Channel Dynamics
At the end of last year I went to the very interesting UX Brighton conference. This looks at various facets of the psychology of user experience (UX) design and acts as an excellent refresher to some of the information that I’ve gathered over many years of working in the field.
One of the speakers was Susan Weinschenk, author of 100 things every designer should know about people. This article is a top 10 summary of the ten things every user experience design agency should know about people when considering their UX designs.
- What you see isn’t what your brain gets.
When you walk around, you assume that your eyes are sending information to the brain which gives you a realistic experience of the what is there. The brain is in-fact constantly interpreting everything you see and filling in any gaps with what it expects to see based on experience.
- The Fusiform Face Area (FFA) influences the interpretation of emotion in the face.
The FFA captures attention, and stimulates emotional appeal. By looking at this area, you can tell if someone is happy, sad, angry or relaxed and using people’s faces can play a significant part in the design of web pages and adverts. People with the condition Autism aren’t able to recognize the FFA connection and as a result can’t identify the subtleties of facial emotion.
- Users have ‘Inattention blindness’.
Users can often miss colour and other changes on a page even if they are in our field of vision.
- People use their peripheral vision to get the gist of a situation.
Food, Sex, Movement and stories get the most attention but an indication of danger is processed more quickly than anything else. It is identified unconsciously and grabs your attention. There are 40 billion sensory inputs entering the brain every second and you’re aware of around 40. Much of what happens takes place unconsciously. This brings into question the validity of Eye Tracking tools as they are not measuring peripheral vision at all. Just because a user is looking at something, it doesn’t mean they are paying attention to it.
- Speaker and listener brains synch up during communication.
When you listen to someone talking, your brain starts working in synch with the speaker. In his research, Greg Stephens (2010) noted that the part of the brainto do with social interaction and information also synched and these are crucial for successful communication, such as the ability to discern the beliefs, desires and goals of others. As a result, presenting information through audio and/or video where they can hear someone talking is particularly powerful to help people understand the message. Don’t just rely on reading if you want people to understand your information clearly.
- People operate in system 1 and system 2 thinking modes.
System 2 thinking requires effort. System 1 thinking is easy. We need to remove any barriers to a user’s experience to ensure that they remain in system 1 mode to prevent difficulties. Daniel Kahneman also identified that when in system 2 thinking mode your pupils dilate, so this is easy to observe. You can test this out by asking someone a series of simple questions versus something more difficult to understand. Something as simple as font changes can affect your system of thinking.
- When something is hard to read, it is hard to do.
Pages should be easy to read as when something is hard to read it triggers your system 1 thinking. This will clearly have an impact on how we should design pages.
- Users have a series of conditioned responses to specific stimulus.
The chemical Dopamine is information seeking and is triggered when we get information that we recognize. Over the development of the Internet, we’ve used auditory or visual cues to create responses or habits. An example of this could be when you roll-over a link and it turns blue and is underlined to indicate it is a link. Ivan Pavlov highlights how we can become conditioned in his experiment with a dog salivating when ringing a bell at feeding times in anticipation of receiving his food. Diverging too significantly from users conditioned responses will have a detrimental effect on how customers will use a website.
- People prefer objects with curves.
This might explain why the Apple iPhone is a best seller, whereas some other models of mobile phone are less well received.
- Vision and hearing can’t be separated from our social and emotional processing.
When people perform or play together oxytocin is released and people bond and their heart beats and other functions go into synch. When designing and making decisions, we need to understand that users bring all elements to bare, including the environment in which they are viewing a particular digital experience.
Conclusion.
When undertaking User Experience Design and its effect on people there are clearly many facets to consider and I hope this provides a starting point for your investigations. We’ll try and cover off some other interesting thoughts in later articles.
