The design of time-based experiences includes a number of disciplines that have roots in the arts and entertainment industry, such as animation, video, sound, and lighting design. The integration and commercial application of these artistic means in Product Experience Design, has been made possible through relatively recent breakthroughs in technology, such as high-speed networks and LED lights. The following section includes brief explorations of commercial time-based disciplines.
The two common themes to all time-based experiences are very distinct from each other:
- The first theme is handling the formation of stories and narratives, of guides and journeys that walk us through real or imaginary situations. Narratives are communication devices, meant for personal and social interaction. The ability to create narratives is an inherent human capability. It enables us to find or invent complex meaning in practically anything we want, including in products. This ability is the driving force of all artistic and design-driven creation and consumption.
Narratives take time to unfold, although they do not require suspense or a surprising end. Products that deliver education, training, guidance, or entertainment content provide opportunities for multi-sensory interfaces that use video, audio, and touch to engage the user with the material in immersive, narrative-driven experiences. Content that might be otherwise dull and difficult to process becomes entertaining, easier to understand, retain, and apply. - At the core of the second theme is survival. More broadly put, products that include features to alert the user of a change and need for action--timers, alarms, notifications, and so on. Our senses are fine-tuned to constantly monitor changes in ourselves, others, and our surroundings--physical changes in properties such as temperature, light, motion, noise, size, proximity, and so on, and emotional changes such as facial expressions and body gestures.
Sweating, shivering, knee jerks, and eye blinks are examples of our body's involuntary physical responses to change. Other responses are learned from personal experience or from following the experience of others. Either way, given the constant stream of information fed from our sensory and nervous system, we learn to normalize inputs and distinguish "normal" changes from changes that require attention and possible action. In other words, we tend to tune out and ignore events.
The challenge for product designers is how to alert the user of a current or impending change and trigger the appropriate response to the change--without causing the user to tune out of the experience.
Animation is a time-based discipline that is heavily used in Experience Design to address both narrative and alert content. It is being incorporated into the interaction experience of apps and web pages, lighting systems, car and appliance dashboards, and wearables.
In 1944, the psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel created a short film for what is considered to be a landmark experiment in psychology. In the short film, a frame of which is shown in the following figure, and which you can view on the web, we observe the movement of three geometric shapes--a small circle, a small triangle, and a large triangle. The movie has no sound track and the shapes are two-dimensional, black, over a simple white background.
In other words, it should be quite clear to the viewer that the shapes on the screen are exactly what they appear to be--lifeless objects. And yet, the movie is full of suspense and emotion. It clearly appears that the large triangle is attacking the small triangle and circle, which are united in their brave fight against the evil attacker.
As viewers, we attribute human qualities, emotions, and intentions to still objects, visuals, sounds, and even abstract shapes--an inherent human trait called anthropomorphism--which makes animation a fantastically engaging experience medium for delivering content. Similarly to video content, the user gets exposed to large amounts of information in a compact frame, and designers can organize graphics, charts, text, images, narration, music, sound effects, and user control to communicate content and deliver it as a multi-sensory experience.
As users, we take pleasure and delight from interactive interactions with products, such as gliding our hand over an object or a screen, and have the system respond, by either omitting a sequence of tones, conversation, changing colors, pulsing, glowing, shaking, and other effects. It is a basic form of dialog, using basic animation principles, which is extremely effective for creating engagement with products as alerts or confirmations of interaction.
Interaction design is a new time-based discipline that borrows heavily from animation, by integration timing principles, audio-visual effects, and narrative development concepts--core animation concepts, with interactivity, to create more engaging and meaningful experiences.
Armed with a large engagement inventory of techniques, and a research-driven understanding of the interactions they are modeling, interaction designers help transform mundane experiences. For example, wizards are task-based interactions that guide the user through a complex set of sub-tasks, such as tax preparation, insurance applications, software installation, flight reservation, and many more. Moving one screen at a time, with each screen focused on a sub-task, the user has only to provide relevant information and preferences.
While wizards are a major improvement over non-wizard approaches that require expertise, they too often result in a bad experience--users zoom through the screens without paying attention to details, or, getting lost in a tedious sequence, ending up making the wrong choice despite confirmation screens, which are also ignored.
When viewed as a concentrated form of time-based narrative, wizards can become truly engaging, keeping the users focused on each of the sub-tasks, through audio-visual animation effects. Interaction designers can also figure out how to simplify the process and when possible, completely eliminate steps that the product can perform autonomously. The result, from the user's perspective, is effortless, positive, and error-free.
The importance of time-based disciplines such as interaction design is underscored, as artificial intelligence and machine-learning usher in a generation of products that are perpetually on, monitoring whatever it is they are meant to track and performing tasks autonomously. Smart appliances and self-driving cars are contemporary examples.
Lighting design is another example of a time-based discipline that emerged through applications in architecture, theatrical, and cinematographic settings, to widespread home and commercial use. The iridescent lightbulb is being phased out by advanced LED lights, which are significantly more energy efficient, have a wide and dynamically changeable color temperature, and can be controlled by the system or remotely through a mobile app, by the user.
Light can infuse a space with unique ambiance, which complements the overall exterior or interior experience of a structure, enhancing the effect of natural light, which changes throughout the day and night. Conversely, adjustment to the color and intensity of the light can improve health by helping the body adjust to time shifts and changing conditions, such as in the design of airplane cabins, homes, office spaces, venues, or the use of LED for street lighting, as shown in preceding image.
Lighting is used to provide feedback about the operational status of a product, such as kettles with indicators that change color from blue to red as the water get warmer.
The LG LMXC23796D 23 cu. ft. InstaView™ Door-in-Door® Counter-Depth Refrigerator, for example, has a long name, but it is also an example of an ingenuous application of light-design. Knocking on the appliance door twice makes the door transparent, and the content visible without having to open the door.
Ironically, in an age where increasingly people prefer to communicate with each other over texts and emojis, we are getting increasingly more conversational with our products. Conversational interfaces are sprouting everywhere, in cars, home appliances, mobile devices, robots, and toys.
Another discipline that shapes time-driven experiences is sound design. Unique to our species is the ability to create musical compositions that can be expressed through symbolic written notations, performed with musical instruments, recorded and played back on demand. These capabilities afford us the experiences of artistic performance and commercial communication.
It was Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877, which made it possible to capture and reproduce sound and usher in a new wave of new experiences, which today is manifested in streaming music services, portable audio devices, conversational interfaces, and so on.
Sound is an incredibly important ingredient in immersive products or support systems. Companies increasingly turn to bots--algorithmic interfaces which are capable of handling independently interactive dialogs with people. To these interfaces, the tone, intensity, accent, and cadence of the artificial voice are becoming as important as the content of the conversation, because the experience of the human partner in the conversation is extremely sensitive to the slightest variances to voice quality
When Siri was first released, users had a blast trying to hold a stream of conversation with the virtual speaker, trying to trip it with nonsense questions, and delighting with smart and seemingly contextual results. But as artificial intelligence advances, the conversations are likely to become more substantial, as portrayed in Spike Jonze's 2013 movie 'Her', or Jacques Offenbach's 1880 opera 'The Tales of Hoffmann'
And so we will close this section with virtual reality design, a time-based discipline that folds into its practice all of the disciplines discussed previously, and others that the scope of this book could not let us cover.
The human imagination is the most powerful virtual machine that has ever existed. Wherever and whenever you are, you can imagine yourself and engage in any number of situations and environments that you invent, at any level of detail, regardless of whether the environment actually exists, or you have ever been there, and so on.
When combined with technology, the human imagination gives us devices such as fiction books, music, theatre, radio, movies, video games, theme parks, and other experiences. Some are more immersive than others, but the immersion is a partnership between the user and the technology--in other words, we generally allow ourselves to be swept into the virtual settings, and engage mentally with the situations.
In recent decades, the term virtual reality has become closely related to and associated with computer-generate environments that can be accessed through a special headset. The commercial promise is overwhelming, because of the ability to interact in virtual environments, but impact the real world.
For example, supermarket layouts are generally predictable, and when we frequent a particular store, location of various items become ingrained in our mind such that when we are in a hurry, we can be very efficient finding what we are after. And of course, we can identify items visually. We also know, based on the position of items, where other items might be, and so on. Shopping for produce online has been slow to pick up for a number of reasons, but among them is that the online shopping experience is much slower and inefficient than it is in the physical store.
The isles of the virtual supermarket are an example for an emerging type of immersive experience that lets the user shop a store from the comfort of their home. With a VR helmet, they can experience the physical aspects of walking the isles. For merchants and customers, virtual stores open many opportunities that are now limited by size and cost. Designers can turn shopping into an incredible adventure--why not include elements from movies, action games, and other narratives in the experience? Place the store on a tropical island or some remote universe with aliens busy shopping included.
Indeed, game designers have always been in the forefront of Experience Design. That's because when we play a game, be it a physical board game such as chess, or bubbles played on a phone, we forget about reality, as we are transformed into an imaginary space where only the game's special rules apply for the duration the game is being played. Like animation and audio-visual disciplines, game design has applications well beyond the entertainment industry in domains such as education, training, and healthcare.