Jared Spool delivers yet again in his presentation. As I mentioned in the live post, when I saw the man last, he was preaching on creating user-centered experience with designing for the scent of information and basic usability concepts that rocked our world and led us straight down the path of designing ecommerce funneling (which I always thought was awesome until Going Social Now completely changed my thinking on it).

This time around, Spool burned down the house with his take on a more abstract concept: delighting users by manipulating their perception of an experience.

To be perfectly honest, Magic was probably too esoteric and gimmicky of an analogy to express these ideas, though it did make them entertaining. The problem with magic is that even when you see a trick deconstructed, you’re still left with the feeling that you can’t do it yourself — the trick is no more accessible to you after having "learned the secrets" than it was before. Pen and Teller have killed for years on this exact concept.

But when you break down his examples, what shone through brightest for me was how important manipulating time and space is for the user experience. And if you look at TV and Film, a lot of the concepts he’s trying to broach with magic have been practically applied for more than a century: and we all know them…

In Spool’s presentation, he talks about how technical the process is to create entertainment, like the Disney World Haunted House, or the complex series of server processes and interactions that happen in a fraction of a second to deliver delightful search results to Google users.

What he’s talking about here is narrative creation. A TV set has 50 people working to create an evocative presentation of our perception of a home, a deserted remote island, or an inner-city street corner.

The entirety of the stories we watch through TV and Film can happen over months or years, but all we need to see are the 22 minutes that are the most compelling and entertaining. We, as viewers, don’t need all the mundane twitters of these characters brushing their teeth or trying to peel an orange. We don’t need to know how many pot holders the prop master evaluated until they found the exact one that would fit perfectly in the kitchen of the main character’s family home.

Jared also talked at length, and backed by statistics (I love it when this stuff is backed up by stats), about when sites are focused on user-centered tasks, like Amazon, their perceived page-loading speed is ridiculously faster than sites who’s pages you need to sit through in order to get the information or experience you’re driving for.

The ability to bend an audience’s perception of time and space (subsequently reaching the Flow State as discussed in the Can Wii Learn panel), is well documented in visual editing techniques.

My favorite example of this is how editors and directors use "Matching Action" to eliminate the fat of actions well all know and can take for granted, and deliver an evocative experience without being bogged down.

If you search Google for "Matched Action" or "Matching Action," you will find a lot of technical, film-school-like instruction that describes this technique as a way to make actions seem fluid when you’re only filming with one camera. Which is true.

You want to make someone walking down the street more interesting than a single long shot, so you’ll do ten different takes of the same walk, and then edit them together to provide the audience with more contrast between the view, describing the action in different ways.

But using this same example, if the actual time of someone walking from one corner of the block to the other takes three minutes, matching action is used to give you the best 10 seconds of that. If you see someone starting to walk in a direction, then cut to them walking in the middle of the block, and then cut again to them looking both ways to cross the street as they come to the end of the block, you know that other 2:50 was spent walking — but you’ve saved the audience from having to live through the junk they don’t need to understand what’s going on because your job is to build character and storyline more than anything.

And it’s easy to find examples of this technique every time you turn on the TV. To the left here are three consecutive shots from Showtime’s Weeds’ episode You Can’t Miss the Bear.

In this scene, the main character is sitting and watching her kid’s soccer game when her friend comes to sit down next to her. If in one shot you have the main character sitting beside an empty chair, and then in the next shot show the friend sitting in that chair, it’s jarring — like magic — as Spool would describe it.

Since as a creator you want the friend to come into the scene in a more perceptually natural way, you have to dedicate screen time to the action of the friend approaching and sitting.

Unfortunately, sitting in a chair is totally boring. As Spool described in his YouTube example, starting a clip while it’s still loading is distracting the user from the boring aspects of waiting for a file to load, and entertaining them while that technical action takes place.

Here in Weeds, the director and editor take out the most boring part — the actual sitting. We do so much sitting in our lives that we know the mechanics intuitively. So why show it? All we need to see as an audience is the approach (which is a two-shot to show you the spacial relations between the objects and people), and the character seated. Instead of watching her actually sit, we’re watching the main character in close up, talking, which is advancing our understanding of the characters and the story.

Moving narrative forward, changing how time and space are perceived by the audience to eliminate what we already know — or don’t need to know is showing up time and again in the discussions led by the people I consider at the forefront of understanding user experience.

So take another look at the shots inserted above, but instead of characters talking on TV, think of the shots as screens in a wireframe.

How long does it take to understand a homepage and click down a path? How much information is displayed on a screen to move the narrative — whether that narrative is buying golf clubs, exploring a brand, or poking friends on Facebook — and change the user’s perception of time and space in ways that make the experience a delight: for users and companies?

Related posts:

1. SXSW live: Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Design
2. SXSW postgame: Video for Web and Devices
3. SXSW Postgame: All The Web’s a Game
4. SXSW Postgame: Social Media Marketing Metrics Strategy and the Culture of Cruelty