Human Experience Design

I wondered if a podcast could be like a movie, but with no images, just sound. But still an adventure. Still a story…

A few years ago I gave it a shot. I first recorded a normal podacst, then while we were in the booth, we quickly did this second version…

It’s unlike any normal podcast. It’s a kind of radio-theatre that takes you into the heart of what it means to design experiences.

When it first released, designers from all over the world DMed me and shared stories… some cried. Other’s laughed. Each felt seen. It starts with an upbeat jingle of the normal podcast… then gets weird, poignant, and bothers to give a damn.

Put on your headphones and prepare yourself for something different.

-Buckhouse

Transcript

The Role of Storytelling in Experience Design: A Conversation with James Buckhouse

The following is a transcript of an Inside Intercom podcast featuring James Buckhouse, founder of the Sequoia Creative Lab.

Introduction

Intercom: Hey there, and welcome to another edition of Inside Intercom.

A few months ago, we were fortunate enough to host James Buckhouse, the founder of the Sequoia Creative Lab and our San Francisco studio, to go in-depth about the role of storytelling in experience design.

James comes at this from a very unique angle. He spent nearly a decade as an animator over at DreamWorks, working on blockbusters like the Shrek franchise, before becoming a senior experience architect at Twitter. And today, storytelling is the foundation of the work he does, which is, in essence, helping Sequoia's portfolio companies create better experiences for their users.

On the day of our recording, James brought a little something extra with him to the studio, a bit of radio theater that is really a short story to inspire and remind us all that we're never just designing pixels or features or user flows. We're designing complements to the human condition. And when doing that, there's a wealth of value in the observations flowing all around us on any given day.

So in this episode, we're going to do something a little bit different and share that first person essay. I'll let James take the mic from here.

James Buckhouse on Storytelling and Experience Design

James Buckhouse: Okay, so I'm imagining, dear listener, that you're now commuting. Maybe you're commuting home. Maybe you're on your way in. And the last thing you want is someone to tell you how to do your job. So instead I'm imagining maybe what you could use is just the tiniest little bit of inspiration. So I'm going to try and experiment here. I'm going to try to do the tiniest bit of radio theater on the concept of human experience design. All right, here we go.

Neck deep in the design of a black ops project. The type of project where you don't talk about it until it's done and even then you keep the details to yourself. Up to my chin, wrestling a problem the way Jacob wrestled the angel. Suffering in the fight, getting my hip crushed, but refusing to back down. Fighting until I'd earned the chance to name the thing I was up against. Deep in what athletes and artists know as the flow, and starting to get that familiar buzzing of an idea scumbling through the substrate to the surface of articulation, and in that moment I dropped my stylus onto my desk and snuck out the back door.

My Cintiq sat there, blinking at me, hardly able to imagine that I had gotten up to leave. I jumped across Market Street and slipped into the nearby classical music conservatory to commit my favorite crime, a type of reverse truancy where I sneak into classes I don't actually sign up to take because no one expects outsiders to break into classical music lectures. But it's as easy as strolling by with a scroll in your hand.

Today's master class centered on the Bach cello suites. Now three master cello professors had flown in to critique a student's playing. And what happens next requires a little bit of an explanation.

As the students started to play, my normal vision took a backseat to my imagination and superimposed on top of what was actually there. I projected my own reductive, essential take on the events at hand. I turned my vision into a type of pencil vision, where the whole world was a series of sketches, and I saw the music appear as cresting waves of graphite that twisted from one musical thought to the next, and the line turned on point across imaginary paper, and my mind drew charcoal shadows of the players gripping their instruments as the professors leaned in with concern and scorn and occasional delight.

The music then became inky wash strokes with its thickness mapped to a type of importance velocity and the whole world turned into a monochromatic pencil and charcoal shaded inky brushed animation of Bach's brilliance.

Now, one professor was not at all happy with the performance, and he cut the cellos off mid-phrase and remanded the cellos to go back and identify the key he was in, not just the note he was playing. And the player was flustered. He had to calculate for a second about the key. Was he in the fourth or was he in the fifth of the fifth in one second? And this pause lit this fire under the professor, who saw a chance to teach a crucial lesson in the interpretation of Bach's music.

And my oldest, favorite idea of Bach's best work came rushing back to me, that there is this second slow-motion melody hidden in the harmonic progression. This secret melody makes the purported melody inconsequential to the poignancy of the true story hidden in the walk back to the tonic. It's like the difference between the bones of a majestic piece of architecture and all the tiny details carved into the filigree along its surface. Sure, the details are lovely, but the story comes from bigger ideas.

The cellist, however, was caught up in the details, all that surface dazzle, that fancy finger work he had trained his whole life to be able to do, you know, the show-off stuff that kept him home at night in high school practicing etudes while his buddies, who had not been cursed with the blessing of a calling, were out getting drunk or causing trouble. And the surface snazziness had been hard won, and it was nearly impossible for the cellist to imagine that it somehow wasn't the important part of the piece.

The professor, unable to explain really what was bothering him, ran over to the organ and he started playing the second hidden melody, emphasizing the harmonic progression and the true story of the piece, urging the cellist to find the hidden core. And the professor and the student pushed on, struggling but trusting, and then with a jolt, the epiphany snapped into place in the brain and the heart of the cellist, and he finally started to hear that slow-motion melody.

And he started to gush, because for the first time he heard Bach's essay on the human condition as it marched from the tonic towards adventure and struggle and poignancy, and then back home again. And when the cellist finally found his way, all of us could feel it in the classroom, and each nearly burst into tears with the truth of human experience laid bare. Everyone, at some level, knows the poignancy of that return home.

So still deep in pencil vision, still seeing the world as a combination of gesture lines, of people, places, music, and abstract emotion, my own puzzle started creeping back into my mind. That music was helping me solve the particular riddle that had driven me out of the office in the first place. And in that moment, I thought, what can Bach teach us about slow time and fast time in the same experience? About the details versus the journey in design. About the pleasure and poignancy of the return home. About the importance of knowing the bones of the story, regardless of the filigree.

I was experiencing pencil vision for a reason, and my mind started sketching what I needed to do next for the product experience I was working through. Hidden in Bach's slow-motion fractal science, I had found a way forward. And I took out a pad, and I started drawing the solution.

Now I know this working method isn't typical. You expect designers to be drawing boxes instead of boxes instead of boxes along this tidy grid with tasteful round rec corners and the rare circle or two and then noting the whole thing with a bunch of really important looking arrows next to the UX and you think of a designer making very designy-y decisions like Booker Thin. Book or thin. That's filigree. What matters are people and experiences.

Now hold on. Experiences. Experiences. Apps aren't just a collection of taps. That's a piano sonata. And apps aren't just swipe stakes and text entries. That's an ATM. Apps portend the sum of human experience if you do it right. And ultimately there'll be choices declared and vocabulary expressed and all of that adds up to your total design system. The epidermis of design. But before any of that can be put to use, the first step is to have some sense of what human experience is all about in the first place. The story.

What if you weren't designing the UI, UX for an app, but instead were designing a movie that starred the person using your product? And what if that movie was based on an emotional, poignant, funny, marvelous story? What if your job was to witness the universe in its vast, unknowable entirety? And understanding human experience starts with admitting what you're actually designing. It isn't just considering the pixels in your app or the Chrome of the phone or the download sign-up flow. It's the whole experience happening at that moment.

You're never just designing pixels. You're designing complements to the human condition. You're designing the kids on the bus, the honking horns, the crying baby, the crazy guy with the bag of bottle caps, and the smell of barbecue sauce, and the overheard phone calls, and the guy singing country classics, and the herky-jerky rage of the bus driver who's screaming at pedestrians as the bus lurches forward. And you're designing that sticky feeling on the seats, and the satisfaction of a super cute outfit, and the empty pang of an earnest, flawed, hopeful bus rider who has recently lost her favorite aunt, who pulls out her phone, and then right in that moment, she sees something new.

You're designing the stone wall filled with bullets, and the streets turn to hell. And the good people who ought to be home laughing with their family and sharing a meal, who are now deaf from the shells blowing up in the town square, you're designing for that moment when a witness sends a single message to the rest of the world that calls out, I am here. This just happened. Help us.

You're designing the long roll of paper across the green vinyl bench and the examination room and the TV with the bad audio and the sneakers on the nurse and the pen on the clipboard and the paperwork on the desk and the photocopy of common questions about rare diseases as someone's best friend taps for answers and tries to book next steps and stay calm and to not get too scared as the TV plays a game show where the contestants silently jump and clap in obscene close-ups.

You're designing the bedside table lamp, the mattress, the blanket, the pajamas, the propped up pillows and the cup of hot chocolate and the mug that contains it and the happy couple holding a tablet and watching the same movie they saw together on their first date.

We are not omnipotent or omniscient, but we can strive to be omni-empathetic. We can be humble enough to know that everything happens within the context of someone else's life story. Everything happens within the context of the life story of others.

[After leaving the conservatory] I walked past the harshest section of Market Street down towards Union Square where there was this terrible traffic jam. And I started sketching out the bent lump of cars, kinked and angry and unable to creep past a single choke point in the road. And I started thinking about the illusion of user choice, where we blame the user for getting stuck in the wrong lane at the wrong time. And how can empathy help us untangle that knot and retrace the steps? Why was every car here? Why don't they turn? Mapping the series of one-way streets and freeway arm wraps paints a picture of a traffic trap that started four turns back.

And I kept walking. What can we learn from watching tourists take selfies at the art museum about the importance of marking a specific time and place? What can we learn from their choice? How do the physical, social, temporal, and cultural influences of the moment encourage different decisions?

How can we assure our work as artists, designers, writers, composers, choreographers, curators, and editors encourages the right decisions? When do we give people what we think they want and when do we strike out and lead the crowd to somewhere new? Empathy, courage, and artistic conviction will wrestle inside our brains as we work through this particular puzzle. My hope for each of us is that we'll continue to try to create decisions born from an urgent insight into what makes us human.

So back to designing apps. When you're designing an app, what aspects of the human condition are you hoping to encourage? For Twitter, the founders hoped to further the open exchange of information, and they went as far to describe Twitter's potential success as a triumph of humanity, not a triumph of technology. Airbnb wants to capture that feeling of being at home, that feeling of belonging, so that we might belong anywhere. Belonging, humanity, these words connote a sense of shared purpose. And without a shared purpose, your work will lack that exquisite pressure required for transformative thought.

And equally important, what aspects of the human condition would you like to reduce? If you hate clickbait, can you strive to create pathways that celebrate meaningful content? If you despise prejudice, can you design a system of engagement that engenders comedy? Hate trolls, can you have a mechanic like a karma score? Are you raging against fake news? Are you livid about the systems in place that reward ignoble action? Then take action.

So don't start your design with a grid or a mock. Start with human experience. You'll know what product and design decisions to make once you know what you want to encourage, reveal, or augment about being human. And above all, after decades of telling the world that we're designers, not artists, I'm telling you being a designer alone is not enough. You must also act like artists and show what we know about being alive. Science or poetics alone cannot save us. There is no Leonardo the artist without Leonardo the inventor or Leonardo the architect without Leonardo the strategist or Leonardo the researcher. We must be all of these, just as he was, if we expect to make something worthy of other human souls to use.

Intercom: You've been listening to the Inside Intercom Podcast.