Susan M. Weinschenk's Blog, page 7

100 More Things #142: SMALL STEPS CAN CHANGE SELF-STORIES

If people filter out information that doesn’t match their self-stories, how can you ever get people to change? Can you ever get people to take an action that doesn’t fit their self-stories?

The answer is yes, but you have to start small.

A Crack In The Self-Story

I used to be a person who didn’t like Apple products. I had always used Microsoft Windows products and had little exposure to Apple products. I thought Apple products were for students or graphic designers. That wasn’t me. I was more of a computer nerd or a geek than an artist.

My husband used Apple computers at his job (at a newspaper), and he and I would have “Apple/PC” wars. I swore I would “never buy an Apple product.” That’s a pretty strong self-story.

When MP3 players first came on the market, they were poorly designed and not very usable. Then Apple introduced the iPod. My children really wanted an iPod. But if I bought them an iPod, I was breaking my promise to myself. It would be inconsistent with my self-story.

On the other hand, I wanted to be a fun parent and get my children the latest cool gadget. So I broke with my self-story and bought them each an iPod.

That was a small step, not in alignment with my self-story. But it was small. I could justify it. It caused me a little bit of discomfort, but not too much. When people take a small action that goes against an active self-story, it causes conflict. It has to be a small action, or else people are unlikely to take it. If it’s small enough and people take the action, they’ve now introduced a crack in their self-story.

The Crack Widens

Now that the children had iPods I began to be frustrated with my MP3 player. Their iPods were cooler and easier to use than my MP3 player. I decided to buy an iPod.

This was a larger step. I wasn’t buying this for my children. It was for me. The only reason I was willing to take that step was that I had already taken the first step of buying an Apple product at all. Now buying another iPod was actually consistent with the previous action.

I could still rationalize that this iPod purchase for me didn’t mean that I was an Apple person. It was just an iPod. I was still a PC person.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but buying that iPod for myself widened the crack in my self-story and allowed me to continue taking actions that were now consistent with a new, developing self-story. I was a person who was open to new, cooler gadgets. I was a person who could adjust to the latest “thing.” I was a person who bought Apple products.

Without realizing what was happening, I started taking actions consistent with the self-story of someone who buys Apple products. When my phone needed replacing, I bought an iPhone. When my laptop needed replacing, I bought a MacBook Pro. Eventually I bought everything Apple, including, more iPods, iPads, a Mac desktop, and an Apple TV.

I had totally changed my self-story, but it all started with one little action that was inconsistent with the existing self-story.

Encouraging A New Self-Story

If you want your target audience to take an action that is inconsistent with a strong self-story, get them to take one very small action. Let them use one of your products or services for free, for a short amount of time. That might be enough of a crack to get the self-story to change. Make sure you build in a series of small, easy actions they can take that move them very slowly to a new self-story.

Once people make one decision that is inconsistent with one of their self-stories, they will unconsciously feel uncomfortable. They will look for a new self-story to explain their action. By offering a series of small actions, you make it easy for them to transition to a new self-story.

For example, let’s say that your company creates SaaS (software as a service) accounting software for small businesses. Your software runs in the cloud. But your target audience has a self-story of “I’m not the kind of person who uses the cloud. I’m not convinced my data is secure that way. If I’m going to use software for my small business, I want it to be on my computer.” How will you get them to buy your SaaS product?

You’ll need to ask for a small commitment first, and then a series of small commitments. For example, try asking them to download a free trial version of just one of your products first, and then follow that with a reduced rate, three-month subscription for the same product, and after that a free trial of another product. Once they’ve made one or two small commitments that start to change their self-story, they’ll be more likely to continue using the product and to commit to a full year’s subscription of more than one product.

Takeaways

When you want people to take an action that goes against a self-story, you need to first get them to commit to something small. After that, they’ll be more likely to take the next action, since they want their self-stories to be consistent.When you introduce a small crack in an existing self-story, you can change the self-story over time.Plan for a series of small steps of increasing commitment to continue to widen the crack until a new self-story emerges.

100 More Things #141: PEOPLE’S SELF-STORIES AFFECT THEIR BEHAVIOR

People have an idea of who they are and what’s important to them. They have self-stories that they tell themselves and other people about who they are, why they do what they do, and why they believe what they believe.

People like to be consistent with their self-stories. So if I feel that I’m someone who’s very technology savvy, I’ll want to stay consistent with that. In fact, it will make me uncomfortable if I come across a situation in which it seems like I’m not tech savvy. Self-stories have a powerful influence on the decisions people make and the actions they take.

As a designer, you can connect with your audience on a deeper level if you know their self-story. For example, let’s say my self-story is that I’m an expert at video equipment. If I come to your website and it seems that the website is for people who are new to video technology, then I may quickly decide that your website is not for me. I will want to stay consistent with my self-story. I’ll filter out anything that doesn’t fit with my self-story.

One of the reasons that designers research and document personas is to understand the self-stories of the target audience and to be able to design to fit those self-stories. If you know who your target audience is, then you can craft your message to speak to that audience. When you craft the message to speak to that target audience, you’re tapping into their self-story.

Let’s say you’re designing an app to encourage people to sign up for a walk/run event to raise money for a charity. How you promote the event, the wording you use, even the wording on the button that people click on to register for the event all depends on what self-story you’re going to tap into. For example, if the target audience’s self-story is, “I’m someone who cares about helping people who need it,” then you’ll want to use messaging about helping people. The button to register might say, “Sign me up to help.”

If the target audiences’ self-story is, “I’m someone who likes to stay fit,” then you’ll want to use messaging about staying fit. The button might say, “I’m ready to run the 5K.” Shaping the wording of text and buttons to fit a self-story makes it more likely that the person reading it will take action.

Takeaways

Identify the most important self-stories of your target audience so you’ll know what messaging will be influential for them.When you want people to take an action, use messaging and wording that matches an active self-story of your target audience.

100 More Things #140: STORIES FOCUS ATTENTION

If you want people to be engaged and pay attention to your design and your message, use a story. And for maximum attention, introduce tension into the story.

In the dramatic arc discussed earlier in this chapter, the second part of the arc (after the exposition) is rising action. The rising action contains tension. When there’s tension, people pay attention. The stories that designers use (for example, a story from a customer at a website, or a video) are often short. If the story is short, then you have to build the tension very quickly to grab attention.

As shown in Figure 40.1, tension in a story causes the brain to release cortisol. This makes people pay attention. If people sustain attention long enough, then they begin to identify with the characters in the story. This will lead to oxytocin release, which then leads to empathy.

FIGURE 40.1 The attention circle.

People who study stories, or “narratives,” call this identification with the characters “transportation.”
Transportation is an actual physical reaction. When people start to identify with the characters, they smile when the characters are happy, and cry when the characters are sad. People’s brains react as though they themselves were in the story. The shorter the story, the simpler and more clear the main character’s actions need to be in order to activate transportation.

Tension In Storyboards

Designers often use storyboards to tell the story of a target audience and how that audience interacts with a brand or product. Designers typically present storyboards to stakeholders or clients.

Storyboards are a form of story even though they’re not a narrative. They’re like a very short graphic novel.

If you want your audience to buy into your plan or design, then treat your storyboard like a story. Build in tension to grab and hold the audience’s attention. In the storyboard, show the problem, danger, or hope of the target audience, build the tension quickly, and then resolve it with your design.

Takeaways

When you use a story in your design, build tension quickly, especially if the story is short.Be clear about who the main character of the story is so that transportation, or identification with the character, is more likely to occur.Treat your storyboards as actual stories. Use tension so that the people you’re presenting the storyboard to will pay attention and will feel empathy for the target audience you’re describing with the storyboard.

100 More Things #139: DRAMATIC ARC STORIES CHANGE BRAIN CHEMICALS

“Ben’s dying.”

This is the opening line to a video that Paul Zak (author of The Moral Molecule) used to research the relationship between stories and brain chemicals.

Note
You can watch a short video about Zak’s research on storytelling and the dramatic arc here: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1a7tiA1Qzo).

Zak ran experiments with the video. The video is a true story about a 2-year-old boy who was dying of brain cancer. In the video, Ben’s father talks about his son. He says that Ben felt better after his chemotherapy and so was often playing happily, but that he (the father) had a difficult time being joyful even when Ben was, because he knew that Ben would die within a few months as a result of his brain tumor.

Zak found that when people watched the video they experienced two emotions: first, distress, and then later, empathy. He took blood samples before and after people watched the video. He found that when people felt distress they released cortisol, and when they felt empathy they released oxytocin. Zak then gave people a chance to share money with a stranger in the lab or to donate money to a charity that helped children who were ill. In both cases, the more cortisol and oxytocin people had released, the more money they donated.

Zak concluded, “The narrative (story) is changing behavior by changing brain chemistry.”

In another experiment, Zak used the same video and added measurements of heart rate, skin conductance, and respiration. He could predict who would give money based on these measurements. (These new measurements allowed him to study people without having to take blood.)
Zak has examined stories in detail. His research shows that stories that follow the traditional “dramatic arc” are the stories that cause the release of the brain chemicals. In his research, Zak repeated the experiment using a different video of Ben and his father. This video showed Ben and his father at the zoo. It did not have a dramatic arc and did not elicit brain chemical release. Zak also found that the story without the dramatic arc did not hold people’s attention.

The dramatic arc Zak refers to comes from Gustav Freytag, a nineteenth-century German playwright and novelist. Freytag studied plays and stories from the Greeks and Shakespeare through to stories from his own time. According to Freytag, an effective story is divided into the five parts shown in Figure 39.1.

FIGURE 39.1 The dramatic story arc.

Exposition—The exposition is the introduction. It sets the time and place, the protagonist or hero, the antagonist or villain, other characters, and the basic conflict of the story.Rising action—The rising action is where the conflict that was introduced during the exposition starts to grow. Tension increases. The initial conflict becomes more complicated.Climax—The climax is the turning point. At the climax, the protagonist has a change of fate. If it’s a comedy, then before the climax things were not going well for the protagonist, but after the climax things look up. If it’s a tragedy, then the opposite happens. Things get worse for the protagonist. The climax is the highest point in the arc.Falling action—After the climax, it may seem that everything is done, but that’s actually not true. This is the last point of suspense. Unexpected things may still happen, so the outcome that the audience thought was set during the climax may or not occur.Denouement—People tend to call the last part of the arc the conclusion, but Freytag called it the denouement. This is a French word referring to an unraveling or untying of a knot. The protagonist either comes out on top (comedy) or the antagonist does (tragedy).

When people watch or hear a story that contains this dramatic arc structure (even if it’s a very short story, such as a testimonial on a website), their brains will release cortisol during the rising action and climax, and oxytocin during the falling action and denouement.

Common Stories And Plots

In 1949 Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In this book, Campbell traces the myth of the “hero’s story.” A typical hero’s story usually contains the following steps:

The hero is living in his ordinary world, but then he receives a message that calls him to adventure and a higher purpose.He often is reluctant to go on the adventure.He has an encounter with someone wise who encourages him to take the first step.He faces some kind of test.He encounters helpers.He has to undergo a harrowing ordeal.He is successful and brings back some kind of treasure.He is transformed and brings the treasure to the rest of the world.

The Harry Potter books contain many examples of the hero’s story. Luke Skywalker’s storyline in the Star Wars movies is an example of a hero’s story. (George Lucas specifically cites Joseph Campbell and The Hero with a Thousand Faces as critical influences.)

The Seven Plots

In addition to the dramatic arc and the hero’s story, storytellers often use one of seven basic plots, which may or may not involve a hero:Overcoming a monster—The protagonist has to defeat an antagonist (monster) who is threatening the protagonist’s homeland (for example, Star Wars).Rags to riches—The protagonist is poor and suddenly becomes wealthy with money, power, and/or a mate. The protagonist loses it all, but then grows as a person and gets the important riches back (for example, Cinderella).The quest—The protagonist and friends set out to get something important, face lots of challenges along the way, and eventually are triumphant (for example, The Lord of the Rings).Voyage and return—The protagonist goes to a foreign place, makes it through many dangerous situations, and comes back without anything of value, except a personal transformation (for example, The Chronicles of Narnia).Comedy—The protagonist is somewhat of a fool and gets into lots of embarrassing situations and near-disasters, but in the end triumphs over all the adversities and finds happiness (for example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream).Tragedy—There may be a protagonist or an antagonist. He or she ends up with a tragic ending/death. He or she may learn from the troubles encountered along the way, but not enough to be redeemed in this life (for example, Macbeth).Rebirth—Instead of a protagonist, there’s an antagonist. He or she learns and is redeemed over the course of the story (for example, Beauty and the Beast).

These common plots resonate with people. When a story follows one of these plots, people can easily understand the story and are more likely to become involved.

Takeaways

When you want people to take an empathetic action, follow the dramatic arc.Simply creating a video doesn’t guarantee that you’ll capture your audience’s attention. The video needs to follow the dramatic arc or people may not stay engaged.Use the dramatic arc in your storyboards and when you explain to others how people will use your design.

100 More Things #138: HOMOPHONES CAN PRIME BEHAVIOR

Let’s say you’re reading a newspaper article I wrote about the impact of the global economy. If you were hooked up to an fMRI machine, it would show that your visual cortex is active, since you’re reading, as is Wernicke’s area of the brain, where words are processed.

What if you were listening to me give a presentation on the same topic? I’m giving you facts and figures, but not telling a story. The fMRI would again show that Wernicke’s area is active, since there are words, and now your auditory cortex would be active as well, because you’re listening to me speak.

But what if, during the presentation, I started telling you a story about a family in South America that’s being affected by changes in the global economy—a story about the father going to work in a foreign country to earn enough for the family, and the mother having to drive 100 kilometers for health care. What’s going on in your brain now? Wernicke’s area would be active again, as well as the auditory cortex, but now there would be more activity. If, in my story, I described the sharp smell of the forest in the Andes mountains where this family lives, the olfactory sensory areas of the brain would be active as though you were smelling the forest. If I described the mother driving over rutted, muddy roads, with the vehicle careening from side to side, your motor cortex would be lighting up as though you were driving on a bumpy road. And if I started talking about the devastation the family felt when their young son died before he could get medical treatment, then the empathy areas of the brain would be active.

Stories evoke a simulation of the event. Your brain reacts to the story as if you were in the story, and having the experience.

This means that you’re literally using more of your brain when you listen to a story. And because you’re having a richer brain event, you enjoy the experience more, you understand the information more deeply, and you retain it longer.

And With Emotional Chemicals, Too

When you listen to a story, your brain releases neurochemicals throughout your body.

If the story is tense, then the hormone cortisol will be released (cortisol modulates stress). If the story is heartwarming, then oxytocin is released (oxytocin makes people feel bonded to others). If the story has a happy ending, then dopamine is released (dopamine makes people feel optimistic and seek action).

Stories And Your Product

You may think that, as a designer, stories aren’t part of what you do. Writers write stories, or speakers tell stories. But designers don’t.
That’s a narrow view of design. I used to hear people who design websites say that they weren’t responsible for the content of the website—just the design. Or they weren’t responsible for picking out the photos, just for preparing and placing them on the page. As a designer, you’re active in decisions about the product. You may not have the final say, but you’re part of the team. Just as you have to pay attention to and be involved with decisions about interaction, visual design, and content, you need to be involved in decisions about stories, too.

Stories are so important as a medium that if you want to design a compelling product and have people use it, you have to at least influence the use of stories and the way they’re told.

If you don’t create stories yourself then, at the very least, you can be an advocate for effective stories.

Stories And The Design Process

Even if you think you have nothing to do with stories for the actual product, you do have stories when it comes to design. Do you create scenarios? Storyboards? Present your design ideas to your team, stakeholders, or clients? Any design process involves summarizing and explaining how the target audience for a product is going to use that product. These are stories too, so even if you don’t do any work on other stories, at least use what you know about stories to sell your design ideas to your team.

Takeaways

When the product you’re designing doesn’t use stories, or doesn’t use them effectively, speak up. If you’re not empowered to create good stories, at least alert someone who is.Look for opportunities to add stories. Whenever you provide information, facts, or data, there’s a place in there for a story.When you’re responsible for pictures and graphics, evaluate how you use them.A photo or a series of photos can also tell a story even without words.When you present your ideas and storyboards to stakeholders or your team, use strong stories to influence others to buy into your design.

100 More Things #137: FOMO (FEAR OF MISSING OUT) IS REAL

FOMO stands for Fear of Missing Out. It refers to the idea that some of our behavior is motivated by being afraid that if we don’t take certain actions we are going to miss out on opportunities.

A series of research studies by Andrew Przybylski (2013) shows how pervasive FOMO is, and also has some interesting conclusions about who has the highest FOMO and how FOMO affects behavior.

Przybylski found that:

FOMO was negativly related to age. The older you are the less FOMO you feel.Men have high levels of FOMO than women.Young men, therefore, have the highest levels of FOMO.People who have the highest rates of FOMO were the least satisfied with their lives.

High levels of social media use are correlated with high levels of FOMO. Watch out for this conclusion, though. Correlation does not imply causation – social media use could lead to more FOMO, or more FOMO could lead to more social media use.

Takeaways

If you are thinking of using FOMO as a motivator to get people to take action, it might be more effective with men.If you are thinking of using FOMO as a motivator it might be more effective with younger people than older people.

100 More Things #136: THE QWERTY KEYBOARD IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE STATUS QUO BIAS

Previously we described the status quo bias – the idea that people will tend to stick with what is rather than make a change.

The Qwerty keyboard is an example of the status quo bias. The Qwerty keyboard is the keyboard that 99% of us use to type on with our computers. It’s called a Qwerty keyboard because of the letters Q-W-E-R-T-Y that are on the top left row of letters.

There is no particular reason that most keyboards follow a QWERTY layout. It is not because research shows it is the best layout. It isn’t even because people prefer it, since most people haven’t even experienced any alternatives. It is an example of technology that came into being and was so widely adopted that changing it doesn’t seem worth it to most people.

The History

As with most technologies that have been around for a while, there are a lot of supposedly historical truths about the QWERTY keyboard that don’t have much evidence behind them.

The first of these is that the QWERTY keyboard was created by a printer from Wisconsin, Christopher Latham Sholes, in 1868.

Sholes did create a typewriting keyboard layout which he then sold to the Remington company. But Sholes’ version is not the QWERTY keyboard we know. In fact Sholes’ version did not have the letters QWERTY in a row at the top.

After Remington acquired the keyboard from Sholes the company started tinkering with the design, eventually landing upon pretty much the version I am using to input the text of this paragraph.

Another myth is that the QWERTY design was made to purposely slow down typing speed, because the mechanical typewriters that it was first used on would jam if you typed too fast. It is true that old typewriters could jam up, but that is not why the QWERTY keyboard was developed.
The goal with the keyboard was to speed up typing, not slow it down.

Another myth is that the QWERTY keyboard was designed with telegraph operators in mind, to help them with the type of coding they did with telegraph messages. Apparently there isn’t any evidence that this is true either.

Another (more recent) myth is that people tend to like words that are made from the right hand part of the keyboard. There was actually research written up about this one, but the research has been heavily questioned, so I can’t say that this one is true either.

What we do know about the QWERTY keyboard is that it was used and taught to many typists and became widely adopted. Other keyboard layouts exist. The Dvorak layout was one of the most popular contenders. It was created by August Dvorak in the 1930s. An educational psychologist and academic, he claimed it was a better design because it puts the most commonly used letters on the home row for easier typing with less movement. But it never really caught on. Others have been suggested since then, for example the Colemak layout, but QWERTY continues to dominate.

You can purchase a Dvorak keyboard and change your settings on your computer to use a Dvorak keyboard if you want to buck the status quo.

Takeaways

The QWERTY keyboard is an example of how powerful the status quo bias can be.You can switch to a different (for example Dvorak) keyboard and tell your computer to use that keyboard if you want to give one of these other keyboards a try.

100 More Things #135: PEOPLE STICK WITH THE STATUS QUO

People prefer to stick with the current situation rather than change. William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser (1988) summarized many studies on the idea of status quo bias. Their conclusion is that when choosing from alternatives, people have a bias towards sticking with the status quo.

Based on the research Guthrie Weinschenk (2019) concludes that if you want people to change and choose something other than the status quo you should assume that it will be difficult, that people will need to be motivated to do so.

Takeaways

Unless they have a strong motivation to change, most people most of the time will stick with what is.If you want people to change you are going to have to either push them or give them a strong reason why they should change.

100 More Things #134: PEOPLE ARE READY TO MOVE ON FROM “OLD” MEDIA

Here’s something that’s at least a little ironic: if reading is so unnatural, maybe we should let it go.

I say ironic because I’m an author. I write books with words in them and assume (and hope) that people will read them. So it doesn’t really make much sense for me to say that we should let reading go. I have a lot of videos that I use to teach behavioral science and design, but, as you can tell, I still rely quite a bit on the written word for communicating.

If we’re not going to eliminate reading altogether, then maybe we should confine ourselves to physical books and just stop asking people to read on screens. If, as you’ve seen in this section of the book, reading is problematic as a way to communicate on screen, then what are the alternatives?

Video And Audio Alternatives

Visual content with some kind of audio is one effective form of online communication that’s currently available. I don’t mean to sound vague, but there are many possible combinations, and they can all be effective.

For example, a video that has a talking head image (a video of the person) with the audio of the person talking is one combination. If the person who’s being filmed has poor speaking or on-camera stills, it’s less than perfect, but it’s probably more effective than reading. Why is that? There are several reasons:

The fusiform facial area (FFA) of the brain analyzes and interprets faces. So people are predisposed to pay attention to faces. Faces grab people’s attention. The FFA also interprets the emotional information from the face, so people get added emotional content when they watch a talking head video.People get a lot of information from hearing someone talk. There is, of course, the content of what the speaker is saying, but there’s additional information contained in what’s called the paralinguistics of speech. Paralinguistics consist of prosody (patterns of intonation) and emotional content.Gestures and facial expression tell the viewer how the speaker feels.Movement in peripheral vision grabs attention. If people watch a video of someone talking, they notice the speaker’s gestures—even if the gestures are subtle. (Refer to the chapter on How People See for more about peripheral vision.)Speakers and listeners’ brains sync up. When people listen to someone talking, the brain starts working in sync with the speaker. In his research study, Greg Stephens (2010) put participants in an fMRI machine and had them record or listen to recordings of other people talking. He found that when participants listened to someone else talk, the brain patterns of the two people started to couple, or mirror each other. There was a slight delay, which corresponded to the time it took for the communication to occur. Several different brain areas were synced. He compared this with having people listen to someone talk in a language they did not understand. In that case, the brains did not sync up.

The more the brains were synced up, the more the listener understood the ideas and message from the speaker. The parts of the brain that have to do with social interaction were also synced. Social communication is critical to understanding the beliefs, desires, and goals of others. A video of someone talking is more powerful than just reading words on a page.There’s a special part of the brain for processing the human voice. Although people aren’t born ready to read, they are born ready to interpret the human voice, including the emotional information conveyed by speech.

Dogs and humans have similar voice-processing areas

Attila Andics (2014) took fMRI brain scans of dogs and people. He had them listen to both dog and human sounds, including crying, laughing, and barking. The dogs showed a similar voice-processing area of the brain as the humans, in a similar location. Dogs and humans showed similar brain activity when they listened to voices with positive emotions (laughing), and less activity when hearing negative emotions (crying or whining). Both dogs and humans responded more to their own species.

Victoria Ratcliffe and David Reby (2014) discovered that dogs break human speech into two parts—the emotional cues and the meaning of the words—and these different kinds of information are processed in different parts of the brain, similar to humans. For the most efficient interpretation, Ratcliffe recommends speaking emotional information to a dog’s left ear and commands to its right ear.

Emotions are contagious

When people are excited and happy, they display that emotion in their body postures, movement, gestures, and facial expressions. This is true for any emotion— sadness, fear, and so on. The converse is also true: even if people aren’t feeling a specific emotion, if they make facial and body gestures as though they are (for example, frowning and slumping your shoulders as though they’re sad, even if they’re not), the body sends that information to the brain and they actually start to feel the emotion they’re physically displaying (Dana R. Carney, Amy J. C. Cuddy, and Andy J. Yap, 2015).

It’s not only the body that interprets this information. People unconsciously mimic and mirror other people’s actions, gestures, and facial expressions. If a speaker is talking in a happy, excited manner, the listener will duplicate those mannerisms. This means that people’s emotions are contagious.

Any Visual Plus Audio

Talking head videos aren’t the only effective communication. Showing pictures while someone talks is also more effective than asking people to read text. Even displaying words on a screen while someone talks is more attention-getting, and communicates more information, than reading alone.

Recently I watched a 20-minute video that consisted of words appearing on the screen in a large font, like a series of slides, while a person talked. It was very effective. I stayed till the end. The words matched what the speaker was saying 99 percent of the time. The visual was just slides with one sentence or phrase in black text on a white background. There were no images. But the speaker’s voice was interesting and compelling, as was the content, so I stayed.

Takeaways

Since video has so many advantages over text, consider video before you decide what and how much text to use in your design.Since audio is just as important—and sometimes more important—than video, consider using a person talking with visuals when you need to communicate.

100 More Things #133: THE MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE OF PHYSICAL BOOKS IS IMPORTANT TO READING

Many people now do some of their reading (as defined in the section above) on paper and some on an electronic device. The world seems split these days between people who like reading physical books and those who prefer reading on a device.

Even with e-readers that use electronic ink and therefore have a different screen than a tablet or phone, is reading an e-reader a different experience than reading a physical book? Does the sensory experience of reading a book make a difference? If so, in what way?

The Multisensory Experience Of Physical Books

The design of tactile experiences is called “haptics,” which refers specifically to applying tactile sensation to a human-computer interaction.

There are many differences in the tactile experience of reading a physical book and the current haptic of reading on an e-reader or tablet. Even though the ink on the page may be similar, books have other tactile features that the haptic interface on an e-reader doesn’t have, at least as of the time I’m writing this book.

A physical book has weight, and the feeling of weight is different from book to book. The physical weight affects people’s perception of the importance of the work. Research on embodied cognition shows that when people hold something heavy, they think it is more important. With an e-reader, all books weigh the same amount. The same is true of a thin book versus a thick book. The number of pages and the thickness of a physical book is part of the experience of the book.

When you read a book, you can feel the paper. Turning the pages of a book requires a different movement than turning the pages when reading on a device. The pages of a physical book make a sound when you turn the page. There’s a sound when you close the cover of a large, hardcover book.

You can even smell some books. I was a reader at an early age, and the smell of old books can still take me back in my memory to being a young child in the public library with my mother, running my hands over the spines of old novels, excited about what I would read.
Reading a physical book is a multisensory experience that involves touch, smell, sight, and sound. Reading on a device involve touch and sight, but they’re the same for all books; there’s some sound, but not like a physical book, and no smell.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a Luddite. I do most of my reading these days on a device. But I know that it’s not the same as a physical book.

The Navigation And Mental Map Of A Book

People can navigate physical books in a way that they can’t with a device. A physical book is like a landscape. People map a physical book when they’re reading. Their memory of a certain section is tied to the physicality of the book. If I ask you, “Where’s the passage in the book where John expresses his doubts about Adam’s competency as a doctor?,” you’ll probably turn to a particular spot in the book, for example, about one-third in from the front. You might say, “I remember seeing that at the bottom of one of these pages on the left.” Your memory of the book is a physical memory. That type of physical “mapped” memory of reading doesn’t occur with devices.

Physical books have what Ferris Jabr (2013) calls a “topography” that devices don’t. When you have a book open, you have left and right pages. There are eight corners you can reference. You can see where you are in relation to the edges of the book, the corners, how far you’ve read on a page, and how far you’ve read in the book. Jabr says that these cues make it easy to not only navigate, but also create a mental map of the text.

When you read a book on a device you don’t have these navigation cues and you don’t have that mental map. You can navigate, but not in a way that creates a mental map.

Limited Navigation Impairs Comprehension

Anne Mangen’s (2013) research study in Norway had tenth graders of similar reading ability read and study a narrative passage (a story, either fiction or nonfiction) and an expository passage (text that explains, not in story form). Each passage was about 1,500 words long. Half the students read the passages on paper, and the other half read them as PDF files on a computer with a 15-inch LCD monitor. After reading the passages, the students took a reading comprehension test with both multiple-choice and short answer questions. During the test, they could refer to the passages. Students who read the texts on the computers had lower scores on the test than students who read the texts on paper.

Mangen watched the students reference the passages during the test. Students who worked with PDFs had more difficulty finding information. Those who read on paper held the paper in their hands and could quickly switch between pages. They could easily find the beginning, middle, and end, or anywhere in between.

Some research shows that students who read textbooks on a computer don’t remember the information as well in the long term. There’s a difference between “remembering” and “knowing.” When people “remember,” they recall a particular piece of information, and they often also recall the situation around it — where they were, where they learned it from, and so on. When people “know” something, they feel that it’s true, but they may not remember how they learned it. One theory by Kate Garland, a researcher at the University of Leicester, is that remembering is a weaker type of memory than knowing. Memories fade and knowing stays. Garland’s idea is that when students read on paper, they learn the material more thoroughly, which helps it turn into “knowing.”

Screens Are Harder On The Eyes

When you read text on paper, the paper reflects the light in the room. This is called ambient light. If you’re using an e-reader with e-ink, that also reflects ambient light. But if you’re reading on a computer monitor, smartphone, or tablet, you’re not using ambient light, at least as of the writing of this book. The light coming from a screen is harder to read and causes eyestrain.

Some researchers hypothesize that people learn or remember less information when reading from screens because they have to spend more visual energy reading the screen than they would reading a book.

Will People Just Get Used To It?

Because reading is something the brain learns to do, it’s possible that reading on devices is also something that our brains will get used to doing. It’s too early to know whether some of the disadvantages that researchers currently see for reading online compared to physical books are because reading online is less effective, or if people who grow up reading online first, or only reading online, will have brains that adapt.

The Role Of The Designer

Designers have created some innovations in online reading, such as e-ink, but in many ways we haven’t really designed an online reading experience. We just took letters and pictures and put them on a screen. The hardware is new and sometimes innovative, but the experience isn’t. Experience designers need to dig deeper into what reading is, and what books are, to build some of the multisensory aspects of reading a physical book into digital reading devices. We need to not just add features, like highlighting, but apply innovative design thinking to re-imagine the whole idea of digital books and digital reading. (Where’s my Harry Potter newspaper?)

In the meantime, we need to think about how best to deal with asking people to read online. If the experience is just OK, if it hampers learning and hurts people’s eyes, maybe we shouldn’t ask people to do it as much as we do. You’ll learn about some alternatives in the next section.

Takeaways

When designing a product that requires people to read online text, don’t assume they’ll remember what they read as well as when they read a physical book.Rethink your use of text. Is it necessary to have people do so much reading online?Since online books lose navigational cues, consider building in additional ways of navigating text online. Make sure it’s easy for people to go back, go forward, mark a section, and search.