Ahead or Up?

The drive to school in the morning sometimes produces amazing insights. This morning I was asked "How do you go up?"

After a few moments of thinking, I responded with "What made you ask that question?"

"There was a sign back there that said to go up...how do you make a car go up?"

"Oh...I see." Now, I could answer the question directly, but there was an opportunity to see into the mind of a child here, so I didn't want to pass that up. "Well, it means to go straight ahead, not up."

"Oh..."

Pause. Long pause.

Me- "How would you draw a picture that tells someone to go straight?"

"I don't know."

"Well, think about it and draw a picture of it for me."

"OK"

I haven't seen the picture yet, but the point is that it's good to be looking out for these opportunities to encourage creative expression, especially in children. There's so much to be learned from a mind that has not yet been informed by common conventions, like up actually meaning straight when it comes to street signs.

The Monster in the Light

The purpose of speaking with users about products and interfaces is to align them more closely with user expectations and abilities. Observing the users as they attempt tasks, listening to them, and querying them for more details are all elements of what I call "looking for the monster in the light". Compiling the data to eventually produce actionable recommendations is the goal, but the value of the recommendations is deeply linked to the accuracy of the data.

When my two year-old began waking up in the middle of the night last week, I wanted some immediately actionable recommendations. So, I needed some accurate data to analyze.

I decided to conduct a contextual inquiry. As I carried him back to his bed, I began the interview.

"Do you want a drink of water?"
"No"
"Are you cold?"
"No"
"Do you want different pajamas?"
"No"
"So, do you want to go back to sleep?"
"Yes"

I put him in his bed.

"OK, now close your eyes."
"Can I hold your hand?"
"Yes...why do you want to hold my hand?"
"Because..."
"Because what?"
"...monster."
"Monster? Where?"
"...in the light."

My experience with his older siblings told me that no amount of convincing him otherwise will work; he sees a monster in the light.

So, I asked him to show me; he pointed to the light in the ceiling. At this point, I was stumped. I know that it's just a light. So, I changed my vantage point. I lay down on his bed and saw...a light fixture in the ceiling. Not a monster. But I know my kids, so I tried to look at the light like a child would look at the light, and suddenly, there it was; a monster.



There is a nightlight on the other side of the room that was casting a shadow across the ceiling light. As I looked at it, the sockets inside the frosted glass dome became eyes, the knob that holds the dome to the fixture became a nose, and the shadow of the dome became a hat.

Not exactly what I would call a monster, but I haven't been two for a *long* time.
So when usability professionals are interacting with users, there is a very delicate process taking place. We're trying to preserve normalcy as much as possible , so that the user behaves as they would if they were actually engaged in the task- but it's difficult to remove your own perceptions and sensibilities from the observation process.

Kind of like looking for the monster in the light. You have to divest yourself of everything that you know about the product or interface, which can smooth the underlying user-perceived reality.

PS- I moved the nightlight to the other side of the room, and we all sleep soundly now.

Creative Thought ,Part Three of Three- Focusing

As the cycle of creative thought matures, we enter the second “focusing” stage and move from identifying correlated items to causally related items. During this phase, we refine the idea, gradually narrowing our options as we seek to arrive at a conclusion. We also move into the realm of direct, conscious thought in the working memory space, and we let the mind direct its higher cognitive functions to consider the potential solution for appropriateness and validity. However, working memory is self-limiting for efficiency, and can hold a handful of items at most. We can extend its capacity through representing its output graphically, thereby preserving the creative idea and offloading the burden from working memory to a medium that we can still leverage. The use of imagery specifically can produce greater success than text alone, as our minds are extremely well suited for image recognition and recall. Since the vast majority of the experiential content that we encounter everyday is made up of shapes, colors, spatial relationships and other non-textual inputs, the mind needs to store much more than just words. The creation of a graphic artifact can increase comprehensibility of a concept or problem through pictorially representing things that are harder to store in short-term (working) memory if presented textually. Again, working memory is limited, so a bulleted list detailing the physical characteristics of a person is less efficient than a simple drawing, which conveys the same information but in a format that is a better fit with the cognitive power of the mind. The visualization of the creative thought has further benefits in that working memory can now better analyze the output…missing items are more obvious, new connections can be made, and causal relationships made evident.

Creative Thought Part Two- Brainstorming

The early stage of creative cognitive activity is familiar to most, and is often known as “brainstorming”. This “anything goes” phase of a creative session is characterized by the free-form generation of long lists of items. Since this material typically includes the final product, albeit in an embryonic state, it is critical to obtain as much raw material as possible. This phase of almost subconscious tapping of the mind should be sustained until a suitable amount of data has been generated, but the mechanics of this associative phase and the pre-disposition of the mind to reach conclusions introduce their own limitations. As the mind traverses long-term memory, it gradually narrows its options and resists returning to the associative state that results in novelty. This can be problematic if the creative process has not proven fruitful, and more incubation is necessary. In the words of Donald Norman, “People tend to focus on the active hypothesis and once focused find it difficult to change even in the face of contradictory evidence.”

Let's look at what must happen cognitively during this phase. First, by definition, creative thought is implicitly novel. That means that it cannot already exist in the mind. Rather, existing memories must be combined through association to form new insights. The associative nature of the mind encourages creative thought by allowing thought to wend through various regions, retrieving more data along the way. As previously mentioned, the mind will soon turn to pattern and routine, and the opportunity for creativity may be lost. The use of a visualization technique such as a “Mind Map” can play an important role in encouraging the preservation of this associative mode. Through writing or drawing a key concept of the task on a blank page, branching sub-topics can be added and then further extended. As elements of creative thought are added to the visualization, we can prolong this associative brainstorming phase and mine the rich store of potential contained in our long term memory through this external mirror.

Up next- Focusing.

Grouping

In order to rapidly make sense of novel situations and interfaces, our minds will "smooth" things. It's important to note that this smoothing will override reality if reality is too difficult to comprehend. We don't like the unknown as it may contain threats, which in turn incur stress. So, a great deal of cognitive resources are devoted to decoding and understanding that which is in front of us at any given time.

Since this decoding can't take too long (our defensive mechanisms "demand" a response and attentional resources cannot be pointed at one thing for too long) our minds will actively engage in parsing scenes by grouping elements. We seek relationships where none may exist simply because it helps us to understand, and if we understand, we can formulate a response. A preattentive feature that can be used effectively to indicate grouping is similarity. This can be further broken down into text size, color, and shape. Items within a scene that share any of these characteristics are liable to be grouped preattentively, especially if they share proximity. A good example of this can be seen by looking up at the stars on a clear night- Orion. The three-star belt with the four-star extremity square seems to "pop" out at the eye. Why? The stars are roughly the same size, color, and intensity, and easily "form" a geometric shape.

The grouping instinct was demonstrated to me by my own mind a few years ago. I went to a library to conduct some research and approached a study table. No one was sitting there, but a crumpled paper bag from a bakery was on the table. Instinctively, I looked around for an owner; not seeing anyone that fit my definition of an owner, I sat down and immediately felt uncomfortable. A thought occurred to me- "Anyone looking at the table will assume the bag is mine, because it is close to me and because an inanimate object like this bag has to have an owner; it can't get around by itself". A few minutes later, a student came to the table, looked at the bag, and then looked at me.

I found it easy to believe that he had grouped me with the bag. He thought it was mine.

After a few more minutes, I saw that a computer station had opened up, and I decided to move. As I picked up my papers and bag, I watched the person who had joined me. He didn't look at me, but he did look at the crumpled bag.

I also found it easy to believe that he was now grouped with the bag.

Implications for information design are that users will group elements of your interface, whether those groupings are real or not, simply in an attempt to understand. Since this is the case, use color and shape carefully, as these can act as confirmational cues to a user-created group that may not reflect reality. This may in turn cause confusion and unsatisfactory experiences.

Form vs. Function

Here's a chart I just pulled from MOSS 2007. The stylized tubular column looks great, but makes it difficult to determine what the number is. Look at the two columns on the right.

For quick analysis of numbers, use simple line charts. Our eyes are excellent at determining line-length, but far less able to judge area.

Creative Thought

The human mind is a marvel. It allows us to experience life through managing our senses, it directs our emotions, it maintains our bodies, and it has produced each technological, medical, and societal advancement in human history. As is well known, it contains billions of neurons, each capable of holding an event or sensation for later recall. In order to allow humans to occupy a dominant role in the world, it is designed for maximum efficiency in the areas of communicating and survival, and it is here that we encounter the first signs of the limitations of the mind. When we ask the mind to perform tasks that are less directly related to its core functions, the very same traits that act as facilitators turn into hindrances. Creative thought is one such task…the mind excels at recording experiences and storing them in long term memory as what is termed “knowledge” and can later be rapidly searched to identify opportunities for advancement or countering perceived threats, but creative thinking must extent beyond the known. Breaking free of the limitations of the mind requires external assistance, which can be effectively offered through the use of information visualization.

The demand for creative output exists within almost all spheres of human experience. Regardless of the nature of the task, there are common cognitive requirements that characterize this mode of thought. Once tasked with engaging in the creative process, the creator and the eventual output will move through a number of stages. The initial preparation stage sees the creator assembling the raw materials that will be used to address the task, such as understanding and evaluating previous efforts. As the creator enters the second incubation stage, the process typically recedes to the subconscious, where associations between the raw data gathered in the first stage can be made. Ideally, this phase will see the crystallization of creative thought into a rough solution in the third illumination phase. The final verification phase involves the refining and communicating of the new thought. These four phases can be arguably combined into two categories, unconscious brainstorming and conscious focusing. An examination of these two models will lead us to understand how the mind’s strengths and weaknesses can be manipulated through visualization.
Models of the first category will focus on the presence of associational mechanisms as related to creative success. This mode of thought is more intuitive, and can reveal connections that are not obvious, but may contain potential solutions. However, the mind does not predictably enter this spontaneous state of defocused attention. Models of the second category will be constructed on the premise that “the expression of a creative insight requires a high level of skill, knowledge, and/or technique that depends upon continuous problem solving” (Dietrich 2004). This focused mode of thought, while potentially more manageable and therefore predictable (i.e. applying a trial and error approach), can limit the amount of raw data available in working memory to about four items, which presumably affects the level of innovative thought that is possible. Research has also shown that performing at a high level of concentrated thought over time is draining to the attentional system, and cannot be sustained. It is further suggested that these two categories may not be mutually exclusive, but may be cyclical phases of a single, integrative model.

Stay tuned for the first phase, Brainstorming.

Respect User's Time for Better Satisfaction Rates

I was a member of a team earlier this year that conducted a competitive analysis in which we examined user satisfaction rates for two websites. While task success rates were not significantly different, task times were.

We were able to correlate this to a positive reponse to the question "Would you recommend this site to your friends?". Shorter task times meant that users were more likely to promote your site.

So, optimizing task times may be an important part of building a network of site promoters. More to come as I conduct additional studies this fall.

Multimedia Learning

Documenting our experiences for various purposes has been a human constant since creation. The use of imagery in various cultures to accomplish this could be ascribed to the lack of a written language, such as the petroglyphs of the American Southwest, or to the prevalence of illiteracy, such as the religious icons of Russian peasantry. We might equally acknowledge that imagery is an instinctively powerful medium, and has been used throughout history for that reason. Why is this so? We can certainly point to the speed of visual perception, or its permanence. But imagery, which Stephen Kosslyn terms “a basic form of cognition (that) plays a central role in many human activities”, can be used to tap into long term memory. Images are encoded into the brain via the ventral and dorsal systems, which are inputs to associative memory. Working memory processes visual and verbal information through two separate channels, and learners can use both effectively to select and organize new information that can be integrated and passed into long term memory as a schema. It is important to note that textual information alone, such as this page, may be encoded and processed via the visual channel. However, studies have shown that inclusion of images with text increases the likelihood that the learner will employ both channels, and therefore create the potential for deeper learning. This approach is not foolproof however, and instructional designers must create artifacts that complement cognitive architecture, or risk overloading working memory.

Coding information into memory through using both visual and verbal channels is known as dual-coding theory. An image viewed by a learner is encoded by the visuospatial sketchpad component of working memory as an imagen. Descriptive text in proximity to the image is generally encoded by the phonological loop component of working memory as a logogen, but may also be encoded via the visuospatial sketchpad. The internal representation between the image and the text must also be encoded in working memory…this referential connection is key for successful integration with long term memory. Memory for this integrated information may be improved by the two systems acting as load-balancers for working memory, and perhaps also through the enhanced information maintenance ability of working memory when text is bound to an image through proximity. Presenting the learner with visual and verbal explanations that are positioned next to each other, rather than simply found on the same page, is termed the contiguity effect, and has been shown to enable deep learning of this dual-coded information through effective construction of referential connections that are stored and retrieved from long-term memory in the form of schemata.

However, dual-coding can actually incur cognitive load if not employed carefully. If the visual and verbal explanations are not closely integrated on the page, working memory must be directed to locating and comparing the referents. Known as the split-attention effect, this reduces working memory’s capacity to support learning. Dual-coding based instructional design can also incur working memory load if textual descriptions merely redescribe an image or diagram. This redundancy effect requires working memory to differentiate between unnecessary and essential information, a non value-added process with deleterious results. These cognitive load effects highlight the potential risk of combining images with text inappropriately for both domain experts and novices, which can be further understood when seen in context with some functions served by placing images in text. Decorational images are just that, decoration with no educational component. An image of a seagull placed next to a passage about the ocean would add no value, and would likely elicit the redundancy effect. Representational images depict the actual textual descriptions, and depending on their complexity may incur the split-attention affect. Organizational images complement the structure of the text, and would likely provide the desired benefits of dual-coding theory as they support the text rather than competing with it. With this background, the use of imagery to drive knowledge transfer can produce deep learning and practical benefits.

Windows Server 2008

I was logging on to a Windows Server 2008 box for the first time recently, and was tripped up by 15 years of routine. I entered my login information, and clicked a large button below the entry fields. Take a look:



















I expected to see a desktop, but was surprised to see this:

It happened once more before I realized that I was hitting a button that said "Switch User"; the action I was seeing was entirely normal. However, it was so difficult for me not to hit that button! Not only is it a big button, and not only is it located right where the "OK" button is located on all previous server login screens, but it is designed with a half-glare effect that makes reading the light text/dark background instruction effortful.


The correct action is to hit the little circle with the arrow in it, seen just to the right of the entry field in the top image. It has taken me several days to get used to that. I wonder what drove Microsoft to change their design for logging in? There's no apparent benefit, and the seemingly-minor problem that it caused adds to a probably-undeserved bias against the company.

It seems obvious, but routine governs so much of what we do that to ask users to reset a routine that they have developed in the course of using your product or interface should not be undertaken lightly. In the coming weeks, I'll be writing about steps I took recently with a major non-profit to mitigate the effects of change.

Nordstrom- Decison-making in Online Shopping

Traditional brick and mortar retail outlets are often complemented by a click and mortar counterpart. Rather than competing with each other, these two channels can work together within a company to increase sales. For example, a visitor to a store may be interested in an item, but defer the purchase for an unknown reason. On the way out of the store, a large sign promoting the URL of the store’s website allows the visitor to see the item again from the comfort of their home, without pressure, and possibly complete the sale. A web surfer abandons a cart, but notices on the website that there is a retail outlet nearby. A desire to actually see and handle the item prior to purchase is easily fulfilled, and the sale is made. A well-designed website should either leverage an online consumer’s prior knowledge to facilitate a choice process, or improve the consumer’s mental model to increase the chance of a later sale in a physical store.

Nordstrom is a high-end retailer with two stores in Massachusetts. The stores are not conveniently located for all Massachusetts residents, nor are they open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If a customer does venture into a store, they may or may not find an associate to help them, but they will certainly be able to create or enhance a mental model of the store, with various schemata for items of special interest. Once at home, can these mental models be activated via the always-on internet? A visit to the Nordstrom.com website presents us with images of mannequin-like models wearing the latest fashions…these stylized poses could trigger memories of similar poses seen in the in-store displays. A prominent “free shipping” banner anticipates the online shopper’s concern that shipping charges will raise the true price of their potential purchases, and make the online browser comfortable enough to be a potential online shopper. A large array of shopping categories is evident, including men’s suits. Can we use prior knowledge to convince someone to purchase a suit online? Surely the fitting process is a time-honored part of purchasing a garment? If we browse for men’s suits, we soon see images of trim, young men wearing elegant suits. These models often have a body shape that enhances the appearance of the clothing. The selection process dictates that we use existing mental models of ourselves to encode these images into memory, possibly selecting details regarding the age, hairline, and physique of the models that may confirm an idealized self-image. The images are then abstracted, further reducing the fidelity of the percept as it is encoded, and then interpreted by using general schematic information, presumably about ourselves in this case, to compensate for the reduction. Finally, the image is integrated into our memory store by modifying our existing schema of ourselves. It has been proposed that ego plays a major role in the acquisition and organization of knowledge. This process could theoretically cause the online shopper to encode a mental model of themselves wearing a Nordstrom suit, possibly even adopting some of the physical characteristics of the models to result in an idealized version of the self. This would perhaps fulfill the personal fitting process to some extent, and may create a positive affective response within the consumer towards the purchase.

Other possibilities for combining the best qualities of the online and in-store experiences include the activation of a “purchase” schema through a well-worded “Add to Shopping Bag” link. A “shopping bag” in the context of Nordstrom could suggest a completed sale, which (in the store) is placed into a bag, further influencing the choice process. The more familiar “Shopping Cart” text used by most websites would potentially invoke a “supermarket” shopping schema, which would be a poor fit with the Nordstrom brand. The next screen reverts to using the expected online language for completing the sale, “Proceed to Checkout”. Many adult users, who may not be accustomed to spending $1000 on a garment sight-unseen, will likely be accustomed to obeying the instruction to “Proceed to Checkout” on other websites and will therefore possess an “online purchase” schema. This familiar term may help them to invoke this schema, overcome any remaining reluctance, and complete the purchase.

Schemata allow humans to operate with high efficiency. However, schema creation and invocation is not an exercise in high-fidelity recording and storing of experiences, but is a highly processed method of internalizing information. Understanding these processes can help predict user behavior and allow us to design for better performance.

Color Choice and Mental Models

This choice of logo color by Roche Bros. is not necessarily a "bad" choice, but it does potentially activate a "FedEx" mental model. I found myself thinking that perhaps there was a new partnership and I could ship the groceries to my house?

Words can do the same thing...there is a plumbing supplies store near my house called "Ferguson Express". It makes me think of either photocopying or package delivery, but not copper pipe and wrenches, which is what they sell.

Is this a big deal? Well, Ferguson is out of business, but that may be for other reasons. I think it is a big deal when you roll it up with all of the other things that are competing for our attention, which eventually drives action.