My dream job would be a place where I get to play with, interact with, and build physical objects. It is incredibly satisfying to hold something in your hand and say I built this. It gives you that instant connection with the fruit of your labor. Now given the business that I am in, of building software (which I love by the way), there are no physical objects in a software system. The closest we get, is drawing some diagrams to represent the components in a software system or show how data flows between those components. Physical objects are great not only from a gratification point of view, but they also provide valuable feedback on the design and usability of the system.

Enter the idea of design studio for software. The idea is to have entities in a software system represented by physical objects, that you can touch and feel. When you interact with this physical world of software, you would get a much better feel for the system you are building and it would accelerate your learning about the system under construction. Also it levels the playing field between the designer of the software system and the innocent user. Let me explain how.

Lets say you are building a website that comprises of multiple screens. In this design studio, these screens would be represented by wooden blocks that would be placed on the floor, large enough for a person to stand on it. A user navigating these screens in a real world would be represented by a person jumping from one wooden block to the other. In addition to moving around on these blocks, the person would have to carry weights on her/him. These weights would be representative of the “effort” that the user has to put in, to use the website. Example of such “effort” would be the presence of too many UI (User Interface) elements on the screen, like buttons, drop-downs, et al (more UI elements, more effort required on part of the user to understand what they do), waiting time spent on the screen, information user has to hold across screens (did I click that checkbox 2 screens ago or am I shipping this to the right address on the checkout page with no shipping address on it), etc. All these things negatively affect the user experience on the website and hence, in a physical world, weights would be added as and when the user is subjected to such “effort”, when jumping from block to block.

So the first justification for building such a design studio would be to reduce the user interface complexity of a system. When professionals design a website, they often do not realize what a user really goes through when navigating a website. This is partly because websites are built by professionals for people who have little or no experience in working with a website. Imagine if you were to click a couple of extra links to get somewhere on a website, you might not think of it as a big deal. But if you were to hop around a few extra blocks carrying all those weights, then it seems a bit too much. When the designer is feeling the pain (literally) the user goes through on a real website, in a sense we are leveling the playing field between the designer and the user.

For usability testing, you could bring in some real users and have them walk through this physical world of the software system. You could introduce them to this “game”, hand them a task and see how they perform. You could have the person, leave a breadcrumb, when she/he jumps over the wooden blocks. This way you could study the paths they take through the system. With the help of the physical trace, you might notice that people, when performing apparently simple tasks, jump through a lot of “hoops” (in our case blocks), when it should have been rather obvious to begin with. This could be because of bad layout or just incorrect assumptions about user behavior. The solution could be as simple as placing related blocks adjacent to each other or providing appropriate directions to the user on the blocks. This would translate to providing a better workflow to the user in the software system and placing related screens closer to each other and linking them in a easy-to-find way.

The other justification for the design studio would be to get feedback on the system architecture. Same situation, you were building a website with some screens. Lets say each screen was backed by a combination of databases and services. Now as per the previous analogy, each screen would be represented by a wooden block and each external service/database would be represented by a physical box. There would be ropes connected from a screen to all the external systems that it talks to. What do I get out of this?

First of all you get the system view of things. You can easily tell if a screen is backed by too many external connections and infer that the screen might be slow to respond to user input. May be you should think of consolidating the external system end points or move some of the functionality to a different screen. Going back to the earlier example, you would add additional weights proportional to the connections the screen makes, to account for the latency introduced by the system integration, when you jumped on the wooden block representing that screen. Typically this kind of system integration information is left out of initial prototyping and becomes cumbersome to incorporate later into the user experience. User experience is not just about how the software looks but also how it behaves. Integration points can have a huge bearing on the design of the user experience and it is better to identify them sooner than later.

One other thing that I would like to throw in there is that the lengths of the ropes connecting the screens to the external systems should be proportional to the integration effort. Say a database is quick and easy to work with, so it gets a shorter rope, whereas an external uncontrolled service gets a relatively longer rope. A crazy idea would be, just by measuring the lengths of these ropes, you should be able to put some estimates around the actual integration effort. Yaa, how about putting some science into estimation!

All in all, it feels that this experiment might be worthwhile to give it a shot. I hope I can try this out soon enough on a real project. Thanks for reading and let me know how you feel about this idea.