Zen and the Art of UX Design with David Vogel @Awwwards Conference

thank you you can all hear me right yes cool thanks very much for showing up and thanks Awards for having me it's it's a pretty full house I think yesterday we were completely packed so that means that everybody's here is really committed to being here right now so thank you very much for that I'll try not to disappoint so I'm David Vogel I'm a group user experience director at AKQA Amsterdam and that's a mouthful most of you will probably have heard of akq or hopefully have heard of AKQA we're an agency we're all across the world about 2000 I never remember the stats completely we have we have a lot of age a lot of offices and a lot of people all around the world and some really interesting clients all of you will also know what UX design is but if I'm at a party and somebody says ok I'm a hairdresser I'm a designer and I'm a group user experience director at AKQA there's literally not one word in that sentence that people understand and I've and I've not really been able to articulate what it is that a UX designer does over the years also because it changes all the time but also because it is a little bit hard to explain somewhere it's a little bit like an architect and it's a little bit like a designer but at a kqa it's also very strategic discipline so you always have to launch into this long explanation as opposed to just say I'm a butcher which is so much more simple but then I've also started to realize that it's a real blessing it's it's really cool to not be able to explain what you do very well because it gives you certain freedom it means that you can change your description of what you do from time to time and you can sort of make it up on the fly a little bit and I found that I've done a lot of that over the and that's also really useful I think it was maybe just furious today somebody yesterday made the really good point that user experience design skills sort of tend to go obsolete and we have to continue to adapt and I think that is now true probably more than than ever and I'm gonna try and talk a little bit about why that is and how we might deal with it so we've had this is this is an old pretty old video actually from Microsoft they have done a number of these future vision videos and I'm really impressed with all of them because they're I don't remember how old this one is but it's it's multiple years old and it looks very it's very prescient you know it really is the aesthetic is very it really came true in many ways but at the same time what's interesting about it is that it's really about pieces of glass you know there are different pieces of glass from what we're used to were they're not necessarily all laptops and mobiles but it's very glass based it's very visual and your works used to be really about sort of wireframes and taxonomies I don't we still make some wireframes but hopefully not too many anymore and we still need to understand taxonomies but it's not information architecture is no longer the core of what a lot of UX designers do we got service design and design thinking into the next few years ago and that became really hip and it's still hip and as we saw yesterday a lot of these design thinking agencies have now been bought by bigger corporations to internalize that thinking that was Josh Booher who talked about that and then we got behavioral science neurology more of an understanding of the subconscious behaviors that people have and also the way the brain works and how that influences our behavior and then for us in turn how do we influence how do we understand that behavior to be able to influence it or to anticipate it so design UX design has really always been a this idea of having a dumb machine at one end and a smart user on the other but that paradigm is really changing it's not that we're becoming dumb but it the machine is becoming smart and there are a lot of other changes as well so we're no longer designing for these for these pieces of glass the first change is the interface our input mechanisms are changing does every is there anybody who hasn't seen this film two people haven't seen this film okay it's really worth watching it's her and it's about a near future and what's really cool about this if you work in in digital is that it's a very credible version of what that future might look like how we might interact with technology and it's and and it's basically all through voice it's it's just talking to your machine in your machine talking back to you and this scene in particular has all these people talking seemingly to themselves it's a little bit like when we all used to walk around in real life with these things on our head like Bluetooth these ridiculous Bluetooth things in your ear and for me personally I saw this and I first it felt a little bit incredible all these people talking to themselves but actually it's not about a million miles away from everybody looking at the phone screen and actually now I think it's probably really prescient and it's probably really that is probably very much like the reality in a few years time the aesthetics in the film are also really cool this kind of craft fake craft so is these handwritten letters that are actually written by a machine so this blurring of what people do and what machines do I think is really beautifully expressed in this film and it's not it's not just the the the the the idea of voice technology and interacting with the Machine through voice but there are other input mechanisms that we're discovering everybody already knows Xbox and Xbox Kinect a few years ago that was like I when those first videos came out it was called something else then it wasn't connected yet and you could move your body and the computer would respond and recognize that and that was really awesome and already we're now at a KQ I were doing a project for Intel who've basically taken that same technology and shrunk it and put it in a laptop so you can gesture to your laptop and have that same interaction same interaction patterns and what you see here in the background is probably also familiar to a lot of people project soli by Google and they've shrunk that technology down to the size of a chip this big and it's basically radar technology so you can interact in the air and you can just use virtual controls that feel that are modeled on real-world controls that they're in the air and you can control machines like that it's still in the experimental phase just that just in the same way that Kinect was a little while ago so some version of this technology is coming up very soon and we have to think about ok how do we how do we designed for that it's almost going back to these I forgot the name now what doesn't matter Apple used to be famous for can somebody help me out what is he called when a button looks like a button and a wooden thing looks like I wouldn't think skeuomorphic thank you so those principles that skeuomorphic principles in a different way are coming back again with with this topic than with technology because it's it's an analog it's mimicking an analog into interface so another interesting new way of interacting with machines is brain control this is emotive I think it's still it's in a very early phase what's cool is that after the military industry they obviously are always the first to really leverage technology and also that's where a lot of the investment comes from which maybe isn't so so nice to think about but a lot of our technology comes from thinking about how we can kill as many people as we as we possibly can but after the after the military industry the toy industry are actually really at the forefront of adopting technology that will do a lot of testing and it's interesting because they of course their audience are children and they're very critical they they they don't have any preconceptions you can't hype technology to children in the same way that you can to adults so you get some really interesting direct feedback there are for instance toys that have quite sophisticated emotional or artificial intelligence inside them like teddy bears that talk back and they talk back to you differently if you're a three-year-old than if you're a five-year-old or an eight-year-old so they're quite advanced in thinking about how to use technology and there is there are also toys that use brain control I think there's a Star Wars toys that toy that uses brain control so the toy industries is already playing around with this and in some way I mean obviously we're not going to be walking around with these big things on our head anytime soon but in some capacity these types of interfaces are coming are coming up again what do we do with that of course the medium is changing so we've had some really interesting talks yesterday already on VR and VR to me personally is incredibly fascinating and one of the reasons why it's fascinating we saw that yesterday as well is because we don't really understand yet what's going to happen Minh of those things on your head and as I'm sure many of you have you you you know how incredibly immersive it is it's it's absolutely a new experience I remember the first time I had to have one and it was that early demo the oculus rift demo with with the roller coaster and they told me to sit down on it on a stool because otherwise you do fall over and you have this thing on your head and and it's you feel it in your stomach you know it's very physical because your your body really is so primed to respond to what you see we're such visual people or visual beings that that if you see something and if you're placed in the situation and then your whole body starts to feel like you're actually in that situation just because it's so immersive on your on your head and you can see that in this video as well I saw a guy called Chris milk speak last year and he is a he's the head of verse he's a VR filmmaker he's a he's done a lot in that space he was one of the early early people and versus one of the early companies who were very active in VR and he was also responsible for this documentary in a Syrian refugee camp where you actually get to you're placed in that position of being a refugee and walking through the camp he called a VR and empathy machine which i think is a really interesting way to think about it because from the from the book all the way up to VR we've got near and nearer to experiencing what somebody else experiences and that is what empathy is all about so this idea that you can really be put in the position of another person and feel what they feel I think has massive implications for how we interact as a species and again for us as UX designers we have to think about what are the implications for us how do we design for that type of medium it's really interesting the Machine as I said used to be dumb and it's becoming increasingly smart I won't say it's come of age yet somebody yesterday said it's in its awkward teenage years in a different context but I thought it was a good description of this meymaneh fest manifest itself for the first time when we I think some of the videos in here also this one I Robot we've always thought of artificial intelligence either as a sort of a god very benevolent God or a threat something very scary something that sits outside ourselves and is smarter than us maybe that'll happen at some point I don't know maybe it won't right now certainly artificial intelligence isn't isn't like a being it doesn't have agency it doesn't have feelings yet so Kevin Kelley called what we have at the moment artificial smartness which i think is a really interesting description of it it basically it's almost like those exoskeletons for the brain in it allows us to become much better at what we are already good at and we all know this already because if you use Google Maps to walk around Paris or something if you if you're not from Paris or if you use LinkedIn to look at somebody's profile we this idea that we augment our own intelligence and our own wayfinding capacity or our social capabilities is already very much part of our culture we don't really think about it anymore but the big difference is that we always used to have to go and look for that information and now that information is coming to us and artificial intelligence is one of the things that allows that to happen so we have new technologies or new services like m4 from Microsoft Siri nests the these systems that basically anticipate our behavior and almost nudges in the right direction or provide just this the right type and the right amount of data when we need it and again that needs to be thought up somehow it we can't just leave it to the Machine we have to we have to have we have to play a role in that in that interaction so the the the the last thing is that the relationship that we have with the machine used to be very much through computers and and smaller computers like like marbles but it's now going to come through a lot of other connected devices the Internet of Things has been around as a as a term has been around for so long that everybody's or a lot of people have become very skeptical about it and I remember the the same used to apply to mobile there have been these evangelists Marvel evangelists who for years have been saying whatever 2012 is the year of mobile 2013 is the year of mobile 2014 and and at some point we were actually in that reality what it never was really the year of mobile but the reality is now that MA is is pervasive and and and there are a couple of things that made that happen the main one obviously being the the iPhone the invention of the iPhone which suddenly made mobile make sense to a lot of people and and that sort of drove adoption I think for the Internet of Things the face of it it's still very useless you could say there's very few really cool applications of the Internet of Things and and it used to be a little bit like that on mobile as well so it's easy to think Internet of Things is a bit bullshitty but I think there's one thing that really will drive the adoption of the Internet of Things or the emergence of the Internet of Things in the same way that that has happened to mobile and that is really Moore's law which is is more about computer chips but actually applies to every aspect of computing and technology in that the basically the price gets driven down and down and down and there and the capabilities go up and up and up and so there's gonna come a point in the very near future where it's pretty much as expensive to produce a product without a chip in it as it is to produce that same product with a chip in it and when that becomes ubiquitous then all of a sudden maybe it's no longer about this one device with a digital layer on top but it's more about all these devices together that create interesting new possibilities so in my view the Internet of Things and everything that it promises isn't inevitability and it's also coming very soon because the prices are going down and down and down these chips are already you know at the level of cents and we already see at AKQA that we're already developing solutions that for instance take into account mass adoption of rfid for some of our clients so it's coming and it's coming soon and we have to think about what that means for us so really all these things I try to to list all the different ways in which the way that we as UX designers think about our craft is is is under the influence of a lot of new urging technologies and things that happen in society and we have to think about what what does that mean for us so rewind back about 20 years little over 20 years even when I was young and or younger than I am now I went backpacking which is amazing everybody should do that everybody it's almost more important than going to university I think but anyway I went to Australia New Zealand Asia travelled around for a year did lots of interesting stuff this is so long ago that it was actually before the internet existed at all or probably somewhere in a lab but it wasn't a thing there was no Kindle there was no computers or no no connected computers and so I had to and I still wanted to read because I've always liked to read but with a backpack that weighs 15 kilos 15 kilos doesn't sound like a lot but if you have to carry it around it's it's ridiculously heavy so you can't bring all your books so what happens is you have these backpacker hostels that you stay in and they're full of books and if you finish your book you leave it behind you grab another one and in that way I came across this book zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by Robert and Pirsig I think a lot of you will at least know of this book and a lot of you will have read this book my copy actually looked I mean it was this edition I found this online because I lost it again I gave it to somebody else never got it back but it looked even worse than this copy it was completely torn up back cover was missing really really bad state which is really cool right it's it's really great if you have a book that's been read by a couple of hundred people before you and you understand that you know this people have really taken this book to bed with them you know carried it around in their bag it's it's been lived and it is really it's it's a great book I can really recommend it the guy who wrote it Robert Pirsig is a really interesting character a very and highly intelligent child went to university at a ridiculous early age and ran really quickly into the limitations of scientific thought and basically started to work through that and started to come up with answers and when Matt went insane so he got he went to a psychiatric hospital and this was in the I think 60s 70s had electroconvulsive therapy where they you know shoot electronic electrodes electrodes to your brain not for brain manipulation but actually to push electricity through your brain to make it better again in his case it helped he got out he wrote this book and then followed it up with another book which further expanded on this on his theory and the book is about it's it's not it's like a philosophical scientific novel and it really deals with the tension between these two these two words holism and reductionism and holism to remind you is the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts so that the whole comes ontologically first and the parts are a are are literally a part of the whole and the whole is the part should be understood through the understanding of the whole and then if you turn that on its head and say if I understand each individual component and that can help me understand the whole you're basically looking at things from a reductionist perspective so you could say that the holistic view you you try to explain the parts through the whole and in the reductionistic view you try to explain the whole through the parts that's the simplest way to think about it and this goes back many years to the you could say the founding fathers of Western intellectual thought these guys were both students of Socrates and Socrates arguably was very close to what Pirsig wanted to get to Socrates was that he didn't write anything down he was the first real philosopher but he actually lived his philosophy so philosophy in those days was was really concerned with morality morality was was in a way the Greek way of talking about what is true and what is good and what is real so Socrates was arguably very close to to a very rounded understanding of morality but he didn't write anything down he just lived it so it was up to Plato his first student and then later Aristotle who was Plato's student to try and put all that into words and Plato put that into words from a holistic perspective so Plato wrote the Republic which is about the ideal Society and so he had this idea of the good as a construct an indivisible construct something that is real and that exists almost outside of us and that we can strive for whereas Aristotle he was basically one of the first biologists he was a he was a he loved taxonomies he did a lot of creating of collections and and and so forth so he understood the world through breaking it down into its component parts and then understanding each of those component parts and then constructing reality from that and persik argue is really eloquently that this battle if you like between these two ways of thinking about it has really stood at the basis of scientific thought philosophy but also science and it's it's irreconcilable and unresolvable and that also I think drove him and and the way he tried persik tried to figure that out to madness and that's I can kind of understand that because there is something very frustrating about trying to connect with either or both of these ways of thinking at the same time so persik came up with a third idea which he called quality and quality is more closely related to Eastern scientific and philosophical thought and he tried to reconcile those eastern and western worlds through introducing this notion of quality quality he says it can't really be defined because persik says it precedes and supersedes intellectual construction of it which is a very complicated way of saying you can't really describe it but you can live it it's he says quality exists at the knife edge of experience and so it means that everybody can attain it everybody can in fact understand it and get close to it and go after it he says it's the fundamental force I need to read this off my notes the fundamental force in the universe stimulating everything from atoms to animals to evolve and incorporate ever greater levels of quality it's a really interesting way of thinking about it as something that innately drives the emergence of bigger and better versions of what ever came before it so if you think about quality and if you bring those notions back to where we started from this idea of how do we how do we deal with all these different ways in which we have to define the relationship between mean machine and and a man and woman then these three notions are really interesting to me I think for instance when you think about artificial intelligence and designing artificial intelligence you really can't talk about trying to define it anymore you can't annotate artificial intelligence you can't write it up and say if this happens then this should happen and if that happens that should happen that's the that's the whole point of of that kind of organic way of back-and-forth so you become much more like a choreographer it becomes much more like a ballet there's some independence in the execution but at the same time there you still have to set out the the lines and you have to create the narrative there's a there's a new now or at least there's a new person who's called artificial what's called artificial intelligence interaction designer I think as Anna Kelsey she's called and she works at X dot AI and she studied folklore and folklore mythology and directed theatre and she said the whole idea of creating a character and thinking very technically about the way specific words or groupings of words can make people react and respond is something I thought about all the time in college so here's an example of somebody who works as normally as an interaction designer and her background is not at all in taxonomical thinking it's it's in storytelling and it's in character creation and it's in understanding the relationships between words and meaning and interaction and behavior so the fact that somebody with a background like that is now employed to really create the first instances of artificial intelligence because AI now is primarily used for basically for low-level communication between humans and and and services or humans and computers AI or X today I make basically you could say chat BOTS or you know systems that take the first line of interaction between people and a brand or a company so that's that's that's kind of cool the way those disciplines feed into our discipline I think what it boils down to is that modern digital experiences whether we're talking about ecosystems or only channel shopping or services that enhance physical products or even internet of things like machine can machine to machine communication I think 80% of that probably happens without really involving a human at all there's a lot of chatter between machines and ultimately that should be to the benefit of the user but it doesn't really it's not really about the interaction between the user and the machine in the traditional sense so what all these things have in common is that they become that they've become too complex too really described in detail and so I think these notions that Percy introduces in zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance are really really really can help us grab ahold of that complexity so to make that a little bit more concrete some of the deliverables that we've created it at AKQA include what we call an experience flow and an experience flow really is it's really about these three components so across the top and this is not an unfamiliar way of describing experiences to a lot of you but of course the top you basically consider the experience from a holistic perspective what is the thing that we're trying to do what is the overall experience from beginning to end and how can we condense that into something that makes it really easy to understand what the point of this whole thing is and then going down you have the the reductionist part so we look at the tasks that people have to perform at each of these steps and we look at the behaviors adaptive paths had something similar and it was this doing thinking approach we've kind of evolved this idea of thinking a little bit from sort of an internal narrative into more a description of behavior and a description because a lot of behavior is subconscious and and may be irrational even so we try to anticipate that irrationality and that behavior and we try to describe that here and you can see that the ebb and flow of engagement and of emotion that we try to map there so the emotional ingredients and the rational ingredients are both key to understanding how that holistic experience can be expressed in functionality and then we turn that into a prototype so from here to there is actually one step we go straight from that explanation to something that we can start to feel because that's where the quality sits that's the knife edge of experience right it because just putting things in an illogical flow and then looking at the components doesn't necessarily get you to a great product the quality that that that ungraspable undefinable element is what brings it to life it's almost what what what makes it better and better and the nice thing about these kinds of deliverables is that it really helps with the client relationship as well so if we we always start doing this together with clients and interestingly some clients come to you with a very reductionist way of looking at their problem they basically have already written a list of functionalities that they want you to build and that's very unhelpful because having a big excel sheet with functionality doesn't really get you to a really good an interesting user experience and similarly some clients just tell you the end result it needs to be something like this and so these types of deliverables can really help us for those of for that for those people or clients or whether it's internal people or clients who really think about the holistic aspect it helps force the reductionist reductionistic thinking in there okay what are the components of that overall experience and people who come from a very reductionistic perspective you can force them to think about the overall experience through quality and again you see the the line of ebb and flow of emotion in here and then we have additional deliverables that take that even further so we could go further out and we go further in this is some examples of ecosystem maps that we use to go further out because even if we're asked to build something like an app or a specific website or a service we always have to pull out and look at what the context of that because an experience flow allows you to map one type of experience but that experience always takes place in a context and actually that experience more that often than not is very fragmented and random the way people interact with brands through digital is it's very unpredictable there are multiple multiple user journeys there multiple states multiple types of users and in order to map all those complex interactions across all these different touchpoints you need to have a different type of deliverable and so that's what we try to do with ecosystem maps and also we go deeper into the reductionist reductionistic element so after we've done an experience flow we do something called story mapping which is actually a something that we stole from somewhere else we do a lot of stealing begging and borrowing which i think is key to being a smart UX designer you shouldn't be too precious just you know if you see something cool interesting use it anyway that's by the way story mapping is a way to use something very similar like an experience flow across the top and that's the spine so that's the spine of the experience and then you can go really deep into the ribs the individual ribs and define all of the different types or the different versions of that task that sits at the top so that allows you to get much deeper in and understand the parts more but you still have the whole - - to contextualize those parts and then how do we get to quality how do we how do we safeguard quality if quality is the thing that makes that whole thing sing then we need to understand really quickly whether that quality is there so prototyping is key and not just prototyping as in making a clickable prototype but prototyping in every single way quickly sketching things using After Effects to look at micro interactions and and animations all of that is is key to understanding whether the quality is there and you can take that one step further as well and say it's not just about creating prototypes and testing those but actually if you create a product you need to allow for that product to be to have lot lots of life cycles so you need to have multiple releases you need to develop agile so that you can judge the value of your work in the context of the use of it so being able to do this in our multiple releases is key so we take actually those three concepts of holies holistic sort reductionistic sort and quality from our earliest deliverables all the way through to post-launch and i noticed a very interesting similarity between something we say at AKQA we strive for the imaginative application of art and science to create beautiful ideas products and services and persik said quality is the Buddha quality is scientific reality quality is the goal of art thank you

Channel: awwwards.

Views: 18,105

Rating: 4.8400002 out of 5

Keywords: awwwards, awwwards conference, awwwards amsterdam, ux, ux design, david vogel, talks, awwards

Id: azYtJjU8zks

Length: 36min 24sec (2184 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2016