When is Immersion Necessary?

In many areas of interactive design, the ultimate goal is to make the user feel like part of the experience. Surround sound, IMAX theaters and cutting-edge video games all strive to make us feel like we’re not just witnessing a story, but living the story as it plays out. Whether it’s a movie displayed on a television screen, music blasting through a pair of headphones or a story printed on the pages of a book, immersion is an attempt to make the user forget about the medium in question and focus solely on the narrative. But is an immersive interface always necessary to achieve a memorable experience?

Immersive vs Casual Gaming

When the game Myst was released in 1993, it received wide acclaim for its innovative visuals and gameplay. A large part of what made the game so memorable was its high level of immersion, a point that the developers themselves made sure to drive home in the instruction manual:

The key to Myst is to lose yourself in this fantastic virtual exploration, and act and react as if you really were there.

With no toolbars or interface components aside from the hand cursor, Myst was about as immersive as a computer game could be in its day.

With Myst and its sequels, little was offered in the way of instructions, aside from suggestions to turn the lights down and the volume up. Ideally, such an experience doesn’t allow for visible taskbars and flashing LEDs from equipment in the room. The creators of Myst knew their game was to be experienced with 100% attention given to the game itself. Most popular computer and console games use this same mentality, that players want to place themselves in another world through beautiful imagery, rich sounds and even vibrating controllers.
Casual games, on the other hand, are not necessarily meant to demand the player’s full attention. Solitaire and puzzle games usually don’t try to wow the player with stunning graphics, fullscreen gameplay or background music, and can be paused and tucked away when something else comes up. Games like these are designed with the assumption that users will play them in short bursts, during breaks or to kill time, and the lack of features and options reflects this assumption.

Multitasking vs Single-Focus Computing

Since the dawn of multitasking operating systems, most applications no longer take up the entire screen, may be shuffled behind other windows and minimized to take no real estate on the screen at all. More recent versions of the Mac and Windows operating systems have become more immersive than previous releases, each one attempting to become a gratifying experience in and of itself, making use of animated menus, customizable widgets and integration with internet technologies to the point that some users may get all that they need from the operating system alone.

But with more immersive operating systems come less immersive applications. As operating systems strive to draw more attention, individual programs lose their ability to hold a user’s focus. How easy is it to pay full attention to a document you’re working on when an icon keeps jumping into the corner of the screen, trying to tell you about an unrelated file error that just can’t wait for you to acknowledge it? Or finish a round of Minesweeper when Windows keeps bugging you to accept or deny access to a program you left running?

With desktop widgets like these, computer interfaces are focusing more on the operating systems themselves. Source: apple.com

While the lines blur a little more each day, operating systems are still primarily a starting point for launching other applications. But the more immersive they become, the more distracted users will be when trying to focus on a particular application. This is one reason some users choose classic desktop themes, turn off animated windows and transparencies that use more resources and demand more of the user’s attention. Sure, it’s a great way to show off what a computer can do, but more often than not, we look to the programs we run to create our computing experience, not the operating systems that launch them.

Flashy vs Simplistic Websites

A decade ago, Flash sites began popping up all over the internet. While a large number of them launched splash animations right off the bat, a good number of more user-conscious sites allowed two options: a static HTML site for slower connection speeds and processors, and a more immersive, bandwidth- and CPU-heavy Flash site, for users who wanted the full online experience and were willing to wait for it. The ability to choose between the two options meant designers were putting extra effort into their sites, understanding that not all users wanted the immersive experience Flash has to offer.
This splash page gives the user a choice between a static HTML or animated Flash site. Source: aikido-tessen.ee

The Nielsen Norman Group, whose website looks like it was last updated when AOL still shipped on floppy disks, is designed that way for a very specific reason: the group’s founders, Jakob Nielsen and Donald Norman, believe their site (and in most cases, the rest of the internet) is not meant to be an immersive experience, but rather a tool for storing and retrieving information. Approaching the design of their site from this viewpoint makes an assumption that the user will want to find what he or she is looking for in the fastest, least fettered way possible. While there are likely those who would want a little more style to their online experience, the NN Group prefers to err on the side of functionality rather than immersion. A wise choice when you think about every website you’ve visited that forces your browser to full screen and blares music through your speakers. There are worse alternatives to being bland.

The Nielsen Norman Group website appears dull in comparison, but follows strict usability guidelines for presenting information. Source: nngroup.com

Companies such as real estate and car dealerships can get away with more immersive websites. After all, their products are fully immersive experiences in themselves. There’s a good chance a user will want to know what it’s like to sit in the seat of a new car, or stand in the living room of a new house and get a feel for what it would be like to live there. It would only be appropriate to try and portray those feelings as effectively as our current technology will allow.

Virtual Reality vs Augmented Reality

Virtual Reality was on everyone’s tongue near the end of the last century. Science fiction phenomena such as Tron’s Light Cycles and Star Trek’s holodeck had us excited to lose ourselves in fantastic make-believe worlds, while Nintendo’s Virtual Boy reminded us that we had a while before the dream would fully take shape. We’re still waiting for an acceptable immersive virtual experience, but VR has recently taken a backseat to a different form of technology-assisted experience.
Augmented Reality serves to enhance the user’s perception of the real world, not ignore it completely in exchange for a fictitious one. With AR, developers and users alike lower their desire for a fully immersive experience, and the tool that has become the most popularly utilized AR device–the mobile phone–is helping us realize the benefits of a lower degree of immersion.

With Layar, an AR app for Android, icons depicting locations such as this restaurant are superimposed over an image of the real world as seen through the phone’s camera.

While VR commonly relies on goggles, a large helmet or an entire room to immerse the user in a virtual world, AR skips the quest for illusion and aims instead to enhance the physical world with useful information. Developers of AR know the benefits of embracing and functioning within the real world, and since the most commonly used AR devices are handheld, the user is not as physically immersed in the equipment as would be the case with VR goggles or a helmet. A mobile phone can be moved independently of the user’s eyes, shared with other users and put away easier than a pair of glasses, and the form factor of the phone makes it more of a portable window to the augmented world, something that may be used casually and pocketed until it’s needed again. This lower level of immersion becomes a great advantage to fully immersive virtual reality applications, allowing the user to operate in the real world rather than escape from it.

Conclusion

The best interfaces are designed with a good understanding of the real-life context in which they will be used. It’s important to determine early on whether your website or application will be used alongside others or receive the full attention of its user.
When tailoring your design for the appropriate level of immersion, it’s important to keep a few things in mind:

• Survey users to find out where and how they would use your product or website.
• Animations and sounds make for a more immersive experience.
• Less immersive interfaces don’t need to be boring. Rounded edges and gradients can spice up any application, no matter how simplistic.
• Don’t let pride get in the way of your design. If surveys and user testing conclude that most users will expect a non-immersive experience, give them what they want. Demanding that users focus on your product and nothing else only works when your users are already willing to do so.
• If your interface is meant to be fully immersive, prime your users first. Ease them into the experience with examples and tutorials, if possible.
• When you feel some users would want a more immersive experience than others, or you simply can’t anticipate which one would be more appropriate, offer both.
• After the product is released, run tests and surveys again. Users will be able to provide much more accurate data once they’ve spent some time using it.

Above all, remember that your users ultimately decide how immersive an experience they’re looking for with every product they use. If a product doesn’t conform to those expectations, chances are they will stop using it before changing their lifestyle to accommodate it. Products that show understanding and empathy for the user experience will be much more welcome in a user’s life than products that don’t.