I like to think of Interaction Design in its purest form as being about shaping the perception of an environment of any kind. Yes, today the discipline is so closely tied to visual displays and software that it almost seems to revolve around that medium alone, but that’s only because as of now, that’s pretty much the only part of our environment over which we have complete control.

The one field that has come closest to overcoming this limitation is the video game industry whose 3D games are the most vivid and complete alternate realities technology has been able to achieve. Game designers have control over more aspects of an environment, albeit a virtual one, than anyone else.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea that interfaces can be more closely integrated with the environment in which they operate. I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned from the universe of video games and how it might be applicable to other kinds of designed experiences.

In Designing for the Digital Age, Kim Goodwin criticizes the term “Experience design” as being too presumptuous because we don’t really have the power to determine exactly what kind of experience each person with their own beliefs and perceptions has. Even when we work across an entire event from start (e.g. booking a flight) to finish (arriving at the door), there are still countless factors outside our control that can significantly impact how a person will experience it.

Video game designers on the other hand can orchestrate a precise scenario since almost every detail in their virtual world is for them to determine. They can arrange exactly what kind of person sits next to you on a flight no matter who you are or how many times you take that flight.

That isn’t to say that videogames don't have their limitations. Of course, it isn’t completely true that game designers can determine who sits next to you. They can only determine who your avatar sits next to. The most significant weakness of videogames is the inability to truly inhabit a designed environment or narrative. As much control as we may have over a virtual world, as long as we are confined to experiencing it through television screens and speakers, it won’t be anywhere near comparable to our real world.

Fortunately, there’s a growing effort to address this lack of immersion.

A key area of the problem lies in how we’re presented and interact with complex information diegetically, that is, interfaces that actually exist within the game world itself.

Before continuing, it helps to be familiar with some basic concepts and terminology around diegesis in computer graphics, the different spaces of representation between the actual player and their avatar. The diagram above illustrates the four main types of information representation in games.

Non-diegetic representations remain the most common type of interface in games. In first person shooters, arguably the most immersive type of game since we usually see the scenery through our avatar’s view, the head-up display has remained an expected element since Wolfenstein 3D first created the genre.

I’m going to call it. Apple won on this one.

The whole host of Latin-derived diacritical characters (such as ç, č, & ĉ) are too large to fit into a standard keyboard. The methods by which various operating systems have provided access to them have, in all but one case, sucked.

This sucks. It's hard to access and takes way too much visual hunting, not to mention having to "select" and "copy" the character to the clipboard.

Election Day is finally here, and as ballots are cast and counted, I’m hopeful that voters will declare victory for the candidates and measures that I care most about. But as I review my sample ballot in preparation for my visit to the voting booth, I am discouraged to find that it includes many of the design flaws that the AIGA’s Design for Democracy project has been working to expose and eliminate over the past 8 years. As AIGA reports on their website:

“In July 2007 the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) accepted AIGA Design for Democracy’s research and best practice recommendations for ballot and polling place information design. Guidelines and editable samples were distributed to 6,000 election officials across the country this January. As a result, local jurisdictions now have the tools to apply communication design principles and make voting easier and more comprehensible for all citizens.”

Why, then, am I holding a ballot that violates at least three of the Top 10 election design guidelines, including the use of all caps, center-alignment, and tiny fonts?

As Marcia Lausen notes in Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design, typographic specifications are often dictated in well-intentioned but misguided election law. So while the valuable work of Design for Democracy is to be commended, it alone is not enough to bring about the change we need in the design of ballots and other voter information and materials.

So as you head to the polls, review your ballot carefully — not only for its content, but for its design. Make note of the ballot’s flaws, and contact your state and county registrar and representatives to press them to implement the AIGA guidelines. In addition, consider participating in the Polling Place Photo Project, which seeks to document what is politely described as the “richness and complexity" of the voting experience in America.

Most of all, don’t forget to vote!

I often find design inspiration from photographs. One of my favorite sources for this is Flickr groups. Lately, I’ve been really distracted by the list of my groups on the newly designed homepage. Here are some of the best that I find directly relevant to the work we do.

Visual language and interface inspiration

Possibly my favorite group of the entire collection is Inspiration Boards. This set is a compilation of people’s stuff. It might be postcards, magazine cutouts, interior design samples, shells, or a mish-mash of other objects. I find this group particularly interesting because it approaches design the same way we approach early explorations in visual interface design. When designing a product we’ll do research, define the visual strategy, and then design visual language studies that are an emotional, immediate representation of the visual strategy. The studies are arranged similar to inspiration boards in a way that separates them from any specific behavior so that our design team and our project stakeholders can have a more focused conversation about the visual design without being distracted by the interaction design.

Designing affordances using reference material

The dials, knobs, buttons etc… and Push Buttons groups are great for exploring user interface control languages. These groups cover examples from everyday life that are sometimes new, sometimes old and worn. Designing realistic controls can be difficult so it’s helpful to reference photographic material when designing your own creations. Texture is a similar group of photos with… you guessed it… texture! Of course, this shouldn’t be a sole substitute for getting out there with your own camera.

On a recent vacation to Europe I promised myself that I’d put my new camera to good use by documenting as many examples of typefaces as possible. With only a week of travel time I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to accumulate the desired collection of new and modern trends that I’d hoped for given that I was dedicating my travel to the olde parts of York, London and Paris.

I captured some old and new typefaces but came to a more profound realization that traveling is like being a beginning user. As designers, we try to put ourselves into the minds of beginners through observation in research but this can be only partly successful. Research doesn’t beat the real thing and there’s no better way to do that than throwing yourself into another country. I should disclaim that I spent 18 years of my childhood in England so it’s not a completely new experience, and I’ve been to France many times also. Being away for so long is a good way to completely forget old experiences and see new design innovations for the first time.

The photos

Axel Peemoeller’s wayfinding system for the Melbourne Eureka Tower Carpark has been making the internet rounds. Props to him, it’s a novel and eyecatching design. (See below for one example from his site.) But something about it makes me think it’s disorienting (and possibly dangerous) for drivers. Let me try and articulate my amateur cognitive science/interaction design theory to explain.

While driving, your brain’s 3D systems are in high gear. (Pardon the pun.) Your mind is tuned to look for positioning cues such as occlusion, parallax, and especially size changes. This last is most important, as your visual system is on the lookout for anything that suddenly grows larger than the things around it, which would be a clear sign that you’re about to hit something. It’s called the startle response, and it happens within about 80 milliseconds, far too fast for any rational processing to counteract it.

So now, think of yourself in the Eureka Tower Carpark. Turning a corner, you’re a little confounded by the strange and lovely colored shapes on the wall. What’s going on here? All of a sudden, your visual system puts all these shapes together in a way that could only make sense if there was something (in this case, typography) jumping out right in front of you. Your gut reaction should be to slam on the brakes, even if your logical brain can decipher the thing a few milliseconds later. Hopefully the driver behind you left enough room.

So I haven’t been there, and I don’t know if this conjecture bears out in fact, but the pictures certainly set off my startle reaction.