💻User Interface

Wayfinding: Spotlights > User Interface

Figure 35: meme attempting to describe user experience design.

The avenue your audience can use to access and engage with your theatre work online or through other digital means is not only a practical access consideration, but a dramaturgical one. Benford and Giannachi suggest that the UX might impact the audience’s interpretation of the work: ‘… the form of an interface shapes the experience of onlookers as well as of its direct users, either addressing them explicitly (a deliberate spectator interface) or perhaps more indirectly. This is a relatively unexplored aspect of interface design in HCI [human-computer interaction], which has tended to focus on the details of the dialog between a user and their interface’. Tech companies generally work hard on their UX / UI designs to ensure users remain on their platforms and find the digital interface enjoyable, useful, or potentially addictive.

The Interaction Design Foundation defines user interface design as ‘the process designers use to build interfaces in software or computerized devices, focusing on looks or style’. The goal, per the IDF, is to make the front-facing part of a program or online platform both easy to use and pleasing to engage with. This includes determining whether the interface is a graphical user interface (GUI – the most common and oldest form of digital technology interface, popularised by Apple’s Lisa in 1982), voice-controlled user interface (VUI – relevant to accessibility), or a gesture-based interface (most common in videogames and virtual reality). Brenda Laurel considers, regarding the UX process: ‘The design of human-computer interaction should be informed by an analysis of constraints to determine what kinds of constraints are most appropriate. That analysis begins with understanding the various reasons why constraints are necessary’. Constraints keep the software user on task and prevent them from breaking the program; in second wave digital theatre, the constraints in many platforms’ UX designs were not set up for theatrical use.

The UX design has similar constraints. It is important, then, to dramaturgically consider how the unchangeable aspects of each platform might affect the audience and decide what changes can be made based on the play’s needs. In cases of platforms like YouTube and Zoom, for example, the interfaces combine these considerations to create an experience that Nathan Leigh describes as ‘averagely good enough for most of our needs’. It is also possible to integrate a less familiar or more bespoke platform with a different UI which requires some learning on the part of the audience – and might require time spent onboarding the audience – but might serve the dramaturgy of the production better.

First wave digital theatre makers considered the implications of digital tools made by outside companies. Reflecting on his own resume of computer-generated, often interactive, performance art, Roy Ascott writes: ‘It may not be an exaggeration to say that the “content” of a telematic art will depend in large measure on the nature of the interface; that is, the kind of configurations and assemblies of image, sound, and text, the kind of restructuring and articulation of environment that telematic interactivity might yield, will be determined by the freedoms and fluidity available at the interface’. Thinking of the dramaturgical implications of UX design as it relates to theatre practice, Brenda Laurel writes: ‘The interface becomes the arena for the performance of some intentional activity in which both human and computer have a role’; unlike Ascott, Laurel worked within a software development company and viewed the malleability of computer code and the fluidity of potential designs from that perspective, having much more design control over the finished product.

For most second wave digital theatre, theatre makers cannot control UX design since they have use existing platforms like YouTube, Zoom, Twitch, and Vimeo. Even theatre-focused streaming services like Digital Theatre+ have an inflexible interface. In Computers as Theatre, Brenda Laurel compares the physical stage space to UX design: ‘While some of these features can be modified by the set or usage made of the space, the basic architectural features of the building provide a physical grounding for the performance that is a crucial part of its meaning’. When you are physically inside a theatre space, whether for a traditional staged work or a site-specific production, the space will have affordances that can be incorporated or changed, and limitations that must be worked with or around – for instance, the size of the useable space for performance.

On second wave digital theatre, Lewis and Bartley write: ‘UX design utilizes user-centered design frameworks where every step in the creative process is predicated by questions and solutions related to how a user interacts with a product. As we apply UX framework to experiential theatre-making processes, we simply replace “user” with “audience/spectator” and “product” with “event/encounter”’. This analysis conflates software users with a theatre audience, a point similar to Brenda Laurel’s analysis; this suggests, as many second wave digital theatre makers did, that the screen is another type of proscenium arch, and that television, cinema, online video watchers, and traditional theatre audiences are similar in their style of viewership – a notion that other second wave digital theatre makers challenged through the UX.