Experience Prototyping

In their paper “Experience Prototyping” (2000), Buchenau and Suri explore the idea of creating representations of user experiences, through which early designs can be adapted and refined.

One example given is where the designers were tasked with having to design a pilot’s interface for an underwater, remotely operated vehicle. The designers created a super low-fidelity prototype consisting of a person holding a cabled camera attached to a television, where another person had to navigate the camera operator around a room with only the video feed. Even this extremely basic prototype yielded many useful insights and gave the designers a greater appreciation of the user experience. They went on to interview an expert user of one of these systems, and it could be argued that a lot of the information that they gained through the prototyping could have been obtained through the interview process. However, I would say that any opportunities for designers to understand the needs of the end-user first-hand are extremely valuable.

Many aspects of the paper can be linked to Experience Design Theatre (which I also wrote a blog post about), which is clearly a descendant of experience prototyping. Interestingly, one of the core differences in the scenarios in this paper is that the designers are the ones doing the acting, whereas in Experience Design Theatre the simulated participants’ roles were filled by hired, professional actors. While a professional actor is involved, they act in more of a directorial position. While being in the participant role could be valuable, the paper does question if there is “any danger that active involvement […] tends to direct energy away from understanding the experience to acting as if you were having the experience”. The ability for designers to be able to stand back and observe the whole scenario – not just from one participant’s viewpoint – might be impacted by participating in the ‘performance’.

Another interesting difference between EDT and Experience Prototyping is the role of the audience – in EDT, the primary goal is to get audience feedback and immediately adapt the performance appropriately. In Experience Prototyping there might not even be an audience – the primary goal is for the designers to put themselves in the users’ shoes. If there is an audience, the goal can become the communication of ideas. The paper gives the example of presenting a “Kiss Communicator” project to a group of suited businessmen in a boardroom, using recorded Experience Prototyping to convey the ideas and tone in a challenging environment.  The transmission of ideas is decidedly one-directional compared to the reactive, two-way flow of EDT.