Interaction as Experience

A promising new perspective on interaction considers interaction as a dimen­sion of experience. Gilmour (2003) described the phenomenon of experience in the context of what he called the "experience economy." He suggested that con­sumers increasingly desire sensation-filled experiences that engage them in a per­sonal and memorable way. In making his case, he suggested that someone who charges for the time people spend with him or her is in the experience business. Gilmour noted that consumers seek to spend less time and money on goods and services, but they do want to spend more time and money on compelling experi­ences that engage and inspire in personal and memorable ways.

A common example of a business focused on experience is Starbucks. Star­bucks has capitalized on something as simple as a cup of coffee and turned the concept of a coffee experience into a multiple-million-dollar international busi­ness success. Convincing consumers to spend $3.25 or more on a double latte may seem like a challenge, but the Starbucks experience is about much more than a simple cup of coffee. Knowing how to navigate the menu of coffee choices gives customers a sense of affiliation. Combined with comfortable chairs and tables, a (real or imagined) community gathering place, and the current addition of a reli­able wireless access point for surfing the Web, and that $3.25 seems a small price to pay for the experience.

Extending better sensory-filled experiences, particularly richly immersive online experiences, is the driving obsession of the software and Web services in­dustries. The demand for applications of increasing complexity has continued to outpace the ability of traditional Web applications to represent that complexity in online settings. The result that comes from pushing most flat-file Web sites beyond their ability to manage their own complexities is often a frustrating, confusing,

The Handbook of Blended Learning

or disengaging user experience, resulting in dropped users, low click-through rates, lost connections, and increased costs.

The promises of enterprise-wide system integrations that marry back office infrastructure with rich presentation layers continue to push consumers toward enterprise information portals with very high expectations of good online expe­riences are hugely compelling goals. As each successive wave of client and Web server technology ups the ante on the previous generation, improvements regarding capability, integration, and responsiveness continue to come forward. Web applications have come a long way from the first hard-coded unchang­ing Web pages and CGI Web server scripts (Duhl, 2003). Taking a technological view of what it takes to enable a high-quality, interactive online experience, some of the attributes includes the following:

• It must use a ubiquitous client to maximize the audience reach.

• It must run unchanged across the Internet on multiple platforms.

• It must execute well across low- or high-bandwidth connections.

• It needs to restore processing power (not just rendering capabilities) to the client.

• It must deliver engaging user interfaces with high degrees of interactivity.

• It needs to represent processes, data configuration, sale, and feedback complexity.

• It must use audio, video images, and text in a seamless manner.

• It must support the mobile work flow by allowing users to work on and offline.

• It must allow the client to determine for itself what content or data to access and when.

• It must access multiple middle-tier services (both .NET or Java) and back-end data stores.

• It must provide a dynamic and powerful front end for the evolving Web services-based network using emerging standards such as XML and SOAP

• It must integrate with legacy applications and systems.

• It must allow the incremental addition of new functions to existing Web applications and environments to get the most out of existing Web application investments.

The model resulting from an analysis of these experience-enabling attributes was developed by Macromedia in 2003 to describe what the company then re­ferred to as "the experience layer" of rich Internet applications (see Figure 4.1). From Macromedia's perspective, the experience layer was based on the ubiqui­tous rich client framework (in this case, Macromedia Flash Player) through which the user received a rich visible experience. It also depended on a rich server

On Designing Interaction Experiences for Blended Learning

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environment that ensured maximum flexibility, security, efficiency, and control, linking users to enterprise resources in innovative ways to get the most value from existing IT investments.

The "Experience Received-Experience Created" dimension of this model was vaguely reminiscent of the notion of the field of experience introduced in Shannon and Schramm's communication model (Heinich, Molenda, Russell, & Smaldino, 1996) (see Figure 4.2). In the late 1940s, Claude Shannon developed a theory of communication as a mathematical model that communication schol­ars immediately applied the theory to human interaction.

In 1954 Wilbur Schramm adapted the model to deal with the concern of what he called "communication, reception, and interpretation of meaningful symbols— processes at the heart of instruction." Schramm emphasized that communication cannot occur unless the field of experiences of the sender and receiver overlap, in

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FIGURE 4.2. SHANNON SCHRAMM MODEL OF COMMUNICATION, 1954.

order to challenge and extend the knowledge of the receiver. In this case, the notion of experience referred specifically to the background knowledge likely to influence the interpretation direction or influence of a particular communication dynamic, rather than to that which a participant in a communication dynamic might posit or feel as a result of the communication. Still, the notion of improv­ing the quality of experience as the goal of an interaction offers some intriguing and compelling design possibilities.