Pre-conference workshop

Learning from Las Vegas: Insights from the Ordinary and the Extraordinary

Bill DeRouchey, Dan Saffer, Steve Portigal

22/03/2007 (Thursday). Full day.

How often do several hundred user experience practitioners gather in Las Vegas, a global capital of experience design? The opportunity is priceless. Let's get out of the hotel and go see it. Let's go Learn from Las Vegas.

Experience design goes beyond the screen, even beyond physical products. Entire environments are architected and designed to intentionally evoke specific experiences. In Vegas, this intention is amplified; from the slot machines you first see leaving your plane to the lack of coffee makers in your hotel room. Every detail has a purpose. Very little is left to organic chance. This gives us an incredible opportunity to critically examine those design decisions as user experience practitioners rather than tourists.

In this full-day workshop, we will take what we know from the field of user experience and apply it to looking at intentionally designed spaces. We will consider everything. Just how little wayfinding is there? How few steps are required to use a slot machine, and then again, and again? How is money transacted? Why does the inside of Paris simulate outside? How often does the present experience reference a more exotic experience? How are each of our senses being stimulated, influenced, or focused?

But even more importantly, how do people behave in these environments? Can we determine the impact of these decisions on the users? Their actions? Attitudes? Or expectations?

First, we will examine the elements of user experience as they apply to physical spaces and objects. Wayfinding. Stimulus and feedback. Sensory bombardment. Time and motion. Memories. References to other experiences. These elements can be mixed and matched in limitless fashion, but how do we achieve our desired ends?

We will consider how these elements of experience architecture have been applied in a way that makes Vegas, Vegas, by learning to recognize its patterns. Based on the classic architecture text, Learning from Las Vegas, we will first consider Las Vegas in light of another bastion of 'ugly' design, MySpace, before heading out into the field. Finally, we will consider how to really see a culture: What to look for, how to immerse yourself into another culture to get the most out of it, how artifacts can signal the social norms that drive behavior within that culture.

Second, we will go out to see Vegas. Breaking into teams, we will venture to nearby attractions. We will document our observations in multiple categories and analyze what we see. How do the designers intentionally design their environments? What details do they focus on? What is working incredibly well? What might be changed? Workshop participants will be highly encouraged to bring digital cameras to help document the observation.

Finally, we will reconvene to share what we saw and begin to discern the patterns and key factors that contribute to successful Vegas experiences. We hope to Learn from Las Vegas new ways to observe cultures and spaces and then apply them to the user experience work we do daily. Ambitious, but fun.