Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

by Andrew Hinton

At the center of all this disruption is how we understand basic elements of our environment: What place am I in? What objects does it contain, and how do they work? Who am I, and who can see me, and what I am doing? What used to be clear is now less so.

context in digital space

(UX) design is all about: including the experiential reality of the user as a primary input to design rather than relying only on the goals of a business or the needs of a technology. Embodied cognition is a way of understanding more deeply how users have experiences, and how even subtle changes in the environment can have profound impacts on those experiences.

Satisficing is a valuable idea for design practice, because it reminds us that users use what we design. They don’t typically ponder it, analyze it, or come to know all its marvelous secrets. They act in the world based on the most obvious information available and with as little concentration as possible.

Users aren’t motivated by first understanding the environment. They’re too busy just getting things done, and in fact they tend to improvise as they go, often using the environment in different ways than intended by designers.[

We’re used to thinking of design as creating an intricately engineered setting for the user, for which every act has been accounted. But the contextual meaning of the environment is never permanently established, because context is a function of the active engagement of the user. This means the primary aim of the designer is not to design ways for the artifact to be used but instead to design the artifact to be clearly understood,[66] so the user can recruit it into her full environmental experience in whatever way she needs.

The properties of user interfaces need to be consistent for us to learn them well. We hunger for stable landmarks in the often-ambiguous maze of digital interfaces.

We know software isn’t physical. But because perception depends upon invariant structure, we see it and use it whenever it seems to be offered to us, even if a software code release can upset those invariants in a moment’s time. These differences and disruptions are not the sorts of behaviors we evolved to perceive with any accuracy. They are instead the black ice, or quicksand, of digital objects and places.

Perception evolved among actual substances and surfaces, made of atoms, so even in the insubstantial realm of language and bits, it still reaches for substantial information, hoping something will catch hold.

How well we perceive context in digitally affected environments is often a matter of how well the environment clarifies what is an object that is detached or attached, what sort of object it is, whether it has agency of its own, and what rules it follows.

We often hear users say “there’s so much clutter” in an interface. Yet, everything in an interface was put there by someone for some reason, whether warranted or not. One user’s trash is another user’s treasure. One shopper’s clutter is a marketer’s sale promotion insert.

User perception is important to consider when looking at the results of analytics and other performance measurements. Ten clicks might be fine, if the user is getting value out of each one (and feels like she’s getting where she needs to go); three clicks can feel like forever if the user is floundering in confusion.