[IA Summit 2007] 'Tasks to Experiences' Poster
Posted Friday March 30, 2007
Getting from Tasks to Experiences: What’s Next in Interface Design
Download the Tasks to Experiences Poster (pdf file)
Description
If we look to established fields such as product or environmental design, we can draw some interesting parallels to the still maturing field of UI design. An initial focus on function gives way to better performance, usability testing and eventually differentiation on more visceral and reflective attributes. Of course, this latter focus is far less tangible and certainly subjective— it’s easier to perform a heuristic evaluation than it is to measure a product’s emotional appeal.
With rich interactions, the Social Web, and other recent web application advancements, we are reaching the point where it’s finally appropriate to discuss things like ‘joy of use’ and ‘pleasure’ in interface design. This is also the point at which we must stop designing only to support tasks and begin designing to support experiences. Unfortunately, this transition is a difficult one to get companies to invest in, except where the product is consumer facing and needs to remain competitive. I dub this difficult transition the UX grand Canyon. This is the chasm between designing to support tasks (with a focus on products and features) and designing to support experiences (focusing on people, their activities, and the context of those activities).
As a consultant, I found that Usability, Information Architecture— disciplines that help people accomplish their tasks— were relatively easy to justify. But how do business owners justify desirable experiences, especially where the application is an internal application, a portal for example?
To communicate that this is a critical next step in interface design — and and not a luxury to be marginalized — I developed two, complementary models:
The first visual takes a speculative view of how things have evolved and might evolve, tracing the evolution UI design from the early days of text only functional apps to a not so distant future where people define themselves by the software they use (as with products) and software can personalized, and assembled for use by individuals.
The second model comes at this idea from a slightly different angle, communicating the relative priority of UX . This model is a variant of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, tailored for UX, with six levels ranging from useful/functional up to meaningful (the highest level a product can achieve)
In various conversations and presentations, I have found early drafts of the models to be invaluable tools for identifying where exactly a product is in its maturity, and where it should go next. This has also been useful to illustrate that while many of the new ‘Web 2.0’ application are succeeding at creating emotional experiences, Enterprise software is still struggling with usability issues.
Awesome Poster Stephen! Wish I could have been there :( Hope to see you at MIX or Webvisions.
— Erica Apr 5, 11:33 PM
I also send you a mail, is this poster kind of like an Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) copyrighted?
I think this poster is great! It explains the almost unexplainable.
— Bojhan Apr 27, 03:12 PM