A workshop at Chi 2012 - submissions still being accepted, extended deadline to February 6th 2012
Designing for innovation, with the aim of eventual user adoption, requires that standards be broken and user habits be challenged. In this context, designers need to ask themselves how they can offer a non-disruptive, and indeed enjoyable, user experience while they are at the same time not meeting users’ expectations. A concept whose employment can assist here is defamiliarization. Defamiliarisation has been coined by Viktor Shklovsky to account for an artistic technique that describes common things in an unfamiliar or strange way in order to bring vividness to audiences’ perception of the familiar. In interface design, defamiliarization causes users’ perceptions to slow down and their attention to be averted from the task before them to the process or system through which they are attempting the task. Such a ‘distancing’ can, and often does, facilitate a discovery process that yields the take-up of innovative features, and is rewarding.
In addition to assisting with user adoption, defamiliarization can also be employed to determine where a design can support a new user experience, and where, in contrast, the design is simply creating a usability problem by causing confusion or disorientation in users.
More after the link :)
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