ENJOYABILITY, NAVIGATION, GLOBALIZATION

Enjoyability

An enjoyable user experience is often due to achieving one of two stages of attention - absorption and flow.

Objective
Learn to evaluate absorption and flow.

[see sample links]

Navigation

Navigation is a necessary because there's too much information to fit all on a single screen.

So, navigation should be as easy as possible.

Additionally, navigation systems can be designed to include valuable content or context that help users in general.

Objective
Learn to evaluate the quality of a piece's navigation.

[see sample links]

Globalization

Today's trends to cultural diversity a global economy, and the global nature of the internet require designers to understand how to create pieces whose meanings can be understood by audiences from different cultures and who speak different languages.

Objective
Learn to evaluate if and how well a piece is globalized.

[see sample links]

DEFINITIONS

Enjoyability

What are ATTENTION STATES?

Both absorption and flow are states of attention. These attention states are important because they help us achieve emotional states, but by themselves, they don't have any emotional content.

For example, you can be absorbed and terrified OR absorbed and laughing. Either way, you've got to be absorbed first. If you're terrified, you've probably blocked out everything else so you can focus on whatever it is that's terrifying you. Like when you're watching JAWS...

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What is ABSORPTION?

Absorption is the state of attention you experience when you are so immersed that you forget your surroundings. You are so deep into a book, movie or video game, that you 'become' the experience instead of yourself.

Perhaps it's the ability of absorption to help us escape from being just ourselves that is the reason we all enjoy being absorbed so much.

Note that being absorbed does not require any interaction from the user. You can be a perfect couch potato and be 100% absorbed. You don't have to do a thing, except maybe keep your eyes open, change the channel or turn the page occasionally!

To evaluate absorption, you ask questions like "Are users able to become immersed in the piece?"or "Was I able to become absorbed in the piece?".

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What is FLOW?

Flow is absorption PLUS interaction. In other words, if you interact with and exert control over the medium (media) you're absorbed in, then you're experiencing flow.

Picture a young boy and his father sitting at home in the family room on a Sunday afternoon. The father is absorbed in watching a soccer match on TV; the youngster is also absorbed, playing a very active video game. He is concentrating intently.

Only one of them is experiencing flow. The boy is interacting with the game, controlling the outcome.

The athletes in the soccer match are also experiencing lots of flow. Other examples of flow activities are playing or singing music, sports, dancing, painting, using Photoshop...

To evaluate flow, ask if the activity you're evaluating lets users get absorbed AND requires lots of interaction on the part of the user.

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Navigation

What is NAVIGATION?

In most interfaces, navigation is the most common user interaction. We move around not only each screen, but from one screen to another. In most circumstances, our central concern is information we receive as the result of navigating, not the moving itself. For these reasons, designers need to create interfaces that minimize navigation and the time needed to learn navigation systems.

The navigation system implements and reveals the basic information architecture of a piece, its structure. This is true for magazine readers, channel surfers and web browsers. Without navigation, users would arrive at a piece's opening screen and stay there.

Navigation systems perform four tasks. They tell the user

• Where they are
• Where they can go
• How to get there
• How to get back

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FOUR MODES of Navigation

Imagine going to a library. The typical library supports three ways of helping people find things: Browsing by walking around, searching via computer, lookup in a card catalog, and getting help from a librarian. These same modes of navigation define what's possible in interactive media.

BROWSING requires that users be allowed to navigate to an unknown next screen. Often this is by means of "next" arrows, but it could just as well be by a randomly selected next screen, as well as the more common linearly predetermined next screen.

SEARCHING requires that users be allowed to enter search criteria, such as in a search engine. The user selects the next screen from among the search results.

LOOKUP requires that users be able to see an index or table of contents, for example, and select a next screen.

HELP can be implemented in various ways. Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) pages can answer many questions. Often, pieces provide some way for a user to send a query to a real human.

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How can an interface tell users WHERE THEY ARE?

Think of navigating around an unfamiliar city. What should a city planner do so that visitors can easily tell where they are? One answer is to install easy-to-read street signs, located in predictable, well-lit places. But what are the street signs of interactive media? The obvious answer, of course is to use on-screen signage, prominently displayed in the screen header.

Create a sense of place
One creative way to go beyond simply using signage to tell users where they are is to try to create a sense of place. Looked at from this perspective, showing users "where they are" is theater: painting backgrounds, placing props, adjusting the lighting, providing realistic ambient sound, and so on. In other words, you can differentiate different parts of a piece by designing each part to be a separate virtual place.

Sometimes, color keying certain zones of a site or levels of a game, help orient users; the home page will show colors which represent zones or the color scheme of a game will intensify as the user moves up on the levels of play.

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How can an interface tell users WHERE THEY CAN GO?

Showing users where they can go is the most important role of navigation. Users use pieces to accomplish things, and achieving those goals is the most important user success criteria.

So, imagine that a user knows that a certain piece can be used to accomplish a specific task, and launches the piece with this objective in mind. This task is one of many other things the piece can do. The piece's navigation system must show the user exactly how to navigate to the part of the piece where the task can be accomplished. Any confusion will frustrate the user and ruin his/her ease of use. If the navigation is too vague or misleading, the user will abandon activity altogether.

In addition to signage, contextual and background treatments can help users understand their navigational options.

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How can an interface tell users how to GET WHERE THEY WANT to go?

Once users can see where they can go, showing them how to get there is in general, as simple as making the "where" into a "hot" link or button. Cursor movement over the "where" causes a transformation that signals interactive possibilities.

Each hotspot needs to, at a glance, look like it's hot. There are lots of graphics techniques for doing this: Drop shadows, depth, three dimensionality, colors and textures that stand out against the background. Animation works too -- an interface element that shows life will catch the user's eye, and signal a potential for being a hyperlink.

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How can an interface tell users how to GET BACK?

Lost in space?
This feature of navigation is often given short shrift on websites, perhaps because web browsers offer 'back buttons.' Unfortunately, the back button only satisfies users' needs in a very limited way -- it takes them to the last page they visited.

While this is sometimes where users want to go, they frequently want something else. When designing the navigation system, its your job to understand these other destinations as well.

You must ask "Where might the user want to go back to?" In addition to the last screen, users might want to go up one or more levels in the piece's hierarchy; to the main menu, to a previously visited submenu, to a screen or activity that is particularly important to them, to a bookmark.

Once you've identified all these other backwards destinations, you can design mechanisms to help users get there. Usually, this is achieved by designing a global navigation system.

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What makes for a good GLOBAL NAVIGATION system?

Within a piece, a global navigation bar is a set of buttons that are grouped together and represented consistently on all screens of the piece. The bar acts like a permanent table of contents that appears (theoretically) in the same place on all pages of the piece.

Users can then tell where they are. They can see all the global destinations they can go. They can see how to get there. And, at least for those global locations, they can see how to get back.

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How and why do you embed MEANING in the navigation?

Meaningful Navigation
To embed meaning in the navigation, you can add text labels, rollovers, audio clues, and contextual graphics or other media. All these help the user understand the meaning of their navigational options, as can reinforce the main and secondary points of a piece.

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Globalization

How do you GLOBALIZE a piece successfully?

Globalization focuses on how to make a piece that will work for audiences of different cultures and languages. Globalization is a prerequisite for successful integration of a piece into a global environment.

All too often, globalizing takes place after a piece has been released and succeeded in an initial mono-cultural context. While this may seem logical, it is far easier to design a piece from the beginning with future globalization in mind than it is to redesign an already completed product for a new culture.

If you globalize, but don't do a good job, the result can make your product appear offensive, funny, inappropriate, or otherwise undesirable. The same unhappy results can also occur if you make no attempt whatsoever to globalize, and just release your product as is. The only way to be sure of a positive outcome is to test your globalized product with natives of each target culture.

TRANSLATION FLUNKS

Language is the most obvious concern when globalizing. Translations must take into account the unique cultural context of the both the original and target languages. A piece like You Don't Know Jack is difficult to translate because the humor and slang in it is culturally specific to Americans.

Grandma and Me, on the other hand, speaks in far more universal terms. It is much more easily translated. Let's take a serious-- but humorous-- look at how shrewd American businesses have chosen to bring products, slogans and packaging into new contexts.

Tissues for the World's Oldest Profession
Here's what can happen if you don't translate! Puffs Tissues tried to introduce its product in Germany, only to learn that "Puff" in German is a colloquial term for "whorehouse".

Regular Beer
Unfortunately, translating words doesn't always work either. Coors' Spanish translation of its slogan, "Turn It Loose," was widely understood as "Suffer From Diarrhea".

Chicken Lovers Beware
Chicken magnate Frank Perdue's line, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," sounds much more interesting in Spanish: "It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate."

Microsoft Should Know Better!
You might think that a company whose every product has an interface would be sensitive to the problems of globalization. But Microsoft made a classic gaff in an English ad they translated into Japanese as: "If you don't know where you want to go, we'll make sure you get taken."

Nonalphabetic Language Problems
Nonalphabetic languages, such as Chinese or Japanese, are based on characters that represent whole concepts.

Ghostly Beverages
When Pepsi began marketing in China, they attempted a literal translation of their slogan, "Pepsi Brings You Back to Life." They came up with a set of characters that mean "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave."

Frog a la Coke
Fortunately for Pepsi, Coke didn't fare much better with their first campaign in China. Coke confronted the translation problem with a different strategy. Instead of a literal translation, they tried to name the product with characters that when pronounced sounded like "Coca-Cola".The rationale was that since the sounds of the words worked well in English, they'd also work well in Chinese. The only problem with Coke's plan was that the characters used to convey the sounds also conveyed a literal meaning "bite the wax tadpole".

Understanding the Target Cultural Context
You must test all media elements for appropriateness, not just the characters or sounds, and they must be consistent with each other and with cultural expectations.

Food Made of Babies?
When Gerber started selling baby food in Africa, they used their original USA packaging. You can probably picture their cute baby on the label. Unfortunately, most people in Africa can't read. To address this problem African companies use pictures on the label to indicate the contents of the package. Gerber's choice left the impression that Americans eat babies! In this case, the cultural confusion is not translations, but the contextual expectation of how pictures are used.

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