HCI VISTAS, VOLUME-I, 2006-2007

 

User Inexperience Design

 

Dr. Dinesh S. Katre

Article INS-6./July 2006
My previous article The Paradox of User Experience Design, mentions that 'absence of any experience, while meeting all the objectives effortlessly, can be the ultimate measure for usability'. It invoked interesting reactions from many readers. Therefore, I thought of elaborating this concept further for clarity. Both 'user experience' and 'user inexperience' are important. There is no doubt about it. Both need consideration for the totality of design. User Inexperience Design (UIX) will be stimulating to UX designers and technology developers both.
 
User Experience Design makes sense when you look at products and its operational procedure from the viewpoint of multimedia designers and marketing professionals. It provides them good scope to contribute. But the technologists tend to be more on the side of User Inexperience Design. For them it is most important to build technologies that are fast, intelligent and almost invisible. Donald Norman has already written a wonderful book 'Invisible Computer', which basically focuses on fulfilling the user goals. He says, I don't care whether it is computer hardware or software or whatever. As a user he is least interested in the process or the device but the goals.
User Inexperience Design plays an important and at times undesirable role. There are many examples of it- 
 
* The doctor tells that the advanced operative technique does not let you feel any pain or experience the surgery.
* Internet and Mobile telephony has also erased the experience of distance, geographic boundaries and separation.

* With electronic equity transactions (buying and selling) the experiential aspects are lost.

* Washing machines have almost erased the experience of conventional washing and drying of cloths.

* Searching on Internet produces results without exposing you to the processes and complexities of the Internet.
* With e-commerce the tactile experience of currency is lost.
* Digital photography has erased the experience of film photography (e.g. the smell of chemicals used for film development).
* The ubiquitous applications e.g., the vegetable tray of your refrigerator would sense its emptiness and send SMS to the supplier for more vegetables.

 

Basically, User Inexperience is also an important virtue of any technology. It is largely defined by the speed, intelligence and compactness (invisibility) of technology. Wherever there is a manual process to achieve the objectives, there is scope to design for User Experience and Inexperience both. When you design to offer sensory stimulus it is the paradigm of User Experience Design. 

The moment you design an intelligent and efficient technology

to take over a manual process, it is the paradigm of User Inexperience Design.

 

After searching a lot, I found someone who thinks similar to me. To further ascertain my viewpoint, I mention the quotation of Swiss Architect and Novelist Max Frisch-

" Technology is the knack of so arranging the world

that we don't have to experience it."

 
Donald Norman (He conceptualized and coined the term User Experience Design)
(Sorry for the delay in answering. I'm traveling a lot: right now I'm in Germany)
---
 
"The moment you design an intelligent and efficient technology to take over a manual process, it is the paradigm of User Inexperience Design."
 
Very funny. I like that. User Inexperience.
 
One interesting question: What is the difference between "deskilling"
(through automation, say) and "User Inexperience"?
 
A wonderful concept.
Thank you for sharing it with me.
 
Don
My attempt to answer Norman's question-
 
I feel that User Inexperience Design through SMART technologies has two distinct approaches as given below. I have also tried to think of the results of both.

1. Designing to achieve absence of experience
Freedom from unwanted stuff (labor, pain, waiting, etc.)
Loss of control
Lack of knowledge enrichment (less addition of new knowledge)
Missing the process enjoyment
Unlearning (losing the existing knowledge, skills) Losing metamemorial abilities like mental calculations due to calculators and
knowledge of spellings due to auto spell-checkers and many other core skills, which may not be desirable.

2. Designing for inexperienced user
Deskilling
Technology supported smartness (enable the unskilled users)
 
Increased technological dependence is a common result in both cases.
 
Dinesh
 
I think you are doing a nice analysis.
 
Deskilling is related to inexperience, but as you point out, different
in several important ways.
 
Thanks for keeping at it.
 
Don

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Perspectives
 
I'm relatively new to the field of design, but thought of contributing to the discussion.

If i'm not wrong then Dr. Katre is trying to highlight the point that if we make efficient and smart use of Technology, we can Design the Experience of the stakeholders and make it pleasant enough that all the while a person is dealing with the product/system/ process, he/she remains amazed of how such an efficient/exciting experience was made available to him/her. In other words, User Inexperience refers to minimize the time during which the user starts analyzing the process n inturn tries to point out the shortcomings, as Dr. Katre said in previous mail, that for him, journey down to Mumbai begins only after Vashi comes.

Moore's Law states that, Technology more than doubles its pace every 24 months. The rapid changes in the global society in past decade is a result of the same. If we try n perceive Moore's Law in Design process too, what we perceive as No-experience or Inexperience at this point in time would be considered as regular-experience by the time the society adapts to it, for eg. today we have troubles many time while doing Railway reservations on net and we work on improving the same n suppose that by next year somebody comes up with a solution that gives him the ticket without even going to a different site or adopting a new process. Initially users would be amazed by the technology and they perceive it as "No-experience" or pleasant-experience , but another year this will become a norm and society will consider this as experience and after some we would be required to improve the same experience to the next level of "Inexperience" .

The point i'm trying to make here is that its always a target of the developers/designer s/planners to achieve the state of giving "Pata hi nahi chala..." kind of experience to the users, but once they adapts to it and start using it in daily lives, the hidden aspects or the limitations also comes out as it is well known fact that "No Design is Perfect" and that leads to a need of another cycle of improvement. Windows could be a great example of the same.

Mudit Mittal
TCS, Hyderabad
I have been a silent follower of the group for some time now but can't keep shut amidst such an interesting discussion..

I think the matter can be better simplfied with the example of 'Darkness' n 'Light'..Simply put darkness is nothing but absence of light..[we can consider here the anology of inexperience and experience if we want]..

And for all our efforts of designing sources of light we don't consider darkness at all..though it can be said to be an important entity in itself.It is automatically taken care of when we consider light as there isn't any scale to measure darkness [as I think would be in case of inexperience coz if there isn't any u can't measure it]. On some level this darkness/light is similar to what Soumitri has referred to as negatives/positives ..So I think though it is an important enitity it does not have significance as a field of design as it falls under the perview of 'User Experience Design' itself.

Moreover what Sudhir Bhosle has taken as an example is nothing but how Einstein would have explained relativity to a lay man..Here two things are being compared: the time 'felt' and the actual time. This I think wud form performance measurement matrix for user experience and not user inexperience coz u cannot measure lack of something..and the user feeling it, itself makes it a part of user experience..
Parth Nilawar
In our life, good time passes very quickly and bad time doesn't. The same time slot, if it is content & joyful, appears too short and if it's full of problems then too long. That mean's there are two measures of time, one is how much actual time (measured by watch) and other is how much time felt / appeared for the person. If earlier is higher than the later then, person's experience is like "Pata hi Nahi Chala".

This is triggering on type of usability test scenario. We can conduct the user test, but without giving any hint to the user about time taken for it. Then we can ask question "How much time you think spent on this?" the user's felt time and actual time comparison may convey useful information.

Sudhir Bhosale
Microsoft, Hyderabad
This is related to the thread we are discussing ;)
http://tinyurl. com/n8rno
Read it!

Sunandini
If " Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." and if this is the ideal technologists are taking us to, we better stand up and start asking if life is going to be worth living.

I don't think there is much to live for in this world, except experiences. The effort of humanity has been to design positive experiences and remove the negative ones and so ideally, technology has always been the knack of arranging the world so that negative experiences can be minimised and positive ones maximized within the same space/time. Whether its the discovery of the wheel or any artisan's craft or the industrial revolution or modern information technology, human endeavour has always been in this direction.

I don't think we need to introduce a new word like "user inexperience" since "user experience" by itself covers that definition as well. Any removal of negative experience is an effort to enjoy a positive experience in that vacant space/time. While travelling on the Pune-Mumbai expressway you might not experience potholes (negative experience) but you certainly get time and mental freedom to experience "speed" for example or the beautiful ghats.

On the otherhand if the removal of a negative experience didn't give space for a positive one, then it might actually end up providing boredom which is another negative experience. If you couldn't enjoy speed driving or the beautiful ghats and had to drive through a tunnel on the whole route at 40km/hr speed, you might soon decide to abandon such an expressway and move onto the old Pune-Mumbai highway, even if there were a few potholes.

The point I am trying to make is that, people choose or not choose something NOT because of a lack of experience, but because of a positive experience. Ask any marketing guy and he will tell you that this is a fundamental aspect their marketing/selling is based on. As designers we should be aware of this as well.

Your thoughts about inexperience are interesting, but misplaced, in my opinion.
Saumitri Chaudhary