A human factors expert, Susan Weinschenk explains the significance of ‘loads’ and the ABCs of ‘UX’ (user experience).
You believe that the best designs address three parts of our brains: the new brain, the mid brain and the old brain. Please explain how they differ.
The ‘new brain’ is the part of the brain that evolved most recently – it’s the conscious part that we’re used to focusing on. But there are other parts of the brain, and for simplification purposes I call them the ‘mid’ and the ‘old’. The mid brain is the part that deals with emotional processing, social interaction processing and the processing of images. This part of the brain is extremely important as it has a huge effect on our decisions. The ‘old’ part of the brain is the part that evolved the earliest, and it remains focused on our survival. It is constantly scanning the environment and asking things like, Can I eat that? Will it kill me? We tend to pay the most attention to the ‘new’ brain – to what people think about consciously, even though research over the past 10 years shows that most of our mental processing occurs unconsciously. But these other two parts of the brain are actually responsible for more of our behavior, so if you want to design something that will grab and hold peoples’ attention and persuade them to act in a certain way, you’ve got to address all three.
Describe the role of storytelling in attracting peoples’ attention to any service or product.
Research has shown that people process information best when it is presented in a story or narrative format. There are several reasons why stories are so powerful. One is, they elicit empathy. When something happens in a story, we identify with the characters and their actions. In fMRI [functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging] studies, we can now actually see certain parts of the brain responding as a character in a story goes through certain conflicts; the brain literally lights up, as if the subject was going through it himself. Another reason why stories are so powerful is that they set up causal relationships; they imply causation, even if it doesn’t actually exist. If I say to you, “Jimmy had a fight with his brother, and he came to class the next day with bruises on his arm,” the implication is that he got the bruises from the fight, even though that may not be the case. The human brain is very persuaded by what goes on in a story.
What are ‘loads’, and what role to they play in a user experience?
This is human factors terminology, and it refers to the idea that when we ask someone to do something – whether it’s to read something on a computer screen or to type something -- there are inherent requirements of the human brain and our physiology to make that happen. For example, a particular interface might have a high ‘cognitive load’, meaning that in order to use that web application, you have to do a lot of thinking or remembering. We also talk about ‘visual load’: in order to read a particular page, you might have to deal with a lot of clutter, colour and movement.
The third main type of load is a ‘motor load’, which has to do with the extent to which we have to move our muscles to accomplish a task. In the realm of computers, this would entail using keyboards or a mouse to accomplish something.
People often assume that the goal should always be to lower the overall load – that the less load you putting on a user, the easier the interface will be to use and the better the user experience will be. But there are some important exceptions: in the realm of gaming, for instance, sometimes the designer purposely increases one or two (or all three) of these loads in order to make the game even more challenging and interesting for the user.
Describe the difference between mental models and conceptual models, and what happens when a mismatch occurs between them.
Here’s the best way to think about it: when people sit down in front of any product or technology device, they already have some mental model of it -- an idea in their head of what it is and how it works, which leads to certain expectations. All of this occurs before they interact with the device. Mental models come from our previous experience, from what someone told us, or maybe from some training we have gone through. The tricky part is that everybody has their own mental models about a particular product or service. If I’m sitting down at my computer to do my taxes, my mental model might be very different from yours as you sit down in front of the same software.
The conceptual model, on the other hand, is the model the designer has put forth. When you sit down in front of a piece of software and observe its navigation, page layout and menus, a conceptual model is being presented to you that was designed by someone. Unfortunately, sometimes it wasn’t actually designed -- it might just have emerged from the programming work that five different programmers did. The idea is, if you don’t design that conceptual model so that it fits with the mental models of the people who are going to be using it, the users will find the product difficult to use. Take the iPad, for example. When it first came out, nobody had a mental model for it, so whatever the conceptual model was, it wasn’t going to fit any mental model. In such cases, you want to design very strong conceptual models that can be easily learned and then figure out, How are we going to get people to learn this? What support (videos, demos) can we offer to make it easy to learn? The matching of mental models with conceptual models is at the core of what designers in the field of user experience do.
[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]