everything you always wanted to know about psychology and technical communication ... but were...

E v e r y t h i n g y o u a lwayswantedto k n o w a b o u t p s y c h o l o g y a n d techcomms . . .

... but were afraid to ask.

Chris Atherton, University of Central Lancashire

User Experience: An Agony In Eight Fits.

— or —

(with apologies to Lewis Carroll)

1. Celestial Navigation

There’s a sort of hidden theme to this presentation, stuff that recurs. Answer on the last page :)

“The procedure is quite simple. First, you arrange items into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient, depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities, that is the next step; otherwise, you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. In the short run, this may not seem important, but complications can easily arise.”

This text was used in a classic 1972 experiment by Bransford & Johnston. Can you tell what it’s about?

“The procedure is quite simple. First, you arrange items into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient, depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities, that is the next step; otherwise, you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. In the short run, this may not seem important, but complications can easily arise.”

People given the title “Doing the Laundry” do much better at remembering this text than people with no context.

context is brilliant— once you have it.

Related: the book Made To Stick talks about “the curse of knowledge”— going back to “the beginner’s mind” is hard.

Showing the user where they are — navigational context — is really, really useful. iPad e-books even do it twice!

Reliance on spatial memory (“it was about halfway down the page”) is complicated by multiple, near-identical pages.

we remember gistand location

People are pretty bad at source monitoring (where stuff we know came from) but good at spatial source monitoring.

where was the washing machine?

1 2

3 4

where was the washing machine?

1 2

3 4Yeah, I don’t think anyone got this one wrong.

ad revenueSEO

user sanitytime on site

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Breaking down your content across several pages might be great for page-rank, but it might be pissing off your users.

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Eye-tracking research from Nielsen demonstrates that readers do actually read/scan quite long web pages.

Paper content? Not dead yet. The sight and feel of “how many pages through?” is a great spatial-navigational aid.

2. Metaphores and Other Such Beastes

image schemas

(Johnson, 1987)This is a very cool idea: metaphor in our language might be shaped by our three-dimensional, embodied experiences.

(Risch, 2008)

SPATIAL ORIENTATION

up-down

left-right

front-back

verticality

These are examples from Risch (2008) of metaphors grounded in our physical (as in Newton) existence.

I think most people are comfortable with this kind of chart, and the metaphor of “up is more”

However, if we represent the same quantities in a “down is more” framework, it feels weird, maybe even wrong.

... after all, we talk about “piling stuff up”, not “piling stuff down”. Real objects stack upwards, not downwards.

“Down is more” works better when it represents stuff you don’t have, and when contrasted with positive quantities.

(We also use colour as a metaphor. In my culture, red signifies danger, bad, warning, and debt. YMMV.)

Horizontal left-to-right (again, potentially culturally-specific) might indicate a time-sequence or other progression.

Left-to-right has also come to be used as a hierarchical metaphor — from top-level through to the fine detail.

Apple breaks that “top-level” metaphor by having a pull-down menu where “down” means “superordinate”. Weird.

temperature marker

thermostat

How do you make the shower warmer? My husband and I had a very spirited discussion about this user interface.

up is cold

down is hotIMO, this shower violates spatial metaphor — to turn the temperature up, move the horizontal bar down. WHAT?

(Then again, the shower was in the very same hotel where I took these pictures. I’m just saying.)

3. Breadth and Dogma

“I’m really visual”

“I have to hear something to understand it”

It’s common to hear people make statements like this; I do it sometimes, too. But it’s dogmatic — and unfalsifiable.

no evidence for learning styles

Coffield et al. (2004) published a comprehensive white paper on this, but learning styles are still taught as fact.

thou shalt

There’s a lot of emphasis in education on making sure you address all the different learning styles — again, dogma.

NeurolinguisticProgramming

(NLP)

NLP is a lot like learning styles, and used widely — and yet nobody can find scientific evidence that it works.

“but doctor, don’t you see? It’s a single-cell paramecium”

“you feelin’ me? huh?”

A central NLP tenet is tailoring language to target a person’s preferred visual/auditory/kinesthetic framework.

Derren Brown: engaging people with psychology (yay), but also muddying the water with magician-style showmanship (boo).

“Use brain gym to calm, energise or reconnect right and left brain

for improved concentration”

Let me be as clear as I can, here: THEY’RE ALREADY CONNECTED. (cited in Roderique-Davies, 2009)

generous interpretation

NLP and learning styles provide an interesting framework for thinking about learning and communication.

4. There can be no Proper Substitute for

Goode House Traininge

The conference room at TCUK got really hot, but despite the hand-logo, nobody wanted to open the fire-doors.

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Pavlov’s dogs: he rang a bell every dinnertime, and soon they would drool when he only rang the bell: ‘conditioning’

... a bit like this.

+ =+ =+ = ?!

Previous experience meant that many of us were hesitant to open the fire door in case the alarm went off. (It didn’t.)

5. Icones Is Icones

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You want icons that are generic enough to speak to everyone, but not so simple that they’re meaningless.

This is iMovie on the iPhone. It’s pretty cool, but with the exception of ‘play’, I find the icons hard to relate to.

abstract concrete“but mine doesn’t

look like that!”“what is it? how does it relate to what I do?”

The perpetual dilemma of the icon designer, and the problems at either end of the user experience spectrum.

I had really mixed feelings when I heard again recently that there might be a Sandman movie, or maybe a TV series.

iconicGraphic novels often produce iconic art.

exemplars trying to look iconicThese guys are cool, but not iconic. Reality is specific.

Sometimes even icons don’t look like icons.

the best icon is the one inside the user’s head

A word paints a thousand pictures. Words, which preserve meaning, might be the archetypal icons.

The Matrix was a rare example of a graphic novel-style premise that was iconic while also being specific.

I hope that any Sandman movie will be rotoscoped, like A Scanner Darkly, to retain the characters’ icon-ness.

(Keanu really likes sitting at tables.)

6. Stop That, or You Will Go Blind

7. Cum Hoc,Ergo Propter Hoc

— and —

At this point in the presentation I show an animation that flickers a bit between this and the next slide ...

... it takes people quite a few seconds to realise that every other frame is missing the bike saddle and bag logo.

change blindness

Pashler, 1988Visual glitches or discontinuities can cause us to miss things

(google ‘movie continuity errors’, for example.)

http://localoaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/wgetgui-screenshot.png

Don’t set a value of more than 20 attempts

Don’t check this box. Ever. Spiders come.

Callouts might appear simultaneously, as we blink, change slides, or cut between scenes or contexts. (Discontinuity)

“with this, therefore because of this”

cum hoc, ergo propter hoc

The human brain likes patterns, and when things appear together, we often (wrongly) infer causality or relatedness.

http://localoaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/wgetgui-screenshot.png

Do choose a more useful name for your log file

Don’t set a value of more than 20 attempts

Do remember to save before you press Exit

Don’t check this box. Ever. Spiders come.

At the very least, if objects appear at the same time, try to differentiate between them in other ways, like with colour.

Here I run another animation that transitions from this slide to the next slide over the course of 20 seconds ...

... because it fades over such a long time, it’s quite hard to notice that the Carbon-12 diagram is slowly disappearing.

inattentional blindness

Mack & Rock, 1992If visual changes occur gradually and/or

peripherally, it’s easy to miss them.

(Also, isn’t this the most shouty textbook ever? It’s like a Death By PowerPoint overdose, in book form.)

8. A Foole Knows the Price of Everything but the Value of Nothinge

Tech Comms and User Experience people sometimes feel undervalued or underappreciated. You can use experimental

psychology to demonstrate how value can be added, to improve customers’ experience of your product.

8. A Foole Knows the Price of Everything but the Value of Nothinge

By engaging with the literature in experimental psychology, you might be able to show colleagues that you can reduce at least one source of your company’s pain (poor revenue/

user dissatisfaction/lots of calls to user assistance, etc).

finiteattentionspan.wordpress.com

twitter.com/finiteattention

CJAtherton@uclan.ac.uk

AND! Come for a short run tomorrow morning— meet in the hotel foyer at 07:30.

Let’s keep having this conversation!

(and yes, we really did go running :)

finiteattentionspan.wordpress.com

twitter.com/finiteattention

CJAtherton@uclan.ac.uk

AND! Come for a short run tomorrow morning— meet in the hotel foyer at 07:30.

(By the way, the hidden theme was Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The West Wing. You should watch his stuff; it’s good.)