SXSW: Learning Interaction Design From Las Vegas
[Panel with Dan Saffer]
What can we learn from the normal and extraordinary of Vegas? What can we learn from this mess?
Withholding judgement may be used as a tool to make later judgement more sensitive. This is the way of learning from everything.
Disorder is only an order that we cannot see. Henri Bergson
It's not hard to conceptually move from Vegas to MySpace. Designers talk about the latter the way that architects talk about the former.
You can't talk about this issue without talking about social class. On the one hand you can see Vegas as all-you-can-eat buffets.
As Experts with Ideals, who pay lip services to the social sciences, they build for Man rather than for people-this means, to suit themselves, that is to suit their own particular upper-middle class sensibilities.
This means that we must start thinking about our technologies. Are they too complicated to use?
Why have email and IM separated? This is why people use MySpace.
Nothing in Vegas does just one thing. Everything does everything.
We have this mantra that less is more. Instead consider that less can be a bore.
Consider the importance of role-playing. People want to explore other identities and we can design for this.
the familiar that is a little off has a strange and revealing power. If you put something in a different context you are allowed to experience it in a different way.
Vegas understands user experience. Aside from Disney, few people think about creating total experiences. The carpet is designed to keep you in the building. Oxygen is pushed into the room to keep you there. The ceiling is painting like the daytime sky. Vegas understand both the macro and micro levels of designing experiences.
Las Vegas is not made like an ordinary city. Instead it is organized around a pattern of activities. You have gambling and shopping and hospitality in the same way that MySpace is organized around a pattern of activities. You can perform complimentary activities in one place.
Looking at the casino experience in particular you have the idea of tiered functionality. Anyone can slide a quarter into a slot machine and play without any knowledge or training. From there to the high-stakes poker game every level of the experience is really good and readily available. Each tier is its own rich experience. Yes the high-stakes poker game is given special treatment but the slot machine is the bread and butter of the casino.
Looking at slot machines in particular we see an amazing amount of detail. A single model of slot machin can gross more than McDonalds, Wendys, Starbuck, and other retailers combined. Players initiate the game every six seconds to an average of ten games per minute. So how do you tune this experience at the micro level?
The first step is that they focus on a specific audience: Women over 55 with a disposable income. Every design decisions is for this audience. Everything can be played be people who are legally blind. The also use positive reinforcement effectively to keep you at the machine. Most of this feedback is through designed sound experiences. As the coins drop they sweeten that with more sound.
[Note from me: There was a great NYTimes magazine article about slot machines last year or the year before.]
Slot machines are highly tuned machines where the odds are designed to keep you going.
So how we do we take good design and make it approachable? Irony is an effective tool to this end.
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Who is this guy?
Thanks for the notes, Its interesting to think that we can learn off myspace. It seems most web designers hate the place and just ditch it but the thing I think we all miss is that is were the audience is at the moment, they are all over there. The youth, bands, next generation etc
Im downloading the notes as well so I can get a bit more of an idea, thanks again.