Author Archives: Tariq West

Theatre and Tech in conversation: Stanislavski and UX Design

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This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for months. I was inspired to finish it today when I stumbled upon a Forbes.com interview with Jon Wiley (below), a Lead Designer at Google. Wiley, once a professional improv comedy actor, articulates the relationship between Theatre and UX design that I've been toying with. 

I’ve had the privilege of working with and learning from some brilliant UX designers at AKQA over the past few months. There is an ethos at play among the best minds in the UX discipline that reminds me of my adventures in the Theatre. 

Jim Zidar, one of the most talented thespians and directors I’ve had the privilege of learning from, introduced me to 'Stanislavski’s system'. This acting methodology is comprised of set of techniques codified by its namesake, the great 19th century Russian actor and director, Constantin Stanislavski. 

The system has three elements at its core: (1) 'The Magic if', (2) Motivation and (3) Objective. These are analogous to the process of discovery that a UX designer undertakes.

The “Magic If”

The "magic if" is a line of questioning that allows an actor to escape the reality they are living and insert themselves into another. It is an exercise in imagination which answers questions along the lines of, “What if you found yourself in this situation? How would you behave? How would you feel?” 

The UX designer faces a similar task. As one UX designer on my team put it, 'You are an architect, sitting in one building, while designing another. You must design a building with many of the amenities of the one you are sitting in while avoiding the temptation to replicate the one you're sitting in. The client needs a better building, but the light switches need to stay by the door.' 

In re-designing an existing system for instance, a designer might think, "I am not attached to how the system currently works. But what if I'd been using the system for years? What metaphors and mechanisms do I expect? Which ones must be replicated to create continuity of experience? The current system allows a user to accomplish this objective this way, but what if we re-order the steps in the task or automate them?"

Motivation

Motivation refers to the practice of analyzing the underpinnings of every action and line of dialogue. The actor must look beyond a given movement or articulation and construct a picture of the inner life of the character. This is accomplished by searching out clues in past actions of a character and putting together a narrative of self, a presiding emotional logic that is consistent across actions.

This is an exercise that parallels the approach of the empathetic designer. To get to the motivations of a user, a UX designer looks beyond a given user action to develop a useful theory of motivation that allows them to guess at how a user might behave in a new interface. This often involves sitting with a user and observing how they work generally, and how they complete the sorts of task your solution will need to accommodate. It can also be done through eye tracking and other more analytical tools.

Great UX designers understand that interacting with an interface is an emotional experience. Users are motivated by curiosity, frustration, time pressure, familiarity, comfort, esthetic pleasure, accomplishment, uncertainty etc…

This crystallized for me while working on a call center interface recently for a major apparel manufacturer and retailer. Sitting six inches from the agent, I could see when they clenched their jaws, when they cursed under their breath, when they banged on the keyboard because something just didn’t work as expected, even when it did work as designed. 

It takes very little interaction for a human being to start to ascribe human-like characteristics to a technological object or interface. The question, then, is, “If my application is a person, what kind of person is it? Is it stubborn or cooperative? Honest or deceitful? Is my application an ass?” A user forms a relationship with an interface and every action becomes emotionally charged, reflecting the state of that relationship and a user's emotional disposition towards the world more broadly.

Objectives

The objective refers to a goal that a character wants to achieve. The actor must ask, “What does my character want?” Objectives, in contrast to motivations, are action oriented and externally facing. Stanislavski conceives of different orders of objective dubbed “units”, “bits” and “beats”. 

An actor discovers the character’s objective in any given scene. This objective, the “unit”, could be something like “to reach the front of the buffet line”. The bits and beats are smaller goals that support the overarching “unit” of the scene. The super-objective represents a character’s ultimate goal through the entire play, say “besting an enemy”, and is the connective tissues between “units”.

In capturing and building to user stories, the UX designer creates interfaces that accommodate the user’s objectives. He or she asks the question, “What does the user want?” “Units”, “beats” and “bits” are analogous to steps within a user flow while the super-objective ties it all together. 

The super-objective might be, “the user wants to purchase a pair of shoes.” The “units” could be pages in a user flow. On the first page a user searches for a product, on the next they view the products details, on the third they buy the product etc… The “bits” are the actions that a user must take, like inputting fields or selecting from a set of options, to accomplish the goal of one page in a flow and advance to the next. 

Pursuit of a Quixotic Ideal

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This piece by Gregory Jusdanis in the Stanford humanities blog, Arcade, captures many of the internal conflicts I encountered in my time this past summer spent touring the cherished and sanitized relics of South America's past, and Machu Picchu in particular.

I have been looking for words to explain the unease at encountering de-vined, de-peopled, tour-guided, no-touch ruins and trying to find a personal sort of authenticity in my engagement with them.

To climb Machu Picchu we lined up at the bottom gates before dawn with hordes of khaki-pantsed, hiking-shoed people from places like Israel and France and Germany. When they opened, we rushed through them and across the river-bridge with all of the ceremony of Best Buy shoppers on Black Friday.

We wanted to be among the first 400 to arrive at the manicured, guarded gates so as to guarantee one of the limited entrees into Wana Picchu, but perhaps there was more to it.

Perhaps we also wanted to be first to the top to secure for ourselves a moment of authenticity free of French tourists asking us to move our wonderment to the left so they could take the cliched picture of the Inka Face formed by the mountain relief.

Perhaps we also needed to separate ourselves as much as possible from the first group of people who bussed up the mountain at dawn instead of running the two-thousand plus feet of narrow, steep Inkan steps in the dark.

We resented them their safari jackets and expensive, spotless trekking attire that spoke of the luxury trains they'd opted for over the brutal, four-day mountain and jungle foot-trail.

In our resentment towards them, there was also some amount of self-loathing.

As Jusdanis so aptly comments the paradox of modern travel and part of the reason for our guilt, "Not only does travel contribute to the melting of the glaciers in Peru that bring us there. But it also reminds us of the painful story of conquest centuries earlier."

Like Jusdanis, I traveled another Inka trail, not so crowded with tourists as the one referred to as "the" inka trail. It was still well traveled enough that there was a squat peruvian woman, often times with a baby tied to her back, selling Powerade every few kilometers.

It occurred to me in reading Jusdanis' piece that maybe there had been a moment of "visiting without being a tourist" during my travels to Machu Picchu, although one much less elegant than his encounter with peruvian musicians on a mountain trail.

On the winding, bumpy 24 hour bus ride through the Andes to Cusco, a launching point for our Machu Picchu trek, I had terrible altitude and motion sickness. I vomited until there was nothing left in my stomach, and then I just dry-retched.

We pit-stopped in a small Andean town, and I found myself on my knees gripping the bars of the sewer grill beside the one paved road, up-chucking the coca tea I'd bought from a wise-faced old woman who assured me that it would help with the altitude sickness.

I looked to my left to see a quintessentially andean-faced man on his knees as well. We made eye contact briefly and exchanged an understanding nod as he half-smiled wryly. He, I later learned, was from Cusco but hadn't been there in many years and had become unaccustomed to the altitude.

We'd come to Peru "to enrich ourselves, to observe the spider spinning webs on the crumbled barricades of Machu Picchu" but maybe the closest I came to achieving some part of a quixotic travel ideal was there, on that mountain, vomiting with a descendant of the Inkas.

Breastfeeding, Technology and the Symbolism of Progress

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Stanford University – Science, Tech & Society Program Commencement – Student Address – June 13th, 2010

A couple of people have asked me to post the address I made at Stanford's Science, Technology & Society Program commencement ceremony. I do this with some hesitation. Things were incredibly hectic in the days leading up to graduation and I ended up writing the speech an hour or so before delivering it. That is to say, it's not my most elegant or elaborated work, but it gets a point across I hope.

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I’d like to begin by addressing a question to my fellow graduates: By show of hands, who knew coming in to Stanford that they would be an STS major? [only one hand is raised] Obviously, we who knew coming into Stanford that we would study Science, Technology & Society are rather atypical among STS majors.

We are far more typical in the sense that STS represented a disciplinary framework that allowed us, and indeed, required us, to reconcile interests in science and engineering with pursuits in public policy and business and the humanities. In my case, Stanford topped my list of schools precisely because such an interdisciplinary course of study existed.

There was more to it than that, though. I followed in the footsteps of an older brother and sister, who brought the things they’d learned in the their STS courses back to our dinner table in DC. The discussions were lively, colorful and ranged from trivial speculation on the latest gadgets or Internet startups to ruminations on the role of mobile infrastructure in international development and the implications of failures in STEM education to the future of minority communities.

This is to say, even before I came to Stanford, my engagement with STS as a discipline was stimulating, horizon expanding and eminently relevant to people and places I care about. It is no surprise then, that during my time here at Stanford, STS has been more than just an academic discipline, more than just an ivory tower pursuit. It has been personal.

Professor McGinn and many others have encouraged and empowered us not only to understand theories and frameworks in the abstract, but also to engage in a personal sort of inquiry. We were encouraged certainly, to think about lofty questions such as what values are embedded in and engendered by technologies.

But we were also invited to think about the fabric and fibre of our own lives and to be rigorous, deliberate and experimental in deciding which technologies we will use and which we will not, which add richness and variety to our lives, and which have unacceptable costs.

For me, STS has provided principles and insights that will actually inform the way I live my life. It has grown my ethical mind and my ability to recognize nuance and complexity, perspectives and stakeholders. It has taught me to balance exuberance with healthy skepticism and to be lucid about convenient equivalencies – to understand that an email is not a letter, nor an ereader a book nor the human mind a computer.

It has taught me that technology cannot be the chief barometer of human progress, lest we sucomb to the tragic ironies embodied in the fact that food production and prep technologies have created for us the problem of obesity, without solving the problem of hunger; embodied in the fact that technology has increased the variety and abundance of food we can eat, but in many cases degraded its nutritional value.

In our time, the symbolism of progress has become deeply intertwined with science and technology, but we we must not confuse the symbols of progress, for actual progress.

As we go out into the world we must understand that technology will play some part in the way we solve entrenched global problems. But let’s not forget the place of sweat and labor and paradigm change; let’s not forget that the most important endeavors facing us are not technical ones, but rather have to do with expanding and re-drawing our circles of empathy to be ever more inclusive.

As practitioners, if you will, of Science, Technology & Society in the world we must subscribe, in the words of one great public intellectual, to “a sort of blues inflicted hope rather than a cheap American optimism”.

That is to say, we must live the Sensheimer-Baltimore debate – tempering an optimism around technology based in the faith that somehow technology will solve the very problems that it engenders and perpetuates, with an understanding that we and our world are actually delicate and impermanent, that we are constantly threatened by our own genius.

These are some of the things that STS has taught me. But to return to the idea of how STS has not just been lofty and abstract, but also personal – let me share with you in closing, a story that is both deeply personal to me and quintessentially STS.

I am one of eight breastfed children. Bear with me here, I know the mention of breasts discomforts the puritan in every American. You see, in our times, this is a highly unusual occurrence. For over 30 years my mother has counseled mothers and families on the challenges of maternal and early childhood health. Much of her work has been in teaching poor, minority women about the benefits and practices of breastfeeding.

This is pretty bizarre in the sense that, only a generation or so ago, breastfeeding was the primary nutrition for infants. Today, breastfeeding has to be taught and advocated for, even among experts such as pediatric doctors. What happened over the course of one generation that disrupted the transmission of a vital practice which had gone uninterrupted for millennia? The answer, is manufactured infant formula and its lobby.

At a time in American history where the ability to consume manufactured industrial goods became the ultimate measure of upward mobility and success, nutrient dense and far superior human breast milk was replaced with expensive, manufactured, dairy-derived products. This is a perfect case study for the STS discipline. In this instance a food technology, infant formula, taken as a symbol of progress, won out over actual progress with deep cultural and health repercussions.

And with that story, I leave you. To my fellow graduates, I wish you joy and abundance. To the STS department professors, lecturers and staff, thank you, thank you and thank you. To our parents, families and mentors, thank you, thank you and thank you. To all in attendance, thank you and peace be upon you.

Digital Camera + Facebook + Alcohol = Augmented Reality

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On Saturday I spent a delightful evening at Stanford's Senior Formal – it was a pretty spectacular affair. I didn’t bother to bring my camera because I can always rely on every young lady at the party having one – you've seen it: cute, pink, canon. 

As I eagerly wait for the photos to post to Facebook, some musings I've had at the intersection of FB, digital photography and college culture (read as alcohol) are beginning to crystalize.

The jestful adage ”if it’s not on Facebook it didn’t happen” is becoming a powerful statement of reality for young people. Many can attest, for instance, to the sort of ripples that an announcement that “so-and-so is in a relationship with so-and-so” creates in a FB social circle. 

A recent study aptly titled "Look at us: Collective Narcissism in College Student Facebook Photo Galleries" explores the ways in which FB has transformed the way we use and share personal photos. 

Authors Andrew Mendelson and Zizi Papacharissi (of Temple and U. Chicago respectively) conclude from looking at some 20k+ photos, that "the central objective among college students on Facebook was the recording and posting of their participation in the social rituals of college." No surprise there.

Certainly photos are narrative aids in telling a social-status garnering story about participation in college life. More than that, I suspect that photos serve as a sort of cognitive aid or reality augmentation. The emergence of cheap digital photography and a nearly ubiquitous sharing medium increasingly shapes the way young people parse lived experience. Bear with me here:

Over the past several years I've had dozens of day-after-the-party conversations. What I've concluded from these is that many of my peers dramatically overreport “how good a time” they had last night. Part of this is semi-conscious – tales of epic nights of mayhem are an important cultural ritual in college and people play up the "good" parts while skipping over the bad. There may be more to it than that though.

How do you tell the story of a night you don't remember very well? You reconstruct it using the clues available to you.

You have a neon-yellow drink bracelet so you know you went to the Sigma Fratty Psi party. You have a receipt for five milkshakes and $30 worth of chicken tenders in your pocket to you know you hit up the LateNight eatery. The receipt has a name scrawled on the back, so you know you hung out with a girl named Mindy (or Minty?) who could only remember 9 digits of her cell number.

Then you go on FB. There are a couple of photos of you with buddies, with pretty ladies – you were all smiling and apparently having a good time. You vaguely remember some unpleasantness, but a dozen pictures of smiling, fun-having people assure you that a good time was had all around.

Not so. That vague unpleasantness you remember – shortly after the last photo you lost track of your buddies. You wondered around feeling alone, disoriented, miserable. Then you marked your territory around a palm tree…in vomit. Having lost your keys, you then called your roommate, almost unintelligibly drunk and maybe crying a little bit, and got him to retrieve you from the hallway.

Ok, so I took this scenario to a ridiculous extreme, but this is I suspect, representative of an actual phenomenon. Facebook photos don't just tell other people what we experienced – they tell us what we experienced. And like Fox News, they lie – the photos are out of context, plus, who doesn't try to put on a good face for those conspicuously staged, destined for FB snapshots?

Web 2.0 and the Business of Family

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"…[because he doesn't have a computer] there is so much of my life that he misses out on that the rest of my family gets to see…it's very hard for him to visualize what it is I even do in my day-to-day world."

In the above interview from PBS Frontline's Digital Nation series, producer and blogger Daniela Capistrano laments how her father's refusal to live digitally has disconnected him from her increasingly digital life. Her frustration resonates with me as I'm sure it does with so many people who have friends and loved ones still living in the analog.

We got my father a laptop back in '07 (I flew to Miami to set it up for him, seriously) and he's gotten pretty good at the basics like email (although I still have to remind him about email etiquette like thread hijacking and ALL-CAPS). My mother on the other hand, is somewhat of a tech whiz.

Family, the most important business
Capistrano's story reminded me of my own musings around the internet and the family dynamic. There has been a lot of talk lately about how web 2.0 tools allow businesses and governments to more effectively engage employees, customers and constituents. Blogs, wikis and social media tools like twitter and Facebook allow stakeholders to inform the decisions that impact them and collaboratively create knowledge.

Families are using some of these same tools to conduct the enormously important business of family. Web 2.0 tools allow for the active collaboration and decision making, and passive awareness and sharing. In my family for instance, we use a Google group frequently to discuss family matters and share information of common interest, particularly around health, personal finance and politics. 

Business conversations are increasingly media rich and take place across many platforms; in my digital household, our threads are rich with links, calendars, maps, images and video as we go about the hard work of family.

As governments and other institutions struggle to regain the public trust in this age of turmoil, web 2.0 tools, and the ethos of openness that has grown up along side them, have become central to transparency efforts. I've seen a similar dynamic play out in my family in terms of what and how we share.

Now more than ever, I'm clued in to many of the challenges my parents and siblings face and involved in plans for facing them. And it's not just because I'm "old enough" to participate in family decision making - new tools make inclusiveness practical and normal.

A few stories from my Family 2.0
Facebook helps me keep up with six of my siblings; they always have some passive awareness of what is going on in my life and I can check up on my little sister's FB suitors and figure out a little about what's on my moody teenage brother's mind, leaving him notes to publicly remind him I love him even if he doesn't feel like talking to me. 

This past Friday, my siblings and I organized a birthday surprise for my mother and I got to see the look on her face as she opened the fruit sculpture, from 1500 miles away. 

As I write this piece, my big sisterbear is taking the lead in organizing travel for three generations of my family plus significant others to my graduation in June; her strategy doc, shared with the fams via Google Docs, would make her old boss at Deloitte proud. 

One of the best laugh's we've ever had together as a family was over an email: A friend of mine emailed my father about interviewing him for her thesis research. My father replied saying, among other things, "The best way to get in touch with me is generally to just Hollaaaaaaaaa! Peace, El-Tehuti".

(My father recently changed his name from "Emory" to "El-Tehuti" which means something like "sage" in Ancient Kemetan. More on this in a future post.)

There is a lot that has and should be said about how digital technologies can tear at the fabric of family life. Yet these same technologies have brought my family together, and not just digitally.