Context:How we broke it, and how we might be able to fix it.

Andrew Hinton@inkblurt

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Context:How we broke it, and how we might be able to fix it.

Andrew Hinton@inkblurt

Thank you for coming. Iʼve been asked to introduce this topic in a span of about 15 minutes, and then leave the rest of our time for conversation, so Iʼm going to do my best to make that happen. So forgive me if I just jump right in ...

LanguageLanguage

Context

This is a urinal. Itʼs also probably the most influential work of art in the 20th century. To be exact, itʼs a urinal that Marcel Duchamp submitted to an art show in 1917. He didnʼt just submit it, though. He scrawled R. Mutt, 1917 on the side, like an artistʼs signature, called it “Fountain” stuck it on a pedestal, and *then* submitted it. It was a splendid act of Dada. But it ended up being more than merely a joke. >>By labeling it, >>and putting it in a different context, Duchamp changed the frame of reference for the object. It was a challenge against everything that had come before: every cultural assumption or taboo. It eventually affected how people thought about art, high and low culture, everything.

Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Duchamp_Fountaine.jpg

UI Behavior

Past experience of similar functionality.

Visual Placement

CONTEXT

Hereʼs a screenshot from my iphone, using a 3rd party browser. Notice the little x icons in the top right. How do we know those two almost identical shapes donʼt do exactly the same thing? ... Itʼs because of a *lot* of factors, actually. Some are ... >>The user needs to understand that because of their placement and how theyʼre contained, >>as well as when and how they became visible -- experiencing their appearance gives some idea of what theyʼre connected to in this interaction. >> It also assumes the user has enough background and experience to know *anything* about whatʼs happening here, including experience with little x-icons. >> All of these are part of the context of the experience.

One thing this interaction has going for it is that itʼs at least all right there in front of you, if you know how to read the cues. But I bring this example up only because itʼs small and easy to point out. What about when itʼs a bigger deal, and harder to see?

WTF?

Where am I? What “mode” am I In?

Does “mode” change what “where” means?

Earlier I searched Google for “information architecture context” to see what would come up ... and discovered that my blog comes up as number 3 for that search result! Awesome!!!

>> But then I open a different browser and run the same search, and ... Iʼm nowhere to be found... >> Itʼs a real WTF moment... >> Until I realize Iʼm logged in on one and not the other ... but thereʼs nothing telling me this is an issue, explicitly. >> As a designer I ask questions like these ... where am I? what mode is this? and does mode change what “where” means to begin with?

Hereʼs a fun one with ecommerce. After my flight in from Atlanta, I get to my hotel in Portland, and I decide I need some duct tape. So I visit the Ace Hardware site to find a store that has duct tape nearby. >>So I go there, and see a map. >> I see a store and select it, and it shows me the details about the store. Iʼm thinking awesome let me check this nearby store for duct tape. But when I click it...>> Iʼm asked to LOG IN or create an account! How annoying. Oh well, luckily I have an Ace Hardware account, so I log in ...

And now when I search for duct tape, I can see that the Portland store is at the top of the page. That must mean Iʼm looking at the inventory for that store. Perfect. >> I select the kind of duct tape I want ... >> And oddly enough I have an awful lot of text here about how I can or canʼt get it ... the only thing that specifies anything about finding it right now in my local store is this, so I click it ...

WTF?

And I get yet another map ??? >> And this one is in North Carolina???Oh itʼs because earlier, I signed in and it had my old address from when I lived in North Carolina last year. There are all sorts of contextual disconnects happening here, even though each individual *page* works pretty well -- it doesnʼt hang together very well as a system that accommodates life complexity.

Google Buzz

Facebook Beacom

There have been a number of spectacular disasters with privacy in the last few years. Google Buzz connected people in ways they didnʼt want to be connected, because Google assumed if you emailed someone a lot they were a close friend. Facebook assumed youʼd want to share with everyone labeled “friend” information about everything you bought online.

Friend?

In the information dimension, labels are architecture.

Both Facebook and Google made huge mistakes about what the word “Friend” actually means. Language is powerful, and labels are powerful. And now weʼre living in a world where thereʼs an ever-present dimension of information that shapes our daily experience. >> >> in the information dimension, labels are architecture. The semantics of that dimension can affect us just as strongly as the physical architecture of our cities and buildings.

One thing Google and Facebook did wrong ... They each created an overly simplistic model for connecting people, and then tricked themselves into thinking that model reflected everything important about the complexity of the contexts we live in every day. >>They give us a few little boxes to label ourselves with,

When in fact, our lives are much more organic, analog and full of facets and shades of identity and relationships.

Workplace

Shopping Mall

Home

Location-Awareness(Physical Context / Digital Response)

Friend Request

Workplace

Email Sharepoint

LinkedIn

FacebookMessage

Wall

Invitation

Group

Personal Email

Reply to Individual

Reply to AllMailing List

(s)

Phone/SMS

Post

Direct Message

Reply

Mailing List

Pictures

Pictures

Tags

BusinessPhone / SMS

Multi-Presence(Digital Context / Cognitive Response)

One important difference I want to point out is between what those of us designing and researching mobile digital behavior think of as context, and what Iʼm focusing on here, though theyʼre both relevant in the examples I mentioned. >>In the first type, we have the ability for our devices and the physical places we visit to interact and be location-aware. They change their digital response based on our physical context. >> In the second type, the one Iʼm focusing on more here, we the person can be anywhere physically ... but cognitively theyʼre inhabiting multiple “places” often simultaneously, and itʼs our cognition thatʼs supposed to respond and comprehend it all. The first one is getting a lot of attention in research and in the marketplace, but I think itʼs the second one that is a bigger present problem.

Workplace

Shopping Mall

Home

Shopping Mall

Friend Request

Home

Workplace

Email Sharepoint

LinkedIn

FacebookMessage

Wall

Invitation

Group

Shopping Mall Personal Email

Reply to Individual

Reply to AllMailing List

(s)

Workplace

Phone/SMS

Post

Direct Message

Reply

Mailing List

Pictures

Pictures

Tags

BusinessPhone / SMS

The Full Context Clusterfrack

It gets even worse when you mix these up into one big contextual soup.

danah boyd

The digital researcher and sociologist danah boyd recently finished her dissertation on this very issue, and her work has been very influential in the social computing space. She makes the case that this problem is, at core, a context problem.

danah image: strandgreen.com

“The problem is not lack of context. It is context collapse: an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording.”- Michael Wesch

Sociologist Michael Wesch, who has done a great deal of research especially around YouTube, says that this technology has created a condition he calls “context collapse” where we simply cannot comprehend the sorts of places weʼve created, and how theyʼve all essentially collapsed into one. It takes everyone by surprise, and we still havenʼt figured out how to work within it.

Embodiment

We have huge blind spots in our cognitionfor this new kind of space we have invented.

guardian.co.uk

Our brains evolved in physical space, and use those categories for comprehending digital experience.

At the center of why we struggle so much with contextual cognition online is the fact that we use the same brains that evolved over millennia by comprehending context as physically bounded, explicitly demarcated space. We have HUGE blind spots in our cognition for this new kind of space weʼve invented.

image guardian.co.uk

“In pervasive information architecture, context is personal,

social, existential context, connected tightly to the concepts

of place and place-making, and spans channels.”

- Resmini & Rosati

“Existential Space”

The new book from Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati does an excellent job of pushing us as practitioners further down the road for understanding this kind of space ... they call it Existential Space. I canʼt recommend this book highly enough, by the way.

What do we do?

We have the methods... but do we use them properly?

Emotional

Cognitive

Physical

SituationSituation

Need

Need

Need

TaskTask

Task

Task Task

Task

Task

Task

Time

This is a diagram Iʼve used for a while -- >>it describes how a person has physical, cognitive and emotional aspects that we should keep in mind. (aka a Persona)>>They also have a life situation that gives rise to needs in their lives, which then spawns tasks theyʼre having to do (aka Scenarios). >>And they move through this experience over a period of time, during which things can shift and change. We know how to generate this information. But from what Iʼve seen we ignore most of it.

Emotional

Cognitive

Physical

Situation

Need

Need

Need

Time

Emotional

Cognitive

Physical

Situation

Need

NeedNeed

NeedNeed

Time

TaskTask

Task

Task Task

Task

Task

Task

In the rush of project work, we focus on the tasks. In fact a lot of our methods encourage us to focus on activities and tasks, extracted from their life context. The full scenario goes away and we only think about the parts of it that are neat & tidy and that fit the requirements we inherit. So, no wonder this goes wrong.

System

Task

Need

Situation

Cognitive

Emotional

Physical

Organic, Analog

Person

Artificial, Binary

System

Systems In Context

Bridge between = the work of UX

So if we take the models I showed before, and turn them slightly, adding the system, we see how the system lives in just one island within a vast ecosystem of human context. >>Much of our job is to bridge the gap between the harsh, artificial logic of the system and the living reality of people trying to get things done.

Let’s Talk

andrewhinton.com | @inkblurt

So if we take the models I showed before, and turn them slightly, adding the system, we see how the system lives in just one island within a vast ecosystem of human context. >>Much of our job is to bridge the gap between the harsh, artificial logic of the system and the living reality of people trying to get things done.