Designing the User Experience at Autodesk

What’s a Service Anyway? New Packaging for an Old Concept, or a Game Changer?

By Kursat Ozenc

Software designers and development teams have lost the luxury of working on a single platform or device. In today’s fast-paced environment, traditional waterfall processes and long product launch cycles are gone. Within recent years, major software companies—including Autodesk, Microsoft[1], and Adobe—have moved toward service-based offerings. These take the form of monthly subscriptions and product suites covering comprehensive workflows. Many factors account for this shift, including demand from the users, competition, and protection of profit margin. The overall zeitgeist in the software industry also plays a role, with game changers such as ‘the Cloud’, mobile, and social app ecologies.

Designers and product development teams are now in a tough position. They need to respond quicker to small product level challenges while also applying far-reaching, insightful thinking across platforms, devices, and workflows. Designers and product owners need a fresh perspective that can address both particular and systemic design challenges at the same time. That fresh perspective can be service design, which combines design, business, and development lenses. This two-part post will uncover service design, and make a humble suggestion for product teams to reconsider what a software ‘product’ might mean in this new era. We will also examine how designers might address mobile, social, and cloud-related design challenges more effectively.

Service design (SD) is an interdisciplinary field that aims to deliver service interfaces that are usable, useful, and desirable to the users, while also being efficient, effective, and distinctive to the suppliers (Mager, 2009.) In the past decade, interest in SD among designers has been noteworthy, including organizations such as www.service-design-network.org, as well as personal blogs such as www.servicedesigntools.org, designforservice.wordpress.com, and design4services.com. SD can be seen as a T-shape discipline that addresses both systems- and product-level challenges. Service designers approach a service problem as a drama with beginning, middle, and end phases. They also frame front and back stages of the business as design challenges. Finally, service designers bring a holistic perspective that considers both single touch-points, and the overall journey of a user engaged with the service.

Sample coffee shop service with journey map and touch points

SD methods are real mash-ups, taking best practices from different design disciplines including interaction, graphic, and industrial design. The most distinctive methods, however, are mapping and enactment. Mapping of journeys, relationships, and stakeholders allows exploration of system level interactions, whereas enactment methods such as experience prototyping and role enactment reveal the product level interactions and service moments.

In characterizing service design thinking, Stickdorn suggests user-centeredness, co-creation, sequencing, evidencing, and being holistic as the five principles of the discipline. Among these principles, sequencing means designing all the steps that a user might take while using the service, which can be developed through using journey maps, role-enactments, and scripts. Evidencing means defining the intangible delivery of the service through offerings, such as a coffee-latte for a coffee shop. Engine, a service design consultancy, similarly put value, systems, journeys, people, and propositions as the five fundamentals of service design. Journeys are similar to sequencing: the path that the user takes to form her experience. Proposition is the distinctiveness and desirability that a service can offer to the user, such as a preference for coffee shop A over B.

In software design, it’s easy to relate current design practices to user-centeredness. What user-centeredness means in our hyper-connected world is another story. In parallel with advancements in computation, the way people access, create, and use information has changed dramatically. These changes affect not only people’s tools and resources, but also their habits around technology use. People become real jugglers, wearing many hats at once, curating their product wardrobes based on emerging needs and desires. One workflow per product is not the case anymore. To unlock this dynamic challenge, other principles become handy, mapping peoples’ prospective journeys and creating offerings, value, and propositions accordingly.

The strength of SD lies in its ability to capture both the system-level and product-level challenges. Aforementioned principles blend both abstract, intangible wholes and concrete, tangible parts of a service. The next post will take these principles and apply them as lenses to inform the design of software. Situating service design in a cloud-computing and cross-platform SaaS context will demonstrate how the manifestations of these principles can inform the design endeavor.

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[1]
http://www.kuow.org/post/microsoft-launches-new-office-subscription-service

 

Navigation is information in context

By Kursat Ozenc

Having laid out the main influencers in navigation design, how then can designers create smooth navigation controls in spatially-based software?  Depending on the complexity of the design brief, designers can embrace these influencers without marrying one in particular, instead synthesizing navigation features and behaviors based on their priorities.

How do you as a designer form priorities and act accordingly?

• Do your homework: know your audience and their contextual needs, and discover which navigation mode is priority: egocentric, exocentric, or both. What are the contextual needs? Are your users office-bound, or are they usually mobile and in the field? Do they navigate for the sake of navigation, or is navigation just one step in another task? Are they shortcut-savvy power users, or do they come from all walks of life? Do they need a first person egocentric view, a global exocentric view, or both? Which modes of navigation do they want: look at, walk, drive, or fly over? Do they want to navigate through an object, an area or global world? These questions can be taken as guide posts to help you strategize and determine your priorities.

• Hybrid is the new norm in design. Designers should consider a design that will work across platforms and devices, which means a curated navigation framework rather than a one-type-fits-all approach. Curating is different than blind consistency; it means being sensitive to the specified platform or device context. Delivering the same interaction on both tablet and desktop may not make sense, since they have different affordances. Disruptive technologies such as gesture or other novel input devices are a critical influencer for forming these hybrid designs.

• Navigation means information in context. People navigate in order to get informed, or to inform others with different goals. The value proposition of way-finding is to get location information. For leisure, it’s to get information to progress in the game setting. For engineering, it’s to inform the designer so that she can better design an object, and for creative production it is to present and convey an idea in an editorial setting. From a broader perspective, navigation design is about creating affordances for intuitive, flexible, yet structured paths for the end user to reach and consume information. This idea should bring an information architect’s mindset to the navigation problem, which is to create a framework or skeleton for the navigation flow before thinking about specific features or controls.

• Designers need to create or use already-formed navigation patterns to simulate a smooth flowing experience. What do patterns provide? Patterns address felt-life experience by leveraging the user’s memory and cumulative experience.  Patterns are also an embodiment of best practices where the designer can cherry pick snippets of best flow, behavior, and controls. However, current state-of-the-art products lack good explicit navigation pattern libraries, leaving designers to try to deduce patterns by observing the products in action. One drawback of patterns might be the inflexibility that they bring to the table when non-traditional influencers are at play, like disruptive technologies, gamification, or reverse webification. At this point, it is the designer’s call to break the pattern, especially when these new influencers are necessary to provide the best user experience.

• Finally, designers need to think of the quality of the navigation experience. What gamification or reverse webification shows us is that creating playful, light-weight, straightforward products is a way to reach quality. To achieve this quality goal, designers can leverage game-like or web-like experiences and deploy them in the navigation design. 

In designing navigation challenges, designers should be aware of the main influencers that are at stake, namely gamification, reverse webification, disruptive technologies, and felt-life experience. To effectively manage or make sense of these influencers, designers need to act strategically and prioritize what’s important for their users. To do that, they need to dive deeply into understanding their target audience and that audience’s contextual needs. Designers need to think hybrid, drawing on a constellation of experiences, instead of trying to provide a one-size-fits-all solution. They need to rethink what navigation is in terms of information in context. The designer should leverage design patterns to use felt-life experience and best practices in the field. However, designers should also be cautious, but perhaps brave enough to challenge established patterns to address disruptive technology influencers. Finally, designers need to think of creating a quality experience that will provide a working flow while the user is in action.

Navigation, not the same old story

By Kursat Ozenc

Navigation in software products usually has two meanings: one being 'to move around software’s mental space', and the other 'to get around spatially-based software’s two or three dimensional world'. Navigation in mental space means easy access to architectural pathways such as menus, functions, etc., whereas the latter means traveling in a spatial ‘world-like’ or virtual representation. In this article, I will focus on navigation in a 2 or 3 dimensional space and sketch out the main paradigms shaping today’s navigation design.

Reflecting on state-of-the-art frameworks, products, and applications, one can discover four influencers in current navigation design efforts:

1. Gamification: ‘Gamification’ means providing a game-like experience in other domains. In 3D modeling software, this means adapting navigation tools from the game domain to enhance the user experience. Most games offer a spatial journey to their users, which usually requires extensive navigation controls, whether it be a 1^st person or 3^rd person game. The advantage of gamification is the playful, engaging experiences it can provide; the disadvantage is the potential for misuse of gaming metaphors without proper justification.  
   
   
2. Reverse Webification: ‘Webification’ refers to the simplification of a software feature to make it suitable for a web context. However, in recent years, with the ubiquity of map applications over web and mobile, software designers are looking at these simpler navigation controls for inspiration or adaptation. An advantage of reverse webification is ease of use, but with the risk of oversimplification of tasks that need a more complex interactive behavior.
   
   
3. Disruptive technologies (Mobile, Gestures, and sensors) Disruptive technologies have had a tremendous effect on navigation design. With the widespread use of tablets, touch and location-aware interfaces, navigation design gained new traction towards its long-awaited promise of augmented reality, or ‘immersive’ experience. Tablet/mobile apps now give users built-in navigation metaphors. Think of an iPad with a motion sensor, or a mobile app using image recognition software. In both, navigation design becomes more like real life (and therefore intuitive) rather than virtual and metaphorical. This provides both advantages and challenges for designers. One advantage is the ability to create simple, powerful interactions that don’t tax the mental and financial bandwidth of your user. For example, imagine an augmented reality app that uses motion and image recognition technologies with very little user input or guidance required. One disadvantage is the ’halo effect‘ of these disruptive technologies, which can lead to over-expectation from your users.  For example, they might ask for a holographic navigation control because they have seen that technology in a recent Hollywood movie.
   
   
4. Felt-life experience & Metaphors Designers always face the paradox of creating new solutions while maintaining old conventions. Along these lines, felt-life experience plays an important role in defining the amount of novelty required. Felt-life experience means two things. First, the user’s built-in capabilities and their perception of affordances, in the context of navigation. This means up and down, left and right perceptions, which are also called direction metaphors. Felt-life experience also means the sum of all the user’s experiences with other products available to them. The advantage of felt-life experience is the designer’s ability to be one of their own users, and empathize with them through research and role-playing. The disadvantage of too much reliance on felt-life experience would be a tendency to inflexibility where a novel behavior is needed.

What do these influencers mean for navigation design in the context of product development? Navigation is used in an array of domains including map-based products, 3d modeling and animation software, geographical positioning devices, and games. Given the richness of these domains, these influencers can help designers find creative navigation solutions for the creative arts, engineering, entertainment, and way-finding. The designer’s role in creating new ways of navigating is also constrained by other inside factors, such as legacy code inside a product, stakeholder expectations, industry standards, etc.  To effectively deliver a navigation design that can add value to a product, designers need to pay attention to these influencers in the design process. In a way, all these influencers are expectations from different stakeholders, and mainly from end users. In my next post, I will focus on users through the lens of their main influencers.