xProbes at Work: Using In-situ Experience Prototyping as Probes in Projecting and Discussing Possible Futures Daniel Fallman Umeå Institute of Design Umeå University SE-90187 Umeå, Sweden +46 90 786 7038
[email protected] ABSTRACT In this paper, we will reflect on a particular methodological technique—namely our use of in-situ experience prototyping; what we call xProbes—that has evolved in our collaboration with a large industrial company and that we believe to be potentially useful for interaction design, as xProbing can come to complement rather than replace the use field-studies using ethnographic techniques, workshops, brainstorming, scenariobuilding, and low-fi prototyping.
Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Prototyping.
General Terms Design, Prototyping, Human Factors
Keywords xProbes, experience prototyping, industrial setting
1. INTRODUCTION In an ongoing collaboration since 1999, the Design Research Group at Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, has been working together with the industrial company ABB. Around 15 different project, mostly within the area of interaction design, have been carried out so far within this cooperation, most of which have also been directly funded by ABB. The Design Research Group is a multidisciplinary design research organization that seeks to combine knowledge, competence, and practices in industrial product design with interaction design and HCI. Swedish-Swiss industrial company ABB is one of the world’s leading industrial engineering companies, focusing on effective use of electrical power and increasing industrial productivity. In this paper, we will reflect on a particular methodological technique—namely our use of in-situ experience prototyping; what we call xProbes—that has evolved in this collaboration and that we believe to be useful for interaction design. We will also discuss how xProbes come to complement (rather than replace) our use of other interaction design methods such as field-studies using ethnographic techniques, workshops, brainstorming, scenario-building, low-fi prototyping, etc. Especially, we find xProbes as a useful tool for projecting and laying out possible futures for end users through the use of an
artifact acting as a middle ground speaking as much the language of the end users as the language of the designers.
1.1 Sketching In traditional design fields, such as architecture and industrial design, sketching has long been recognized as a (not to say the) core professional skill [9]. Design theory typically separates the kind of sketching that is occurring in the early part of design and envisioned as primarily a tool for thinking and the drawings that are produced in later stages for communication and as presentation aids [14, 18]. Sketching, in the role as a tool for thinking, can be seen as the way in which the designer works out the form, appearance, and character of an artifact from fuzzy and intangible visions and concepts. Sketching cannot hence be seen simply as an externalization of ideas already in the designer’s mind, but on the contrary the way through which new ideas are shaped. In this, the sketch itself seems to take on a kind of ‘middle ground’ between the designer’s vision—the parti or ‘guiding image’ [18]—and how it becomes realized into a coherent whole, a format [3]. The discrepancy between parti and format is important, and is possibly what makes sketching such a useful instrument for the designer in that it allows simultaneous experimentation with wholes and particular details as well as with the relationship between them [3]. The materials in this way come to ‘talk back’ to the designer [33]. Sketching is thus also different modes of ‘seeing’ [14], i.e. reading and interpreting the sketch, explaining it and eventually rephrasing it, or as Stolterman puts it, sketching is about “externalizing ideas and interpreting external representations as ideas” [18, p. 14]. We argue that sketching is not just another tool for the designer, but rather a vital part of the way designers think. It is through sketching designers get to know the materials of the design situation, how they simultaneously work with the design problem and its solution. Hence, sketching in design is a process, a kind of inquiry through which the world is explored.
1.2 Prototyping in user-centered design In the areas concerned with user-centered design—including Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), Interaction Design (IxD), and other related areas and disciplines—physical, contextual, and functional prototyping techniques has a long-standing history and tradition. A ‘prototype’—in this particular use of the term, which is somewhat different from the way it has been traditionally understood in for instance industrial design—can be thought of as a representation or a mock-up of a proposed solution to a design
problem, regardless of the medium or material through which it is shaped, where its typical use is for usability evaluations conducted within an iterative design process [16]. For them, the purpose of the specific prototyping activity in each situation should decide what kind of prototype to be constructed. Houde & Hill [16] argues further that so-called ‘integration prototypes’, i.e. prototypes that combine a finalized look and feel with the technology needed to implement it and which is exposed to users in a real setting and for a real purpose, tends to be very time-consuming and expensive to build. Recently however, some have argued that combining physical, contextual, and functional prototyping techniques to generate compound prototypes can in fact be particularly useful for specific design context, such as for instance mobile and ubiquitous computing applications [1].
1.3 Experience Prototyping An explanation to the recent interest in compound prototypes is the similarly emerging focus on issues of user experience over traditional usability metrics in user-centered design. ‘User experience’ is rapidly becoming a critical issue in several research disciplines that have traditionally taken on a more cognitivistic stance in understanding the meeting between human and artifact. Unlike traditional usability, user experience denotes the holistic experience of use rather than specific aspects of a design, such as performance measures, error rate, and learning curves. Such a holistic view, ideally, thus embraces all aspects of interacting with a product, including physical, sensual, cognitive, emotional, aesthetical, and contextual issues, as well as broader concepts like fun and playability. With such a wide spectrum of meaning connected to the word experience, it is of course not surprising that there is not yet a unified theory of the role and implication of experience to design [12]. A number of recent efforts have been made in the direction of establishing a better understanding of the role of user experience in interactive systems design and for finding ways of getting at users’ experiences [2,12,17,11]. In relation to prototypes however, the argument could be that to get at the user experience of someone interacting with an artifact, designers need to paint a more holistic and full picture of the future product they want to represent in their prototype, which in turn implicitly or explicitly calls for compound prototyping techniques.
2. UNDERSTANDING USERS A common issue all kinds of user-centered design is of course that while interaction designers have a good knowledge in issues in and around interaction, the domain knowledge needed to really understand users’ needs and desires are seldom as developed. To deal with this, user-centered design has typically resided on the use of qualitative methods, such as interviews, field-studies and other ethnographically inspired techniques, and on renderings of participatory design.
2.1 Ethnographic Methods While some anthropologists used ethnographic methods to support both computer design and evaluation as early as in the 1970s, the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) has since its origin as a field in the mid-80s been especially concerned with understanding the practices of people at work and by turning this understanding into the design of novel
computer systems [4]. Early influential ethnographic studies suggested that work is carried out by individuals or groups of people acting as members of and within a social community, where their activities are locally situated, difficult to define, document, and impose in operational terms, and highly interactive to its nature [13,19,20]. Today, ethnography has become established as a useful skill in user-centered design. Many research groups as well as many software companies are employing anthropologists to take part in the development process. However, a growing numbers of nonanthropologists are also attempting to borrow ethnographic techniques. According to Dourish [6], simply adopting ethnographic techniques are however not a straightforward process: “untrained ethnographers tends to overlook things that anthropologists see as important parts of the research process. The consistency of this pattern suggests that some aspects of ethnographic fieldwork are invisible to the untrained eye. […] quasi-ethnographic work based on [misconceptions made by untrained ethnographers] is likely to be superficial and unreliable.”
2.2 Participatory Design Related to ethnography in several ways, the second way in which user-centered designers have tried to get domain-specific insight was the Participatory Design movement. It too grew out of work beginning in the early 1970s, but unlike ethnography participatory design arose primarily in Scandinavia. Since its origin, participatory design has been strongly concerned with political issues such as workplace democracy and end user involvement in the changes in working conditions. The participatory design movement argued that good systems cannot be built by designers with only limited input from users or the client’s management, and that requirement specifications and systems descriptions made directly from interviews were not very successful. But according to Ehn [7], “Improvements came when we made joint visits to interesting plants, trade shows, and vendors and had discussions with other users; when we dedicated considerably more time to learning from each other […] when we started to use design-by-doing methods and descriptions such as mockups and work organization games” (p. 117). The heritage from participatory design has made user-centered design stress four issues [15]. First, designers need to take work practice seriously, and that the current work practice has evolved in relation to a complex situation that the designer only partially understands. Second, as designers we need to be dealing with users’ concerns, treating them first and foremost as people; not as those that perform functions in a defined work role. Third, work tasks must be seen as situated action in a specific context and cannot be understood or evaluated in isolation from it. Fourth, participatory design has contributed with the recognition that work is fundamentally social and thus based on cooperation and communication. Like ethnographic techniques, the primary concept of participatory design—that it is important to design with the user, rather than to design for the user—is becoming a standard practice in the software industry.
3. OUR PREVIOUS WORK Throughout our collaboration with ABB, we have relied on use of a range of qualitative techniques in trying to come to terms with our limited domain knowledge. While the actual design goals for these efforts have varied greatly—ranging from specific physical tools; understanding and supporting different sub-cultures at a vehicle-manufacturing site; to building up an entire environment for mobile use of industrial information technology—we have used similar strategies in getting to know these different context, cultures, situations, and work practices. Primarily, we have used a mesh of on-site visits, more rigorous observational studies with note-taking, video-filming, and thinkaloud sessions, as well as different kinds of interviewing techniques. For the most part, the sites we have studied have been those of ABB’s customers, rather than ABB themselves. Since 1999, we have come to study mining companies, car and truck manufacturing companies, milk-producing factories, sawmills, pulp mills, and so on. Primarily, the end user has been our main concern for most of the projects, continuing a long-standing tradition in Scandinavian industrial design. This kind of gettingto-know work and the insights and problem areas those efforts have shed light on have also been greatly appreciated by ABB, as they as an engineering company do not have the tradition to devote neither time nor resources to do similar kinds of end user studies. While conducting these inquiries, we have been applying a range of ethnographic techniques to get at what people at these sites are actually doing, what kind of problems they have and frequently encounter, what they like and dislike about their work, what their dreams and desires are with regard to their work, etc. While some would probably regard these efforts as “quasi-ethnographic work” [6], we would argue that while that might very well be the case from for instance the perspective of anthropology, we nevertheless believe that these inquires are useful and valid for us from the perspective of design. They are not necessary for us in terms of finding specific problems to address in our designs. Rather, they provide us as designers with an immense experiential experience; a rich glimpse of what life and work is about for these people. In this process, many of our preconceptions (our respective repertoires) of suitable design solutions become challenged. Hence, for us, these inquiries rather come to play the role of inspirations for design than implications for design. At the end of the day, our use of ethnographic techniques comes to challenge our own practice (which, by the way, is a quite anthropological stance).
3.1 Going Beyond ‘Now’? While the ethnographically inspired inquiries discussed in the previous section provided inspiration for design and gave us some hints about the current work practice, a typical purpose of the many projects that we were conducting were to suggest various design solutions, often in the area of interaction design, where it was clear that it would take another five to ten years, if not more, before products of the kinds we were suggesting would actually appear and become used for production purposes. While ethnographic techniques provide insight into current issues, they do not really suggest what work and life will be like in ten
years. Hence, we needed a technique that would keep the closeness to the actual site that we were working with, but which would allow both designers and workers to project work into the future and which would allow to discuss potential future problems, issues, and opportunities as non-artificially and spontaneous as possible. While this is of course an impossible endeavor to some extent, we began to discuss and sketch ways in which people can come to experience what it would be like to use our designs in their settings, especially with regard to products and services in the area of interaction design.
4. xPROBES AT WORK We call the technique we developed for xProbes, and the use of it for ‘xProbing’. The technique itself is inspired by the ethnographic methods, methods of participatory design, sketching, and prototyping techniques discussed previously in this paper. Basically, an xProbe is an experience prototype that on the surface looks quite real and polished; more like an actual product than a prototype. The key to xProbing, and what makes it different from other prototyping techniques, is that the prototype looks ‘real’—users should be able to touch, grab, and treat an xProbe like a real product, without it breaking down or arcting strangely; they should be able to interact with it and get intelligent feedback. An xProbe thus need to look very real and polished on the surface. However, if one metaphorically looks at what happens behind the screen, the picture changes completely. Behind the screen, all kind of hacks, tricks, sticky-tape solutions, wire meshes, and unscrupulous programming should be thriving. In some sense, this connects xProbing with filmmaking: it is only what is happening in front of the camera that matters and all means available to make a scene better must be allowed. In developing xProbes, most of the work is directed towards the interface level in order to provide an authentic and deep user experience—it is knowingly not directed towards the level of implementation and infrastructure. That work comes after, but even then it is not emphasized. In fact, we often encourage quickand-dirty programming solutions over more reliable but slower approaches to save time and devote that extra time to the user experience level. This may seem to contrast the use of xProbing to the use of compound prototyping or what Houde & Hill [16] calls developing integration prototypes. We rather think of it as a further development of Houde & Hill’s notion that the purpose should guide all prototyping efforts. When they argue that integration prototypes should most often be avoided as they require too much development time, we agree to that in that time is critical in all prototyping efforts. However, when the purpose of a prototyping effort is to get at the user experience, as is the case with xProbing, we believe that if user experience is said to denote the holistic experience of use rather than specific aspects of a design—then in xProbing the we argue that the user must also be exposed to something which in fact appears as a whole, at least on the surface level. If this is not done, we believe that might be asking too much from the user.
4.1 Examples of xProbing
5. CONCLUSIONS
In this section, a few of the xProbes we have developed within our collaboration with ABB will be presented.
In this paper, we have introduced, discussed, and exemplified a particular methodological technique that we call xProbing, which we have used in several interaction design projects for industrial environments. While ethnographic techniques provide us with some insight and inspiration when it comes to current issues, we needed a technique that would keep us as close to the context but which would also allow both designers and workers to project work into the future and which would allow to discuss potential future problems, issues, and opportunities as non-artificially and spontaneous as possible.
4.1.1 Wear, Point, and Tilt
An xProbe is an experience prototype that on the surface looks more like an actual product than a prototype. However, behind the screen all kind of hacks, tricks, sticky-tape solutions, wire meshes, and unscrupulous programming are allowed to make the user experience possible. In developing xProbes, most of the work is directed towards the interface level in order to provide an authentic and deep user experience—it is knowingly not directed towards the level of implementation and infrastructure.
Figure 1: Wear, Point, and Tilt
In conclusion, while this is still early work in terms of use of xProbing methodologically, we have found them to be useful tools for projecting possible futures and discussing these futures with end users. Here, the xProbe takes on the role of an artifact acting as a middle ground, speaking as much the language of the end users as the language of the designers.
This xProbe was developed as a vision for a future mobile support system for service technicians. It is a fully functional ‘intimate computer’ which is mounted on and remains at the user’s arm at all times. Users’ main means of interaction is to physically point the device at objects in the factory setting [8].
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
4.1.2 Powerwall
Thanks to Niklas Andersson, Mike Kruzeniski, Andersson, Staffan Eriksson, and Björn Yttergren.
Mattias
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