The Experience Stack
This talk is organised as a fool’s alphabet. Incidentally, if you’re in the market for a good book to read, I do recommend Fool’s Alphabet by Sebastian Faulks.
Am I going to go all the way to z? You bet I am.
Is there a prevailing narrative arc? Is there order? Well… no. I wrote down the topics I wanted to talk about, coerced them into fitting the alphabet, and am finding a path from one to the next.
But whether I’ve designed order or not, you’re assuming a pattern. You’re assuming I’ve got a reason to talk about one thing after another. And patterns exist everywhere! I’ve tried to get as far away as possible from having all but the most necessary pattern in this talk, but I guarantee you’ll be seeing more patterns than I’ve deliberately included.
And even though I’m not directly responsible for the juxtapositions and rhetorical steps, you’re reading meaning into it.
To get back to Papanek’s definition of design, you’ll assume that the order you see in this presentation is meaningful, whether i like it or not.
This is important because of conversational implicature.
Implicature is what happens when you use your model of me – what you expect from me – to extract more information from my responses in a conversation than is what is actually contained in the words.
Paul Grice, the linguistician, put forward a number of maxims of conversation—a priori assumptions we can make going into a conversation. One maxim is that of relevance.
For example, if I start an anecdote about something completely off-topic now, you, knowing that I’m following the maxim of relevance, can assume that what seems off-topic is actually important, and you can start confidently building on the connections you can see to the topic at hand.
This is called implicature.
So when I take my new computer out of its box and the battery isn’t charged, I could ascribe no importance to the fact. But who can blame me for assuming it is a meaningful message, for thinking that it’s because the company i bought it from doesn’t care about me once it’s got the money out my hands.
Or when i’m talking to an instant messaging bot, and it uses a word at me, and I assume it knows what that word means… who can blame me for feeling stupid when it tells me it doesn’t understand. [If you’re building this kind of conversational user interface, The Jack Principles are a must-read.]
Implicature means that whether you like it or not, people will relate every experience they have with or around your product or website back to how to use it and how much slack to give it when things go wrong: it’s because they assume everything is deliberate and meaningful.