(just having written this summary for print, i thought i'd share this because it makes some points important to me in a rather plain&simple way ...)
“Working in a field of constant change, information technology designers habitually deal with evolving practices, fluid conventions, and unpredictable uses.” (Brown/Duguid 1994)
“Micromedia” are all about design driving content, not the other way round.
In the most simple form, it means a user to whom a series of very small preconfigured information objects is presented, be it continuously, one shortly after another, or discontinuously, covering longer time spans. Activity here is restricted to low-level interaction with the media device. This may seem simple, even primitive, but it is not quite if the full media context is really taken into account.
This poses two crucial questions: How can micromedia experiences become integrated into the complex context formed by the usage of one device (or the simultaneous usage of multiple devices), by the workflow, by the personal flow of tasks (be it professional or private), and finally by the sociocultural context of the media being used? And what forms of guidance and steering could possibly be designed to feel natural for a micromedia user?
At the moment I see six concepts that are fundamental for designing micromedia experiences. These would certainly need a rather complex discussion, and the following list is giving just some superficial hints, but just to pull the microchunks together for a single look may have some value:
Periphery/casuality: Microlearning applications have to feel peripherous and casual, for being usable in a state of (more or less) “Discontinuous Partial Attention”. Being a “foreground device” that is requiring full focus, the PC can only be simulating periphery and casuality within the main screen: as additional layers and items at the level of the the desktop interface (e.g. widgets, e-mail alerts …) or the browser window. The mobile phone is casual by nature, being a “background device that makes it easy to pop into the foreground for a brief moment before simply falling into the background once more”. Successful micromedia applications must be designed for this kind of unstable, peripherous attention.
Flow: A main challenge is to design microcontent structures in a way that these are not experienced as de-contectualized fragments, but as small particles that over the day are together forming some continuous structure in the user’s mind. This has many facets, but in any case it is important to design for the implicit flow structure of different types of media devices and usage.
Point of Presence: In the microcontent-based Web, stable roles and pre-defined identities become much more unimportant than in a software environment or in the page-based “Web 1.0”. The “Point of Presence” is more of a ‘blank page’, a field of of possible connections, an ‘anything, anytime, anyone’-position waiting for the user to step in. Thus micromedia applications cannot rely on an existing motivation of the user. They have to gain and to manage the user’s attention with every new “micro-impulse”, using skilled user experience design.
Gesture-driven: Micromedia experiences may be conceptualized as a flow of micro-impulses and responding micro-activities. Some activity has to be demanded to draw the user into the application, but at the same time these activities have to be as low-threshold as possible, like for example the thumb-gestures used to navigate the interface of a mobile phone.
Openness: A “feeling of openness” is crucial for a micromedia experience that has “to put the user in the center”. Still this can be created in different ways: on a symbolical level (like the feeling of ‘playing a game’, although the game’s content is not “open” at all), on the level of ‘Continuous Partial Attention’ (easy change of focus between background and foreground) and finally on the level of content (open content, user-generated content).
Simplicity: Microlearning must be experienced as a simple activity on each device. Of course, this always been recognized as a key factor in user-centered design. But media-orientated simplicity is not necessarily the same as usability. Rather it is “perceived simplicity”, which is for a large part an aesthetical quality.
These concepts certainly have to be discussed in detail (more links and some still superficial hints in this paper), but they can be used as a sort of benchmark test for microcontent/micromedia applications in the Web 2.0. Each quality that is lacking is diminishing the micromedia experience.
Posted by martin at May 10, 2007 11:14 AM