A transcript of Episode 271 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom discuss articles by Stephen Anderson, Daniel Cook and Erik Flowers around the concept of loops, arcs and terrain within the context of service design.

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Bevan Nicol.

Transcript

Computer voice
UX Podcast, Episode 271

[Music]

Per Axbom
Hello, I’m Per Axbom.

James Royal-Lawson
And I’m James Royal-Lawson.

Per Axbom
This is UX podcast. We’re in Stockholm, Sweden, and you’re listening in 200 countries and territories in the world, from Norway to Thailand.

James Royal-Lawson
Today’s a link show. Now, normally I’d say that link shows feature at least two articles that Per and I have discovered in our travels around the internet reading things. Which is true this time as well, really. But it’s a little bit different.

Per Axbom
Yeah, we started listening, or listing and suggesting articles to each other in our usual chat, and one of them that you suggested, I started reading that and I realised I could spend so much time with this article. And that article in itself linked off to another article that it was inspired by, and an another article it was inspired by, and all of a sudden I was in this link mess, reading different things and getting all these astute ideas which I reasoned, this has to be the thing we spend the time on, because we can’t do more than one article. We do this one, but also the spin-offs coming out of it.

James Royal-Lawson
Yes, exactly. Now, basically, Stephen Anderson, who we’ve talked to on the show a few times, and we’ve had him on link shows before, as well as the articles on link shows. Now, Stephen is has a wonderful mind. And he’s got this wonderful ability to write about things and to press the right buttons in my head or your head, to Per, and probably many other people’s heads, to get them thinking about things. And the way in which he explores topic areas and spaces and references of a people and brings in other people and other people’s work is really inspiring, and really does get you thinking.

Per Axbom
And he also shares how his thought process works and where he got his ideas, which is fantastic. Then you realise, well, I can start with his idea, or I can go back and start with that idea if I want that.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And that’s kind of what we did. Stephen, in a tweet, said he was working on a new article. And I replied to that tweet and I quizzed him a little bit about something like what I presumed he was doing. He mentioned what I thought was the list of articles he annually rereads and rereads every year. Turns out he doesn’t have that. I really do like the idea of having a collection of articles that you do read every year to remind yourselves of certain processes, thoughts, ideas, spaces to explore. But that’s a different show. But Stephen himself references and mentions Christina Wodtke as an inspiration, or at least a source of nagging and talking about loops and arcs, all the time.

Per Axbom
And loops and arcs seems to be the main inspiration for what Stephen, or the journey he went down exploring this new concept that he was trying to figure out, based on an inherent drive and frustration with a common tool in service design: Customer journey maps. And the fact that customer journey maps are always drawn as linear, giving the impression that users always follow the same type of path through a service.

James Royal-Lawson
And we as a profession, we have journey mapping workshops, we do lots of exploratory research, and try to produce linear journey maps. And I, in my teaching to do with analytics, I often bring up journey maps as something – I mean, I don’t complain about them all the time – but I highlight to people how the linear journey map is not something you see in your data. Yeah, that might be the most, it might be a common route through your service, or website or so on. But when you look at the data, you see that people are going up and down, left, right, they’re traveling through the site in very, very many different ways.

Per Axbom
So it reminds me of our interview with Dana Chisnall, when we were talking about how people vote, and she looked at the user customer journey map, or the voter journey map in that case, and looked at that, did her interviews, and looked at it again and realised, well, people aren’t moving this way. They’re living moving 1000 different ways to get to the voting booth.

James Royal-Lawson
So this what really got me excited by Stephen’s teases about what he was gonna write about this. I was triggered by the fact that he was complaining a bit about journey mapping and linear stories in that sense. But should we spool our way back to what we’re gonna consider the beginning of this story.

Per Axbom
Loops and arcs.

James Royal-Lawson
With Daniel’s article. Daniel Wood, wasn’t it?

Per Axbom
Cook.

James Royal-Lawson
Daniel Cook. He wrote an article back in 2012.

Per Axbom
And his article is called “Loops and Arcs,” fittingly, and it explains loops and arcs. From a game mechanics perspective.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, his tagline on his blog says that this is a collection of thoughtful essays on game design theory, art, and the business of design.

Per Axbom
Now UX designers are definitely familiar with the concept of gamification and adding game elements to your designs. Often mistakenly thinking that adding scoreboards and stuff like that is what adds to the gamification experience. Whereas articles like this really contribute to the understanding of what gaming is and game mechanics are. He explains very well about loops, as the smallest smallest component of game design, where in a person performs an action within a game, let’s say they try to open a door. First, they have to actually understand what they’re looking at, they have to have the mental model that they have the possibility of opening something that looks like a door. They try that and something happens. And so the action does something.

James Royal-Lawson
So yeah, the game itself responds.

Per Axbom
So there’s a feedback there. And you look, ‘Oh, the door did open.’ And so now I learned that, there was a loop, I can open the door, and so I can go on after that and open a lot of doors.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and next time you meet a door, you will try to exercise your previously learned knowledge on that next door, which will be quicker, effectively or more successful, I guess, because you’ve done a knowledge loop already previous in the game.

Per Axbom
And the more loops you go through in a game, of course, the more understanding you build, and the more confidence you build, and you become confident at playing a game.

James Royal-Lawson
These loops are fractal and occur at multiple levels and frequencies throughout the game, they are almost always exercised multiple times, either within a game, or by playing the game multiple times, to quote Daniel’s article.

Per Axbom
And I think I made the connection when I was reading this that this is how we learn as human beings, of course, as well. When you look at toddlers, they try to stand up and fall down and they reach for things and they drop things. And I think Steven has in his article, putting your hand on a hot plate and pulling it away. Those are also small loops that create understanding that make you more confident to trying again, because you see the feedback, see what happens. That gives you the confidence to think you may understand how to do it well next time.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it’s an exploratory learning loop. Your model leads to making an action towards a certain system and that system gives you feedback. And then you update your mental model and go round. Which actually, Daniel points out that, pre-computer age, all the games we played are effectively just loops. He listings like chess, monopoly, and a lot of these classic games that we used to play, or still play. They’re just based on iterative loops the whole time.You get better at learning and understand the loops and you sequence loops together, or you play certain loops again, during these games to be successful at them. And he points out that it’s maybe only when the computer age of games came around, with adventure games, where we started mixing together both loops and arcs. I guess now, it was probably a time to talk a little bit about arcs.

Per Axbom
So arcs are perhaps not next steps but are like parallel steps, I guess, to loops, in that something that takes you from one point to another without being a loop. It’s actually something that you go through and experience but then you exit it immediately after that. So it’s a broken loop you exit immediately, is what he says. He gives the examples of watch a movie and read a book. I’m thinking within gameplay, that it’s also those segments of stories that exist between levels, sometimes these days and sometimes even backstories that you’re given through a short video before starting an adventure game. so they’re actually telling you a story. It’s not something that you are doing and getting feedback from. the feedback is just finding out the story.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I mean, this is where we’re experiencing a journey, but you’ve still got a model, you’re still doing something and there are bounds to that experience. And then you have a result. There’s an end point to this. But the point isn’t actually learning, updating and do it again. Now, the point is the whole arc. That is in itself what you’re trying to do. So I think the analogy would be like adventure games compared to an arcade game. So things like Pac Man, then it’s designed in a way which makes you want to keep on coming back and playing it and you play it multiple times. And you want to put another coin in the slot to play it again, going back to, you know, the 1970s -80s when arcade games really came about. Whereas, when you start looking at the role of the adventure games that came maybe in the 1980s, -90s, where, you’re taking yourself and character through, again, not to be repeated. I mean, we have a lot of these games, where once you play them once, it’s done. You don’t play it again because you’ve experienced the story arc and doing it a second time wouldn’t deliver any value.

Per Axbom
Right.

James Royal-Lawson
And that, I think, is one of the points that comes from it. That the value of an arc is in the feedback at the end of the arc itself.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
Your pay-off, I suppose, as you’d say, is the is the feedback at the end, the conclusion.

Per Axbom
That makes me think of, I think you and I have talked about on the show before, Choose Your Own Adventure games that I absolutely loved, text-based adventure games.

James Royal-Lawson
Books, paper books.

Per Axbom
From the 80s. Exactly. Where essentially, the text tells you, ‘you wake up in a dark cave, there’s light to the east and to the west.’ And you can write ‘go east,’ and you get eaten by a lion. Oh, now I know I don’t go east when you need to go west. That’s sort of a small learning loop within the arc. But now you can actually pursue the other path. And in the end, there’s not much not many paths you can pursue. So there’s the big arc. But within that arc, there are lots of small learning loops.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, they allowed you to have little deviations from the main arc. But there were just moments of distractive exploration, I guess, on your way on the main arc.

Per Axbom
Or teaching you how to pick something up, perhaps. How to light a fire or something like that.

[unexpected siren sound]

James Royal-Lawson
You want to pause a second, Per?

Per Axbom
Oh, I can hear that. We’re keeping that in the show. Definitely.

James Royal-Lawson
Really?

Per Axbom
Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
See, then we have to explain it.

Per Axbom
I know. But yes. Because it’s actually a loop. It’s the same month. Now it’s every three months, I think.

James Royal-Lawson
Yes. Every quarter.

Per Axbom
Yeah, it’s every quarter. It used to be every month before. That they play this alarm that you’re hearing in the background. And this is the test of that system, same time, every quarter, three o’clock.

James Royal-Lawson
And the point is with the system that you’re supposed to be able to hear it from everywhere in Sweden. The danger is over where were we?

Per Axbom
So what Daniel is doing in this article is he’s building up to his point about mixing loops and arcs, and actually enhancing the game experience by using combinations of loops and arcs, parallel arcs, and also micro-parallel arcs. But the parallel arcs would be playing a song at the same time as you’re doing something else, and the song actually carries part of the experience.

James Royal-Lawson
Micro-parallel arcs: That was a bit more difficult to get my head around.

Per Axbom
Snippets of evocative stimuli as you progress through the level. And the snippets of evocative stimuli – I mean, only the imagination can can be your border there.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that’s why I thought it was a little bit difficult to understand exactly what that meant. Because the definition was as complicated as the phrase itself. So.

Per Axbom
I actually don’t play Half-life, he actually says the game Half-life there and I don’t play that. So I don’t know how to explain what he’s seeing.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, he actually says in the article, ‘The arc is a central rule book for a larger game consisting primarily of loops.

Per Axbom
So in conclusion, he’s saying that it’s easy to stay on the trodden path of doing the same type of gameplay over and over and game companies build sequels and do the same gameplay again. But he’s encouraging people to challenge traditional gameplay by inventing new different combinations of loops and arcs. We actually don’t perhaps need to reach a goal but he has the examples of build a hobby, or create a 45 island nation with an ongoing stream of revenue, so never ending gameplay. If you will.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, remove any elements of the game where you can beat or render that game boring or meaningless upon repeated play. So fascinating aspects when it comes to game design and game theory.

Per Axbom
But now we have to circle back to Stephen Anderson, and how he’s using this to cope with his frustration of the linear customer journey maps. You have to also know that as he’s explaining his frustration with journey maps, he also references Andrea Resmini, who has an explanation of cross-channel ecosystems that we actually interviewed him on the show about before. And so that is currently one of Stephen Anderson’s favourite explanations for a non-linear journey map. And I can hear the alarm going off behind you now.

James Royal-Lawson
Another thing that he references is his colleague’s article, Eric Flowers, from 2017. And this article is… Well, this is where we introduce another aspect to all of this. So we had arcs and loops. And Eric has a background, I guess, or his writings, at least at this time, were very much around service design. The article Stephen references is three analogies for the aggregate nature of service design. And it starts off by saying, ‘How do you predict and then shape the behaviour of the population? Or better? How do you design for something that is the collection of countless touch points or products that are interlinked, each with their own vastly different user experience?’ I don’t know. I mean, maybe cut to the chase a little bit Per in the sense that I think one of the quickest and best ways of getting a feeling for what Eric was talking about is an article is looking at the video, which is linked in his article, which Stephen links in his article.

Per Axbom
Right. They’re both inspired by Super Mario Brothers.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and the video we’re talking about, is actually really, really fascinating. It’s basically a it’s a video from the 2013 Gamescon conference where almost 1000 people played through a level of Super Mario Brothers, and they recorded it. And then they basically overlaid all these onto the same full level view of that particular part of the game. And what you see in the video, is how these 1000 people progress through the level. And, of course, everyone starts off at the very same platform, and they’re jumping down, they’re going to bounce, they’re jumping up, they’re hitting things and bouncing back, they’re resetting, trying again. And then, as time goes on, it’s like the crest of a wave kind of thing. There’s more and more people get further and further into the game and succeed in taking themselves further and further into the level. And this still, even when you get right towards the end, there’s still people who are completely lost and are completely stuck still a very early point in the level. By and large, you can see how there is – and Stephen, in his article, talks about how if you squint, just kind of like blur things a little bit, you can see the golden path through the level. That there is there is a desired path through the level

Per Axbom
Which is not really the point. But yeah, exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it’s not the point. It’s not the only way through it. And it’s not the only way of succeeding, I guess, at the level.

Per Axbom
But the point is then what all the players are going through is the same thing, the landscape that they are traversing. So what Stephen goes on to call the terrain. And which is what we as designers are creating And what Eric and Stephen have been discussing that the role we are playing is designing that landscape or terrain. Or even he’s using the free sandbox, which seems to be Stephen’s favourite term. Which means that they feel that they’re seeing the role is quite different from most designers. So it’s not designing for the person and the perfect path that they can take through the terrain. But they are designing the terrain, so that the person can choose their own path.

James Royal-Lawson
This whole thing with terrain, though, this is what Stephen and Eric, I guess, in talking has been like the third element of thinking about service design. And the whole thing about design, it’s interesting when Stephen hasn’t talked about it from viewpoint of controlling the terrain or designing the terrain. Well, I mean, it’s maybe a bit, I don’t know, maybe it’s not quite that clear here. Think of terrain as the environment, or ecosystem in which all players play. Yeah, it’s a sandbox itself. If there’s a national park with dozens of trails, which is our example, the terrain is the entire park itself. That’s the quote from Stephens article. But I think this feels to me that terrain is the current realm. It’s the extent and state of the world as we can currently observe it and map it.

So, Stephen, in the article talks about – I think Eric’s example was a shop, that you get a building and you can do things in that building, you can take down a wall, or you can add some surfaces, counters or whatever you can work in that space. But your space is finite, not known and mapped. This is the sandbox you have to play with. Now, in some situations, that’s going to be something that we design and create. In other situations, it’s going to be something we’ve mapped or inherited, and reflects our current understanding of that space, or our current extent of influence of the space. It might be that we can’t control beyond this place. So in some way, I started thinking about Stephen Hawkings’ A Brief History of Time and noble universe and we get to the point where a black hole starts sucking in all life, and it’s like, you can you see beyond that and where’s the end to our observable universe? And this is why I said the thinking gets really confused.

Per Axbom
And parallel universes. But the thing is, as you’re saying that, I’m thinking about infinite spaces, because I’ve been working on Mural the past couple of days, and you can actually expand the worksheet to whatever size you want it to be. And you can add tools, and you can, you can work there, and that is your space. But I also use other online whiteboards. But I can’t easily move the objects in that space to my other space. So if we take the broader perspective is that I am a person moving between different spaces, and you as a designer can’t control all of them. You can’t just cannot. So either you accommodate that, or you just allow me to be in my space and take stuff with me. Or you can find me to that space and say, No, you cannot.

James Royal-Lawson
Yes, this is an excellent example, because there – from a terrain perspective – then you’d maybe want to map all of those related spaces. Because within those related spaces, there are there are loops that are beneficial to you. And transferable between.

Per Axbom
Exactly, yes.

James Royal-Lawson
So you might do a loop in tool C. And you might actually cause frustration in tool B. This is something else we’ve talked about -Jared Spool calls this current knowledge – that consistency is not always the thing you aim for, it’s more ‘what does the person understand and know?’ So we can translate that to be ‘what loops have they performed and what loops will be useful in our terrain to help them on an arc?’

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
Thinking back to Andrea Resmini’s eco system mapping, when he has all the circles and the lines connecting between it, and he uses different colours to kind of light up connected journeys or paths through the ecosystem.

Per Axbom
Right? This is one possible path. That’s another possible path.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So in some ways you can just like – this one, we look, this one we look at now. And I think about how you would chart the seas, you have to have a map of the sea, a chart of the seas, in order to safely navigate the seas. Like, you need to know there’s rocks there, and there’s rocks. So there’s not one way to sail across the ocean. But to sail across the ocean safely, you have to have a map of the sea. Someone has to have mapped it so you understand the space that you’re sailing in.

Per Axbom
Yep. and you have to trust the map.

James Royal-Lawson
You have to trust the map. Or rather, you have to maybe be open that the map’s not correct. Because if we go way back to talking about, like, my example about the known universe, I guess, and how far you can see, then once upon a time, in fact some people still do, they thought the earth was flat. So the maps, at that point, were only as defined and as big as the flat world. And they work perfectly okay until you reached the edge of them. So what’s important there was not to fear going over the edge, it was more be open to the fact that your map could be updated.

Per Axbom
Right, and most maps are wrong. This is a favourite topic of mine, because we have the Mercator projection that’s up in every classroom around the world. It makes a lot of sense for time zones, because you can get a strong draw straight lines, and that’s the time zone. But I mean, that’s not the way the world looks. And the sizes of the countries aren’t correct. And the distances between countries aren’t correct. So it’s just weird, but it serves one purpose. And so other maps serve other purposes. I don’t know where we ended up now. But this is the fun thing about this type of topic, is that it’s exciting, because it makes you think about different topic areas. And it makes you make connections between things that you haven’t thought about in a while. But perhaps could they be relevant to the thing that actually I think Stephen is working towards, as we’re continuing with this article.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Now this is this has really managed to get me quite excited about ways which we could further explore mapping and journey mapping, you know, this whole thing where people are experiencing loops, and in the loops, we update our current knowledge or mental models. And then then from there, we go on arcs, where we string together a series of loops, or knowledge, segments, and stream that together to achieve things. And that thing we achieve is just one of many possible outcomes. And this room does feel like a space between helped me design better environments and understand people’s use of those environments better.

Per Axbom
Exactly. I think the point that Stephen makes about the order of things, it actually gave me an aha moment. Now, we talked about this as arcs and loops and we ended on terrain. But the real order, he’s saying is, number one terrain, number two loops, and number three arcs. And the reason it’s in that order is about control. Because you can control the terrain, much more than you can control the loops and arcs. And much more than you can control the person within that terrain, and loops and arcs, and how they are reacting. But the interesting thing is that you can you can try and control the way the people move through your terrain. Or you can allow them to move the way they want, but just keep the train understandable and workable for them.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I’m not completely sure. I mean, the whole thing but which order it is, it’s really interesting. It loops back again to what we discuss about where does the end of your terrain that you can control end and start and how much does it interplay over terrains?

Per Axbom
It all depends on, if you say you’re working on service and you’re working with a specific product, but that is actually as we were talking before, that is limiting the space to something that is not a sense of the world the way that each user sees it of course, because they’re moving across different sides, different webs and they’re moving offline. And and reading even books. Choose Your Own Adventure books on paper.

James Royal-Lawson
So maybe what we’ve come to here, Per, is we’ve added a fourth to this only because you could be loops, arcs terrains, but then Erickson’s article talks in the article about the holistic nature of things. Yeah, but, but I guess what we’re talking about now is that yes, the terrain is that space that you’re really interested in, you know, the National Park or the product, but you can still zoom out one level further – another bigger level – and start looking at the broader landscape.

Per Axbom
Which is really what Resmini is talking about when he’s saying cross channel, now that I think about it, because he’s talking specifically about moving between different types of services.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And interconnecting services. The example Andrea’s used when we talked to him is with buying a cinema ticket or going to the cinema. It’s not just about buying a ticket on a website, it’s about arranging with friends that you’re going to go, deciding on a film, obtaining the tickets, you know, taking yourself to the cinema, getting yourself ready to go into the experience, buying snacks, and so on, going through the experience itself, and then getting home again at the end of it. So when it comes to mapping the experience, it’s cross-channel and multi-domain. Maybe domains is the thing about terrains.

Per Axbom
This is interesting, because then it’s easy to get stuck in this model, I think, when we are specifically talking about game mechanics, because you’re within the game, and the game is the thing that is where you want to attempt, where you want to achieve your goals. But as we’re working with online tools, the end game is usually not the tool, but something else that you’re trying to achieve outside in your own real world space, together with other people. Which means that we have to take that into account, we have to think broader than the specific service that we’re looking at just now.

James Royal-Lawson
That’s the same for all the things isn’t it? Even if it’s an e commerce website, the point isn’t the website…

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, the point is, you know, if you’re going to a website to buy a new spade, then the point is buying a new spade.

Per Axbom
The point is planting your damn bushes.

James Royal-Lawson
Oh, yeah.

Per Axbom
The point is showing off your bushes to your neighbour. Another point is inviting your neighbour to dinner. So I mean, yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
But I want to show off my new spade.

Per Axbom
Damn, that’s a nice looking spade, James.

James Royal-Lawson
Per, that’s a great bush. Probably time to wrap up.

Per Axbom
Did we get out of control here? I think we stayed on topic a bit, though. I mean, one of the huge purposes of this show was to actually acknowledge the fact of how interesting it is to just explore blog posts. This reminded me of how internet was like for me way back, like 15-20 years ago, when I was just reading different blogs, linking between those blogs, moving between them and seeing how people were talking about each other’s findings and insights. And building on that, and having fun with it, without it having to be so well thought out before you actually put it out to the world.

James Royal-Lawson
I think this really nicely ties back to what we said at the beginning, that this was a journey through a tweet, related conversations that people had in the tweet. It’s an article from 2012, an article in 2017, and a summary article with some new thinking from 2021. You’re right, this is wonderful, how thoughts can mature, develop, be brought up again, thought through again. It’s a nice feeling. And I enjoy doing these little exploratory thinking sessions with these articles.

Per Axbom
And a huge thanks to everyone who puts down the time to actually write them, write all this stuff, and share it, and just be open about, ‘This is something I’m thinking about, what do you think?’

James Royal-Lawson
And you can, of course, listen to some recommended listening and a really, really relevant one is Episode 144, which is anticipatory design and cross-channel ecosystems, which is a two-parter. It’s two people in one show there. We used to do that kind of thing. We went to events, we recorded double interviews and squeezed them into one show. Well, that’s actually a chat with Sarah Doody. And the chat with Andrea Resmini. Really worth listening to.

Per Axbom
Oh, that is the one. Excellent. And that interview with Sarah Doody, I think is relevant. Well, everything we do is relevant.

James Royal-Lawson
Everything we do is irrelevant.

Per Axbom
Otherwise, I think there will be so many links in this show actually, which will be loads of fun. And I know we have volunteers these days that help us out with that.

James Royal-Lawson
We do, which is really, really great.

Per Axbom
And all of that, of course can be found, along with the transcript on uxpodcast.com. And maybe even where you’re listening right now.

James Royal-Lawson
Yep. So click follow or subscribe. Add us already if you aren’t doing so already, and join us again for our next episode.

Per Axbom
And if you’d like to contribute to funding UX Podcast, then visit uxpodcast.com/support. Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

How do the Mario Brothers surf the internet?

Per Axbom
I don’t know James, how do the Mario Brothers surf the internet?

James Royal-Lawson
With a web Bowser.

Per Axbom
I can’t believe you found a topical joke.

This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom recorded in September 2021 and published as episode 271 of UX Podcast.