Interactions what makes things cool

Any time that a new platform emerges, it calls for new design principles and techniques to truly bring the possibilities of that platform to life. Starting with the iPhone in , a new era of mobile life is upon us and people are flocking to all kinds of touch and mobile devices.

A new way of living has been born. This research, a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, identified the core factors of cool expressed in the Wheel of Joy and Triangle of Design. My Interactions article introduces you to these core concepts. We hope it will start a dialogue about how to deliberately design cool into your products, apps, and devices. Since this publication we have continued to collect data on the cool user experience in different business segments.

Consumers were talking about it everywhere. They gathered around the phone to watch the pinch and the swivel; they were awed by the pictures, apps, and games. The technology industry reacted as well. Companies expressed their frustration at not being able to create a game-changer too.

Everyone wanted to re-create the iPhone's impact in their own products. Game-changing products and applications are part of the natural ebb and flow of product design.

But something different seemed to be happening with the release of the iPhone: something all-consuming, something related to the overall user experience, something more than previous technology innovations. But what is that something? What does it mean to design for a transformative experience? What makes things cool? What drives the cool user experience? Here we introduce the results of the Cool Project and the key constructs we uncovered as core to the user experience of cool.

The Cool Project. What is going on with people using cool things? What impacts the experience of cool? How does the cool experience change across the life-cycle as we age? We wanted to identify principles to guide companies in designing cool into their offerings. We [ 2 ] began by going out into the field to understand people's experience with their cool products. We conducted field interviews with nearly 70 individuals between the ages of 15 and 60 across multiple locations in the U.

Using Contextual Design [ 3 ], our well-known user-centered design technique, we gathered and organized the data, producing affinity diagrams, personas of people and devices, and activity boards summarizing findings in key activity areas such as health and family. Then we conducted an online survey with more than people in multiple cities across the U. The analysis of all this data revealed the themes of the cool experience and implications for product design. We introduce them below.

What Makes Things Cool? The absolute center of cool is joy. Joy is our autonomic response to our encounter with the world. Joy is pulled unknowingly and unwillingly from within. It is the most basic of human emotions [ 4 ]. Throughout our research we encountered joy over and over, hidden beneath the experience of cool. The experience of cool is compelling because it is tightly connected to the experience of joy and delight.

But how can something as simple and limited as a technical gadget or a piece of software create an experience as profound as joy? Joy doesn't come from one specific feature. It doesn't come from using trendy colors, or adding people that move or jumping graphics. It doesn't result from using a touchscreen or fewer clicks to complete a task. Rather, joy in life happens when products help us fulfill our most core human motivations: Accomplishment, Connection, Identity, and Sensation.

We use the Wheel of Joy Figure 1 to represent these core life motivators, the what of cool. But joy in life depends on how a product is put together. The Triangle of Design Figure 2 represents key product design considerations that lead to joy in the use of the product itself.

Taken together, the Wheel of Joy and the Triangle of Design define the aspects of life and experience that designers must focus on to design for cool. Some elements have more impact than others, but overall the more of these elements that a product fulfills, the cooler the product is experienced.

Here we introduce the Cool Concepts. Our research uncovered many examples of each factor, although I can elaborate on only a few in the space of this article.

Each segment of the Wheel of Joy represents an aspect of life that cool products enhance and so generate joy in life. Joy erupts when products empower us to fulfill the many intents of life that, taken together, make up our days. The joy of accomplishment is our recognition that we can now "do our life" better than before. For more than 20 years designers have focused on making tasks simpler [ 5 ].

The very idea of going into the field, as emphasized in Contextual Design, is to better understand a work task within its larger context of relationship, culture, and place. But the joy of accomplishment revealed by our cool research challenges that focus. Joy in accomplishment reveals a more primary motive: to keep moving along in the unstoppable momentum of life. Cool tools keep us barreling along, moving from intent to intent, from urge to urge, spontaneously driven by our own desire and timeframe.

Consider the following moments of life: Tracy, 28, a married full-time graduate student, lives in Boston with her new husband, Mike. Last weekend, they went to New York City on a lark.

Let's go to New York! Why not? We have the vehicle; we have the time When we got to New York, I found a great hotel with Priceline. But they wanted 70 bucks to park a car! Then we wanted to eat and there it was, right at my fingertips. This couple is driven by their inner urge to go or see or do or eat. Today, with mobile information in hand, people can move along in their life with hardly any up-front planning, responding to their moment-to-moment desire or situation.

The cool of accomplishment changes the design focus from task to life. Life-centered design supports spontaneity and momentum. Life-centered design asks us to pay attention to the chunks of activities that make up any bigger task and how they can get done in smaller pieces of time.

Because people are trying to get all of work, home, and fun done by using every minute in life. Life-centered design calls for reconceiving activities in terms of the chunks of time and the amount of attention we want to devote to them:.

Connection between people is basic to human existence. Whether it's in the context of family, friendship, community, or one's career, reaching out to transcend our aloneness is as necessary as breathing. The joy of connection is not about the number of friends you have on a social network site; it's not about the usability of collaboration tools; it's not about being able to see each other with video.

Central to the cool experience of connection is the way cool tools help make relationships that matter more real and manageable within the unstoppable momentum of life.

The mobile phone, texting, and collaborative little games help us maintain our relationships by "dropping in" on those who matter to us more frequently. A relationship with nothing to do and nothing to talk about is not a relationship at all. Within a community context, online communities like Ravelry.

Sites bringing together communities of interest create tangible community where only dispersed people existed before. Taken together, cool tools reveal the work of relationships and how by simplifying that work, relationships so essential to the feeling of connection can better fit into the unstoppable momentum of life.

Figuring out who you are and how you will contribute to the world is the basic life task [ 7 ]. Children dress up and play make-believe to practice the behaviors of society and their role in it. This quest for self-definition is most intense in adolescence but continues over the lifecycle as people become independent adults, professionals, partners, home owners, parents, grandparents, and retirees. Just as relationships need conversational content, so too do we need ideas of who we might be.

Cool tools bring us a way to see what others our age or stage in life do to become more adult, parent well, or make the transition to grandparents. We can check with friends and media showing people "like me" to find out if our choices are reasonable. When we feel like we have made a choice that fits our real selves, we feel the joy of a centered self.

Since Neolithic men recorded their accomplishments in cave paintings that still speak to us today, people have sought to record and share their life story. YouTube is cool not only because it provides a way to share video, collects potential conversational content, and relieves boredom in dead time. YouTube is also cool because everyone can announce their existence and become a movie star.

Facebook is cool not only because it creates connection, but also because it is becoming the living cave wall. The joy of pure sensation starts with an infant staring at patterns or a child pouring sand over her body.

The cool of sensation falls into two camps: sensory immersion, creating "time out of time," and moments of pure sensual delight.

Products that offer sensory immersion take us away from the everyday. Music, a really large TV, and the graphics of games deliver transformative cool when done well because they fully and completely absorb us.

They become our core leisure activities absorbing us for longer periods of time. They are cool because they take us away from the everyday.

Elements of sensual delight can be built into any product: a compelling color like a lime-green coffeemaker, the visceral sensation of suede on the Droid cover calling to be touched, or the soothing sound of crickets coming from an alarm. Sometimes there is a twist in the sensation that ups the ante when a digital product recapitulates the real: digital photo quality that is "like real," digital flashcards that flip and generate that tiny smile of playfulness.

The key for design is making sensation a natural part of the product and experience. These sensations and natural playfulness, although not the dominant reason something is cool, still draw us in and create a smile.

They create a cool moment. When done really well good sensations make work like play without feeling gratuitous. They augment the other cool factors, enhancing the overall coolness of a product. The core of joy comes from how the factors in the Wheel of Joy impact life. The Triangle of Design makes this joy in life accessible through creating joy in use.

The Triangle of Design defines the factors which taken together increase or decrease the overall cool experience; they ultimately enhance or undermine the joy of life that the product is trying to provide. Joy in use comes from a holistic approach to providing and accessing capabilities that transform life. Direct into Action. Cool tools let people achieve their intent in a way that is most natural without stopping to have to learn, figure out, find, orient, negotiate logistics, or even decide.

The most direct experience returns people to their original interactions with the world. Design for Direct into Action is possible today because technology has matured enough to build much more directly upon these original capacities.

Today smartphones feel like an appendage, as immediate as any sense, allowing us to acquire information about the world or take a desired action.

From thought to result, it works magically. Design for "back to origins" affects the interaction paradigm we can now use to access product capability. But Direct into Action is equally about that capability itself. Instant on, one-click to buy, and even getting absolutely everything needed to use a product in the box let us move instantly into action. Bringing all data and function needed into one place, organized so that we don't have to orient or figure out a page is direct because we can see, decide, and do in an instant.

It takes us directly from desire to result. Today's technology makes real Direct into Action possible and that in turn makes living within the unstoppable momentum of life also possible. The principles of Direct into Action call for an entirely new way of designing.

Just as natural language commands overtook cryptic comments, WYSIWYG enabled direct writing interaction with the page, and drag-and-drop let us manipulate the digital world directly, touch interfaces and small targeted mobile apps let us fulfill our intent in the minute-by-minute context of life.

The Hassle Factor. The Hassle Factor is the evil twin of Direct into Action. Hassle is a natural part of life. Clothes are a hassle compared with nudity. Buttons were a hassle until zippers and then Velcro were introduced.

But Velcro can get clogged up and stop working, so Velcro is a hassle too. Every invention removes hassle from what came before it, but every invention also introduces new hassle. The design challenge of the Hassle Factor is to figure out how to remove tool and life hassle while introducing the least possible amount of new hassle. The Hassle Factor points to the experience of relief , that "ahhhh!

The cool of the Hassle Factor includes the physical manifestations of technology. Over and over our users told us, "De-junk me! The Hassle Factor asks us to raise our collective design consciousness to design for the hassle balancing act: How much hassle can we remove and how much have we created anew with our great new tool?

But when we get it right, we achieve the "ahhhh! The Delta. The Delta is the context necessary to achieve Direct into Action from the very beginning of product use. The Delta highlights the learning stretch built into a product. People learn how to operate in the world with their senses and they learn to use tools when they are young. Anything that builds naturally upon what is installed in childhood is a simple stretch to use. But if the Delta is too wide, the product won't be experienced as cool no matter what functions it provides.