Susan M. Weinschenk's Blog, page 3

100 More Things #168: PEOPLE HAVE PHYSICAL LIMITATIONS OF MOVEMENT

If you ask someone to turn a button or knob that’s 8 inches (20 cm) in diameter, that’s going to be difficult, or even impossible, to do with one hand. People have physical limitations of movement, and range of motion based on body size and physical structure. If you’re an industrial designer, then you’re probably familiar with human factors and ergonomic standards.

But if you don’t have experience designing products that require body movement, you may need to learn about human factors and ergonomic standards in order to design for gestures, and augmented and virtual realities.

Note

If you need a reference book on human physical averages and limitations, check out Human Factors and Ergonomics Design Handbook (2016) by Barry Tillman, Peggy Tillman, Rhonda Rose, and Wesley Woodson.

Note

One reason augmented and virtual reality is powerful and holds promise for rich interactions is because people react to simulated environments as though they were real. Even if people know they’re interacting in a simulated or virtual environment, they react and behave as though the environment is real.

Takeaways

If you’re not familiar with human factor ergonomic standards, familiarize yourself with them so you’re ready to design interfaces with gestures.If you haven’t personally experienced augmented or virtual reality devices, try them out so you’ll have a mental model of what the experience is like before you’re asked to participate in the design of one.

100 More Things #167: PEOPLE NATURALLY GESTURE

Tell a friend about the last time you went to visit a family member, and you’ll notice that you’re moving your hands and arms while telling the story. Your body is gesturing without you even thinking about it.

Gesturing To Manipulate A Device

As designers, we’re now building in gestures as a way for users to interact with and manipulate interfaces. We’ve been designing interactions with keyboards, mice, trackballs, track pads, pens, and touching with fingers. And now we’re using more complicated hand, finger, and body movements as gestures for interacting with device interfaces. Just listing some of the finger and hand controls on a smartphone shows the variation:

TouchTouch and dragTap once with one fingerTap twice with one fingerTap once with two fingersSwipe with one fingerSwipe with two fingersSwipe with three fingersFlickPinch closed with two fingersSpread open with two fingersRotate

The ability of devices to understand gestures is increasing. The latest technologies use radar to detect and interpret human gestures and then connect them to a device so that people can control the device by making gestures near it.

It’s now possible for people to “grab” something on a screen by making a grabbing motion in the air, or hold out a hand with the palm facing out to tell a robot to stop.

Why people gesture

It’s often thought that people gesture while they talk to convey information. Although that’s true, the latest theory is that the most important reason people gesture is because they need to gesture in order to think. It’s another example of embodied cognition.

Natural Gestures Versus Forced Gestures

While many gestures come naturally, others don’t. Moving a finger clockwise to signify that you want to rotate something is a natural gesture, as is holding up your hand with your palm out to tell someone or something to stop. Swiping with two fingers to mean one thing and swiping with three fingers to mean something else are not natural gestures.

Should people have to learn new gestures that aren’t natural to them in order to interact with devices? I don’t have a definitive answer to this question yet. On the one hand (embodied cognition metaphor!), people often learn new movements to interact with devices. Many people type quickly on a keyboard without thinking about it, yet this is something they had to learn. But if they have to read a manual to find out what gestures to use in order to use a device, maybe those gestures aren’t the best way to interact with the device. Did the designer invest enough design time, energy, and knowledge in the interaction decisions when designing this device? Or, rather than taking the time up front to design the interface so that a limited set of natural gestures would encompass all the needed tasks, did the designer optimize the technology and just throw the human gestures needed to use it on top?

Takeaways

People like using natural gestures rather than always having to type or touch.When you’re choosing gestures for people to use when interacting with a product, choose gestures that come naturally whenever possible.When you’re designing a product that will respond to human gestures, allow enough time in the project planning to decide on and test the gestures.

100 More Things #166: PEOPLE ENJOY HAPTIC (TACTILE) INTERFACES

A lot of the interfaces that designers create are digital interfaces for screens and pages, or auditory interfaces. There is also a specialty area in human factors and interface design that is all about interfaces that people physically touch. This is called “haptics”.

K.E. MacLean (2008) writes about tactile feedback and user experience. People often enjoy physically engaging with a product. Haptics provide a sense of control and immersion.

In particular, people enjoy pressing physical buttons (Plotnick, 2018). Research shows that button pressing can provide a satisfying and enjoyable experience due to the tactile and interactive nature of button pressing, as well as the sense of control and agency that it provides.

Pressing buttons is a conditioned automatic response. People will reach out to push a button before they realize they are doing so.

Takeaways

If you are considering whether to have a purely digital product versus a physical product or a combined digital and physical, consider adding a physical component to so that you can include a haptic interface.Actual buttons, or digital buttons designed to mimic actual buttons, will have increased engagement compared with “flat” digital buttons.

100 More Things #165: PEOPLE THINK AND FEEL WITH THEIR BODIES

If you think about why people think, feel, and behave in certain ways, you probably think about what’s going on in their brains. You might not realize how much people’s bodies influence their behavior. The field of “embodied cognition” is gaining more ground in cognitive science, psychology, and design. It’s the idea that people’s bodies—their size, shape, and movement—not only contribute to how they think and their behavior, but also actually drive their thinking and their behavior.

Catching A Fly Ball

The classic example to explain embodied cognition is the example of how a baseball outfielder catches a fly ball. Let’s say you’re the outfielder and a fly ball is coming toward you. It’s your job to catch it. How do you get to the right location at the right moment to catch the ball?

It’s a difficult task. You’re very far away from the batter and the ball will appear very small until it gets close to you. It’s all going to happen very quickly. You have to move from wherever you are on the field to the exact location where the ball will land at some point in the future. You don’t know exactly when that will be, or exactly where it will be. A regular cognitive science brain model to explain how you catch the ball goes like this:

You have a mental representation of the motion of the ball, information about the speed with which it might be traveling, and information about direction. You predict the future location and timing of the ball using physics. Since the ball is being thrown near the Earth’s surface, it moves in a curved path. The only force acting on it is gravity. If you know the size, mass, direction, speed, and angle, then you can use this information to predict the location of the ball. Your brain does these calculations and then gives commands to your motor system to move you to the right location in time.

Interestingly, if this were really what you would do, you’d move in a straight line right to the location. How many times have you seen outfielders move in a perfectly straight line from where they are to where the ball is going to be? They usually start in one direction, but then pause or speed up. They move backward, forward, or sideways. They rarely, if ever, move in a straight line right to the ball.

The embodied cognition explanation is different. The brain doesn’t have to calculate anything. According to the embodied cognition viewpoint, if you were really mentally computing physics calculations, you’d make too many errors. The ball is so far away that you could barely perceive it. You wouldn’t be able to get the data you need to make the calculations.

The embodied cognition viewpoint says that you would use “kinematic” information—information about how things are changing over time in relation to your body. The physics of the ball make it at first rise and then gravity makes it slow down. It reaches a peak height and then accelerates as it starts to fall on the other side of the arc. You see this motion and use the “kinematic” information it communicates.

It turns out there are two strategies you can use within the embodied cognition explanation:

If you’re in a direct line with the arc of the ball, then you can use your eyes and your muscles to move you. If the ball appears to move at a constant velocity (speed and direction), and if you keep adjusting your location and movement so that it still appears to move at a constant velocity, then you’ll end up in the right place at the right time.If you’re not in a direct line with the arc of the fly ball, then you use your eyes and your muscles to move in a way that makes the ball look linear. The trajectory of the ball is actually curved, but as long as you keep moving in a way that the ball looks like it’s moving linearly, then you’ll be at the location where the ball is when it arrives.

Experiments designed to see if people actually move in these paths when catching a ball show that they do (and so do dogs when they’re catching objects thrown at them).

The Proof Is With The Robots

If the baseball thought experiment didn’t convince you about embodied cognition, then perhaps these robot comparisons will.

The ASIMO robot was built from a traditional cognitive science approach. It has programs that control its movement. It can walk and (sometimes) climb stairs. But any disruption that doesn’t fit this programming causes disaster (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTlV0...). It does fine until something unexpected happens—something it hasn’t been programmed for.

Compare ASIMO to Boston Dynamics’ BigDog (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQr6U...). BigDog is built from the embodied cognition viewpoint. BigDog was built to walk on uneven ground. Instead of complicated software to control movements, BigDog responds to what happens in its environment through feedback from its “legs.”

The more designers understand how people move and interact with the world, and then apply that knowledge to the design of machines, the more the machines come to resemble people in terms of how they interact with the world.

Designers have a tendency to focus on the visual aspects of design. It’s true that vision is a critical sense, but what happens if you start to include the implications of the body for design? People are moving all the time, and their movement is part of their decision-making. If you design a product that’s visually appealing and fits the context only visually, you could end up designing a product that’s unappealing or unusable.

People are more satisfied with a choice when they engage in a physical act of closure

Imagine that you’re sitting in a tea shop looking at the menu, deciding what tea you want to order. You make your choice and close the menu.

What you may not realize is that because you closed the menu after making your choice, you’ll be more satisfied with the choice than if you hadn’t closed the menu. It’s a version of embodied cognition: the physical act of closure changes your emotional response.

This tea experiment was actually conducted by Yangjie Gu (2013). Gu told the participants in the experiment that once they decided, they could not change their minds. Participants who were told to close the menu were more satisfied with the tea they chose than those who didn’t close the menu.

Takeaways

When you design products and product interfaces, keep in mind the body and muscle movement required and the context in which the product will be used.When you do user research, include research on how people are moving when they use your product.When you storyboard and sketch your design, include information in the storyboard on how people are moving while they use your product.

100 More Things #164: BEING A PERFECTIONIST CAN RUIN CREATIVE WORK

It’s my opinion (uncorroborated by any science that I know about) that people who are drawn to design tend to be perfectionists. Being a designer, and being creative, means that you have an idea in your head about how something should be, and you work on it as long and hard as you can to get it to match what’s in your head. It’s like the quote attributed to Michelangelo:

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

You’d think that wanting perfection would be a good trait in a creative person, and often it is. But perfectionism can also be detrimental to creativity.

Fear Of Failure

We all have fear of failure sometimes, but perfectionists have this fear more than most. Failure, in many cultures, for example, in the United States, is seen as a bad thing—it’s not good to fail. This is not true in all cultures. In some schools, in some cultures (for example, in some schools in France and in Asia), children learn that struggling and making mistakes are good. They’re taught that the whole class can learn from the mistakes and failures of one student.

Changing the idea of failure from a bad thing into a process often enhances creativity. There’s the famous quote attributed to Thomas Edison:

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

He purportedly said this when he was trying to find a good filament for the light bulb.

And indeed, he had tried many different types of filaments, and ways to use them that had not worked. But he didn’t consider these attempts to be failures. He just thought of them as part of an iterative process. By going through all the different possible filament materials, he believed he would eventually find the right one.
If you’re open to the idea that failure is iterative, then you can accept that you may not get the most creative idea right away, that you’re not going to solve the problem necessarily with the first idea you come up with, and that you don’t have to come up with perfect, fully formed ideas. You can get past the idea of failure. If you’re afraid of failing, then you’re going to be afraid of starting. Assume that you won’t have perfect ideas at the start, and see if you can get to the point where you think that’s OK. Turning the idea of failure into an idea of iteration is a great way to generate creative solutions.

The same applies to designing with a team. The team needs to iterate to get to a good design, too.

Takeaways

Be on the lookout for perfectionists on your team — yourself included. You might need to get some coaching to relax and lose some fear.Make sure you and your team have time and cycles available to iterate. This lets you come up with ideas and try them out, discarding them until you get to the idea or solution that fits best.

100 More Things #163: THE RIGHT KIND OF COLLABORATION INCREASES CREATIVITY

I tend toward introversion. When I tell people that, they usually don’t believe me. I like being on stage: giving talks at conferences, performing in local community theater productions, singing as a jazz vocalist with a small ensemble. So when I tell people I’m an introvert, they usually laugh. “I am!” I assure them.

As an introvert, I like working alone. But I also know that I’m more creative when I’m collaborating with others, and not just collaborating asynchronously through email or sharing documents, but collaborating with others in real time.

I’m probably not alone, however, in my reaction to the suggestion that we all get together and brainstorm. I have to admit that sometimes I cringe. It’s partially because I’m an introvert. But it’s also because brainstorming can be ineffective and even harmful to creative collaboration if done incorrectly. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do brainstorming.

Doing Brainstorming The Right Way

In case you’ve somehow managed to avoid participating in a brainstorming session, here’s how brainstorming often works: A group of people convene in a room together with an idea or a problem to solve. Everyone comes up with ideas, and the usual rule is that ideas are not judged or criticized until later—the goal is to generate as many ideas as possible as quickly as possible. One person is usually assigned to be the scribe, and this person writes down the ideas on a flipchart or whiteboard.

Scott Isaksen and John Gaulin (2005) reviewed dozens of research studies on brainstorming, and did some of their own research. Here’s what they concluded:

The instructions that people are given are important. In one study, when the researchers gave the group the instruction to generate five to seven ideas, the group produced seven ideas. When they gave the instruction to generate at least 20 ideas, the group produced 21 ideas. When the instructions did not include a number, the group generated 29 ideas.Having a trained facilitator to lead the group has a huge (positive) impact. The groups with a trained facilitator produced more ideas by a factor of 5 to 1 over groups without a trained facilitator.Some of the groups used a variation of brainstorming called “brainwriting.” Brainwriting is different than brainstorming: people write down their own ideas first, then hand that paper to the person on the right, who adds more ideas and hands the paper to the right, and so on.The groups using brainwriting and a facilitator came up with more ideas and better ideas than any other groups. When the facilitator participated in coming up with ideas (not just leading the group), then the group effect was even stronger.Individuals working alone generated fewer ideas than any of the brainstorming or brainwriting groups. The differences were striking. The brainstorming groups with facilitators generated an average of 126.5 unique (non-redundant) ideas per group. People working on their own, not in a group, generated 58 unique ideas. The brainwriting groups, with facilitators, generated an average of 208 unique ideas.

Brainwriting As An Antidote To Anchoring

One of the reasons that brainwriting is better than brainstorming is that it avoids anchoring. In brainstorming, someone comes up with an idea first and says it out loud. As soon as that idea is mentioned, it can act as an anchor and may influence all the other ideas people come up with. With brainwriting, no one “goes first,” so there’s no anchoring, and as a result there are usually more diverse ideas.

Another reason brainwriting works better than brainstorming is that quiet people, who may not shout out ideas in a regular brainstorming session, have the chance to have as much input as everyone else.

Takeaways

Collaborating with brainstorming can be a good way to generate ideas, but use the variant of brainwriting instead of brainstorming to come up with more diverse ideas.Use a trained facilitator for brainstorming/writing and let him or her participate in the generation of ideas.

4 STEPS TO DESIGNING A GREAT USER EXPERIENCE

If you want to design a great user experience for your product you have to first create a great conceptual model design that either blends well with the users’ current mental models and/or helps them create a brand new mental model.

Instead of jumping into detailed user interface design, I challenge you to do high level design:

1. Create Jobs to Be Done (JTBD): What’s the real outcome users need? Not just “use our product” but “solve a problem in their world.”

2. Develop Quick Scenarios & Storyboards: How does the experience unfold in context? What defines success?

3. Map out a Task Analysis: Detail the steps the user should be able to take to accomplish the JTBD within those scenarios and storyboards. What are the branches? What is the common path and what are the exceptions?

4. Develop an Object Model: What’s the model of the system? What are the things (objects) that people will be interacting with? What are the different ways (views) to present those objects? What are the most important actions users will take on each object?

Once you combine the object model with the task analysis you have a beautiful interaction flow diagram. Now you are ready to design screens, pages, voice interactions, or whatever is in your user interface. You will know exactly what to design, and the detailed design you come up with will provide a great user experience.

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100 More Things #162: PEOPLE ARE MORE CREATIVE WITHIN SOME CONSTRAINTS

Before you continue in this chapter, I’d like you to do a short exercise. Do not read ahead. Do Step 1 first before reading any further:

Step 1: Get a pen or pencil and a piece of paper, and take up to 30 seconds to write down as many things that are white as you can think of. Not things that could be white (for example, a shirt could be white or blue or green), but things that are usually white. Begin!

Ok, now do the second part of the exercise:

Step 2: Get your pen and paper ready again, and this time take up to 30 seconds to write down things to either eat or drink that are white. Begin.

Count up how many items you have on each list.

I got this exercise from Keith Sawyer’s book Zig Zag: The Surprising Path To Greater Creativity. The point of the exercise has to do with constraints. Most of the time when I have people do this exercise, they come up with more items in Step 2 than in Step 1. That’s because the second time the instructions included constraints.

Some Constraints Enhance Creativity

We usually think that to be creative, it’s best to have as few constraints as possible— maximum freedom. I’ve heard designers say, “You’ve imposed too many constraints for me to come up with a creative solution.” When I’ve had a client that wants the design team to follow an existing style guide, or use an existing pattern library, some members of the team will complain, “All these constraints limit our creativity.”

It’s certainly true that too many constraints can and often do limit creativity, but having no or too few constraints also hampers creativity.

If you have no or few constraints, then you also have a less-defined problem or design space. It will be harder to set a specific intention about what you’re designing or solving. This means that the executive attention network discussed earlier in the chapter won’t have a clear idea of what to focus on. And the first step in being more creative is to stimulate that executive attention network with a clear intention.

What constraints you should impose, and how many, depend on what you’re designing. Here are some examples of constraints you could put on a design or a project:

Limit colorsLimit sizeLimit shapeUse a particular style guideUse a particular set of design patternsDo the work in a limited time frame

Takeaways

Try applying some constraints on your next design project.When you’re working with a team, get the team to agree on some constraints, at least initially.

100 More Things #161: NOISE AND MUSIC INCREASE CREATIVITY

A lot of my work involves activities for which I need a very quiet environment, but when I’m writing, I’m more creative and more productive when I have some amount of visual and/or auditory stimulation. For example, I found that when writing this book I was more creative and more productive when I did the writing at a coffee shop, where there are sights and sounds surrounding me.

Although I haven’t yet found the research that would support the idea that stimulation of peripheral vision increases creativity (I’m still looking), there is research that shows that noise and music increase creativity.

Quiet Isn’t Necessarily A Good Thing

When it comes to creativity, being in a very quiet environment isn’t always a good thing. Ravi Mehta (2012) tested how much noise was ideal for increasing creativity. 50 dB (decibels) was not enough noise, and 85 dB was too much. The best level seems to be around 70 dB, which is about the level at a coffee shop, taking into account the general noise level from the espresso machine, conversations, and perhaps music. Mehta concluded that as noise levels increased, so did abstract thinking. When the noise reaches too high a level, abstract thinking continues, but there’s too much distraction for creative thinking—hence the “just right” middle amount of noise between 50 and 85 dB.

Debunking The Mozart Effect

You may have heard about the Mozart effect. This popular theory from the 1990s stated that listening to Mozart would make people perform better on tests, make them smarter, and make them more creative. It has since been debunked. But not the entire theory has been debunked.

It turns out there is a Mozart effect—and a Bach effect, and a [name of favorite musician goes here!] effect. It’s a “listen to music you like” effect. In fact, it’s not really a music effect. Even listening to audio books can boost people’s ability to solve visual problems after they listen (Naintais, 1999). In fact, listening to anything they like helps people solve problems better afterwards. The idea is that the audio puts people in a better mood, which makes them perform better.

But what about creativity—does listening to music make you creative while you’re listening?

Music And The Default Network

Remember the discussion of the default network and creativity earlier in this chapter? According to Daniel Levitin, author of The Organized Mind, listening to music activates the default network, which as we saw before, increases creativity.

Takeaways

To increase creativity, don’t work in a totally silent environment. Have a moderate level of noise (70 dB).To increase creativity, listen to music you like. This will activate your default network.

100 More Things #160: SLEEPING ENCOURAGES CREATIVITY

You’ve learned about the positive effect that daydreaming has on creativity. The same is true for sleep, but it works on the brain in a different way than daydreaming.

Boost Your Creativity By At Least 33 Percent

If I told you that there’s a way to boost your creativity by at least 33 percent and that this method is free, you might be skeptical. But as you’ve probably already guessed, the answer is sleep! The 33 percent figure comes from Jeffrey Ellenbogen, the director of the Sleeping Brain Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital. Psychologists and neuroscientists have been trying to figure out what sleep is all about for decades.

Listening To Brain Waves In Sleeping Rats

A breakthrough in understanding sleep and learning came from Matthew Wilson because of a small mistake he made in the lab. Wilson was working with rats in lab experiments on learning. He recorded signals from the rats’ brains while they were running mazes. One day he accidentally left the equipment hooked up. The rats were sleeping, but the equipment was still recording their brain signals.

When he compared the signals from the sleeping rats, he found that the signals matched the brain activity when the rats were awake and running the maze. The rats were re-running the maze in their sleep.

Consolidating Information During Sleep

Since then, sleep researchers now know that when people sleep, they review things they learned while awake that day. They “decide” (even though they’re asleep and unaware of deciding) what to keep and what to let go of from what they learned during the day.

There are four stages of sleep. A series of research studies at Robert Stickgold’s Sleep Research Lab at the Harvard Medical School shows that people jettison most of their memories of what happened during the day in Stages 1 and 2, and they transfer the memories they want to keep to long-term memory during REM sleep. REM sleep is also when most people dream. A small group of cells in the brain stem affects proteins in the amygdala and hippocampus in the brain. These cells are responsible for memory consolidation during sleep.

The Connection Between Sleep And Creativity

This reviewing and consolidation of information during sleep has an effect on creativity. A large part of being creative is making connections between new information and existing information in memory. This is part of what’s happening during consolidation when people sleep. The time connection between concentrated executive attention network focus (discussed earlier in this chapter) and sleep is important, too. For optimal creative output, you need to set that intention not too long before going to sleep.

What about naps and creativity? Naps can also improve your creativity, but only if you’re able to go into REM sleep during the nap.

Takeaways

Restate or write down the problem you’re trying solve or the creative idea you’re seeking progress on an hour or two before you go to bed.Get a good night’s rest (at least six hours—eight would be better). Naps might help, but only if you enter REM sleep.Keep a pen and paper or recorder handy. Often the answers and ideas you’re looking for will come right upon awakening.