Comments on What Does Rich Mean?

mike krivansky — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:17:59 GMT

I have to say that the term “rich” is usually a marketing description and a selling point, not necessarily a term that is readily used in design circles. I mean, when was the last time that you seriously used the term during a design meeting, other than when you are made to cave in or communicate to a business/non-design team member?

Frankly, the analysis is a little pretentious – the rhetoric of the ui design seems to sounds a little heavy handed. So is the use of the “diachronic and synchronic.” Let’s look at Design not in terms of its descriptors but in terms of what it does – the services it provides, the tools that enable people, etc. “Rich” is a silly term. Let’s look at the actual Experience.

Uday Gajendar — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 17:50:45 GMT

Just finished reading a short piece in the latest ish of Wired (Jun 2007, “Rocket Boom” on the cover) about the parties thrown by Richard Garriot, founder/creator of Ultima Online. Talk about the ultimate in staging a rich experience: the party invitation is a cryptic message that has to be heated in an oven to get the RSVP URL. Then once you arrive, the parties are themed with wild recreations of movies like Mad Max or Titanic. As the writer said, “Rich people throw lavish parties; rich role-playing game designers host living theater experiments”! Continuing on, Garriot says, “I imbue my games and parties with the process of discovery, with a physical manifestation of unreality.” Love it.

Colleen Jones — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:45:26 GMT

I love the references to rhetoric here. Clasically, ethos and pathos have different definitions than shown here. Pathos is the appeal to emotion, while ethos is the appeal to speaker credibility (which for UX professionals could be website/brand/company credibility). But I think mapping these concepts to UX and web application models still applies.

I also like the cross-channel focus and the emphasis on communication. Communication is not just a website purpose (informational vs ecommerce/transactional) but something that occurs in a website regardless of its purpose.

Brendan Hamley — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 21:22:43 GMT

Good thinking on this – thanks.

Does anyone remember when all clients wanted ‘sexy’ design? Makes me shudder. Seems to me we’re at a similar place with all this ‘rich’ stuff. ‘Rich’ seems like a way of expressing the layers within something, but not the layers themselves. For example, you can describe a seam of gold as being rich, but it doesn’t describe the gold itself, or the potential of it to produce beautiful artifacts.

Maybe it would be better to use the term ‘smart’ instead?

Chocolate, Kings and Impressionist Paintings are rich
Cars, cameras and expert friends are smart
Rich things are emotional and sensory.
Smart things are clever and useful.

Web interfaces are still in their infancy and personally, I don’t believe they are quite ready to define or deliver genuine richness to the masses. This mustn’t stop us trying to build richer environments, but let’s just aim to be a little smarter about how we go about it.

Uday Gajendar — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 06:47:05 GMT

Yes, the collaborative, participatory, communicative, user-generated qualities that have come to typify the “web 2.0” gestalt as articulated by O’Reilly undeniably shape the “richness” of today’s online experiences:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/…

Paul Geronca — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 06:11:58 GMT

The emphasis on interaction and collaboration is probably the more cogent definition of “rich” within the Web 2.0 context. Although it is tantalizing (and relevant) to have visual embellishments to contribute to the “richness” of an experience, a stronger argument is made for the capacity of Web 2.0 sites to create points of connection and communication within its user base.

Uday Gajendar — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 05:46:28 GMT

Thanks for the comments thus far… Just a few quick replies:

- Indeed, there’s more to rich experience than simply websites and I hope this article provokes substantive discussion beyond the mundane. Immersive massively multiplayer games, cross-media promo campaigns, “reality games”, and the like are great examples to highlight. Perhaps someone could volunteer to map out a continuum of richness, where such examples would reside at the far end…

- Please don’t get hung up on design as a “speech”, rather consider that every designed product/service/experience is an act of human communication of some kind to varying degrees of persuasiveness and engagement…and thus prompting a human response.

- Thanks for the pointer about “sophos”—very intriguing!

- In the course of rapid editing, some shortcuts had to be taken…so in my extremely terse “definitions” of the rhetorical elements I may have been a bit misleading. Note that much of my understanding of rhetoric as a mode of design thinking comes from the writings of Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin (Design Discourse, Discovering Design, and The Idea of Design). So I should have stated that Pathos (as a rhetorical element of design) is the emotional, cognitive, behavioral affect upon users, while Ethos is the tone of voice of the designer typically expressed as presentational style, thus conveying the character and credibility of the designer (ie, speaker). Ultimately, this rhetorical balance is about the central task of the designer: to envision and create products appropriate for human situations of use, drawing upon whatever knowledge is needed to get the job done.

Please keep the comments coming! Thanks again for your feedback!

Patrick Lambe — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:42:13 GMT

I’m tempted to take a rhetorical stance and argue for the existence of present and future history (I would probably dig up some historiographical support) but you’re absolutely right, you caught me in a verbal slip, Joe. Red handed :)

Joe Sokohl — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:38:11 GMT

“Past history”? Isn’t that the only kind of history out there?

Ericka Menchen Trevino — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:03:05 GMT

A bit of a mix-up of rhetorical terminology here. Pathos is about emotions and ethos is about the reputation of the speaker/expectations.

See: http://www.rpi.edu/dept/llc/webclass/web/project1/group4/… for a definition and links to a dictionary.

Patrick Lambe — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 21:20:52 GMT

Really interesting to see the rhetorical framework used in this way. I think there’s an element missing however, and it relates to your “thin” use of ethos. The analysis is synchronic, ie only exalining what happens at one point in time.

In rhetoric, ethos has a diachronic dimension, and encompasses past history (reputation) typicality of behaviour and future intent. This contributes to a sense of “character” in the speaker which leads directly to their credibility with their audience. In modern communications terms, you might associate this with brand, although brand doesn’t fully encompass this.

I have used this framework to look at knowledge management approaches (logos maps to information management; pathos maps to collaboration and social interaction; ethos maps to identity, vision and culture). See my book Organising Knowledge for more (www.organisingknowledge.com). Looking at both synchronic and diachronic needs lead me to add the element of “sophos” – wisdom, which reflects the function of learning and building experience over time. In your terms, wouldn’t that map to the “legacy” of the experience in your visitors’ minds – ie richness as a contribution that they take away with them?

Thomas Sola — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:04:37 GMT

With all due respect to Uday, (who I think does a good job redefining the concept), when I hear people start talking about RIAs and Web 2.0 all I can picture are the snake-oil salesmen of yesteryear. Application design has been a long-studied subject with decades of history and I have yet to find anything particularly new offered by anyone trying to define RIAs or Web 2.0, (though usually more convoluted). It may be news to them but generally you can find what they’re talking about in any one of the numerous volumes of work on application design. “Designing The User Interface” by Shneiderman et al comes to mind where I believe you can find nearly all of the ideas expressed here.

As the internet moves towards complete ubiquity in both connectivity and data transfer rates we’ll see traditional client-side applications being delivered over the web-as-a-platform rather than the “rich” experience being limited to the desktop.

What Web 2.0 does for RIAs is that it makes it no longer necessary to present workflows in a structure that conforms to paging through a document, a metaphor on which the web was predicated but which makes little sense for the workflows in major applications. We’re now more free to create a traditional client-side structure and experience using the browser as a platform rather than an application with which to access an application. We’re not 100% there yet, but it’s much closer than it’s ever been.

Andrew Otwell — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 22:26:24 GMT

Ujay writes “rich has become the de facto buzzword…”. I’ve actually been pleased to see that the use of that word seems to be on the decline recently. Compared to other experiences – like the example of a dinner with friends – even the richest experiences on the web still seem pretty impoverished.

Michael makes a great point in his comment here: thinking of “rich” as basically a synonym for “enhanced marketing” feels like a very limited definition of the idea. Ujay suggests on his blog that we “re-imagine the design as a speech to the user, convincing the user this product is best for meeting specific goals…” I do think that this rhetorical approach to certain interactions is appropriate, but truly “rich” online experiences do not do this. Who wants to “make speeches to users” anymore?

There are some truly rich experiences on the web that are totally different from the ones listed above. I’m thinking of alternate-reality games like those that sprang up around List (http://www.thelostexperience.com/) or the new Nine Inch Nails album (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(alternate_reality_game) ), or World Without Oil (http://www.worldwithoutoil.org/default.aspx).

Those experiences are *actually* rich and fit Ujay’s definition above really well: they appeal to reason and emotion, they involve mental effort, real human interaction, and (gasp!) offline activities. But the technology and design around these experiences are about as Web 1.0 as you can imagine, basic HTML, email lists, maybe some phone calls. Often the design around them is ugly and clunky. They rarely if ever include what Adobe/Macromedia has tried to claim as “rich media”: a lot of snazzy drop-down menus and drag-and-drop. “Rich” doesn’t mean being compelled to click on a zooming, fading UI widget.

Michael Zuschlag — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 22:26:06 GMT

Compelling synthesis of present thinking on web design, but I fear it thus suffers from a limitation I’m noticing in current thinking. It seems to be still rooted in an old-style web perspective that the purpose of sites (and apps) is to push a message onto a relatively passive user, which you seem to regard as a vessel of attention that must be divvied out. By focusing on the management of user attention, I’m concerned the result will be overemphasis of the machine-to-human pathway, saying little more to the user than, “Do this now.” I think the promise of rich web apps is to change the user to active participant in content creation and assembly. From this perspective, the purpose of apps is not to communicate a message to the user but to provide the tools for the user communicate his/her own message. While some effort must be made to communicate the availability of new tools to the user, the emphasis is not to tell the users what the they can do, but in make what they can do it easier, faster, less cognitively demanding, and more fluid, allowing them to forget the site and focus on their own communication.