A Personal Invitation
From Diane Wilson, conference co-chair
As I write this Call for Participation, I confess that I have
no idea how many user experiences are in my house. They
creep in on little cat feet. Some are computers; some are
communication tools, such as the DSL modem that lets me
telecommute to my job a thousand miles away in a different
country. My appliances are hopelessly outdated; most have
no computers at all, although my 30-year-old clothes dryer
knows when my clothes are dry, and stops automatically.
With or without automation, they still provide user experiences.
My car and my lawnmower don’t do email, which is fine with
me, though they could do more to protect me from injury.
My home entertainment system is a half-dozen bird feeders outside my windows. The “user experience”
at my home is highly variable in source as well as in its
depth and quality.
A few months ago, while reading reviews for submissions to UPA
2002, I had a minor epiphany. Tucked away in a dark corner
with a blanket, a laptop, and a wireless broadband connection,
reading reviews written just minutes before by people around
the world, reviews collected on a web site that I built,
reviews aggregated and ranked in a database that I also
built…. It crept up on me, on little cat feet. Our review
system was fast, effective, user-friendly, and yet disconnecting
at a human level. It was a focused, disjointed conversation
with people I might never meet. In so many ways, this was
not the world
I grew up in! I created a user experience, and the experience
caught me by surprise when I became my own user.
That feeling of surprise keeps coming back to me. I’m from the
TV generation, the first generation that could not imagine
life without television, a generation defined by a user
experience. Our children are the computer generation; our
grandchildren are the wireless generation. I’m told that
there are people growing up today who think of a wireless
phone as a companion. A “tool” I can understand, but a “companion?”
Did I miss a user experience somewhere? In the other direction,
I recently heard a 78-year-old woman say, “I don’t have
email!” She said it with pride. If the medium is the message,
this digital divide is generational more than it is economic.
A revolution is under way again. Like all revolutions, it is unplanned,
unruly, unpredictable. This one
is already out of control. Wireless was supposed to be about
phones and PDAs, but instead the current explosion is wireless
for laptops and small LANs (Wi-Fi). Wi-Fi is unregulated,
egalitarian, bottom-up networking
that is beyond planning or control. The wireless revolution
is a sociological revolution as much as a technical one.
Who knew?
These revolutions in interaction continue to surprise us. At first
wireless meant freedom, but as we become more and more wireless,
we are also more and more wired. Sometimes we don’t have
the choice not to be wired, when the last thing we
do at night, and the first thing we do in the morning before
getting out of bed, is to check email. Shared
electronic schedules, instant GPS location anywhere on the
planet, phone calls on hiking trails. Wireless can
mean freedom, but it can also mean “no escape.” That was
not the “design intent.” The user experience changed out
from under us.
Wireless and communication is only one of several revolutions happening
as I write; others are happening in security, smart appliances,
transportation, and medical technology. A common thread
through all of these is that the design of user interaction
is often driven by and owned by the technologists. The user
experience is often not designed, not tested, not even considered,
even though technology survives only to the extent that
it benefits the people who control it. And all of these
revolutions are changing the way we live.
Much of what we refer to today as the “user experience” has always
been ubiquitous. It used to be provided by people, and it
was “social interaction.” Now much of it is provided by
machines. Human-machine interaction is all around us, teleconferencing
at work, cooking at home with a pre-programmed digital stove,
on the road with cameras detecting and recording traffic
violations, in a hospital bed with machines monitoring a
life on the brink, in the park with a videographer recording
nature instead of experiencing it with friends, in a concert
interrupted by the aggravating musical ring of a cell phone.
Human society evolved around social interaction; will the
pervasive user experiences of the future be
an effective and life-affirming extension to that? How
will we know?
This is our challenge. The future is already here; more futures
wait impatiently to get in. Some of them will not creep in on little cat feet. The most effective way to adapt to
change is to lead that change. As usability professionals,
we have a unique opportunity to shape the user experience
of today’s future, and tomorrow’s, and beyond. The tools
of our trade, from ethnography to task analysis to prototyping
to experimental design to statistical validation, give us
the ability to measure and understand change, to envision
it, and to assess it. Like culture, user experience may
be “all around us and as invisible as the air,” but the
sociology and experience of change are visible and malleable.
At the same time, we are all citizens of a technological society.
The question is more than how do we lead; it’s
how do we follow, how do we respond, how do we live, how
do we share, how do we express our professional influence
in a meaningful, effective way? How do we cross the digital
divides of generations, of accessibility, of language and
culture, as well as the digital divides of economics and
class? The technology of the future must be radically inclusive.
I ask you to come to UPA 2003. Explore with us the new frontiers
of interaction. Come to show us what you are doing to improve
the user experience that is already dancing around us at
every second of the day. Come to learn what you can do to
make ubiquitous usability into an experience of joy and
great social benefit. Come and share what you know as well
as what you seek; share your successes and your failures;
come to teach and mentor those who would take their place
beside us. Come and share your business knowledge and your
technical skill; your people skills and your analytical
insights. Come and be part of a diverse community working
for common goals in a world where the user experience is,
and always has been, ubiquitous.
Come and present at UPA. It won’t be the same without you.
