Stop trying to paint the hallway through the letterbox: UX techniques that help teams help themselves

Stop trying to paint
the hallway through
the letterbox!
UX techniques
that help teams help themselves
Chris Atherton
@finiteattention

what do these 3 things
have in common?

Person
:MassMarket
Guide
:Place
:Programme
OfStudy
:Curricular
Topic
:Study Guide
/Learn/Guides
is taught in
is appropriate for
is a non-
curricular
equivalent of
:Asset
mentions/
is about
/Learn/Places
is a type of
:National
Curriculum
is part of
/Learn/
Programmes
of Study
is a type of
:Event
is a type of
is a type of
is a participant in
occurs
in
is part of
is appropriate for
is aimed at
:Temporal
Entity
has
/Learn/Subjects
is a type of
:Subject
:Nation
UK
is part of
:Regionis part of
is a notable
place in
This goes down to the level of
Regional granularity to allow
for the (future?) possibility of
prioritising local content.
:MassMarket
Topic
is a notable
person in
is a notable person in
is appropriate for
is appropriate for
is appropriate for
is a type of
is appropriate for
has
is a notable
event in
is a
notable
place in
is part of
is part of
is part of
is a
notable
event
in
is a
topical
event in
is a
topical
event in
is a topical
person in
is a topical person in
mentions/is about mentions/is about
Mass-market topics can be
triggered by topical PPEs,
whereas Curricular Topics
cannot (assumption that any
topical stuff in curriculum will
be editorially curated?)
:Temporal
Entity
is concurrent
with
has
is a type of
is a type of
Country
is a type of
:Country
is a type of
:TemporalEntit
has the part
One crucial distinction
between Curricular and Mass-
Market learning journeys is
that Study Guides are
appropriate for Programmes of
Study, whereas mass-market
Guides are not. Generally,
curricular assets, guides, etc.
may be appropriate for mass-
market consunption, but
mass-market materials may
not be appropriate for
curricular study,
is in
:Exam Board
has
:Qualification awards
is
assessed
by
:Sub-Subject
is a subclass of
is part of
has the part
information
architecture

Gave up reading this article
on how ad tech destroys
the reading experience
@guardian #ux
Mikkel Bo Schmidt
@mibosc
mobile UI

http://www.durhamregion.com/news-story/4760314-scugog-
veterinarian-checks-dairy-cows-to-see-if-babies-are-coming/
… animal husbandry ?!

tackling big problems
via a tiny viewport

to deal with complexity,
you first need to see it
— @benholliday, about 20 minutes ago
Ben actually summarised my entire talk in one sentence. I
would only want to add “ditto re communicating it”.

a designer starts to
see the patterns
(— ibid)
As observers of people and wranglers of visual media,
UXers are well placed to identify these behaviours

project
viewport
In response to a question I got afterwards,
I see this more often than you might suppose.

1. stuck
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Education/Pix/pictures/
2011/7/28/1311858458328/The-researchers-chose-che-007.jpg

You’re starting a new
project. Do you …
a) open your computer
OR
b) open a new doc
(your computer is already open)
okay, it’s a trick question

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zoomed in

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zoomed out

http://www.curiosityshoppe.com/wp-content/
uploads/2012/09/WholeFoods_Cheese_main1.jpg

we know this stuff
for UX projects

sometimes we
forget it elsewhere

http://gifmovie.tumblr.com/post/70777506727/a-
rabbit-running-in-circles-in-front-of-my-car
this is a gif; it animates.
the bunny goes around and around.

This observation is over 100 years old
but we still haven’t agreed on a solution

uxreactionsofficial.tumblr.com
another gif, supposedly indicating perfect flow in unison

uxreactionsofficial.tumblr.com
also a gif; much better summary of how
communication can look if you’re not careful

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/graphics/newET_discoursegif.gif
some people out there still make docs like this

if not us,
our colleagues
very few people start out perfectly fluent
in communicating complexity — I know I didn’t

habit
we are rewarded at work for regularly returning
to our inboxes (and thus to our computer screens)

your workflow
every day
you use software tools to make other software-y stuff, right?

work culture of
being at computer
work
work not
work?
to at least some people, ‘work’ means ‘computer’

opening a doc =
starting as close to
the end as possible*
(right?)
* Kurt Vonnegut
only do this when you’re sure it’s the right medium
for the story you are telling — so know your story first.

they don’t seem like
complicated tasks

…but they are
http://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/110823669363/
tragedy-is-when-i-cut-my-ﬁnger-comedy-is-when
if there’s one gif you look up,
make it this one. Ouch.
I hope he was okay.

things that trip us up:
you see what I did there

the single
dimension
screen
document

64-page doc
in portrait
that we read
in landscape
list
seriously, why do we do this? I dislike ‘slideuments’,
but at least a corporate slide-deck fits the viewing format.

not helping,
BTW
unless you just can’t get enough of
that widescreen ‘letterbox’ experience

another gif — this one glitches about once per second
obscuring the fact that a change is occuring in the pic.

change blindness
search YouTube for change blindness — our brains sorta
reset and forget detail when there are brief discontinuities.

lost detail
lost detail
lost detail
unknown
unknown
all that exists

this is a Finding Nemo reference, but cognitively speaking
it could also be seen as kind of a self-portrait

"Serial position" by Obli (talk) (Uploads) - Obli (talk) (Uploads). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via
Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Serial_position.png#/media/File:Serial_position.png
‘serial position curve’ from recalling a list
of sequentially presented items.

Long Term
Memory
Rehearsal
or
Meaning
Short Term
Memory
STM is a leaky bucket. Do something with the info or lose it
forever (more or less). Meaning helps with encoding.

Rehearsed/
Lacks
interference
Still in the
leaky
bucket
My brief and incomplete explanation of
why we see primacy and recency effects.

7 ± 2
Miller, 1956
Miller, 1956: number of unrelated items you can hold in
working (short-term) memory. Often misapplied; still useful.

4 ± ?
Cowan, 2001
Cowan, 2001. Sorry; it’s worse than we thought. It also
varies between people, with context, type of task, etc.

fuzzy
OK
OK
great
If all the information in a big piece of work is new to you
and it seems discontinuous, good luck remembering it all.

what if
working memory
is a letterbox?
Or a throttle, if you prefer.
NB: This is an idea rather than a scientifically proven thing.

… it’s really hard to
think about 50 things
freaking impossible

http://alienpapacy.tumblr.com/post/
98545905612/initiating-maximum-overbird

http://brickellvision.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/eye-diagram.jpg
We’ve had ages to evolve this. It’s amazing.

‘zoom lens’ of
attention
Eriksen & St James (1986)
Look it up if you’re interested
— more than just a metaphor.

http://silversora.tumblr.com/post/73499059909/
dave-fuck-off-shaun-i-am-taking-a-picture
Zoomed all the way in.

cells with a nucleus
mammals
apes
humans
software+ UIs
our evolution
Apes may be in their stone age … UIs are still amoebas.

Random mind-mapping software. You can see that there’s a
real zoom issue: seeing the whole vs. seeing the details.

http://www.telepresenceoptions.com/
assets_c/2013/01/vz-8plus4_front2.jpg
mechanical
eyes
The engineering of visualizers is amazing. But our eyes
still win over mechanical versions, nearly every time.

To keep up with the eyes, zoom in UIs must be fast,
frictionless, and unconscious of any effort at all. Ha ha.

The emergence of pinch-to-zoom has improved things a lot

zoomed in
But it’s still a bit haphazard using
pinch-to-zoom to go from this

cognitive load
This is a concept closely related to the stuff about working
memory, begging the question of why I didn’t put it earlier.

intrinsic vs.
extrinsic
Intrinsic = difficulty inherent in understanding a given thing.
Extrinsic = difficulty added by how thing is communicated

holding an idea
holding an idea
holding an idea
understanding
this new idea
For complex information, high extrinsic load means there’s
less working memory left for understanding the idea

t
http://hilarioushumorfromouterspace.tumblr.com/post/112655656484
I feel like this before coffee sometimes

Infinite scrolling came and went … there’s high cognitive
load in retracing one’s steps. Pagination is information too.

use big surfaces
Infinite canvas for your working memory, and for zoom.

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ervices and subscribers
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P to view the page associated with that body.
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zoomed in
Instead of having to compromising between this …

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that curren
Add new service or
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re
Latest
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Add new service or
TTP
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zoomed out
… and this …

use a frictionless,
zoomable medium
…put it on a large surface where you can zoom between
both without thinking about it (using your eyes and/or legs)

yes, zoomable
You get zero points for using 10-point font.

Writing the entire project taxonomy on a whiteboard helped
us work on just one part and see how it fit with the whole

this vs. 64-page doc
the client read the strategy document but for them and us
it didn’t fully click until we showed the whole thing on 1 page

DEPLOY THE
STATIONERY
FIREHOSE!
it looks messy but wow is it effective
for thinking and communication

card sort complex things
We had a long document. The easiest way to understand the
big picture was to cut it up and rearrange the bits.

clear CTA
Card sorting is easy because actions and goals are clear.
“Take this thing, put it somewhere. Repeat with next thing.”

organise many
small things
create one big thing
Building this talk, I wrote short statements until I had run out,
then moved them around until they made a coherent story.

think with objects
Objects have the attractive quality of being specific and,
unless you make more of them, non-duplicate.

all the 4±2
you can eat
You don’t need working memory to retain piles of things; the
pile is still there when you come back to it later. Amazing.

you can only put
one thing
at the top of
a prioritised list
People are amazingly good at the kind of
compartmentalisation that leads to having five #1 priorities

more players
does not buy you
more items
at the top of the list
Often everyone has their own ideas about the items and the
order they’re in. Making it physical surfaces assumptions.

we can do better
than one dimension

the hypothetical
third dimension
second
Even just taking a list (like a Word doc or whatever) …

… and making it into a spreadsheet, buys you an extra
dimension with which to think about and organise your info.

use tools that
create opportunities
for richer encoding
This is Sublime Text, which has a handy ‘you are here’ pane,
so you can see where you are and it’s easier to navigate.

speaking of richer
encoding …

totally a
letterbox
People lose their minds a little bit when they write emails.
Sending one is no guarantee of having been understood.

we could …
talk to people?
Since, y’know, we do that for a living.

we are well-placed
to help our teams
… so maybe we should use all that visual thinking nous
to help them, and thereby help us, all do better.

talk to me?
I’m here all day
@finiteattention
catherton@equalexperts.com

Stop trying to paint the hallway through the letterbox: UX techniques that help teams help themselves

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Stop trying to paint the hallway through the letterbox: UX techniques that help teams help themselves