the ux of theatre

Very early on in the process of creating Shakespeare at Play, our interactive iOS app designed to help students tackle The Bard, we learned that we were going to have to create and film our own productions of Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare is not meant to be read — even if that’s how his works are often studied — and so no tool was going to be complete without full, uncut theatrical productions that were geared towards the needs of the student learning Shakespeare for the first time.

To create app-appropriate productions, however, we were going to have to apply the same user experience processes to the plays that we were applying to the app itself, since the two would have to combine into a cohesive whole. Fortunately the process that every play goes through before it finds its way to an audience mirrors much of the UX design process, a fact made all the more clear when each process was mushed together for Shakespeare at Play.

I am a theatre director by training. It’s what I went to the University of Toronto to study and it’s what I came out most skilled at. Theatre directing and designing user experiences follow many of the same principles, from empathy for the audience/user to plotting out the structure that several other skilled people will operate within. When I approached directing our productions for Shakespeare at Play, I had a unique opportunity to directly apply UX stratagems to theatre production to see if my comparison held up, and if any deviations could give me new perspectives on how I approached UX design.

The first phase, as always, is research and requirements. Our first production was Romeo & Juliet, the most oft-studied of Shakespeare’s plays. Myself and my partner, PhD-candidate Noam Lior (he is writing his dissertation on digital editions of Shakespeare and he also teaches Shakespeare at the University of Toronto) began working through historical productions of R&J and what a user of our app would need from a production to feel like they could comprehend it. That research included talking to students and drawing on Noam’s first-hand experience teaching Shakespeare to create something akin to personas. We developed a sense of a few different student “types” and what they would need from Shakespeare at Play, and which of those needs could be addressed in the productions and which could be addressed in the supplemental materials that we included in the app.

We concluded that our best approach would be a stripped-down production done in modern dress. We wanted to remove any elements that could be seen as superficial or that could distract from what was actually on the page (rather than what directorial flourishes I could come up with), only using set or costume design elements when absolutely necessary to distinguish things like which family a character belonged to or where a scene was taking place.

We also wanted to make it clear that we were filming a play rather than making a movie. Shakespeare’s plays deal with a lot of characters explaining things that they are seeing or doing because there were many things you couldn’t easily do in a theatre 400 years go (it’s why characters often announce when it’s day or night). Making it clear that this was a play with limited production values helps orient the user with those conventions, and we could use annotations in the text to further contextualize those areas, as needed.

This is part of theatre’s onboarding process, as well. You establish a visual and theatrical language early so that the audience understands what they can expect from the play as it progresses. If it’s a minimalist or abstract set, the audience understands that they will be expected to interpret several elements that will be presented to them, whereas an opulent set allows the audience to turn off that part of their brain because the set will make it clear where each scene is taking place.

Next we looked at the journey that this play takes the audience/user on. Romeo & Juliet is about two-and-a-half hours long when done without cuts, which we knew from available data was far too long to expect a teenager (or anyone) to sit watching a mobile video. Even the average length of an act (30 minutes) was pushing it. So, we settled on making each scene it’s own mini play. From a staging perspective, that means we didn’t need to worry about the stage traffic of the actors beyond what occurs during the length of the scene itself. We could now map out each scene individually, while keeping in mind what the audience has just seen and will see next.

Rehearsal is the wireframing stage of theatre. We make quick decisions on how to perform a scene, try them out, and then toss them aside for better ideas, iterating each time in order to get the best version of each scene that we can. Like wireframing, rehearsals are all about not being precious about your work. No one involved in the rehearsal process can become too attached to anything that they have done because it will almost assuredly change as more scenes are brought into the mix.

At this point I, as director, have to be very aware of the early research and planning that we did, making sure that we are honouring the audience/user as scenes begin to take shape. In this case, I need to be faithful to the fact that these scenes need to be clear and intelligible. It can be tempting to get ‘cute’, to twist the meaning of certain words or phrases for dramatic effect, in the same way that it can be tempting to inject superficial features or design quirks into an app or website. However, if we are trying to give a clear representation of the text, I must make sure that each and every line is delivered with that goal in mind.

It’s worth digressing here, for a moment, to discuss communication. Even the most studious UX designer is rendered ineffectual if they cannot communicate their design conclusions to other stakeholders, like programmers or clients. The same is true of a theatre director. A theatre director must be able to get buy-in from everyone involved in a production, from the actors to the designers to the crew, in order for a production to go off smoothly. That means understanding how to justify your decisions, but also how to incorporate feedback, especially if that feedback will ultimately make the project better. I am a firm believer in investing time in communication throughout the process of directing and designing, and have lots of experience backing up the positive effects it can have on the team, the project and the final result.

Next up is feedback, which while not often discussed is a very important component of the theatrical process, as it obviously is for good UX design. You must bring people in from outside the process to ensure that the play you are directing resonates with an audience. Can they understand it? Do they enjoy it? Where does it engage them? Where does it lose them? This feedback is critical because after months of working on a play a director becomes desensitized to a lot of their decisions and requires fresh eyes to ensure that the early goals are being met. It can be easy to remove this part of the process, either because of fear or ego, but a good director must build in time for this kind of feedback and have enough time to implement changes if they are honestly looking towards putting the best product that they can on the stage for a paying audience.

That was no different on our productions for Shakespeare at Play. We brought in fresh eyes to evaluate our progress prior to filming, and we had the added benefit of employing a film crew that was, let’s say, not entirely fluent in the language of Shakespeare. This was invaluable data to be able to assess if the story of the play was being communicated as intended, and to make changes on the fly when things weren’t as clear as we wanted them to be.

Eventually, of course, it comes time to ship. In our case, that means releasing our productions out into the wild and seeing if our work paid off. Fortunately for us it did, and teachers eagerly began adopting our app into their class workflows. We were then able to acquire fresh user research to improve not only the app itself, but the production process of subsequent plays. We were pushed to add more production values to the plays, which we did while also always keeping an eye on retaining the ‘filmed theatre’ aesthetic, while also scaling back on some of the actor doubling (common in theatre, not at all in film).

So were there areas of divergence? Yes, several, but in all but one instance (the availability of and need for data) they stood to me as superficial distinctions. There are rarely direct interactions between the audience and a play, and so we aren’t required to deep dive on task analysis or function allocation. In this case there was no handoff to developers since the equivalent is usually opening a show and leaving it to the actors and crew to execute every night, but since we filmed our productions I was involved all the way through. These distinctions, though, only felt to me like the exceptions that proved the rule: no two UX design jobs are the same. Every project is different, and the ability to give each project what it needs, to realize what makes it unique and to respect that throughout your process, is what makes a great UX designer (it is also, not coincidentally, what makes a great theatre director).

In fact, that’s what this informal experiment really reinforced for me: adaptability is your best friend. I had never ‘filmed’ a play before, but by acknowledging that was the intent, I could build the preparation for that outcome into the earliest phases of my work. This is no different than how I would have handled a UX curveball. Or, really, any curveball in any part of my life. One cannot become a slave to repetition. Great design happens for the same reason that great art happens, and that is someone is able to adapt their skills to the needs of the project rather than trying to wedge the project in to their available skills.

While my start as a theatre director routinely affects how I think about and design for user experience, it was fascinating to see how user experience design could influence theatre directing right back. The two weren’t perfect analogues for each other, but the differences served as a reminder that the best asset any of us can have is to tackle the problem that is in front of us, not the problem that we wish that it was.

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