The other day a co-worker and friend asked me for some help and advice with photography, so I put together a brief tutorial for them that just covered off some of the main techniques and ideas behind taking a good photo.
I mentioned things like the Rule of Thirds – but more importantly I stressed the objective of a photo (or at least my photography) is to bring a viewer of a photo into the scene. Draw them in so they can experience what you experienced while taking that photo. It might just be a 4×6″ glossy print (well back in the old days before flickr) but it doesn’t have to be just a visual experience. Done right, it can stimulate other senses.
One way of helping a viewer of a photo feel like they’re in a scene is to provide context and my reason for drawing on photography for experience design is that providing context is an important part of user and social experience design.
Imagine this: You’re standing on the edge of a cliff. You just walked out of a thick, dark pine forest you’ve been walking through for 2 hours. You left the forest 50 feet behind you and out here on this ledge there’s just a few small scrubby plants. You’re out in the open, the sun is bright, the breeze strong and cool. The cliff is precipitous but the ledge looks sturdy. You’re right on the edge. You can see down to the vast lake a hundred feet below, the water lapping over a small beach that separates the water from the cliff face.
The view is impressive, you feel fantastic – so you take out your camera and snap a photo of the lake below … just to remind you of this trip.
The next day you’re looking over your photos and you come to the photo you took from the top of the cliff. It’s just a solid block of blue water. So disappointing! You can’t even figure out the right way to hold the camera to view the photo. It’s so abstract.
That’s where context comes in. If I were photographing that scene I’d be using the landscape to capture the scale of the height of the cliffs, the precipitousness, the sudden change from forest to barren rock. Small plants struggling to survive in the rock, bent by the on-short breeze. Looking back, the journey of where you’ve come from.
With that context, a person looking at the photo(s) could get a much better picture of the scene and hopefully immerse themselves in the experience. They can put their feet on the ledge because they can see the rock you were standing on. They can imagine the water far below because you’ve managed to capture the scale well using foreground/middleground/background techniques. They can see the forest and hopefully feel the breeze that you felt.
Information architects and indeed web designers in general are used to the concept of context in navigation – providing users with “spatial” awareness through “you are here”, “this is what’s around you” and “this is where you could go” visual clues.
However as mentioned a few times at UX Australia and most directly in Will Evan’s presentation this idea of context is also relevant to social experience design, a context for conversation.
The particular reason I’m referring to photography is not because a photo can be the context for a conversation but how the way the photo is taken can provide the context for that photo being experienced. I want to see the concepts of foreground/background in photography, capturing scale and the art of recording that experience in a way that the photo tells a story and paints an experiential story.
This ties into a conversation I was having with Owen Hodda and Chris Marmo at UX Australia about Twitter or indeed any sort of torrential life-streaming application. These tweets or small grabs of granular information about someone’s life are like the words in a book like Stephen Cox mentioned. Individually the words are relatively meaningless, but together they tell a story.
No one can be across the entirety of someone’s life-stream, unless you tweet once a day in which case it’s more like a dripping tap than a stream. So how can you design an experience that provides users with a context to this small snippets of information? Two bits of information together can provide ten times the meaning. The coherent collation and presentation of this information can greatly enhance social interactions between people – but as yet I have not been able to figure out an elegant way of doing this.
For example, and it’s a very basic example:
I recently went to Hawaii. While we were in Hawaii we visited five islands, drove through dozens and dozens of towns for hundreds of miles. We went on hikes, stayed in hotels, walked along beaches … and then take a tweet like this:
Our legs aching after Kalaupapa hike – and we get a room at Maui Seaside (or Oil Tanker-side) a mile from car, LOL! Or not … #hawaii #fb
Ok – so I tagged it with “hawaii” so you know it’s about Hawaii. Most of the people in my social circle on Twitter would also know I was actually in Hawaii at the time. I mention two locations – a place we went hiking and a hotel which I complain seems a mile from the car. And my legs hurt.
Even if you had been following all my tweets for the previous month and able to piece it all together it’s still half a picture. So you might know of the place we hiked, might remember the photos I had posted … but it’d be a struggle and still only be half a picture.
So I was toying with the idea of how you could enhance Twitter with different levels of context as part of the UI that show different activities (regardless of whether you’re actively tweeting or not) including “sleeping” which would also be designed to provide viewers with an idea of the timeline over which these activities took place. Time context. Then higher-level context like location, perhaps two-layer for example all the towns we visited in Hawaii grouped under Hawaii. Then perhaps take it to the next level by attaching meaning to all those contexts. Why is he in Hawaii? Why was that hike hard? What does that place look like? What is the weather like? If you know all those variables and they’re presented in a way that you can experience then you can engage better with me both directly with what I’ve said and indirectly through the information made available by that context.
It’s bloody hard just to think of a vaguely workable model at a high level let alone try and implement something, but I think we should at least try and tackle the problem.
Anyway – I think I got distracted and changed direction at least three times in this blog post so sorry for that.
Share your thoughts!
// purecaffeine.com, UX, design, social media and Gov 2.0 blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I think these contexts are being dealt with now via multiple accounts – at least in terms of intended audience. The profile gives a very broad context (permanent location and bio), but I can really see the benefit of some kind of built-in commands for changing that. Wouldn’t it be cool if twitter allowed you to enter something like “^location hawaii” in a tweet, and knew then that every tweet that followed was in hawaii (until you gave it another ^location update).
These “context updates” might also include:
^group (for targeting specific follower groups, assuming they existed)
^location
^activity
^mood (to be very myspace)
What do you think?
Cheers,
Chris
Thanks Chris; it’s certainly a start. TwitterVision will detect the L: machine tag in tweets to update your location there but it’s not very useful. Even if it updated your Twitter bio it doesn’t really expose that context to users.
The problem I’m grappling with is that we need the solution to be usable in that we can’t be asking and expecting people to provide all this metadata. For it to really work all this context should be sensed and provided by the system rather than the user explicitly maintaining this stuff.
Geo-aware devices are a start – but not everyone has one, not everyone messages from one and not everyone wants all this information made available. But perhaps we will get to that next level of privacy disclosure and relaxation now that we’re getting comfortable with Facebook.
And then how to present it? We don’t want a paragraph accompanying every tweet with textual information like “When Nathanael tweeted this he was 20 miles west of Hana on Maui. His girlfriend was driving the car at the time and it was just starting to rain. The temperature was a comfortable 30 degrees outside although they had the A/C on in the car”.