- When people use something, they face two gulfs:
- The Gulf of Execution, where they try to figure out how it operates,
- This is bridged by the presence of signifiers.
- The Gulf of Evaluation, where they try to figure out what happened when they performed an action
- This is bridged via feedback and a conceptual model.
- The Gulf of Execution, where they try to figure out how it operates,
Seven Stages Of Action
The Stages
- Form the Goal
Execution
- Plan the action
- Specify an action sequence
- Perform the action sequence
Evaluation
- Perceive the state of the world
- Interpret the perception
- Compare the outcome with the goal.
Discussion
- The stages are cyclical. After comparing, we may reformulate our goals.
- Not all activities in these stages are conscious. Usually, when a task demands full attention, we become conscious of these steps.
- In this framework, we can trace the root cause of why an action was performed. This is because goals can branch out into subgoals.
- Actions can be data driven based on some desired goal or event driven based on some evaluation of the world state.
- For many everyday tasks, goals and intentions are not well specified—they are opportunistic rather than planned.
- Innovations are done as enhancements to the steps in the pipeline. Radical changes entail reformulating goals based on root cause analysis.
Integrating the Three Levels
- See more below
- Reflective Level: Plan, Compare
- Behavioral Level: Specify, Interpret
- Visceral Level: Perform, Perceive
Seven Questions.
- Users of a product should be able to answer the following questions.
- Goal : What do I want to Accomplish
- Plan: What are the alternative Action Sequences
- Specify: What action can I do now?
- Perform: How can I do it?
- Perceive: What happened?
- Interpret: What does it mean?
- Compare: Have I accomplished the goal?
- Feedforward helps answer questions of execution
- Feedback helps answer questions of evaluation
Seven Fundamental Principles of Design
- Discoverability. It is possible to determine what actions are possible and the current state of the device.
- Feedback. There is full and continuous information about the results of actions and the current state of the product or service. After an action has been executed, it is easy to determine the new state.
- Conceptual model. The design projects all the information needed to create a good conceptual model of the system, leading to understanding and a feeling of control. The conceptual model enhances both discoverability and evaluation of results.
- Affordances. The proper affordances exist to make the desired actions possible.
- Signifiers. Effective use of signifiers ensures discoverability and that the feedback is well communicated and intelligible.
- Mappings. The relationship between controls and their actions follows the principles of good mapping, enhanced as much as possible through spatial layout and temporal contiguity.
- Constraints. Providing physical, logical, semantic, and cultural constraints guides actions and eases interpretation.
Human Cognition and Human Action
Subconscious Actions
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Most of human behavior is a result of subconscious processes. Thus, many of our beliefs about human behavior are wrong.
- Because of this, we often don’t know what we are about to do, say or think until after the fact.
- Subconscious thought matches patterns, finding the best match of one’s past experience to the current one. Pattern recognition and generalization is one of our strengths.
- At the same time, subconscious thought is biased towards regularity.
- Conscious thought is slow, controlled, and invoked for unusual circumstances that require attention. Subconscious thought is fast, automatic, and controls behavior we are already skilled at.
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Conscious attention is necessary to learn most things, but after the initial learning, continued practice and study, sometimes for thousands of hours over a period of years, produces what psychologists call “overlearning,” Once skills have been overlearned, performance appears to be effortless, done automatically, with little or no awareness
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One advantage of technology is to offload the task of remembering to our devices via procedural and declarative knowledge
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Cognition and Emotion are inseparable.
- Cognitive thoughts lead to emotions: emotions drive cognitive thoughts
- Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value.
- The positive, relaxed state, and the negative, anxious state are valuable for human creativity and action. However the extremes of both lead to being scatter-brained or being too tunnel-visioned.
- Sometimes, emotion comes first, and sometimes cognition comes first.
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One crucial consideration is the flow state where people are one with the task they are performing. The task itself is at the proper level of difficulty to provide a non-frustrating challenge.
- Tasks that require no processing effort are boring
- Tasks that are too difficult are frustrating.
Three Levels of Processing
Visceral
- The Lizard Brain
- Parts of the basic protective mechanism of the human affective system
- Makes quick judgments and allows quick, subconscious responses.
- It takes place through sensitization or desensitization via adaptation or conditioning.
- Corresponds to the immediate present; to immediate perception.
- Hence appeals to this from a design perspective require consideration of aesthetics and sensation.
- Associated with our reflexes, both physiological and mental.
Behavioral Level
- Home of learned skills, triggered by situations that match appropriate patterns
- In this stage, we are aware of our actions but unaware of the underlying details.
- This acts as an abstraction for all the details in our actions towards a goal.
- Corresponds to how actions come with expectations; hence, feedback is critical to appealing to this level as it manages expectations.
Reflective Level
- Home of conscious cognition.
- It is cognitive, deep, and slow, often occurring after the events have happened.
- It corresponds to evaluation of the world and one’s actions.
- Corresponds to the impression that a design left to the user.
Implications of Cognition and Emotion
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Storytelling is a persuasive medium. Stories resonate with our experiences and provide examples of new instances. From our experiences and the stories of others we tend to form generalizations about the way people behave and things work.
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Conceptual models are a form of story resulting from our predisposition to find explanations.
- Conceptual models are often constructed from fragmentary evidence, with only a poor understanding of what is happening
- Everyone forms stories (conceptual models) to explain what they have observed. In the absence of external information, people can let their imagination run free as long as the models they develop account for the facts as they perceive them.
- This tendency can often lead us to blame the wrong things, especially when we do not get feedback.
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It seems natural for people to blame their own misfortunes on the environment. It seems equally natural to blame other people’s misfortunes on their personalities, and the opposite attributions are made to positive events.
- This self-blame can be explained by learned helplessness.
- But sometimes, there is the case of taught helplessness where the design of the object itself guarantees helplessness.
- Human error is usually due to poor design, communication or interaction. System design should account for human error. One role of the designer is to facilitate the communication between machine and human.
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In the design process, treat failure as a learning experience.
- Do not blame people when they fail to use your products properly
- Take people’s difficulties as signifiers of where the product can be improved
- Eliminate all error messages. Provide help instead.
- Make it possible to correct problems directly from help or guidance messages. Allow people to continue with their task: Don’t impede progress—help make it smooth and continuous. Never make people start over.
- Assume that what people have done is partially correct, so if it is inappropriate, provide the guidance that allows them to correct the problem and be on their way.
- Think positively, for yourself and for the people you interact with.
Links
- The Psychopathology of Everyday Things - more on the basics of design.
- Design of Everyday Things