Artist’s rendering of Katamari Damacy ball
We share much with the prince, because we, too, collect what we experience. We pick up bits and pieces. Everything you see, touch, smell, and taste becomes a part of you, reshaping your expectations as you travel across a landscape full of possibilities. For example, our expectation of an elevator button is affected by our experiences with microwave keypads, game console controllers, mobile phones, and any other buttons we’ve encountered.
We anticipate that financial websites will compute, video games will entertain, and weather apps will forecast. Yet, these are base-level expectations that are continually evolving. Each experience informs the next. And, like a snowball, our experiences grow into an interlocking network of adjacencies, assemblies, and conglomerations. What we experience today is the indirect result of every other prior experience, be it playing a video game or designing software. We soon realize our best ideas are often merely combinations of the past and present.
Even the imaginative gameplay of Katamari Damacy is an amalgamation of traditional and contemporary activities. The game behaves like tamakorogashi,2 a sport where a large , rolling ball is steered by Japanese schoolchildren during an outdoor race. You can find inspirations within the game from Pac-Man to Super Mario Bros. to Final Fantasy.
How do we combine ideas to better serve our users? First, we need to understand what the users have collected thus far: we need to understand their context.
Context
Every experience consists of an event , a time, and a place. An event is what happens. For example, a ball rolls. Time is when an event happens. For example, a ball starts rolling. A place is wherever the event happens. For example, a ball starts rolling down a hill. If we were to design a new experience involving this ball, we would want to know all the past experiences that have led a user to our chosen event, time, and place. In short, we want to understand the user’s context.
Context affects a user’s ability to appreciate a designed experience. A mobile app that works in an office setting may not work when riding a bicycle. Checking into a location makes perfect sense to Foursquare and Facebook users, although it may bewilder other audiences. A Cancel button on a Mac dialog appears before an OK button, but the opposite is true on a PC.
Consider the context of a user placing an item in a shopping cart. Does she expect to see a sign-in or register before checking out? If so, why? Perhaps she thinks all credible websites have them. Is not having a PayPal option a problem? Why? Maybe she doesn’t own a credit card. Does she look for a lock icon to determine if a page is secure? Why? Many people may judge security this way. Only after understanding a user’s context can you design her experience.
An experience will either stick or bounce off , depending on what a user has already gathered. We need to provide something useful, meeting our users at exactly the right time and place. The world is big, and we are only a small part of it. At best, we can fulfill an individual need, at a specific time, in a particular place. Doing so requires context. We must keep our eye on the ball.
Key Takeaways
Past experiences shape future experiences.
Every experience consists of an event, a time, and a place.
A user’s context represents a culmination of all his or her past experiences.
Questions to Ask Yourself
Where was the user before?
Where is the user now?
Where will the user go next?