we even might measure what “effective” communication looks like.

I have been trying to work through some of this in the hopes that I might define what “effective” means in this context, and in the process become a better communicator myself. I believe to understand this we must start with some basic premises:

Communication exists between two parties, and this communication is done via give and take, or for the purposes of this post, via “talking” and “listening.” In describing them this way, I should be clear that I do not mean them in only the physical sense of the words. I also mean them in the metaphorical, or abstract sense of the words. For instance, a picture can “talk to me” because it conveys messages to me. Following from this, I can also “listen to the picture” by paying attention well enough and being equipped with the ability to interpret its message.

All throughout the design process, whether showing sketches to other designers, listening to a user tell a story about an experience they had with a piece of software, or looking at a programmer’s model of the system, everyone employs various methods and tools of communication. We do this whether we are trying to communicate an idea to someone else or to ourselves, or form ideas with someone else or with ourselves. This could be thought of as perhaps either describing the idea or forming the idea, which arguably are inseparable from each other since in describing the idea we also give form to it. In this the act of communication is simultaneously an act of generation and communication. We do this with words, pictures, diagrams, etc. Often this is called a sketch.

A semiotic perspective tells us that basically anything of these things we use in the design process to communicate ideas or value to others could be seen as a “sign” or “text”. Each representation is made up of other signs, connotations, and embedded values that need to be interpreted by others. Everyone in the process brings with them their own life experiences that provides them with unique perspectives and understandings. This is why communication is so vital to the process, because we all have different pictures in our heads about what the design is and what direction or form it should take.

It is here that I think I may have hit on the most important thing to consider when it comes to communication. We are all individual people with individual life experiences. If we understand this to be true, then we understand that every perspective on an issue is valid. This is different than truth. In communication, truth is a matter of subjectivity, and in order to effectively communicate one must accept that everyone’s perspective is a valid perspective to have.

We can disagree and we can discuss, and indeed we should. However, disagreements and discussions are much more likely to bear fruit if everyone recognizes the validity of others’ perspectives on the issue. I believe that this is what makes a person able to truly “listen” to what another person is saying, whether they are saying it with words, pictures, diagrams, silence, etc. So when a “non-designer” (what does that even mean?) comes to me, I won’t dismiss their input because they haven’t been trained to think like I do. When a programmer questions my design, I won’t see it as a hurdle, I will work to explain it so that we both understand it better. When someone tells me they don’t understand why I did something I won’t play the “I-am-the-designer-so-I-know-better” card.

How will I do this? First, I will work to create an atmosphere of co-creation in which everyone is involved in the design, not just people with the word “Designer” in their title. Second, I will recognize that everyone has valid input – and work to understand that point of view so that we can have exchanges instead of arguments.

I am a design-thinker before I am a designer. I don’t come with design-baggage.

That being said, I now present a brief overview of my capstone project and some of the theoretical stuff informing it.

INTRO
This project seeks to design a system that preserve the experience of virtual worlds, in this case World of Warcraft outside of the through the use of screenshots and metadata. The design aims to give players some out-of-game representation of their experience in the game.

By providing players with a persistent, meaningful representation of their time investment, the design will address issues in MMORPG design and with human-computer interaction design. First, it address the three issues outlined here in a human-centered way. Second, it will enhance the entertainment value of MMORPGs by suggesting new ways to understand and design for the “goals” of the game. This could be especially important for aging games like World of Warcraft, where the company wants to provide new experiences for old players and bring in new players, but the majority of players are only concerned with “end game” content. Third, it could attract an even more diverse player base to MMORPGs by focusing on less-emphasized groups, mainly those that might be labeled as “casual” or “atypical” players. Finally, in a broader sense this project will help initiate a sorely needed conversation between the field of human-computer interaction design and the are of MMORPG design.

Some o’ that academic-y stuff

Persistence and Ephemerality
The main source of inspiration for this design project comes from Lindtner and Nardi who discuss “possibilities for new design spaces and forms of interaction with digital media” with regards to persistence and ephemerality. The main argument of my design thus far, and the main argument of this paper are one and the same. It is summed up best by the authors of the paper:

“Ephemeral conversations are beneficial to highlighting certain specific artifacts and making them more meaningful in everyday use…A common characterization of persistent conversation is that it facilitates reflection and recontextualization of past and remote activities, leaving traces for later use.”

Artifacts that help World of Warcraft players to reflect and recontexualize their past and ongoing experiences could provide more meaningful gameplay and social experiences. The authors described several ways in which people use persistent artifacts to represent parts of the ephemeral experience, and even provide an example of how World of Warcraft does this with the Armory. The game experience of World of Warcraft is ephemeral, and there is much more design work to be done to create artifacts that capture this is a meaningful way. However, one of the challenges of doing this well is due to the sheer volume of data that is collected by digital systems and media. As the authors put it: isn’t easy to “weave the ephemeral and the persistent.”

A key issue and opportunity in designing for spaces like World of Warcraft comes about because “digital media often afford large quantities of data, but without making transparent to the user how to highlight values and meanings of the data.” This stands in stark contrast to the ways in which people typically make meaning of their experiences.

The example given of the World of Warcraft Armory shows one way that the game designers use data to represent the game experience. However, this artifact reduces the player to a representation of statistics and armor, which while useful and meaningful in certain ways to players is not a robust representation of other types of meaning.

World of Warcraft as a Cultural Interface
Manovich’s concept of “cultural interfaces” is important to World of Warcraft when you consider that players spend a lot of time in the game world. From my own experience playing MMORPGs, my friendship with several players, and interviews I have found that play times vary greatly, ranging from 10 – 30 hours usually but can often exceed 30. This doesn’t even account for the additional time spent on the screen interacting with other World of Warcraft spaces such as guild and game forums and various other informational resources.

Tyler Pace, using Nakamura’s concept of cybertypes found that embedded values in World of Warcaft races are often facilitating negative connotations on non-white races. He even found that players themselves associate real life races with virtual races, often times with negative results. Another example of how World of Warcraft is embedded with cultural data comes from the participants in one of Lindtner et als’ study of World of Warcraft players in China. In this study, a player in China stated that he “learned several things from about the West…their dragons are different than ours. Western dragons are evil while Chinese dragons stand for happiness.”

These are just two examples of the many levels of embedded cultural data in World of Warcraft, which has been further investigated by Pace and others authors. Game designers have already become aware of some of the obvious negative connotations and have made changes, most notably how the image of a skeleton was replaced with a tombstone for Chinese players whose character dies.

Transmedia
Particularly relevant to an understanding of this space comes from Jen Terrell’s synthesis of “transmedia” using the work of several new media authors. In the following I take her synthesis as inspiration and describe its relevance to World of Warcraft and to my particular capstone design direction.

Henry Jenkins uses the term “transmedia storytelling” to discuss the way narratives are constructed across several types of media. He states, “A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole.” This is especially applicable to online spaces like World of Warcraft, where meaning is constructed via the game, the self-selected groups of players, and the various online sources used to share advice, stories, and other forms of information about the game and game culture. Transmediated worlds across multiple online and offline media and conversations, and while at times are virtual, their “virtualness” is just as “real” as the offline, geographically-defined world.

Another important concept from Jenkins that will be explored in my exemplar study is the notion of “textual poachers.” Jenkins argues that in the process of appropriating texts fans cease to be passive consumers and become active producers of texts and of new understandings of old texts. When World of Warcraft players create artifacts such as fan fiction, art, videos, costumes, etc. they are actively continuing the narratives they have appropriated, and are creating new narratives. Dena says that in games like World of Warcraft players create the actual game content themselves as they fill in gaps that are intentionally left by the original textual authors, in this case the game designers.

Terrell says that “The way that fans are able to move from consumer toward producer is through interaction with texts, technology and each other. Interactivity is a vital part of this transition – it is the interaction itself, the appropriation of media texts and the act of sharing newly produced texts that empower a fan. The empowerment of fans, and by extension cultural producers in general, is a crucial component in the transition from passive consumer to active producer.”

I take this as meaning that essentially if we want to design good stuff for World of Warcraft, it needs to enable players to make their own meanings and produce texts. This subsequently leads to the understanding that navigation through new media requires complex media and technological literacy. Apperley says that “Transmedia storytelling suggests a new kind of literacy, which does not only involve the knowledge of multiple media forms but also [of] the integration of media from these disparate sources.”

Moving Forward
In summary, these three main categories of research helped inform other literature that has been and will be examined as well as a general design direction. If I can design something that uses the volume of digital information that represents the ephemerality of World of Warcraft in a persistent way I can help players reflect and create their own meaning, perhaps helping them to address or make explicit the issues of transcoding and cybertypes. Additionally I can draw inspiration from new media theory, particularly notions of empowering World of Warcraft players to construct transmedia narratives and subsequently new meaningful interactions.

This reminds me of all of the pregnancy ads I have gotten when my girlfriend calls me “baby” in an email. Thanks, Google. Your short-sighted view of what the Internet can be has created a situation in which we all either are forced to deal with the shockingly horrid “context-aware” advertising that reduces the subtlety and complexity of language to a pathetic hackjob of irrelevent and sometimes insulting drivel, or we can self-edit ourselves. Either way we lose, and so do you.

In systems of language, the meaning of words comes from the other words and concepts we associate with them. What happens to our language and methods of expressions when all of our words become predominantly associated with organizations that can pay to have a word associated with them? Take a word like “progress” for example. Type this in Google Search and you get Progress Lighting, Progress Software, and Progress Energy. In GMail you might get ads for Progressive Insurance or any other number of businesses who have chosen to create a brand for themselves based on the concept of “progress,” which is to move forward in a positive way.

Are we headed towards a future where our language is entirely constructed of meanings defined by companies and businesses? I could be argued that we are already there. And I don’t know what the solution is.

End of rant. For now.