Most mental processing occurs unconsciously

The brain often acts without our conscious knowledge. The reason for this is that we have three brains. The old brain, the mid brain (emotional), and the new brain.

The old brain makes most of our decisions

…based on food, sex and danger. These things grab our attention because they determine our possibilities for survival. The old brain was the first to be developed in the evolutionary history of animals and humans. It is the part of the brain that constantly, unconsciously, assesses your environment, deciding what is safe and what isn’t. It controls automatic unconscious processes like breathing and digestion.

As the old brains is concerned with survival above all, nothing is more important that ‘YOU’ to your old brain.

As soon as something relates to you, or the word ‘you’ is used, your old brain switches its focus to that thing. Susan Weinschenk gives this example in her book ‘Neuro Web Design’ where she demonstrates the power of using the word ‘you’ to sway people towards a product.

“First product description: “This software has many built-in features that allow for photos to be uploaded, organised and stored. Photos can be searched for with only a few steps.”

Now read this paragraph for the same product: “You can upload your photos quickly, organise them any way you want to and then store them so that they are easy to share with your friends. You can find any photo with only a few steps.”  Which product would you buy? You’d likely buy the one that says “you” and “your”. This is not a conscious decision. Your non-conscious brain will tell you that the second product is better for you.”

In addition, the old brain is always looking for potential threats, food or opportunities for sex and therefore is very skilled at noticing change. As mentioned above, it is constantly scanning its environment observing changes. And there are a LOT of changes in your environment. The estimate is 11 million piece of information every second. Of that, only 40 are conscious. The unconscious mind lets us process all incoming data and evaluate what is good or bad.

“The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a good deal of high-level, sophisticated thinking to the unconscious, just as a modern jet liner is able to fly on automatic pilot with little or no input from the human, ‘conscious’ pilot. The adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient manner.” -Timothy D. Wilson

It is a hugely efficient tool that shows us what to pay attention to consciously while skimming through the rest. As you might remember from my previous post, multitasking is impossible– we can only focus on one thing at a time– so we need to make sure it’s worth our conscious attention. That’s why it’s such a successful system.

“The only way that human beings could ever have survived as a species for as long as we have is that we’ve developed another kind of decision-making apparatus that’s capable of making very quick judgements based on very little information.” -Malcolm Gladwell

The emotional brain is impulsive.

The emotional brain is (obviously) where all emotions are processed, and it is the root of impulses. Because of this it makes a big impact on our decision-making. The old brain and the emotional brain are very connected in the sense that if the old brain is highly aroused (by fear, or desire) the emotional brain deeply processes this information and etches it in our memory.

Because we are natural visual processors, we respond to pictures and imagery the most. Changes in visuals are easily picked up. Similarly when we think of stories or read, we break the ideas into images in our minds. These images arouse emotions in us. Imagine a news story of a plane crash with a front-page cover of burning, twisted metal shrapnel. That’s going to affect your emotional brain quite a bit. Similarly photos of a sexual nature, food or potentially dangerous scenarios will grab our attention with the old brain and sway our emotions with the midbrain.

Our behaviour is affected by things we aren’t consciously aware of.

“Unconscious processing can give rise to feelings, thoughts, perceptions, skills, habits, automatic reactions, complexes, hidden phobias and concealed desires.”- Wikipedia

One way that scientists have observed this is in the instance of ‘framing’. In ‘framing’, your old brain and new brain receive these unconscious messages and you act upon them. In one study, they saw that using the words “retired”, “Florida” and “tired” actually made people walk slower. Amazingly, a great portion of people’s behavior is driven by factors that they aren’t even aware of.

Both brains act without our knowledge. Rational reasoning is normally not the deciding factor.

Both the old brain and the emotional brain act without our conscious knowledge. People will always assume they made a rational and conscious decision, but in reality our decisions always start from our old- and mid-brains, and sometimes finish there too. Some decisions may come from your new brain (rational), but most are based on the subliminal messages our other brains give us based on things we react to in our environment.

How does this affect web design?

When a website addresses all three brains, then we click and engage with the site.

If a site is visually arousing, we’ll pay attention. If it seems to address ‘our’ needs and relates to ‘you’, we’ll pay attention. If there are a lot of changes, such as movement, carousels, videos, banner ads… it will grab our attention (even if we don’t like it).

By tending to our old and mid-brain triggers (food, sex, danger, movement, change, visuals/imagery, and focus on ‘you’) with appropriate web design decisions, users won’t stand a chance at resisting clicking around a bit.

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Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed it. Next time we’ll be learning about how mental models affect how we should design our products.

Hello again and welcome back to the Psychology of UX series! Today’s topic is all about MISTAKES. But before we begin let’s just define…

What exactly is a mistake?

“..a decision or action, or lack thereof, that we fear we’ll come to regret. They usually cause some degree of pain, loss or struggle,” says Mel Schwartz from Psychology of Today. For a more software-based explanation we might say a mistake is simply something that is wrong or that causes a problem with a user’s normal workflow.

Yes, mistakes. We all make them. We wish we hadn’t. One snooze button too many. Spending money on things we shouldn’t. Having that extra cocktail at work drinks and breaking out your embarrassing dance moves….I’m divulging too much of my personal life. But what about mistakes in the digital world? What happens when a user makes a mistake on a computer? These are things we will cover in today’s post.

‘Assume people will make mistakes. Anticipate what they will be and try to prevent them.’

Susan Weinschenk stated the above in her ‘Psychologist’s View of UX‘ post, the inspiration for this series.

Why would we want to prevent them though?

Well aside from mistakes causing users great frustration and pain when interacting with a system, mistakes can be rather costly, particularly in the financial sector where a user might be trading thousands, or even millions, of dollars with one click. It’s imperative when designing the user experience for financial interfaces to make the workflow easy-to-use and error-free.

There goes my retirement fund!

So how do we prevent errors?

The best error message is no error message. What this means is that a system that is designed well will not allow the user to make an error to begin with. The main way we can accomplish this is by predicting what mistakes a user might make, based on knowledge gathered by researching  the environment they operate in and their needs with the system. We can then adapt our designs accordingly to avoid allowing those mistakes to be made in the system.

If the task the user will be conducting is very complex or error-prone, a further approach is to break up the task into smaller steps so that each step can act as a quality gate before the user is allowed to move onto the next. We often see this design solution in online payment portals on retail websites, like Amazon or this donation website below.

One step at a time...

How do we treat errors in the system?

Not like this. Can you read that? Honestly? Even you developers out there (who often are the ones who have the mission of writing these error messages). You are human too —  we don’t talk like that. The first crucial step to dealing with errors in a system is speak in human language! Explain that an error has occurred, what the error is, how the user can correct it and where they can go for more help to fix it. In plain language. When something goes wrong in a system, it’s of the highest importance that the user knows what to do about it.

The below images are great examples of clear, human language communicating to the user the problem with visual cues (symbols and colours) and sometimes even contextual hints as to where the problem went wrong (i.e. a highlighted password field when the password is wrong)

Suggestions of what to do next

Effective colour and symbol usage

Everything wrong is in red. Perfect.

Human language! Yippee!

Simple. Problem. What is it. Do this.

We should also allow users to UNDO actions, such as mistakes they have just made. Ctrl-Z, anyone? It’s been a godsend for me. Users need autonomy within a system and this can only be achieved if the system is so well designed that the user can’t get so lost down a path they can’t find their way back to where they were. Allow them to undo and reverse steps. Similarly the ‘ESC’ key can be used to exit a curtain task that isn’t yet completed, to prevent the damage from being done.

In reality, it is near impossible to create a completely error-free system that guarantees the users won’t make mistakes. But why?

Because people make mistakes and UX Designers are just people.

“If Ernest Hemingway, James Mitchener, Neil Simon, Frank Lloyd Wright and Pablo Picasso could not get it right the first time, what makes you think that you will?” –Paul Heckel

Without sturdy user research, the designer will have a lack of knowledge of the user needs and this can result in an unusable design. That’s why we as designers need more time. More time for research with the users and more time for testing with the users.

At a ‘Lean UX’ workshop I went to last weekend Janice Fraser, one of the founders of the famous Adaptive Path UX consultancy, said rather powerfully in regards to the Agile methodology, “Don’t throw the design out into the world and hope it works. I no longer want that responsibility. We are supposed to get it right the first time, yet the developers get to do it over and over again.”

UX Designers need the allowance of time and budget to be able to test our prototypes on real users before the designs are fully coded and completed for product release. That’s not to say that a design shouldn’t be coded to test if it’s implementable or to test the functioning prototype on a user, but we need time to test the designs before they are finalised.

The problems begin to appear with usability testing

That way we can see what errors the user might run into or what errors are prevalent in your design. And then we can iterate and improve on our designs.

Not enough time?

“The joy of an early release lasts but a moment. The frustration of an unusable system lasts forever.”

Let’s do it right, step by step, and try to design a system that is *mostly* error-free.

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Thanks for reading! The next part of the Psych of UX series will be on how human memory is complicated. Until then…

Ever since I found the blog ‘What Makes Them Click’ by Susan Weinschenk, I’ve been fascinated with her writing. I’m a natural analyst, much to some people’s dismay, as I mentally poke and prod people till I really understand what drives people to behave the way they do. This has led me to study Product Design, Anthropology and to now be employed in the UX industry in an attempt to understand people and better their human experience. So when I read Susan’s post on ‘The Psychologist’s View of UX Design‘, I was fully engrossed in what she had to say on the matter.

Her article broke down several areas of study relating to the brain, memory and the visual systems in humans to explain how these are relevant to UX. I don’t want to spoil the article just yet as over the course of the next couple of weeks I will break down Susan’s post and further explain my understanding of each of her ten points and what this has meant to my experience of UX thus far or the direction I’d like to take my own UX practices within a professional environment. In the mean time, I will list the ten points that Susan makes in her post.

10 THINGS TO ABOUT HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY THAT SHOULD INFORM UX DESIGN

1. People Don’t Want to Work or Think More Than They Have To
2. People Have Limitations
3. People Make Mistakes
4. Human Memory is Complicated
5. People are Social
6. People are Easily Distracted
7. People Crave Information
8. Most Mental Processing is Unconscious
9. People Create Mental Models
10. People Understand Visual Systems

Keep an eye out for the upcoming ‘Psychology of UX’ series I will be posting over the next couple of weeks!

A BACKGROUND ON SUSAN WEINSCHENK:

Susan has a Ph.D. in Psychology which, for over 30 years, she has applied to design and technology. She has two books published (one being released this month!), Neuro Web Design and 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People. She works for Human Factors International, a leading user research company (and coincidentally the same people who made the ‘ROI of UX’ video I posted about not long ago.)

Good news—we will soon be having a facelift here with Platformability getting an entirely new, fresh look. After several years of running the blog we thought it was the right time to move forward with a new appearance to improve readability and make it easier to follow your favourite author.

No, it won't be black and white

What we’ve done

In between our normal day jobs, the UX team at Caplin have been redesigning the experience, layout and styling of the blog to better match our enthusiasm towards ease-of-use and simplicity. Things we tried to consider were who is our audience, what are their needs or why might they want to read our blog as well as how we could make the blog a valuable resource for technical information. We also tried to bring across some of the visual language of data common to the financial world to our blog, since we do after all design financial applications.

We hope you are just as excited as we are to launch it in the coming month. We’ll be keen to hear your feedback about the overall look and usability once the new site is launched. Keep an eye out for a pleasant change and thanks for reading!