Why experience models are key for your design process?
Since the birth of user-centered design, practioners have come up with several ways to visualize the thoughts and experiences of end users. In the modern design world, this can be seen through techniques of persona creation, storyboarding, journey mapping, etc. While each of these methods of data induction is key, it’s also equally critical to understand a user’s actual context-of-use. Let me explain why…
Technology is deeply tied into our daily activities today. We take some of our most important decisions through a tiny handheld device stored in our pockets or purses, whilst going through each minute of our hectic daily lives. No more are users sitting in an office building figuring out interface puzzles to achieve their end goal.
Further, a lot of our use of these technologies is influenced by people around us. For instance, how one looks for information related to travel is directly affected by their partner/friend who might be involved in that planning. They share information amongst each other and achieve the task as a collective.
Understanding how a product is used in your end-user’s actual enviornment is critical as technology is deeply tied in to our daily activities today.
To properly grasp what a user’s life looks like while they are undertaking a particular task, it’s essential to focus on each key aspect that surrounds them and their technology of use. This is the core idea of Contextual Design.
The contextual design process guides researchers and designers to focus on aspects that enhance joy in a user’s life. This idea stems from the Wheel of Joy in Life, which addresses users’ needs of a sense of Accomplishment (did the users achieve their end-goal with the product), Connection (did the product facilitate collaboration in peoples personal relationships), Identity (does your product reflect your end user and their sense of self?), and Sensation (is there enjoyement is a users’ life after using your product?). Once we, as designers, are able to satisfy some of these needs (if not all) efficiently — we can then focus on the aspects that bring joy in a users’ life.
The process of designing contextually starts with immersing yourself in the user’s life by following a master-apprentice model during user interviews. This form of interaction helps us listen and learn from how the user achieves their task and the factors in their environment that affect them. This is followed by conducting interpretation sessions with a diverse design/research team to properly summarize and gain productive insights from the contextual interviews. Following this, “individual observations into synthesized into higher level insights” (Page 120), called Affinity Diagrams. Affinity diagrams are further generalized into assets such as (**designers all time fav 🤩**) personas and journey maps.
The important aspect that gets missed through this process is capturing significant aspects of a user’s life that directly affect how they perform or achieve their end-tasks. This is where contextual design models, called Experience Models, come in.
Experience models are graphical representations of the structure, behavior, and experiences of human activites, presented in a tangible and meaningful manner. They represent the complexities in our end-users lives and help researchers and designers develop a shared understanding which enables us to communicate insights. These representations are essential for revealing the big picture of the user’s world and come in handy for immersing the whole product team into the end-users’ life context, while going through the design cycle.
An experience model encapsulates essential details of the user’s life. There are four main types of experience models: day-in-the-life model, identity model, relationship/collaboration model, and sensation boards. Each type of model focuses on a specific aspect of our users.
As a designer working in the industry, choosing one of the models for your design process purely depends on what factors influence the end-users most. It’s always handy to build multiple models so that the whole team can immerse themselves in all aspects of the user’s life.
Types of Experience Models
Day-in-the-life model
The day-in-the-life model focuses on how a user accomplishes their target activity while traversing through their daily world. As the name suggests, the model paints a picture of what a day in your end-user’s life looks like; it focuses on daily activities taken upon by our users, the places these activites take place, and the devices being used for achieving the goals.
In today’s world, we as humans are persistent on filling every little piece of time with a significant and productive activity. The model focuses on how tasks get done in small and large chunks of time.
For instance, a parent waiting at their kids swim lesson might be on their phone responding to emails or completing a specific work related task. Understanding their context in this situation is key as they are constantly affected by the happenings around them. Another common instance could be people performing small tasks on their mobile phone such as responding to texts/ emails or engaging with their friends on social media during free times at their work desk or commuting.
With technology being so intertwined in our lives, day-in-the-life model is one of the most important ones out of the four and my suggestion would be to always build this model if the targeted product is something that can be easily equipped through a mobile phone or tablet.
Below is an awesome example template of a day-in-the-life model from the Contextual Design book by Karen Holtzblatt & Hugh Beyer. This template model can be used for your projects. As can be seen above, the data is grouped into the three main locations of a common user’s life in today’s world: home, commute, and work place. Each of these bases have other significant pieces of data collected through the interview process:
Identity Model
Celebrating a user’s sense-of-self is important to design a product that is enjoyable and adds joy in a user’s life. Being aware of elements that enhance the identity of your end-user always helps in designing a product that hones the user’s own identity. As the word suggests, Identity Model reveals key insights related to our end-users identity. Designs that celebrate and enhance that sense of self are considered more essential for users.
For building this model, researchers or designers would typically identify 8–12 identity elements to categorize the product market. These are the core elements that the team focuses on during the design cycle for the product. Your end-users will not manifest all these elements but most will be dominated by a few. Understanding these core elements allows the team to generate ideas that will be loved by the end-user population.
To help in identifying these elements of identity, look for indications of pride, feeling good about oneself, and how the product fits into the users identity. Essentially, focus on feelings of happiness and make note of when they arise during contextual interviews.
Pay keen attention to statements that start off with “I am”, “I do”, and “I like”.
This will help in categorizing all the different statements gathered during the interview process. After collecting all the data, induct it with your team and pay keen attention to phrases and quotes that point towards the feelings of pride.
Relationship/Collaboration Model
The relationship model represents connection amongst people. It focuses on the people that the user interacts with while completing the target activity.
Whether it’s responding to emails while chatting with your colleagues or the casual chat with your friends while finishing assignments for school, technology is so deeply rooted in our lives today that we are always collaborating and communicating while achieving our tasks. Knowing and respecting this, it’s essential that we look at how people connect in their world and how these connections affect their target activities. Long-term relationships in your users life are also key here as these are the people our users depend on for support, assistance, and guidance.
This experience models reveals the key support network of our users. It comes in handy when designing for activites that involve a lot of collaboration. In this context, users will share details of who they connected with, who they got help from etc.
Sensation Boards
These help us uncover the aesthetic and emotional experiences that hook people. Sensation boards help you pin down the specific traits that result in positive sensations for end-users. These could be things like choosing calming color schemes, designing cool microinteractions, or even choosing imagery that creates positive sensations in users and serve the business needs.
Making a log of all the things that result in the these positive sensations can help us incorporate them into the application efficiently while keeping the focus on the main user journey and goal.
How can I leverage these in my daily work?
Each one of the models that we discussed above has its own pros and cons. Every project timeline and requirements obviously dictate which one of these models is feasible to create. Often times, the design team will leverage multiple models to convince stakeholders on design decisions.
Each experience model reveals a different part of the user’s own lived experiences, personality, and identity. This helps us understand the “why” of the user needs and forces us designers to put ourselves in the shoes of our end-users.
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Citations:
Holtzblatt, K., & Beyer, H. (2015). Contextual design: Evolved. Morgan & Claypool.
