Wednesday, February 15, 2012, 6:30 PM

Caplin will be hosting an “Agile UX Safari” in a couple of weeks. It will be a little different to the last one at MindCandy (we don’t have a tree house in our boardroom!) but we share their passion for design and development and mixing the perfect Agile/UX cocktail.

Check out the event –  We look forward to hosting a healthy discussion on all things design, UX and agile.

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.

But what is the reason for this? Why are we so driven to learn new things?

It's no wonder this game was so popular in our youth. Seeking is half the fun.

Can you say 'addicted'?

So what does this mean in regards to web design?

Clear information explaining the product and how to get started

Visual information organised in relevant containers

Choice = Power

Revealing more information with expandable pop-outs

“Ask and ye shall receive.”

How can we give our users satisfaction in the journey of seeking out new information without making it unobvious or tedious? One way we can do this is by providing information to the user when the user asks for it. This also gives them a sense of control, which will heighten their experience. This could be in the form of expandable items, rollovers, contextual hovers, or click-throughs.

Contextual hover reveals relevant tools or actions

Feedback

Because humans like to be aware and knowledgeable, it is equally important to keep them informed of what is going on. Give them feedback as to what is happening behind the scenes. And importantly to do so in a human language. The computer doesn’t need to inform the user that it is requesting file 1458xj via the server. The computer needs to tell the user that their file will be there and when. Progress bars, status updates, live help are just a few ways to do this.

Letting the user know how much is completed

Informing the user of where they are in the process and how much is left

That’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed this post and you learned something! Join me next time when we see how unconscious mental processing affects humans.

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.)

Just last week the UX team at Caplin had the fortune of attending UX London 2011, the largest UX conference in the UK, for three days of talks and workshops. Some of the biggest names in the industry from all over the world came and shared their insights. It was a great opportunity to meet with fellow UXers and learn about their trials and triumphs. Here are our top 3 highlights:

1. We Need A Common Language To Communicate

In many companies, there seems to be an issue of miscommunication, particularly amongst designers, developers and business folk. There is the confusion of “what we said, what he expected” and the end result which is normally nonsense. Dependent on your career you may use different jargon, buzzwords, delivery styles and have different ideas of what are the important aims and goals.

Business jargon defined

In order to overcome this gap of understanding, we need to “align the dialects”, as Kate Rutter says. By this she means that we need to demystify our different vocabularies and clarify their meanings to each other in simple terms. As designers we need to express our strategy and its impact on business through using certain “strategy tools “ such as the Ishikawa diagram, prioritisation charts, storyboards, conversion models and product evolution maps. These tools allow the business people to understand our approach and help reinforce decisions. Having an insider who can appreciate the perspectives of your business colleagues will help bridge the gap between the languages and establish expectations. Finally addressing key points with short, concise answers removes the extra jargon while getting across the underlying ‘What’ and ‘Why’ behind a design.

(For Kate’s full presentation check out on ‘Strategy Patois’)

2. Redesign Must Die

Louis Rosenfeld gave a great talk about how we should never “redesign” a website,  software application or digital interface as it is a hollow, meaningless and vain pursuit.

By this he means that simply giving an interface a new look will never weed out the original problems it had, as this can only be achieved through understanding interface users’ needs and designing to address these. He said that ill-defined problems cause “insanity and vanity” as they cause the user (and the designer!) to have a painful experience and only focus on the surface. In order to avoid doing redesign we should:

1. Prioritise – regularly identify the most important problems to our users
2. Tune – incrementally address those problems
3. Be opportunistic – Look for simple ways you can make a difference now, such as supporting contextual navigational needs of users or improving search results to be ‘smarter’ according to users’ needs

(For Louis’ full presentation check out ‘Redesign Must Die’)

3. Changing A Company’s Culture Is Difficult

This point came from Kim Goodwin’s Leading UX presentation which covered the core skills a good UX team leader should have as well as how to make changes internally in your company. The overall message was that the two things that companies that deliver great experience have in common is: 1. Great Leadership and 2. A Culture That Supports Change. A ‘good leader’ will be able to deliver feedback, handle criticism, negotiate, and mediate conflicts.

A culture that supports change will be full of people that share the same vision and values. It will also be adaptive, accepting of risk & failure, committed to quality and willing to prioritise. If a company is lucky enough to have both of these, it will take a minimum of 3-5 years for the change to emerge in a noticeable way. The reason for this is that old cultures have deep roots and without full commitment from the entire organisation, change is improbable. However if you are determined to bring about positive changes in your organisation the steps to take are:

Establish Urgency —> Develop A Guiding Coalition —> Develop A Vision —> Communicate The Vision —> Enable Action —> Get Short-Term Wins —> Don’t Let Up —> Make Change Stick

(For Kim’s full presentation check out ‘Leading UX’)

For other exciting UX events around the world check out FindUXEvents.com and Johnny Holland’s UX Calendar for listings!

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Breaking Development 2011 (Design and Development for the Mobile Web) is now over. The line up of speakers was excellent with many of the leading voices for the mobile web presenting.

Although I didn’t attend I was following the Twitter stream avidly. It was was full of activity with fantastic insights and quotes aplenty, and links to several of the presentation slides.

Where possible I have collated links to the presentations here, and will continue to add links as and when I find them.

I would strongly recommend that anyone interested in mobile web development, or anyone considering a mobile strategy for their company (and if not, why not?), to read through these. There are many great nuggets of information.

• The Future of the Mobile Web by Peter-Paul Koch
• Beyond the Mobile Web by Stephanie Rieger
• After HTML5: Mobile Device APIs and PhoneGap by Brian LeRoux
• What the web community can learn from Mobile by Brian Fling
• Building Tomorrow’s Web With Today’s Tools by James Pearce
• Native is easier. Web is essential. by Jason Grigsby
• Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski
• Fake it ’til you make it: creating mobile apps that feel like native apps by Jonathan Snook
• Real World Responsive Design by Stephen Hay
• A Perfect Storm: When Mobile Met The Cloud by Brian Alvey
• The Enyo Framework: Designing for Mobile Apps and Speed by Ben Combee
• Building Rich user experiences with Sencha Touch by David Kaneda
• Taxonomy of Touch by Nate Koechley

When I was offered a slot for my own UX Tech Talk the other day, I leapt at it. Working in a company where UX is outnumbered with a ratio of approximately 1 UXer:10 Developers, I wanted the opportunity to shake things up at work and throw some more UX-thinking into the mix. And I accomplished just that…

I managed to rope together around 25 people in my company, from Developers to UXers to Sales people and Marketing, even to the CEO. And the response to the video was surprisingly positive. Everyone agreed that we need to constantly grow as a company as shift our thinking to encompass more of what is the user’s perspective in the product. We are looking to continue expanding our user testing and research programme which is a huge win in my eyes. Working in financial UX can be quite challenging given the confidentiality of our clients and their customers, and the more access we can get to bankers, traders and stock brokers, the better. We are also going to be looking at ways we can make UX more of an Agile-friendly process, interlinking with the development of the products through various stages, rather than being a one-off design output at the initiation of projects.

Adaptive Path’s ‘Turning a Developer-driven Organisation into a UX-focused Company’

Summary of the Video’s Key Points

Five Critical Moves to Making a Company More UX-focused

1. No  quick wins  — Visual design and contextual help don’t necessarily equate to good UX. You need to change your organisation to be more UX-focused.
2. Everyone plays – Everybody should have an opportunity to share every good idea they have regarding our products. Group brainstorming.
3. Tools to think with – Represent our customers (research, interviews, personas)  so they are the focus in decision making (guide design decisions)
4. Encourage fishing — Train your entire organisation to have a UX-mindset; listen to our customers passively and actively
5. You still need pros on board – We need to work together to make UX part of our everyday culture, at every stage of development and release.

Steps to Making a More UX-focused Company

• List all the known needs.
• Identify the ones we must meet.
• Gather every single good idea.
• Everyone together can prioritise.
• Everyone’s work is important.
• Differentiate and clarify the competitive landscape.
• Represent customer so they are the focus in decision-making.
• Make principles that put customers first.
• Change your company’s thinking.
• Keep listening to your customers.

Overall I was very impressed with this video and its ability to speak to people of all levels in a company to the point that they are willing to welcome change into their environment. I highly recommend that you watch it and sharing it with your colleagues and perhaps you might get a similar response!