Interactions - September/October 2010

In doing so, what kind of insights can be derived from leading people in the wrong direction?

Wrong Positioning

The first example of this approach stems from research I conducted with my colleague Fabien Girardin when we worked at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne. We designed a location-based game called CatchBob! to run geolo-cation field studies. We were interested in the user experience of positioning technologies: how people react when they see their own location and how they react to awareness of their contacts’ locations.

An interesting example of provoking failures in the context of location-based services is to locate people in wrong locations (close to the proper location, a bit farther away, much farther, etc.) and observe their reactions. Incorrectly positioning the user and locating a friend in the wrong place on the display enabled us to test different “acceptable” accura-cies of positioning. This helps the researcher to understand the radius of the area in which people are comfortable being located (for self and for others). Evaluating users’ reactions to wrong location is a proxy to understand the mental model: Should positioning be accurate? What is an acceptable uncertainty? Could this be an iterated process to define a “comfort zone” in the context of location-based services?

Games are especially interesting when exploring failures because difficulties and hurdles can be playful and intriguing from the players’ standpoint. Unlike with business applications, designing a game is not necessarily a matter of making everything as easy as possible. Failure is indeed acceptable when framed as play simply because it is a prominent component of the game’s mechanics. Therefore, we thought video games could be an interesting platform to explore failures in the context of interaction design.

In this project, we looked at the Nintendo Wiimote and the sensitivity calibration of its accelerometers. When preparing the software that used the Wiimote (and Nunchuk) sensors, programmers intentionally coded the effects of the gestures to be highly sensitive to motion. Small movements made by players had an extra-large influence on the character’s movements in the virtual environment. At first, this was done to gain an understanding of how people would react to sensitivity so we could fine-tune it properly. But play tests revealed that players liked this utterly wrong calibration because it gave them a sort of superpower. We observed children gesturing and shouting dramatically: The on-screen reaction was more compelling than what they had experienced before. In this example, provoking failures was a way to disrupt the way game designers thought about players’ interests.

and the way people actually perceive those objects, think, and act. Provoking and observing failures can be an insightful tactic in design research. However, this approach nevertheless calls into question the kind of failures that can or should be provoked. Choosing what problems can be tested on users is obviously conditioned by social, technical, and ethical constraints.

In doing so, user experience researchers can start a different kind of dialog with users that highlights inspirational data about how people would behave (and adjust their behavior or solve problems). Knowing how users react to problems can lead to insights about how to prevent these failures from happening, how to communicate malfunctions (i.e., error messages), or simply find solutions so users are not too bothered. In addition, the use of fieldwork in the context of misuse (or flawed use) can be a way to shed some light on original design possibilities and questions.

AbOut the AuthOr
Nicolas Nova is a research-
er and consultant in the
domains of user experi-
ence and interaction
design, undertaking field
studies to inform and evaluate the creation
of innovative products and services. At Lift
Lab, he works for clients such as Orange,
Nespresso, Nokia Design, and UBS. He is
also the editorial director of the Lift
Conferences and he teaches design
research at the Geneva University of Arts
and Design (HEAD-Geneva) as well as the
Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création
Industrielle (ENSCI, Paris). Nova holds a
Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from
the Swiss Institute of Technology
(Lausanne).