(Subtitle — User Experience: an Agony in Eight Fits) Talk given by Chris Atherton at Technical Communication UK, 22nd September 2010. The idea of this presentation was to introduce some findings from experimental psychology that might influence user experience design. Also, it was fun to see how riled up people can get about shower control design ... :)

1. Ever ythingyou
a lw ay sw a n t e d t o
k n ow a b o u t
psychologyand
techc om m s . ..
... but were afraid to ask.
Chris Atherton, University of Central Lancashire

2. — or —
User Experience:
An Agony In Eight Fits.
(with apologies to Lewis Carroll)

3. 1. Celestial Navigation
There’s a sort of hidden theme to this presentation,
stuff that recurs. Answer on the last page :)

4. “The procedure is quite simple. First, you arrange
items into different groups. Of course, one pile may
be sufficient, depending on how much there is to
do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of
facilities, that is the next step; otherwise, you are
pretty well set. It is important not to overdo
things. That is, it is better to do too few things at
once than too many. In the short run, this may not
seem important, but complications can easily arise.”
This text was used in a classic 1972 experiment by
Bransford & Johnston. Can you tell what it’s about?

5. “The procedure is quite simple. First, you arrange
items into different groups. Of course, one pile may
be sufficient, depending on how much there is to
do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of
facilities, that is the next step; otherwise, you are
pretty well set. It is important not to overdo
things. That is, it is better to do too few things at
once than too many. In the short run, this may not
seem important, but complications can easily arise.”
People given the title “Doing the Laundry” do much better
at remembering this text than people with no context.

6. context is brilliant
— once you have it.
Related: the book Made To Stick talks about “the curse of
knowledge”— going back to “the beginner’s mind” is hard.

7. Showing the user where they are — navigational context
— is really, really useful. iPad e-books even do it twice!

8. Reliance on spatial memory (“it was about halfway down
the page”) is complicated by multiple, near-identical pages.

9. we remember gist
and location
People are pretty bad at source monitoring (where stuff we
know came from) but good at spatial source monitoring.

10. 1 2
where was the
washing machine?
3 4

11. 1 2
where was the
washing machine?
3 4
Yeah, I don’t think anyone got this one wrong.

12. http://www.deltasigtu.com/images/seesaw.jpg
user sanity
ad revenue time on site
SEO content across several pages might be
Breaking down your
great for page-rank, but it might be pissing off your users.

13. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html
Eye-tracking research from Nielsen demonstrates that
readers do actually read/scan quite long web pages.

14. Paper content? Not dead yet. The sight and feel of “how
many pages through?” is a great spatial-navigational aid.

15. 2. Metaphores and
Other Such Beastes

16. image schemas
This is a very cool idea: metaphor in our language might be
(Johnson, 1987)
shaped by our three-dimensional, embodied experiences.

17. SPATIAL ORIENTATION
up-down
left-right
front-back
verticality
These are examples from Risch (2008) of metaphors
(Risch, 2008)
grounded in our physical (as in Newton) existence.

18. I think most people are comfortable with this kind of
chart, and the metaphor of “up is more”

19. However, if we represent the same quantities in a “down is
more” framework, it feels weird, maybe even wrong.

20. ... after all, we talk about “piling stuff up”, not “piling stuff
down”. Real objects stack upwards, not downwards.

21. “Down is more” works better when it represents stuff you
don’t have, and when contrasted with positive quantities.

22. (We also use colour as a metaphor. In my culture, red
signifies danger, bad, warning, and debt. YMMV.)

23. Horizontal left-to-right (again, potentially culturally-specific)
might indicate a time-sequence or other progression.

24. Left-to-right has also come to be used as a hierarchical
metaphor — from top-level through to the fine detail.

25. Apple breaks that “top-level” metaphor by having a pull-
down menu where “down” means “superordinate”. Weird.

26. thermostat
temperature
marker
How do you make the shower warmer? My husband and I
had a very spirited discussion about this user interface.

27. up is cold
down is hot
IMO, this shower violates spatial metaphor — to turn the
temperature up, move the horizontal bar down. WHAT?

28. (Then again, the shower was in the very same hotel
where I took these pictures. I’m just saying.)

29. 3. Breadth and Dogma

30. “I’m really visual”
“I have to hear
something to
understand it”
It’s common to hear people make statements like this; I do
it sometimes, too. But it’s dogmatic — and unfalsifiable.

31. no evidence
for learning styles
Coffield et al. (2004) published a comprehensive white
paper on this, but learning styles are still taught as fact.

32. thou shalt
There’s a lot of emphasis in education on making sure you
address all the different learning styles — again, dogma.

33. Neurolinguistic
Programming
(NLP)
NLP is a lot like learning styles, and used widely —
and yet nobody can find scientific evidence that it works.

34. “but doctor, don’t you see?
It’s a single-cell paramecium”
“you feelin’ me? huh?”
A central NLP tenet is tailoring language to target a
person’s preferred visual/auditory/kinesthetic framework.

35. Derren Brown: engaging people with psychology (yay), but also
muddying the water with magician-style showmanship (boo).

36. “Use brain gym to calm, energise
or reconnect right and left brain
for improved concentration”
Let me be as clear as I can, here: THEY’RE ALREADY
CONNECTED. (cited in Roderique-Davies, 2009)

37. generous interpretation
NLP and learning styles provide an interesting framework
for thinking about learning and communication.

38. 4. There can be no
Proper Substitute for
Goode House Traininge

39. The conference room at TCUK got really hot, but despite
the hand-logo, nobody wanted to open the fire-doors.

40. http://www.animalbehaviour.net/gifs+pics/Pavlov%27s_dog.jpg
Pavlov’s dogs: he rang a bell every dinnertime, and soon
they would drool when he only rang the bell: ‘conditioning’

41. ... a bit like this.

42. + =
+ =
+ = ?!
Previous experience meant that many of us were hesitant
to open the fire door in case the alarm went off. (It didn’t.)

43. 5. Icones Is Icones

44. (ignorethecode.net)
You want icons that are generic enough to speak to
everyone, but not so simple that they’re meaningless.

45. This is iMovie on the iPhone. It’s pretty cool, but with the
exception of ‘play’, I find the icons hard to relate to.

46. abstract concrete
“what is it? how does “but mine doesn’t
it relate to what I do?” look like that!”
The perpetual dilemma of the icon designer, and the
problems at either end of the user experience spectrum.

47. I had really mixed feelings when I heard again recently that
there might be a Sandman movie, or maybe a TV series.

48. iconic
Graphic novels often produce iconic art.

49. exemplars trying to look iconic
These guys are cool, but not iconic. Reality is specific.

50. Sometimes even icons don’t look like icons.

51. the best icon is the one
inside the user’s head
A word paints a thousand pictures. Words, which
preserve meaning, might be the archetypal icons.

52. The Matrix was a rare example of a graphic novel-style
premise that was iconic while also being specific.

53. I hope that any Sandman movie will be rotoscoped, like
A Scanner Darkly, to retain the characters’ icon-ness.

54. (Keanu really likes sitting at tables.)

55. 6. Stop That, or
You Will Go Blind
— and —
7. Cum Hoc,
Ergo Propter Hoc

56. At this point in the presentation I show an animation
that flickers a bit between this and the next slide ...

57. ... it takes people quite a few seconds to realise that every
other frame is missing the bike saddle and bag logo.

58. change blindness
Visual glitches or discontinuities can cause us to miss things
Pashler, 1988
(google ‘movie continuity errors’, for example.)

59. http://localoaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/wgetgui-screenshot.png
Don’t check this box. Ever.
Spiders come.
Don’t set a value of more
than 20 attempts
Callouts might appear simultaneously, as we blink, change
slides, or cut between scenes or contexts. (Discontinuity)

60. cum hoc, ergo propter hoc
“with this, therefore
because of this”
The human brain likes patterns, and when things appear
together, we often (wrongly) infer causality or relatedness.

61. http://localoaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/wgetgui-screenshot.png
Don’t check this box. Ever.
Spiders come.
Don’t set a value of more
than 20 attempts
Do remember to save Do choose a more useful
before you press Exit name for your log file
At the very least, if objects appear at the same time, try to
differentiate between them in other ways, like with colour.

62. Here I run another animation that transitions from this
slide to the next slide over the course of 20 seconds ...

63. ... because it fades over such a long time, it’s quite hard to
notice that the Carbon-12 diagram is slowly disappearing.

64. inattentional blindness
If visual changes occur gradually and/or
peripherally, it’s easy to miss Mack & Rock, 1992
them.

65. (Also, isn’t this the most shouty textbook ever? It’s like
a Death By PowerPoint overdose, in book form.)

66. 8. A Foole Knows the
Price of Everything but
the Value of Nothinge
Tech Comms and User Experience people sometimes feel
undervalued or underappreciated.You can use experimental
psychology to demonstrate how value can be added, to
improve customers’ experience of your product.

67. 8. A Foole Knows the
Price of Everything but
the Value of Nothinge
By engaging with the literature in experimental psychology,
you might be able to show colleagues that you can reduce
at least one source of your company’s pain (poor revenue/
user dissatisfaction/lots of calls to user assistance, etc).

68. finiteattentionspan.wordpress.com
twitter.com/finiteattention
CJAtherton@uclan.ac.uk
AND! Come for a short run tomorrow morning
— meet in the hotel foyer at 07:30.
Let’s keep having this conversation!
(and yes, we really did go running :)

69. finiteattentionspan.wordpress.com
twitter.com/finiteattention
CJAtherton@uclan.ac.uk
AND! Come for a short run tomorrow morning
— meet in the hotel foyer at 07:30.
(By the way, the hidden theme was Aaron Sorkin, who
wrote The West Wing. You should watch his stuff; it’s good.)