Silo-busting and Island-Hopping: How (and Why) to Deploy Pedagogic Approaches That Blend Theory and Practice
Michael Gibson, Professor, Graduate Programs Coordinator: Interaction Design and Design Research, The University of North Texas, College of Visual Arts and Design, Department of Design
Dr. Troy Abel, The University of North Texas, College of Visual Arts and Design, Department of Design
Abstract
Explained in broad terms, the purpose of this piece is to briefly examine how and why broadly informed, rigorously examined theoretical frameworks for designing, examined and understood as a means to preface the types of methods these can be used to manage, can be formulated and operated to yield socially, technologically, economically, environmentally and politically relevant, innovative and resilient outcomes to particular user experience and interaction design challenges. To inform the writing of this piece, the authors have drawn from their almost 20 years of accrued knowledge concerning user experience and interaction design curriculum planning, as well as the facilitation of “in-the-UXD-and-IXD-classroom”¹ learning experiences.
The majority of the understandings the authors have helped their graduate and undergraduate UX and IX design students employ in slightly over a decade to guide their design decision-making processes have involved teaching them to utilize theoretical approaches for contextually framing a project as a means to inform the practical methods for operationalizing it. This has greatly enhanced their students’ abilities to broaden and deepen their understandings of “why they think how they think” as they have begun to define working parameters for affecting the development and design of a wide variety of UXD and IXD projects. It has also helped these students to formulate and operate contextual research practices that accurately describe the socio-cultural, economic, technological and public policy issues and conditions that are affecting or could affect the situation within which whatever they are designing will be perceived and used. (In the context of this piece, “issues” are understood to be subject to change, as a result of a given group of users or an audience interacting with a specific product, system, service or network; “conditions” are understood to NOT be subject to change as a result of the actions of a group of users or an audience, and are exemplified by statements such as “the average noontime temperature in Dallas, Texas on July 15 is over 90º F/32ºC,” and “the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, or T.S.A., suggests arriving at an American airport 90 minutes before your flight is scheduled to depart.”)
This piece begins by offering a brief introduction into why the authors qualify and utilize theoretical approaches as they do as they begin to identify and frame the context for interaction and user experience design opportunities. It then makes a succinct, concisely extended case for teaching IX and UX design students to evolve “problem statements” into “research questions.”
Introduction
As interaction and user experience design have evolved from being peripheral areas of study operating at the fringes of more traditionally located design programs within and around modern universities, colleges and academies, the need for UX and IX design students to broaden and deepen their understandings of “why they think how they think” about framing and developing given projects has increased considerably. As Ken Friedman opined in a scholarly article he authored in 2003, “ … designers must know how things work and why. Understanding how things work and why requires us to analyze and explain. This is the purpose of theory.”² Over roughly the past two decades, it has been the experience of the authors that UXD and IXD students, those who teach them, and those who eventually employ them, often tend to over-focus on how given, practical aspects of UXD and IXD-based design challenges are addressed as projects are initiated without expending much thought or effort with regard to why they should be addressed as they are.
This can result (and has resulted) in the failure of many endeavors that are or were supposed to utilize understandings about the needs and aspirations of users as a means to guide the design and development of interactions intended to improve certain conditions occurring in their daily lives. (“Interactions” is used here as a broad, contextual umbrella term to describe products, product features, services and systems that are, or were, supposed to improve specific aspects of, for example, how a given individual or group engage in a purchase, retrieve healthcare records, find a downtown parking place or check baseball statistics.) The commonality among these from a design and development perspective is framed by intentionality. Simply stated, this is to positively affect, or was to have affected, the ways that a particular individual or group is or was enabled to do, make, use, engage in, and operate particular interactive constructs. In turn this is, or was, supposed to “transform a less-than-desirable situation” into one that is “preferred.”³ The authors — and their students — have learned that an effective way to achieve this goal is to preface knowing and understanding gleaned at the various stages of an iterative⁴, heuristically informed⁵ prototyping process with attempts to know and understand “how things work and why” in ways that help account for the issues and conditions described in the abstract above.
Helping Students Learn to Avoid the Error of “Trying to Solve the Wrong Problems”
Understanding how to preface a specific theoretical approach ahead of the operationalization of a particular set of methods for designing allows students to learn to proactively guide project development opportunities, and the strategies necessary to manage them, to good effect. They also provide the means to contribute to agile workflows in ways that help ensure that the problems the students have identified and are attempting to effectively address are “actual problems” — rather than “what appear to be problems but are not” that are affecting the real perceptions and behaviors of real people. Failing to learn to do this effectively can lead to significant, and sometimes even inordinate, amounts of time and money being spent on attempting to design and develop something that fails to meet real needs, or that ends up being mis-used in ways that can cause social, economic, technological or even physical harm. These kinds of mis-guided efforts can and have hurt the reputations of individuals and organizations, budget strategies and expenditures, and have led to the derailment of a wide variety of planned interactive projects. (The latter span the spectrum from arrays of elevator buttons that mystify passengers to patient record intake interfaces on in-hospital computing systems that are so confusing they cause doctors and nurses to handwrite specifications for prescribed treatments.)
Two instances of these kinds of undesirable outcomes the authors have used to exemplify the dangers inherent in “solving the wrong problem correctly,” as opposed to “solving the correct problem,”⁶ come to us from the annals of British medical history and from the history of manned spaceflight. The first involves the efforts of British gynecologist James Blundell, who in 1818 performed the first successful blood transfusion as a means to prevent the post-childbirth death of women from excessive blood loss. Unfortunately for many women (and some men) in many parts of the world during the subsequent century, the intent of Blundell’s breakthrough was misunderstood by many doctors, who implemented the well-documented procedure less as a means to prevent blood loss and more in the misguided belief that it could transform the behavior of people — mostly women — who were behaving “abnormally.” The second involves NASA, the
governmentally funded American organization who, since 1958, has directed and facilitated American efforts to explore outer space. They spent almost $6 million in an almost three-year quest in the 1960s to develop a means to enable astronauts to literally “write in space” with a specially designed and expensive-to-manufacture ink-filled pen, while the Russians decided that equipping cosmonauts with pencils would effectively enable the same activity. (It eventually took the Fisher Pen Company of the United States about three years to develop pen that relies on a gas-filled cartridge to pump ink to the point that worked well — and still works well — in zero gravity. Both astronauts and cosmonauts started using these pens in the late 1960s.)
Both of these examples are the results of not effectively accounting for the affects that contextual issues and conditions could or would have on how various people — users and those who were designing that which was to be used or engaged in — perceived these distinct situations of use. In the first case, Blundell and his supporters failed to account for how the lack of real, evidence-based understanding of issues like the effects of post-partum depression could and could not be effectively treated by physical means. In the second case, almost no one at NASA in the early 1960s thought to pose the fundamental question of WHY it might be necessary for astronauts in space to write with ink. (Eventually, as the U.S. space program progressed, NASA scientists decided that the flammability of pencils, combined with the fact that they could break up into small bits that could float into and foul equipment in space vehicles operating at zero gravity, were good reasons to advocate for the use of ink-filled, internally pressurized pens.)
Introducing UXD and IXD students to these examples and others like them has helped the authors teach them to effectively “frame and set” problems, or “undesirable situations,” at the outset of the project schedules that students must follow to complete them. Framing and setting are terms that are borrowed from architecture. They have been used to help emerging and established architects to better understand — and avoid assuming — essential knowledge of and about the various issues and conditions (as defined in the abstract of this piece) that affect or could affect how the design of the structures they envision and help produce directly and indirectly impact those who live and work in them. The realms of UXD and IXD education and practice share the need for framing and setting that have existed in the realms of architecture for centuries. Effectively accounting for how and why social norms, public policy statutes and laws, socio-cultural perceptions and biases, various economic conditions and technological capacities and capabilities create the contextual atmosphere within which a given architectural system operates has long been crucial in determining the ultimate success or failure of a given built environment. Effectively accounting for these same issues and conditions can now be used to help UX and IX design students and designers ensure that the research that guides their design decision-making yields results that are relevant, appropriately innovative and even, in some situations, resilient. Not accounting for them can lead or negatively contribute to all-too-common UXD and IXD problems that range from creating features like buttons and menus that fail to signify how they should be used, to ineffectively using data from users to personalize information intended for them to consume, to failing to pare down feature sets and design components in a given interface to ensure that only the most essential functionalities are included in its design.⁷
Helping UX and IX Design Students Learn to Evolve Their Thinking from “Problem Statements” to “Research Questions”
Additionally, those who endeavor to educate emerging UX and IX designers should bear in mind that their students will soon enter professional marketplaces wherein they will be challenged to work with people who have been educated outside design, but who have been taught to use well-articulated theoretical approaches to guide the formulation, actuation and assessment of methods for analyzing, doing and making. These people will enter (and have been entering, for most of the past decade) professional UX and IX practice with backgrounds in the social sciences, information science, marketing and logistics, business administration, computer science and technical communication, among others. Over the past five years or so, they have come to cultivate expectations that their soon-to-be professional colleagues — regardless of disciplinary backgrounds — will possess at least somewhat similar critical and reflective abilities and capacities. This poses a serious problem for designers who have learned only to frame, set and advance project challenges in traditional, often vocationally focused or aesthetically rooted ways.
Design students who have progressed through often staid, “cool-artifact-production-centric” curricula are often woefully lacking in experiential understandings of how and why design processes can guide new ways of thinking and knowing. They have a tendency to emerge (at least) in the Dallas/Fort Worth and Austin, Texas, USA UX and IX markets (the ones the authors are most familiar with) knowing how to design aesthetically compelling semblances of interactive products and systems without having much understanding about how they will and will not be used by people who may be, socio-culturally, politically, and in terms of their tech savvy and awareness, quite different than themselves. They have learned of and about design as a means to problem-solve rather than problem-find, as a means to induce purchasing and consumption at the exclusion of inducing thinking, as a means to provide answers rather than pose questions, as a means to operate in the world we know now, rather than in a world that could be better, and as a means to posit design as a means to fuel innovation at the exclusion of positing design as a means to promote “thinking differently,” in ways that could catalyze socio-economic and cultural change. These students also “tend to not know too much,” to use generalized language, about how to operate a given theoretical approach to preface their attempts to operate specific methods for cyclically developing-cum-designing-cum-testing user experiences as these are affected by user interactions. They are often stymied by questions from UX and IX design faculty and practitioners such as, “What happens when your target user actually tries to swipe or operate the orange button to deliver more information about X?”
The dilemma described here is succinctly and effectively summarized as follows by Ian Mitroff in the opening portion of his book Dirty, Rotten Strategies: “The problems one already knows how to solve may bear little resemblance to the problems one actually needs to solve.”⁸ The authors have each accrued at least ten years of teaching and planning various forms of user experience and interaction design across their design curricula. From this, they have learned that design students who have been ineffectively or simply not taught to frame and set the issues and conditions that surround “less-than-desirable-situations” often rely on oversimplified “problem statements,” or “design briefs,” to instigate and guide their design decision-making. These short assertions can be self-generated or provided by other project partners, and they tend to fail to account for what often turns out to be a variety of essential variables that could, if accounted for judiciously and effectively, inform the evolution of much more effective product, service, system or network that meets real user needs and desires. What follows are three typical examples of these types of thinly imagined “problem statements”:
- Design an app that effectively facilitates travel abroad (i.e. outside the U.S.) for women
- Design an interactive, online-facilitated means for newsroom personnel at a large, metro newspaper to effectively streamline their individual workflows
- Design an online, single-source information portal that effectively meets the needs of students attempting to transfer into a large, tier-one research university (ours)
The primary problem with all of these is that they assume too much, and they fail to account for enough of the variety inherent in the issues and conditions that surround each of the situations that confront the groups of users embedded within them. Clarity and a realistic accounting for how and why the specific scenarios-of-use, or userflows, are likely to or would actually be affected by economic factors, social and cultural biases, experiential aspirations, and simple functionalities that enable use are absent from problem statements such as these. This is a significant reason why they tend to be eschewed in academic settings, and, increasingly, in professional settings, that require more broadly informed inquiries and more critically probative interrogations. Transforming problem statements that are limited — and therefore limiting — in scope requires UX and IX design faculty and students to embrace a more complex yet simultaneously more nuanced approach to examining the issues and conditions that surround a specific design problem, or “less-than-desirable situation.” This approach tends to yield ways to formulate research questions that afford individual UX and IX designers and design teams that at least “attempt to solve the right problems,” as articulated in the following examples that are derived from the problem statements listed above:
- How might a woman traveling alone outside the U.S. make the most effective use of digitally facilitated resources to help her plan short- and long-term travel routes that offer her the best chances for achieving her personal “travel experience goals” without endangering her or costing her excessive amounts of money?
- How might newsroom personnel at a large, metro newspaper be able to — “at-a-glance” — analyze content from social media networks relevant to stories they’re covering/will be covering, analytics pertinent to the particular readers of stories they write and/or edit, and other content relevant to the minute-by-minute news operations and developments transpiring around them?
- How might information about a. specific educational programs, b. room-and-board and c. financial support be most effectively provided to a. in-state, b. out-of-state, and c. international students, from first-year undergraduates to doctoral candidates, who wish to transfer some or all of the course credits they’ve earned from a given institution of higher-learning to our tier-one research university?
By challenging our UX and IX design students to frame and set less-then-desirable situations, or “problems,” that involve interactions between people and products, services, systems or networks — these can range from complex, digitally operated databases to apps to a wayfinding system in a parking garage — we have observed them evolve into designers that are much more adept at “solving the correct problem” than “solving the problem correctly.” We have also learned that UX and IX design coursework that challenges students to develop knowing and understanding between using designerly approaches for contextualizing research before they attempt to engage in practical methods for engaging in it helps students in three key areas. First, it enables them to formulate more effective research questions, of the type exemplified above; second, it increases their understandings about how their design and development efforts can positively catalyze the ways people live and work and meet particular goals; third, it empowers them to empower their users by ensuring that what they make and disseminate is easy to interpret and learn from and be acted upon. As all of these understandings are necessary for sustaining careers in the governmental, private sector and community-based organizations that have been and will likely continue to hire them after graduation, we plan to continue to develop and operate coursework that emphasizes their acquisition and cultivation.
