Significance Of 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.

What are some of the key challenges around designing for generational differences?
One of the main problems is our myopia about them. When I give talks, I always begin by asking the audience, How many of you are 55 and older? How many of you are between 35 and 55?  And how many of you are below 35? – just to see what the audience makeup is.  Interestingly, if I’m talking to designers, user experience experts or marketing people -- the people who are most involved in the design and content of websites and technology -- I find that about 80 per cent of them are between 35 and 50 – what is known as Gen X.  What many people don’t think about is, that demographic is actually the smallest demographic in our society. The older generation -- Baby Boomers – and the younger generation -- the Millennials -- are much larger demographics. The Millennials are even larger than the Baby Boomers. But we’ve got this small group of people doing most of the design work for a much larger group of people. If you’re one of those Gen Xers and you don’t realize that the two groups that make up the bulk of your audience are very different from you, you can make lots errors.  

One example of the differences between the three groups is how they experience technology. The period as you enter your teen years is a critical one for setting your expectations about technology for the rest of your life.  For Baby Boomers, the technology they were dealing with was television and telephones. As a result, they’ll say things like, “I’m going to go online to do this task.” Younger people don’t say that, because they don’t feel like they’re ‘going’ anywhere; online just is.  Another example is that Baby Boomers don’t like to see ads online, because ‘you’re supposed to watch ads on TV, not on the computer’. Whereas the Millennials might find online advertising annoying or distracting at times, it doesn’t surprise them because they expect to see it. These sorts of generational differences are very real, and if you aren’t aware of them, your designs and strategies can quickly go awry.

Are most organizations paying enough attention to their user experience (UX) strategy?
There is a real split: some are trying to, and some haven’t got a clue and are not doing much of anything. They think UX means creating a good-looking visual design -- which is part of it, but only a small part. Even in the companies that recognize how important UX is, they may not understand what it really means to do user experience work at a deep level.  

Having a solid UX strategy means  that you’ve researched two things: what your true audience is all about – not just the demographics of who they are, but the psychographics: you really understand what motivates this particular group of people. And secondly, you’ve done task analysis to figure out how they want to or need to go about doing the things that your product involves. Organizations who do this have processes in place internally. Do you have people on staff who know how to do a task analysis? Are there people who know how to create conceptual models? Do you have plans in place for getting user feedback? Do you have a strategy in place of where user experience should even be in the organization? Together, all of these things make up a solid UX strategy.

Susan Weinschenk was till recently the Chief of User Experience Strategy at Human Factors International and  the author of 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People (New Riders Press, 2011) and Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? (New Riders, 2009). Currently she is the founder of User Experience Institute. She holds a PhD in Psychology from Penn State and has over 30 years of experience applying Psychology to the workplace. When she’s not working, writing or blogging, she performs in community theatre, sings jazz, reads books, watches movies and bakes artisan breads.

[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]