Aria Danika on Flash Experience Design
 As
recently as 1999, usability expert Jakob Nielsen was waging war
against Flash designers. If you read "Designing Web Usability"
(now a bible for site architects) you'd come across page headings
like "Splash
Screens Must Die" or "Flash is 99% bad." What enraged
Nielsen was the tendency for Flash designers to create intriguing,
imaginative, interactive experiences, instead of just quick access
to information. Flash forward to today, and the tables are turning.
The spread of broadband, the ubiquity of the Flash plug-in, and
recent developments in Flash itself are generating a new demand
for Experience
Design: the art of creating interactive environments
that emotionally connect.
We
talked with ex-BBCi Flash designer and New Riders author Aria
Danika about the next phase. Wasn't this exactly why 500,000
registered Flash users got into Flash in the first place
Q: "Experience design" sounds like another great reason
to learn Flash. What
is it and how did it come about?
Aria: Experience design might be a hot field today, but it's not a
new phenomenon. It draws from a variety of disciplines in design
and new media: information design, interaction design, communication
design, and visual design. What's new is that digital design
has provided us with more tools to create new forms of interaction.
We're involving the user in ways only hinted at in platforms
such as television and theater. By allowing the user to take
an active rather than passive role, we're creating experiences
that are infinitely more engaging and interactive.
Q: Let's talk about interactivity. To me,
the phrase "experience design" suggests a user experience
that's qualitatively different from the transparent, information-driven
experience that occurs at most Web sites. Do you agree?
Aria: When developing any good user experience for the Web, it's important
to evaluate the needs of the project. Certain sites benefit
from being purely information-driven, but information-driven
doesn’t need to mean boring.
Inherently,
any good Web experience should be transparent, allowing the
user to focus on his or her goals rather than trying to learn
your interface. As long as a site's structure and method of
interaction is well thought out, the user will understand how
to use it. A good user experience is one in which the user is
focused more on your message than the fact that he or she's
using a computer to interact with your design.
Q: Still, isn't there a sense in which "experience design"
seeks to subvert the hierarchical, clear navigation protocols
of Web design?
Aria: Ooh, I like the word 'subvert'! Exploring different methods
of interaction and navigation is definitely one of the great
opportunities in a program like Flash. It's true that we've
developed some basic standards in interface design, over the
years. We use them because they work, but that doesn't necessarily
mean they are the best way to do things. In the last few years,
developers have been pretty much shackled by the constraints
of the operating system they were developing for, and so we
saw very little progress in interaction design. More people
were telling us what approaches to avoid than how to do it right.The
thing is, if you look hard enough, you will find some great
examples of non-traditional navigation schemes on the Web that
do follow clear, hierarchical navigation protocols, while at
the same time encompassing additional information or enhancing
the user experience overall.
The
other thing is that users are savvier than usability experts
give them credit for. It does users a disservice to assume they
will not be able to understand a new method of interacting with
their computer or your experience.
Q: Can you comment on the objections that
usability experts have to this design approach? (Your word in
Jakob Nielsen's ear!)
Aria: Well,
Jakob Nielsen is collaborating with Macromedia now and has become
a lot more receptive to Flash lately!
Actually,
I think you'll find that a lot of usability experts have come
to embrace Flash and modern interactive media — even Jakob Neilsen has posted some DHTML tips on useit.com.
This acceptance will increase as programs like Director and
Flash come pre-packaged with accessibility features, and as
developers begin to internalize some of these techniques and
acknowledge that they are designing for an audience larger than
themselves.
Ouch.
Bottom
line is that the two areas are converging quicker than most
people realize — the good designers who understand what is involved in creating
successful experiences have been practicing good usability all
along, and are helping define new ideas and techniques that
the usability community may not have even conceived of.
Q: Another
level of experience design is expressing the "experience"
of a real or fictional subculture through a site -- telling the
story of a particular identity, whether it's an individual or
a group. Can you talk about some examples of this?
Aria: As
I mentioned before, experience design encompasses all forms
of media and many successful, unique experiences are created
by designers who draw greatly from the videogame culture. One
example is the 'Sony Connected' identity/brand experiment (visit http://www.sonymusic.com/thelab/ConnecteD/)
created by Tomato Interactive http://www.tomato.co.uk/.
Another
example is the spread of skateboard culture — where a certain visual style is reinforced across videos, magazines,
Websites, and the actual events. In each case different forms
of media feeds into each other, pulling from a variety of subcultural
elements. It's like graffiti.
One
of the best examples of an all-encompassing user experience
I have seen recently on the Web is by team ChmAn at Banja.com
(http://www.Banja.com).
Banja is an interactive Web game produced as a series of "episodes"
with goals, but also supplemented by mini games, animated movies,
and an active community forum, all of which support the folklore
of the game and feeds back into the next chapter in the series.
Q: That's
great stuff. If you could sum it up, what is "effective"
experience design? What kind of experiential goals should a designer
seek to achieve, on a user or client end?
Aria: An
effective user experience is one that the user remembers — an experience that's sufficiently engaging and enveloping that
the user walks away feeling it was time well-spent. If a user
has learned something new or done something that he or she might
not ordinarily have been able to, then you as an experience
designer have accomplished your goal. Experience is essential
to building knowledge.
Q: How does experience design reflect cutting-edge trends in Flash
design, such as importing video into Flash?
Aria: Fundamentally,
experience design is about delivering a message or telling a
story. And so, any advances in technology which will help tell
stories (such as integrating video into Flash) are beneficial.
It's especially true in a medium like Flash, which is so accessible
and has the potential to reach a much larger audience than other
forms of interactive experiences. But first a good solid story
has to exist before a user experience can be built around it,
no matter what the technology.
Q: What kind of Web sites will evolve towards experience design,
as this new century wends its merry way forward?
Aria: Business
Web sites will become experience-based, transcending the status
of electronic brochures. Experiences will compete for the attention
of the user/audience and so will Web sites.
Attitudes
in the field will change too. There's a powerful design lobby
today that believes there is no need to create a unique, rewarding
experience on the Web — that controlling your user's browsing experience is unimportant
when delivering content online because the novelty of the medium
is good enough to attract the user in the first place. It's
just not true.
All too often, the phrase "experience design" is associated
with personal Web sites or art-school projects, when in actuality,
ad people have been telling stories to sell products for as
long as commercials and advertisements have been around. As
these designers embrace new technologies, and push the medium
even further, I think that it can only help the entire community.
This
is how online shopping might change as experience design gains
sophistication and technology and bandwidth catches up. The
Web has introduced a new way of shopping, with access to tons
of information, search features, and so on. But until very recently,
a few key aspects of the actual shopping experience were lost — customer service was almost non-existent, and text could never
live up to the tactile experience of in-person shopping. To
solve these issues, designers have come up with new methods
of engaging the user — creating stories, user experiences, rotating views and interactive
demos, feedback forums, and so forth -- new solutions to old
problems.
Q: As
a moderator at Flashkit, you interact daily with an active subset
of more than 500,000 Flash users, of all ages! What kind of developer
or person makes a good experience designer?
Aria: I
think all 500,000 of those Flash users and more are potentially
good experience designers. Basically anyone who takes the step
from passive viewer to active participant, and decides to try
their hand at creating something unique to them, can become
a great experience designer with practice.
Q: The Web might be regarded as a war between Flash and HTML. Um,
I think we know your answer, but who's gonna win, and why?
Aria: The
war in my view is over. We have successfully progressed beyond
"skip intro" aesthetics and usability debates, and
are at a point where we have a history to refer to, but also
a wide-open road to explore in the field of interactive experience
design.
Who
won? Every designer who has been inspired by previous generations
of Flash developers who innovated and dared to push the envelope.
They are the ones questioning standards and creating new user
experiences and interactive methods, which we now take for granted
in our everyday Web surfing expeditions.
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