Susan M. Weinschenk's Blog, page 9

Human Tech Podcast Episode #160: A 2024 Prospective, Big Topics For The Upcoming Year

We make some predictions about what some of the big UX trends of 2024 will be. Happy New Year!

100 More Things #113: REPETITION STRENGTHENS SOME MEMORIES

Autobiographical and flashbulb memories are subject to change, but other kinds of memories resist change if they’re repeated enough.

Memorizing Facts

Semantic memory is memory of facts. “Is Paris the capital of France?” is a question that uses semantic memory. So is “What is 9 x 6?” Once semantic memory is set, it’s not subject to as many changes as autobiographical or flashbulb memories. The tricky thing about semantic memory is not retrieving it once it’s set, but getting it to set—the psychologist’s term is “encode.” While people are learning these facts, they’re subject to change and retrieval errors because the neuron firing traces aren’t very strong. But when they repeat the fact over and over, the neuron trace gets stronger and is less likely to change. It’s possible to make someone believe (incorrectly) that Lyon is the capital of France, but you’d have to repeat that a lot for it to begin to replace Paris in memory once she’s learned Paris.

Learning Motor Skills

Another type of memory that stays constant is called procedural or muscle memory. When you learn how to drive a car, ride a bike, or type on a keyboard, you’re using muscle memory. This type of memory also requires a lot of repetition to be set, but once set, it’s hard to change or forget. Once you learn to ride a bicycle, you’ll be able to ride a bicycle forever, even if you don’t ride one for a while. If you haven’t been on a bike for 20 years, the first minute or two might be a little rocky, but then the muscle memory for this skill is activated and the memory returns intact. This is why it’s so important to learn a motor task correctly the first time. If someone learns to use two fingers to type on a keyboard rather than using the standard two hands on the home row, it will be hard for her to unlearn that and learn how to type keeping all her fingers on the home row.

Sensory Memory

Memories of senses—vision, touch, hearing, smell, and taste—are stored for different amounts of time. As you’re reading this book, your visual sensory memory (iconic memory) is activated for a few seconds. Your brain is remembering the letters you’re seeing just long enough to string a few words together. Your brain remembers the sounds you hear (echoic memory) long enough to make sense of a particular sentence. The same is true of touch, but taste and smell are different. When you smell something (olfactory sense) and taste something (since smell is so active in taste), the sense impression bypasses most of the higher brain, where vision and sound are processed, and goes straight to the amygdala, where emotions are processed. Smell and taste memories are not easily changed. And because the amygdala is involved, a smell or taste may elicit a strong emotional reaction and a memory.

Design And Memory

So, what’s the relationship between design and these kinds of memory?

You may not realize that when people interact with software, an app, a website, or a product, they’re encoding and retrieving semantic, sensory, and muscle memory almost constantly. You think they’re focused on the task that your product allows them to do— paying bills, editing a movie, or using a remote control. And they’d agree with you. They think they’re doing tasks with the product, too. Of course they are, but in the background, much of what they’re really doing is retrieving semantic, muscle, and sensory memories. If you’re designing anything for people to use, then you’re actually designing the retrieval of memory traces.

Because I use my smartphone a lot and because I can set it up the way I want it, I have semantic, sensory, and muscle memory of how to look at the weather forecast, check my email, or play my favorite music.

When I wake up in the morning, I reach for my phone. I’m not even out of bed. I’m not even awake. I grab the phone, click the button that brings the screen to life, and touch the icon for messages. I use:

Touch sensory memory combined with muscle memory to know that I have to physically click the oval button on the side of the phone (not just touch it) and to know where it’s located. I can find that button without vision.Semantic memory to remember what I usually check (weather, texts, calendar).Visual sensory memory to move to the part of the screen where I know certain icons will be and to recognize the icons, and muscle memory to start moving my finger or thumb to the place on the screen even while my visual sensory memory is remembering where to go.Echoic sensory memory to respond in a certain way when I hear an audio alert, ping, bell, or chime.

And so on.

Let’s look at an online banking app. I use a banking app from a large US financial organization. Seventy percent of the time I use it to deposit a check, 20 percent of the time I use it to transfer money from one account to another, and 10 percent of the time I’m checking balances. Yet when I log on to the banking app from my phone, depositing a check and transferring money are hidden in the Menu icon. And the Menu icon moves. Sometimes it’s at the top and sometimes it’s at the bottom; sometimes it’s on the left and sometimes on the right. This means I have to use my semantic memory to remember that these functions are hidden in the menu, and then my sensory and muscle memory to get there.

The same is true of desktop applications. If I’m editing a video, I have a lot of semantic memory demands. For example, transitions between frames are categorized as wipes, movements, or blurs. The transition I like to use is stored in semantic memory. My muscle memory helps me scroll to the part of the timeline I want and, as I get more adept, muscle memory lets me use the mouse to move sliders. Sensory memory helps me identify whether what I’m looking at on the screen is a project or library (based on the icon).

When you design, if you know what people want to do the most, then you can design the product to make those things easy to encode and retrieve with these types of memories. You can put things in the same place, use icons that are familiar and standard, and use semantic cues that people have seen before.

Note
You may have heard that you should play brain games to improve your memory. Kirk Ericsson (2014) showed that getting physical exercise does more for your memory than brain games.

Takeaways

Decide what tasks are the most frequent and important that people will be doing with your product. Then base your design decisions about icons, buttons, naming, categorization, and location on these frequent and important actions.Be as consistent as possible with design decisions. When there are industry standards for buttons, links, naming conventions, or icons, use them. It’s one less thing your audience has to encode.

100 More Things #112: SOME MEMORIES CHANGE EASILY

Think back to when you were last at a family gathering or an annual work celebration. You run the event back in your mind, and it almost seems like you’re watching a movie. People tend to think that memories like this are stored in their brains like digital recordings of specific facts or events. But that’s not how memories are stored or retrieved.

The latest research on memory shows that memories are formed from particular neurons firing. Your brain is being rewired every time you form a memory. But your brain is also firing when you retrieve the memory. And every time you retrieve the memory, it may change based on new information and new memories. You re-create the memory when you retrieve it, so it’s subject to new neuron firings. Each time you retrieve the memory it changes a little more, especially for this type of memory.

Autobiographical Memories

People talk about memory as though all memories are the same, but there are actually many different kinds of memory. The example of the family reunion is an autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memories have to do with a specific event in your own life. These memories are subject to errors because they are re-created each time you bring them to consciousness from memory. Anything that’s occurred since you first created the memory may affect the original memory. For example, say you remember that your Aunt Kathy was at the family reunion last August, but actually she wasn’t at that reunion, she was at the holiday party in October. The memory has been altered and you probably aren’t aware of the alteration.

When people use your website to order clothes, you may not realize it, but they’re creating autobiographical memories. This means that how they remember the experience of using the website may not be accurate.

At the end of user testing of a product, I often ask people to talk about what they were thinking and what they experienced. It’s only been an hour or less, but even after that amount of time the memories of the experience are often different than the experience itself.

During a user test one participant commented that he didn’t like the purple colors at the website. Half an hour later, when we were discussing his experience, he commented on how much he liked the colors at the website. Another person I tested using online banking software to send a wire transfer was so frustrated that she alternated between using bad language and being almost in tears. Half an hour later she said she thought the site was really easy to use. I told her she didn’t have to say that, that she could be honest about her experience. She looked at me in confusion and said, “I am being honest.”

Strong Emotions Make Strong Memories

Another type of autobiographical memory is called a flashbulb memory. This kind of memory has a very strong emotional charge. If I ask you what you were doing on a specific random date 5 years ago you probably won’t remember much, and your memories may be vague, “Was that a weekday? If it was a weekday, I was probably working.”

However, if I ask you what you were doing when an emotional event occurred, for example, when a relative passed away, you probably have a very strong memory of where you were and what you were doing, because that memory was encoded with a strong emotional charge.

Ten Years Later

You may or may not be old enough to remember or have lived through the attack that occurred on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. If you were old enough and you were living in the US then your memories from that day probably are flashbulb memories.

Within a week of September 11, 2001, several researchers joined together (William Hirst, 2015) in the US and sent out surveys about the event. They then sent out follow-up surveys to the same people 11 months, 25 months, and 119 months (almost 10 years) after the event.
They found that people’s memories of the event (where they were, how they reacted, what happened during the event) changed a lot in the first year, and included many inaccuracies. After the first year the memories stabilized—meaning they didn’t change, but they still contained many inaccuracies. At the 10-year mark the memories remain stable, but still inaccurate.

The researchers also studied whether external events—how much people watched media accounts, talked to friends, or were personally affected by the events, for example—had an effect on the memories or their inaccuracies. They found no effect.

Most autobiographical memories activate the hippocampus in the brain. Flashbulb memories also activate the amygdala, which is where emotions are processed. Like autobiographical memories, flashbulb memories change a lot. People’s 9/11 memories are susceptible to alteration from news reports, and conversations with family and friends about that day. They’re a little different than alterations in regular autobiographical memories. Regular autobiographical memories continue to change over time. Flashbulb memories change a lot over about a year and then seem to resist change after that.

Can Memories Be Erased?

The 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is about a service people can hire to erase specific memories. When the movie came out there was speculation that this might be possible, but strong proof wasn’t in. Now, however, we know that it is possible to erase memories.

In fact, there are several ways to erase a memory. They’re all based on the idea that when you retrieve a memory you’re actually not retrieving an intact memory and playing it back—you’re re-creating the nerve impulses and brain activity you had when you first formed the memory. If you can disrupt the nerve firings, then you can’t create the memory—ever.

There are several ways to disrupt the firings:

Particular proteins facilitate the process of forming a memory. If those proteins are stopped from being created, then you won’t form a memory. There are drugs that inhibit the protein.Xenon gas interferes with signal pathways in the brain, so if you breathe xenon gas while recalling a memory, it will erase the memory. Xenon gas is used as an anesthetic.Laser light can change genes and, in doing so, change a memory. The laser light turns genes on or off by stimulating or inhibiting proteins. Interestingly, this method of memory erasing, called optogenetics, is reversible. Amy Chuong (2014) now has developed a way of doing this that doesn’t require a brain implant. It can all be done with light outside the brain.

Takeaways

Because memory is easily changed, you can’t rely on what people say they were thinking or feeling while using a product. You have to observe what they do.When you’re conducting user testing or feedback sessions with the target audience of your product, make a video recording of the testing or interview sessions since your memory may also be faulty.

100 More Things #111: PEOPLE DON’T PAY ATTENTION

In the previous section we covered System 1 and System 2 thinking. Since most people are in System 1 thinking most of the time, this means that most people are actually not paying that much attention to what is going on around them most of the time.

When we design a product we are often sitting at a desk, thinking deeply about the design. Or we might be in a meeting collaborating with our colleagues about the design. We are paying attention to what we are doing. We are (hopefully), deliberately designing the particular page, screen, interface, and interaction. We are in System 2 mode while we are designing.

But what we often fail to realize is that our users might not be in System 2 mode when they are using the product. They are most likely in System 1 mode. They aren’t paying attention all that much. They will miss things on the screen, they will make errors, they will not be thinking all that hard. You have to assume System 1 thinking and you have to plan for that.

Takeaways

People are mainly in System 1 mode which means they are not thinking that much, even when they are using the product you’ve designed.Test out your designs with real users in real environments to see what it is like for people to use them when they are not really paying attention, since that is likely what will happen in real life.

Workshops for 2024

Three opportunities to learn in 2024:

Smashing is hosting our workshop in Behavioral Design in May:
https://smashingconf.com/online-workshops/workshops/behavioral-design-susan-guthrie-weinschenk/

In-person Behavioral Design workshop, May 16th in Columbus Ohio:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/behavioral-design-workshop-tickets-769809008467?aff=oddtdtcreator

In-person UX Leadership workshop, June 4th in Columbus Ohio:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ux-leadership-workshop-tickets-776626299167?aff=oddtdtcreator

100 More Things #110: PEOPLE USE TWO KINDS OF THINKING

Try for 30 seconds to multiply these two numbers in your head, not using pen and paper or a calculator:

17 x 24

It’s difficult to do in your head—most people I ask this of give up after a few seconds.

Here’s another task. Look at the photo in Figure 10.1 and decide what it’s a photo of.

Portrait of a cute boy feeling sad with Soft focus. This image is originally a Black & White negative. Film grain no added. Scanned film with grain. Some scratches and grain due to the age of the photo. Photo taken in 1980.

FIGURE 10.1 What is this a photo of?

Most people say it’s a picture of a little boy who is sad. Why did I ask you these questions?

System 1 And System 2 Thinking

Those two experiences—doing a multiplication problem in your head, and identifying the photo as a picture of a sad boy, feel very different. According to Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow (2013), these are examples of the difference between System 1 and System 2 thinking.

When you looked at the photo of the little boy, and decided what it was, that was a quick and easy task. You didn’t have to think hard about it. That’s an example of System 1 thinking. System 1 thinking, Kahneman says, is quick, intuitive, easy, and effortless.

System 2 thinking is different. When you had to multiply the two numbers in your head, that was an example of System 2 thinking. System 2 thinking is difficult. It takes a lot of effort.

Note
You can tell when people are doing System 2 (hard, effortful) thinking because their pupils dilate while they’re doing it.

System 1 Is The Normal Mode

Kahneman asserts in his book that System 1 thinking (quick, intuitive, easy thinking) is people’s natural or normal mode. Most of the time, most people are in System 1 mode.

System 2 thinking is activated only when people encounter something difficult to do (like multiplication in their heads). When that happens, System 1 gives up very quickly and turns to System 2 to take over.

If you are designing a product that doesn’t require people to think much, (browsing through their social media feed, looking at pictures of friends) you have a better chance at designing a product that is easy to use since most people are in System 1 mode most of the time. But if your product requires people to do System 2 thinking (filing their tax return, applying for car insurance, and so on) watch out. You will likely be designing for System 2 mode and it’s easy to forget that most people most of the time aren’t thinking that hard.

Triggering System 2 Thinking

So what do you do if you want people to think carefully about something before they take action on it? How can you get them into System 2 mode?

Most designers usually don’t make things difficult for the people using their product, For example, if someone is landing a plane, doing surgery, or operating a nuclear power plant, you may want her to be in System 2 mode for at least part of the task.

If it’s important that people carefully think something through, then you have to get them to switch into System 2 mode. You can kick people out of System 1 mode and into System 2 mode fairly easily.

Here are some examples of ways to do that:

Show them text in a font that is moderately hard to read, for example:
Because this text looks like script and because there isn’t much contrast between the text and the background, it is harder to read. (This might not work well in the browser).Give them a moderately hard math problem to do without any external aids, like the multiplication at the beginning of this chapter.
Ask them to solve a word problem, such as:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The System 1 answer is that the ball costs $0.10 ($1.00 for the bat and another $0.10 for the ball). But if the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball, and if the ball is $0.10, then the bat would be $1.10 and the total would be $1.20. So the correct answer is that the ball costs $0.05 and the bat is $1.05, for a total of $1.10.

Here’s another one:If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

The System 1 answer is that it would take 100 minutes. But if you analyze the problem from a System 2 mode, if 5 machines make 5 widgets in 5 minutes, then it’s taking just 5 minutes to make the widgets. So if you had 100 machines making 100 widgets, it would still just take 5 minutes.

System 1 mode makes a lot of errors like this. If you want people to think carefully about something and not make these errors, you have to get them to switch to System 2 mode. You do that by making them think hard.

Design For Errors

When you’re working on a product, you’re usually immersed in the design. This means that you’re not looking at the product from the point of view of someone who is seeing or using it for the first time, or someone who hasn’t seen it or used it for three months. You know how everything works. The user doesn’t.

It’s easy in the design phase to underestimate how many errors people will make. They won’t find the button. They won’t remember where a link is located. They won’t remember what a label means.

This is exacerbated by System 1 thinking. People are just not thinking that hard. Assume they aren’t, and assume they’ll be making lots of mistakes. Your job then, as a designer, is to make sure that it’s easy to recover from mistakes.

Takeaways

Since most people use System 1 thinking most of the time, assume that they’ll make errors. Give them good feedback when they make mistakes and let them undo or easily change what they’ve done.When you want people to think about something carefully, give them something difficult to do first, so they switch to System 2 thinking. Ask a difficult question or use a harder to read font so that System 2 will kick in.

In Person Behavioral Design Workshop

In-Person Workshops are back! We’re excited to announce that we are having an in-person Behavioral Design Workshop in Columbus Ohio open to the public on May 16, 2024. Learn how to apply recent research in brain and behavioral science to engage, encourage, and persuade the people that use your products and services. This will be a fun and intense one-day workshop. Here’s where you can find more information:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/behavioral-design-workshop-tickets-769809008467

Human Tech Podcast Episode #159: todd cherches visits the show

In this episode of the Human Tech podcast we talk with Todd Cherches about his book Visual Leadership, management books, and frogs jumping into ponds.

Human Tech Episode #159: todd cherches visits the show

In this episode of the Human Tech podcast we talk with Todd Cherches about his book Visual Leadership, management books, and frogs jumping into ponds.

100 More Things #109: PEOPLE DECIDE ABOUT A DESIGN IN A SPLIT SECOND

It’s ironic. You spend hours, days, weeks, or even months working on the visual design of an infographic or a website. Yet research by Katharina Reinecke, Lane Harrison, and the team at the University of Michigan shows that people make lasting judgments about the design’s appeal in 500 ms (one-half of a second) or less.

According to their research, this first impression sticks and influences later opinions about the usability and trustworthiness of the website or product.

Reinecke (2013) and her team started by collecting web pages in various languages.

They selected 450 websites, with a range of visual complexity and use of color. They analyzed each page on a variety of metrics, such as hue, saturation, color intensity, symmetry, balance, and equilibrium.

Next they validated these metrics by showing the websites to the participants for 500 ms, and had the participants rate them: 184 people rated 30 websites for visual complexity, and 122 rated 30 websites for colorfulness. (They tested all 450 websites, but each person rated only 30.)

Now the team had 450 websites with validated metrics. The last part of the study was to show the websites for 500 ms to a new group of people. Instead of rating for complexity or colorfulness, however, these people rated the websites on visual appeal. The team tested 242 people in this phase of the experiment.

So what were the results for the visual appeal ratings of websites?

Visual complexity was the most important factor in a website being rated as visually appealing. Most appealing were websites of low to medium visual complexity. High visual complexity resulted in the lowest visual appeal scores.Participants older than 45 liked websites with a low visual complexity more than the other age groups.Participants with a PhD didn’t like websites that were highly colorful; the same was true of those with only a high school diploma.There were no significant differences between men and women.

Testing Infographics Instead Of Websites

Harrison, Reinecke, and Remco Chang (2015) used the same methodology to test 330 infographics for visual appeal. They had 1,278 participants rate infographics after viewing them for 500 ms.

The results for the infographics visual appeal ratings were as follows:

There was a lot of variability in the infographic ratings. Only a few of the 330 infographics were universally appealing. Unlike the website research, infographics that some people rated very highly were rated very low by others.As with the websites, colorfulness and visual complexity were the important variables when it came to judging a design as visually appealing. However, with the infographics, colorfulness was more important than visual complexity—the opposite result of the website ratings.Looking at the data overall, infographics that were colorful were rated as more appealing. However, there’s an important effect hidden in the color data: men didn’t like the colorful infographics, and women did.There were also gender effects for complexity. Visual complexity didn’t affect men’s ratings of visual appeal, but women tended to like infographics that were less complex.Most people did not like infographics with a lot of text, but women were more affected by this than men. The amount of text was not a strong influence for men, but the women preferred infographics with more images.Education had a small effect. The more education a person had, the more they preferred less colorful and less complex infographics. But gender was a stronger effect than education.

Designing For An Audience

It’s probably not news to you that not everyone reacts to visual design in the same way. But sometimes designers unconsciously start designing what they think works well, rather than taking the target audience into account.

Depending on what you’re designing, and whom you’re designing for, you may want to consider changing the complexity, the amount of color, or even the amount of text. Be careful of using your aesthetic when making these decisions. You may not be representative of your target audience.

Takeaways

People tend to make quick and lasting decisions about design, so make sure your design has quick and unconscious visual appeal.When designing a website, don’t underestimate the importance of visual complexity. Research shows visual complexity is the most important variable people use in deciding how visually appealing your site is, and gender doesn’t matter when it comes to visual complexity and website design.When designing a website, use low to medium visual complexity for maximum appeal.When your target audience is mainly people over age 45, reduce the visual complexity of the design.When you’re designing an infographic and your target audience is primarily men, use less color.When you’re designing an infographic and your target audience is primarily women, reduce the visual complexity and use less text.