What magic can teach you about interaction design
Yes, you will also learn a cool magic trick
Being a hobby magician, after starting a “real job” in UX design I began seeing many patterns in common with magic and realized that I could transfer skills between the two worlds.
I’ll try to summarize the commonalities here and give you some insight into my approach to create compelling experience design. So here’s how I approach both. I tried to divide the ideas in three parts:
Story, Effect and Technique.
The Story / World / Diegesis
Design work is generally seen as “making things look pretty/work well”. Which is part of the truth, but I think in order to do good work, ideas need to come from a much larger, more mysterious world in contrast to being purely functional. It took me a long time to grasp the concept of what a story actually is and here’s what I’ve learned.
We humans are surrounded by stories. We tell stories, we identify with characters in stories. We love listening to stories because they take our attention from the real world and redirect it into a world we haven’t seen before. When we create a product or perform a magical piece, our first goal is to create a world or narrative (We also call it “diegesis” in film.) that people can immerse themselves in. This is especially important in the beginning, since people don’t know what to expect. By introducing a story, you provide a path for them to walk down. Many digital products do this through “onboarding.”
The more eloquent we are at communicating the story, the easier it will be for users/spectators to identify as a part of it.
One of my favorite quotes is from a world-famous mentalist, on his approach to creating magical experiences:
“What we’re doing is something serious (not solemn). We’re taking people to the edge of their understanding, and we’re showing them the abyss. We’re showing them over the edge and what’s there.” — Derren Brown
At the edge of the abyss is the world we create. We only show them a little bit of it, but they get the idea.
As an additional plus, if you tell a good story people will forget about questioning the method/technique of the magic effect or technology behind the product, which is important — neither in magic nor in interaction design do we want people to see how it’s done. It’s not the technology that matters, but the emotional impact people find in the experience. Something they don’t experience in their everyday life.
Compare Dani DaOrtiz’ version of the card trick “Triumph” with this version. Which one is more interesting? Compare Headspace and Calm. The former even created characters to make it easier to relate to its story.
Storytelling in interaction design
In order to tell a good story, we first need to make sure we know what our punter’s world looks like and also what the world beyond the abyss looks like. Only then can we use tools like storytelling, visual design, showmanship, interaction, etc. to build a bridge. We pick up the spectator/user in his current world, addressing his belief system, and guide him into the new world we create. Here are a number of good ways to achieve this:
- Know what the target audience knows (or make assumptions)
- Draw a storyboard or write a script, beginning with the user’s current environment
- Convincingly address as many senses of perception as possible (this is why VR experienced such immense hype in late 2016, though plummeted due to lack of applications)
A good case study is a wireless charging app I was working on for an energy provider in Germany. Here’s a picture of how we drew a step-by-step storyboard, which started with the user sitting in a restaurant wanting to charge their phone.
To test it, we made the prototype as realistic as possible and set the whole thing up in an actual restaurant. Here’s a video of the finished product:
With the Android OS, Google is extremely successful at understanding its users, making assumptions about their current technological knowledge, and creating an incrementally better version of the system to suit their needs and blow their minds.
A counter-example is the Ethereum network, which the public is struggling to adopt because there is no base-level understanding of the service it offers. The story it tells starts from a point unfamiliar to most people, meaning they’ll have difficulty connecting with it. Only developers familiar with the technology will get the emotional impact from the story.
Inside the story, we have an effect:
Shaping the Effect/Experience
The effect* is what gives spectators the opportunity to interact with the world/story mentioned above. Our goal is to create something that sparks wonder, mystery, amazement, excitement, and joy — something that remains with them for as long as possible (more on that below).
*By the way, magicians prefer the term “effect” instead of “trick” when referring to a performance piece. An effect is not supposed to be a one-off surprise or a riddle, whereas a trick is usually referred to as a gambler’s trick.
The effect is also something the audience/users want to feel emotionally involved in and responsible for. This is where good interaction design is crucial. The best magic is not where the magician just shows off his skills (“…aaaaand was this your card?”), but it’s something that happens in the spectator’s hands and means something to them. If the spectator inexplicably finds the card he was thinking of by himself, he feels as if he helped making the impossible happen. If, in addition, the experience is emotionally relevant— part of it is achieved through having a good story — they will remember it for a long time. On the contrary, if they don’t care about the effect, it will be just a gimmick, a “trick” that lasts only a few seconds.
In the following example, our users (stakeholders of a tech company) got a package with a VR headset for their phone and a QR code to an app. They were not used to experiencing new technology and the goal was to show them something novel and let them play. By using something emotionally relevant (the content was focussed on the companies technological goals) and creating a little, yet novel experience, everyone was blown away and involved for a long time. Here’s a quick video demo:
Apple excels at designing products that provide subtle hints to guide users into discovering their devices’ capabilities. Learning became an interesting and interactive activity, after decades of reading manuals and applying the knowledge to horrible UX. Since Apple, users of good products are experiencing many small delightful moments upon discovering unmentioned features. (My friend Jim Kalbach wrote a great book on this topic: Mapping Experiences)
In product design we have the great advantage of being able to create a huge number of these little magical moments while they learn how to use the device, and let the users re-experience them many times in different circumstances whenever they want (like e.g. Instagrams AR masks).
But how?
Method and Technology
When we design a product, we need to know a lot of secrets and techniques how to achieve a great result. In Juan Tamariz’ book “The Magic Way” he describes the process of leading a spectator along a path we want them to go and eliminate all questions they might ask themselves, which might lead them off the desired path.
I won’t go into detail on the book, but behind every experience, product, magic effect, art piece, etc. lies a tremendous amount of effort, technology, and thought. It’s what we dedicate our time to by researching (assimilating information), learning (practice and experimentation) and doing the hard, iterative work (presenting or building a product to release).
“In every art, the Master is he who can produce original effects, and understands how to present them in an original and convincing manner.” — Nevil Maskelyne, Our Magic
I see interaction design as an art, just as magic is an art, just as painting is an art. Another concept which has stuck with me for many years is that of the categorization of art in three types:
False art — The artist simply replicates an existing piece. Like a painter copying another painting. It might look good, but he is not creating anything new. He only has the means, not the end of an art.
Normal art — The artist combines his subjective perspective on the world, methods and knowledge of the art with an attained skill, in order to achieve an effect on the spectator.
High art — The artist creates something purely original and manages to display absolute perfection in skill (pretty much impossible to achieve).
The more “layers” we add to our product/performance, the “higher” the art becomes, which in the end can occupy an entire lifetime. Minimalistic interfaces are great because each function has a specific purpose. It doesn’t mean it can’t be complex, but if done well, it means there was a unique and deliberate thought behind every single decision.
The following video below shows just how many intricacies and layers a simple coin trick can contain:
By the way, just because some knowledge is kept secret (as with magic), it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. We have access to all kinds of information, we just need to look for it.
The experience matters most
These three parts are merely scratching the surface of successful interaction design, but I think they are important to keep in mind. Sometimes we become precious and excited about showing something we find cool, but forget that what we are creating actually serves the purpose to be enjoyed by other people (a lot of them!).
As interaction designers, our goal shouldn’t be creating a short-term surprise (“…you’ve unlocked an achievement!”) but to create something extraordinary that lasts in their memory for a very long time. By telling an interesting story and letting our users experience a technologically refined effect, we have the opportunity to take our users somewhere they have never experienced before.
We don’t know the limits to the magic our creations can spark.
