Conflict of Interest- Chairs

I was working at my desk yesterday when I realized it was almost 1:00PM. It occured to me that I should eat lunch...I was actually hungry. Then it occurred to me that even though I often get hungry before 1:00PM, I rarely eat lunch until later.

I began to wonder why I was reluctant to eat lunch; OK, so my usual fare (King Oscar sardines, Wasa crackers, apple, water) is nothing to be eager about, but why would I be avoiding it?

So, I went down to the cafeteria, grabbed a couple of napkins (the sardines are in oil), and picked a table. As I sat down, my calves banged painfully into a horizontal metal rod that spans the two front legs of the chair. Was this what made me reluctanct to eat lunch?


While pondering that, I began to think about why the cafeteria is full of uncomfortable chairs. Maybe the Cafeteria Management prefers chairs that employees don't want to spend a long time sitting in? Does that make them last longer?

Most likely, the Facilities Department simply required inexpensive, durable chairs that are stackable. The chairs certainly fulfill those requirements, but I imagine that there were several options. I checked, and there is indeed a version of the same chair that has the support rod spanning the back legs.

When designing, developing, or selecting something that others are going to use, run a pilot test first. Even two or three users can save you from expensive re-work. I recently deployed a 32-question survey; a pilot user caught a subtle issue that would have compromised several of the questions and prevented me from making some interesting correlations. I've been including pilot tests for years in my work, but there are times when I am tempted to skip it. Make sure to include this step in your plans; a little work now can save you a lot of regret later.

Big Signal for Common Tasks

The power of visual cues to guide user behavior is well known- size and color, for example, are often employed in various interfaces to call attention to the affordance that most users will be looking for most of the time. Large green “Start” buttons on copiers make them easy to use because the most common task is initiated by the most obvious control. The depth of this connection is always impressive when seen in action.

In an effort to relieve my five year-old’s cabin fever, I asked him to come outside with me to fill up the windshield washer reservoir in my car. It’s a brand new sedan, with a complex engine compartment.





I showed him the windshield washer fluid first, and then I opened the hood and said “Where do you think it goes?”

With less than a half-second’s consideration, almost instantly, he pointed at the lid to the reservoir.

“Why do you think it goes there?” I asked.
“Because it’s the same color as the washer stuff”.

The conscious design choice of the blue color for the lid of the reservoir acts pre-attentively to associate the object with the “washer stuff”, which is in the “locus of attention” (see Jef Raskin for more). Almost everything else in the engine compartment is either black or unfinished metal. Even before working memory can process the query and engage in problem-solving, there is a bias towards the large blue “cap”-object.

So, the motorist is happy because they will almost certainly succeed in their task with little to no effort. The designers applied an appropriate signal to the affordance that will be most frequently used. Other preliminary tasks, like opening the bottle of washer fluid and poking at the foil cover, can actually be more challenging than figuring out where to pour the stuff.

We’ve seen that the brightest signal will co-opt our attentional faculty. There will be a bias towards that signal that will require effort for the user to overcome. Violating that expectation through using a color other than blue for either the reservoir cap OR the fluid will impact the user's experience. Predicting and accounting for this behavior is an important part of user-centered design.

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.