IAS16 Let's Get Physical
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Scaling ux strategy for human interactions with physical space - a case study of Hilton Hotels visual room selection
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IAS16 Let's Get Physical
- 1. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat “Let’s get PHYSICAL…”
- 2. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat
- 3. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Image from SmiledSoul.com
- 4. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Image from Hilton Hotels
- 5. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Strategy • Why? • What? • How?
- 6. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat
- 7. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Why NOT?
- 8. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat “Everyone will be forced to play this way eventually…. It is just a question of how quickly you get there.” ~ Jim Holthouser, Executive VP of Hilton Global Brands Why NOT? Images from Room77.com, Google Interior Maps and Bing Venue Maps
- 9. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Image from Hilton Hotels
- 10. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Image from Hilton Hotels
- 11. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat
- 12. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat
- 13. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat What IF…?
- 14. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat
- 15. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Image from colduthie.com
- 16. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat What to Map? Image from Hilton Hotels
- 17. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat
- 18. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Image from Hilton Hotels
- 19. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Image Google Image Search
- 20. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Custom Workflow
- 21. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Custom Workflow
- 22. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Mapping Engine
- 23. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Mapping Engine
- 24. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Mapping Engine
- 25. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat
- 26. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Expect Curved Walls Image from Hilton Hotels
- 27. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat ‘Edge Case’ is all too often code for ‘use case that I don’t want to deal with or think about.’ Perhaps ‘Stress Case’ is a better term. They are less likely to be overlooked during planning/development. Eric Meyer, Compassionate Design
- 28. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Image from Hilton Hotels
- 29. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Image from Hilton Hotels
- 30. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat
- 31. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Results • Mission accomplished • World mapped • Central repository • Change management • Future flexibility
- 32. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat
- 33. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat 183% conversion lift 41 million+ users 91% satisfaction
- 34. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Image from keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk
- 35. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat
- 36. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat
- 37. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Image from Google Image Search
- 38. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Image from clker.com
- 39. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Image from Dribble.com
- 40. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Start with the WHY…
- 41. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat It’s all about people…
- 42. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Systematizing = scale…
- 43. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat Stress cases = norm…
- 44. ● www.lokion.comLet’s Get Physical: Scaling UX for Digital Interactions with Physical Space ● #ias16 ● @sbarnat All Olivia Newton John images adapted from Let’s Get Physical video on YouTube.
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Hey Everybody!... Who’s already ready to be a little less heady? Let’s GET PHYSICAL! Everybody up on your feet! Let’s just take a quick stretch. I’ve been to the IA Summit a couple of times before, but it’s been a while. As I recall, no matter how inspired you are by this drinking from the firehose thing, it also gets a bit exhausting and it’s important to remember that we have bodies holding up these awesome brains around here. By the way, before I leave this slide… let me just say… that’s not the last time you’ll see Olivia Newton John today. Stick around and tell me at the end how many times you see her to win a super awesome prize. Also, please do feel free to post while I’m talking using the conference # and/or reach out to me directly.
- I’m really feeling the Broadening our Horizon’s theme this year because my team back home at Lokion has been doing a lot of perspective broadening lately. We’ve been going through a shift that I suspect a lot of us are going through. Our work has been getting more physical…. Since the last time I was at an IA Summit, we’ve found ourselves focusing not just on planning user flows and interfaces for on-screen experiences (though we still do plenty of that) but more on broader user experience strategies that include tons of “real world” aspects , for example: We’ve had opportunities to dive into the “Internet of Things” thinking through what it takes to design things like ovens that start heating up dinner when you pull into the driveway, fans and lights that activate when you walk in the room with your phone in your pocket or motorcycle helmets that call your mom when you crash. We’ve been exploring cool “mobile” experiences enabled by various sensors and beacons. And lately we’ve found ourselves thinking A LOT about geographic information or geospatial data and how it gets generated and stored and mapped and used to facilitate human interactions with physical space like this hotel. Suddenly our UX strategies are filled with stories of humans moving through physical spaces -- buildings, hallways, landscapes -- and interacting with stuff in those spaces through the things we create…. Raise your hand if you too are at least a little bit designing strategies grounded in physical interactions like these?... There are a couple of other talks this year on this theme. And I’m excited to be a part of the conversation.
- Before we dive in, let me just stay… We definitely don’t have all of the answers about this stuff, but we’re super excited to explore the questions with you… The way I see it, we’re all in this soup together grappling with similar challenges. I’m not up here to deliver any profound wisdom, just to add to our collective tribal knowledge. Along the way today, I’m going to share with you: The work we did to enable Hilton’s new visual room selection feature, including what we did to scale our approach to meet their ambitious scale and timeline Some insights about gathering and architecting structured information about physical spaces And a few of the struggles we’ve been grappling with as we map physical space information into the global context at different zoom levels
- Ok. So, first – The Case Study: Hilton Hotels…. How many of you have stayed at a Hilton within the last year or so? Did you pick your room on a map like this? At the end of 2014, Hilton became the first in the hospitality industry to offer visual maps for selecting your hotel room from a dynamic floorplan like this one. They did this for all of their 4k+ properties across more than a dozen brands in more than 90 countries. And though we didn’t design the website or mobile apps serving as the context for this booking process like what you’re seeing here, we did convert a huge volume of static maps into interaction-ready spatial data for every floor of every hotel in a way that could serve multiple usage contexts…. In less than a year.
- The strategy started, as most good strategies do, by asking “WHY?.” Why are doing this? What’s the context? What’s driving this work? What are the goals? Where’s all this headed? What’s the vision for the near term AND the far term? And then we had to figure out the “WHAT?.” What do we have to start with? What exactly needs to get mapped? And at what level of detail? And in what kind structure, with what kind of naming and id conventions and delivered in what kind of format? Only then could we even begin to plan HOW to get all this done in such a short time. We knew it had something to do with smartly combining a ton of super efficient human effort with some really organized creative management and a dash of automation scripting acrobatics sealed with some awesomely tight quality assurance checks and balances.
- Ok. So, let’s look at the WHY first.
- Or perhaps the better question is WHY NOT?!... We’ve all come to expect to be able to do things visually… to select our airplane and concert seats from interactive spatial maps that show us where that decision point lives in relation to other decision factors – windows, aisles, bathrooms, friends. We’ve been picking airplane seats this way for a decade now. So, WHY NOT also our hotel rooms?
- When we started this digital mapping project with Hilton, the clock had already been ticking for a while in the hospitality industry. Hilton was definitely feeling competitive pressure coming at them from industry disruptors like Room77. And their customer surveys were finding that an overwhelming 84% of business travelers, their prime audience, want the ability to select their rooms visually like they do their airline seat or rental car.
- The immediate mandate, the mission if you will, was to produce these hotel maps and floor plans for bookings so you can pull up a property map and drill into floorplans to select your room, check-in before arrival and upgrade your room while in transit…. That’s where the budget for this initiative would be justified because that’s the focal transaction point for hotels, right? The conversion. The return on investment. Everything in the hospitality industry is measured in terms of increased bookings, “heads in beds.”
- With that as our stated business goal, we began figuring out exactly WHAT needed to be mapped. We envisioned the elements users might want to see and interact with to make their decisions about what room to select and modeled various ways that users might navigate around a property and between buildings and floors.
- But… we thought through those levels knowing full well that customers envision all sorts of future visual spatial interaction possibilities way beyond just visually booking rooms.
- We all knew that visual room selection for booking wouldn’t be the end of the story…. So, we let our imaginations wander a bit… beyond hotels to all sorts of public spaces… to envision the spatial interaction stories that might one day be supported by the maps we would create… the WHAT IF scenarios that I can hardly wait to come true.... Both as a creator and a consumer!
- WHAT IF these maps were smart enough to understand WHO and WHEN and WHERE you are on the map? And what happens when these maps get hooked up with interior positioning and personalization and social networks? Then we could do things like invite all the new contact and friends we’re making here to meet us at a specific spot (the bar, maybe?) and know they’d actually be able to find it.
- Or even more far out: WHAT IF you could navigate through buildings and floors in virtual reality? And WHAT IF, knowing the time of day and your position on the property, these maps could make it easy to see what’s open around you and get turn-by-turn directions from your room to the meeting space where you’ll be presenting soon? (wish I’d had that today!) What about integrating with external map services to get the larger context of what’s around you?... The possibilities beyond the basics are really fun to think about… and quite interesting to design around.
- So, that intersection between the WHAT IF and the WHY NOT was a great entree into figuring out WHAT TO MAP.
- One of the greatest challenges in spatial mapping turns out to be reaching agreement on WHAT to map. How much detail needs to be present to support those immediate plans AND the future visions? For any industry – hotels, malls, airports, hospitals, campuses -- the list of WHAT to map could be quite different. But, this critical step of understanding what details users might want to know about and interact with on the property NEEDS to inform the spatial data specification no matter what kind of space is being mapped. In the case of hotels, some elements are obvious. We clearly needed to map buildings and floors and rooms plus details like lobbies, elevators and stairways, and maybe niceties like restaurants and bars and swimming pools, etc…. But what about less common features like golf courses, fire pits and water slides… or, my personal favorites, the giant lawn chess board at the Waldorf Arizona Biltmore or the elephant statues at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas?... So, for the Hilton project, we carefully architected structural data specifications for a very specific list of standard elements, features and amenities that guests might want to interact with -- plus an agreeable quantity of wildcards to account for interesting oddities like lawn chess and elephants. We architected a plan to organize all of these standard and non-standard elements into a well-structured hierarchy with LOTS AND LOTS OF PHYSICAL SPACE INTERACTION POINTS…. Literally over a million of them.
- At that point, the next question was WHAT do we have to start from? How do we know what’s where on each property?... What goes into this thingamajig machine we’re building?
- Of course, it would have been awesome if we actually got to go visit all of the spaces being mapped. I, for one, really really really want to go stay underwater in the Hilton Maldives. But we knew for darned sure there was no way THAT was gonna be in the budget and the timeline. So, we knew we were going to have to get our starting information about each place some other way.
- It would be great, of course, if data gathering for each property started with an “architecturally correct” CAD drawing, but that’s not always realistic. And there actually are companies out there somewhere that do manual human canvassing in visits to every property and a few that are experimenting with non-human canvassing using little Rumba-like robots and lasers and things, which sounds really interesting but that also just wasn’t practical for us quite yet. Maybe some day. However, we are seriously considering ways in the future to facilitate useful crowdsourcing of spatial data gathering that refines our understanding of paths and shapes of spaces as users physically onsite navigate around the property. How cool would THAT be?!
- But THE REALITY IS – or at least was when we started this work with Hilton, it’s all about the humans. There’s just not an easy way around the people involved in gathering information about each property and keeping communication flowing along the way. So, we worked with folks at Hilton to get a good understanding of the roles and personalities and motivations and communication habits in the mix. And we mapped out an efficient system of information gathering including input forms and file exchanges and motivational nudges and nags and escalation cycles, smart yet flexible automated status updates and customized role-based reporting that would orchestrate activities necessary to get all of the pieces gathered up that would be needed to even get started. This need to manage human participation in spatial mapping likely is a serious dose of realism that translates to just about any situation or industry where we might be creating digital interactions with physical spaces on a large scale. No matter how much technology and automation your throw at it, you just can’t remove PEOPLE from the process.
- And SO… We needed a way to keep the daily communication between literally thousands of humans all over the world in different time zones organized -- a sort of Basecamp for collecting details about hotels. And not finding a perfect match for that need, we customized our own proprietary workflow management application that fit the situation… which of course had it’s own IA effort, but that’s another talk and one we’ve probably all heard or done before, the more traditional flavor of IA for workflows on screens.
- Anyway, getting further into the details, we then needed to figure out exactly HOW to structure all of the data and interaction points to be included in these maps and HOW to validate all sorts of different file types gathered as source materials, exchanged while tracking down missing information, used as reference during production and then output for review and approval processes and ultimately delivered for absorption into their various usage contexts. So then we needed to build a “mapping engine” that would efficiently churn through all these of moving parts enabling the human effort while automating as much communication and production and validation as possible along the way.
- Ultimately, at its core, our mapping engine (both systematic and human) has to efficiently transform - regardless of complexity - flat pixel-based visual references conceptually representing physical spaces into the much more fluid structural essence of SPATIAL DATA reflecting the projected reality of what’s important for people to be able to SEE and NAVIGATE TO and DO in those spaces.
- Here’s peek at what this mapping engine does behind the scenes. It turns things like those paper maps they hand you at the front desk (or the ones in our lanyards today) or those emergency exit signs on the back of your hotel room door into useful interaction points that can be absorbed, re-styled, rendered and leveraged for human action in multiple contexts. This thing bottom-left is a little snippet of the well-structure code that comes out of this process. That’s the stuff for the machines. And this thing bottom-right is a snapshot of the structured interaction points added to the spatial data. That’s the stuff for the humans.
- Oh yeah, did I mention the timeline? Just a little over a year… which flies by mighty fast. So, we had to get pretty creative along the way to infuse our mapping engine, human production processes and workflow management system with as much automation as possible to pull all these pieces together in the expected timeframe. To reach economies of scale: We baked in scripted replication and sequential labeling of every consistent element possible. We rolled in machine learning quality assurance checkpoints that audited output for consistent structural logic and adapted over time as the specification shifted to accommodate each new curveball. And we encouraged all of our production folks to share every little trick they could find for speeding up map creation tasks.
- We also learned VERY quickly that… no matter how carefully you architect a specification around the right WHAT’s, not all maps are created equal. Mapping a nice neat square bed-in-a-box single building hotel that has sensible right-angle walls and not much variance beyond the lobby space on the first floor is a COMPLETELY different task than mapping a big fancy resort with interesting curvy walls, cabanas everywhere and delightful water features. So, in order to scale our mapping engine, our automation scripting, our staffing and scheduling we needed to categorize and quantify the complexity and curveballs (or curved walls) that translate into level of effort for every single property.
- And believe me, those interesting properties weren’t just outliers…. I love this quote! And it definitely holds true for this spatial information architecture work. Let me walk you through a few of the stress cases that strengthened our standards around what to map.
- For example… The Hilton Squaw Peaks Resort was our pilot test model. So, we got quite familiar with its winding 4-acre Hole-in-the-Wall River Ranch water park surrounded by split-level Casitas. Imagine deciding WHAT TO MAP in THAT landscape!... I think some of us still have dreams about that one.
- The Makkah Hilton Towers in front of the King Fahd entrance to the world's largest mosque in Mecca was extra fun to map with it’s 35 elevators and 71 stair wells spread across it’s four guest towers with varied split level floors and separate stairs leading to many of it’s 798 rooms.
- Honestly, at some points, it felt like there were more exceptions than rules. And mapping some of those spaces felt a bit like being lost in MC Escher’s world…. Or maybe like trying to find your way around THIS hotel!
- But ultimately, it all came together. It worked!... Our strategy to map the world by the deadline to get them first to market succeeded. And we learned SO MUCH!
- By launch of Hilton’s new visual room selection feature, our team digitally mapped over 1.5 MILLION spatial interaction points including 707,040 Hilton hotel rooms to be visually booked in 4,292+ hotels across 12 brands in 93 countries…. And we’re still busily updating for renovations and mapping new hotels being built since then, so these numbers shift upward daily.
- But most importantly… This new experience, breaking new ground in the hospitality industry, has proven to be very successful with users: Within just 4 months of launching this feature, one million Honors members had used the mapping features for room selection It’s now used by more than 41 million HiltonHonors members. And Hilton now reports that the lifetime average user rating of their mobile app has gone from 1.5 stars to 4.5 stars in just a year and a half since launching this feature. But perhaps even more importantly, we created a centralized property data repository with an efficient change management engine and ongoing expansion of data elements and interaction points ready to serve all those other impending use cases and future yet to be dreamed of ways for people to interact with physical hotel spaces.
- BUT THAT’S NOT THE END OF THE STORY… As you might guess, we can’t really talk about any specifics of our ongoing mapping work with Hilton. But I would love to give you a glimpse of some of our own recent developments around architecting for interactions with physical spaces.
- Like a lot of folks in the industry, we’ve been fixated on interior positioning -- the elusive “blue dot” that shows where you are in the world, and then zooming in, where you are inside of a particular space. Getting to that means leveraging signal inputs from things like wifi transmitters and beacons… really any low-energy bluetooth (BLE) device.… And, we’ve had to come to grips with the fact that these signals often have variable reach zones that fluctuate for all sorts of reasons that are just totally out of your control. So, we’ve learned that optimal placement, density per floor and compensation via triangulation with hardware inputs like your phone’s magnetometer or accelerometer can be quite helpful. Here’s an example of what the signals for interior positioning look like on one of the floors in our office. <video1> But once you’ve gotten to that illusive blue dot, the logical next use case is to use that to get from that point A to some other point B. Here’s a rudimentary sample of what that “interior wayfinding” looks like on that same floor in our office. <video2> Of course what you’re really navigating through here is a bunch of machine readable algorithms through polygons, nodes and junctures which still have to get translated for humans… by a human, preferably a ux-oriented content strategist, into human readable turn-by-turn directions like these at the bottom…. And then there’s always the issue of accessibility. Your spatial data has to be structured so the map rendering engine, whatever it is, understands the difference between stairs vs. elevators so it can serve the right path based on a user’s preference…. And here’s a behind the scenes look at some of those nodes and junctures that really make up a path through a physical space and tell a mapping engine where that path should go so you don’t get told to turn into a wall.
- Of course, it’s one thing for our maps of properties, buildings and floors to stand on their own like that. But at some point, like us, you’re probably going to want to put them into a larger map context so users can do more. Obviously, you can pin your property maps and building floorplans as one point to any map provider (Google, Bing, OpenStreetMaps), but it really only becomes useful when you add more data points to the mix by “geocoding” – which means speaking the language of machines to connect map data to a global positioning coordinate system. As your property maps and building floorplans get sucked up into these global map providers’ systems, everything about your map’s buildings and walls and paths, and all of stuff inside the rooms inside your buildings… it all becomes shapes with their own polygon geometry boundaries that give them substance that can be used to calculate paths around them, all of which need to get “geolocated” so the global coordinate systems understand where on Earth things are.
- All this geolocating and geocoding gets complicated by the fact that there’s a battle going on for map standards each with varying architectural and naming rules for HOW the WHAT you’re mapping fits together and gets referenced…. Did I mention that I am NOT a programmer?!... But I hear a lot of excited grumbling from our programmers about this stuff…. For example, depending on which map provider system you decide to plop your maps into, there’s a different standard for Google/SVG’s vs. Bing/SVG or PNG vs. Apple’s Core Location Services and MapConnect. And there’s a movement to rally around more open standards like geoJSON through tools like OpenStreetMap and MapBox. Plus the global coordinate systems these providers connect to apparently ALSO don't agree! There’s the North American Datum or NAD which some of them use. Or there’s the World Geodetic System or WGS used by others. And within these, there are different sets released in different years – like WGS66 vs WGS86 or NAD27 vs NAD83. The problem in making things that rely on these standards is that the x/y coordinate numbers in the NAD standard from 1927 can be very different from the ones released in 1983. And all of the WGS standards are based on the position of things in relation to the center of the earth which produces very different spatial data than NAD. And, as if all that weren’t confusing enough, there's other local geocoordinate standards used by NATO, England, Tokyo, etc.... There's so many layers to this map / coordinate standard stuff it's almost a ridiculous challenge!... But chances are, if your working in this interior mapping space like we are, you’ll have to adapt your outputs to most if not all of these standards at some point in some context. So, we advise that there’s a good reason to architect your information strategy from the beginning, as we have, to be able to work with any of them.
- But for me, as an information architect / ux strategist who happens to have a philosophy degree, one of the more interesting insights is that in all of this, we have to acknowledge that what we are doing is STILL not really REAL even though it’s necessary to support REAL interactions with REAL space. We’re still just creating digital approximations of physical space. It’s all a compromised representation of what’s really there. You do the best you can to be accurate and inclusive and to scale, but it’s never perfect because it’s not reality. This imperfection of representation becomes more and more important the closer you zoom into a map interaction. At the global level, it may be enough for the pin that represents a person’s location to be plopped on a country or a state or a city. At the city level, you hope for the pin to be in a decent approximation of a street intersection. But zoomed all the way into the inside of a building or at the level of, say, this room, the degree of accuracy and detail needs far more definition to avoid snafus like overlapping buildings or directions that have people walking through walls. The more zoomed in the focus of your use cases, the more important all those WHAT to map and HOW to map decision points become. Are straight lines really straight? What’s IN the room? What in the way?... So, once again, those questions about WHAT to map and HOW are all wrapped up in WHY so you get an understanding of how far and how much to map and what to position in relation to what in a larger context. Remember in the Hilton work, we started out representing standard elements and special features – everything from the lobby to your room to the far and the lawn chess or whatever, even a statue of an elephant, doesn’t matter what it is – they were all single interaction points with good labeling and logical structure. But when you zoom further in, all of these things have a shape. They are polygons with their own navigational intricacies, which means the more custom elements that seep into your maps, the more work you’ll have gathering and creating and layering in aspects of data to interact with over time…. I just love how geoJSON structurally refers to all the things in a space as “obstructions,” things in the way of getting from A to B. It may not feel that way if you’re a hotel guest finishing a rousing game of lawn chess and looking for the bar, but it sure does feel that way behind the scenes sometimes.
- It’s all fascinating stuff to chew on at work these days. We as a team have entered an exciting territory of “WHAT IF LAND.”... I expect a lot of you are also seeing your UX Strategy and IA work open up to these new dimensions of time and physical space and non-screen smart things in the interaction visions we champion. And this is barely the beginning. I’m certainly not redirecting my career to suddenly become a cartographer, but I sure am glad to be in such good company up here on the speaker side at this conference to help energize the conversation around this big scale mapping and physical spatial interaction stuff. So… as we sprint forward daily broadening our collective horizons, here’s the short list of our team’s contributions to the tribal knowledge for us as an IA / UX community:
- Start with the WHY. The earlier you decide your zoom level and your use cases and therefore the level of map data fidelity needed, the less rework you’ll have over time.
- 2. It’s all about the people, so efficient workflow is critical.
- 3. Systematizing is the secret sauce to scaling, but some bits that just can’t be automated.
- 4. Physical space just isn’t consistent. Stress cases are the norm. Plan for it. But remember that the more exceptions you allow, the less pliable your architecture and spatial data will be for all those future use cases. It’s a balancing act.
- There you have it. That’s what I’ve got for today. If you’d like to talk more about scaling ux strategy for interactions with physical space, I’d love to meet you. Come talk to me, please. Come find me at lunch or happy hour. AND… for the important bit… Olivia…. I’ve got a bonus prize for the first person who can tell me how many times Olivia Newton John appeared in this presentation. (12) Thanks for listening!