Swapo’s Space

Our emotional responses often govern our cognitive responses to problems - in simple words, “if a user has a positive emotional response towards a UI, then it is likely that he or she will stretch their cognitive functions to resolve any confusions or problems in using the UI”. Our emotions influence the way our mind tries to solve problems at hand.

I recently heard Don Norman’s (icon-o-cast) podcast interview with the guys at Lunar Design on his new book entitled Emotional Design. And I like his simple analogy to the same phenomenon, “the day I wash my car, it drives better”.

A lot of our scientific research has been focused on the effects on human performance of negative emotions like anger, fear etc. Little work has gone into the effect of positive emotions towards the things we use and the UI’s that work on everyday.

It is said that negative emotions towards UI’s narrows down our thought processes, making it more difficult to solve the problems that we encounter. Positive emotions on the other hand open up our thought processes and help us to look at more options in trying to solve the problem at hand.

This has great impact from the UI designers point of view - making it imperative to design UI’s that look good and feel good in the first place. Fitting the UI elements into a Grid Layout, using consistent Typefaces, using a pleasant color scheme, become critical in getting a positive emotional response from the end-user and in turn help in making the UI “work better”!

One of the first things I learnt about UI Design was that whatever you do, please do not humiliate the user by designing a UI which confuses or overwhelms him. Simple and easy to understand UI’s are what users like and love to work on.

Kathy Sierra talks about a similar concept in her post earlier this year, entitled “Reducing Guilt is the Killer App“. She practices (and preaches) two things in her “Head-First Book Success Formula” - 1) Take something people are typically made to feel guilty about; and 2) Let them off the hook.

Simple, clear, plesant looking UI’s are what users “like” to work on, and if they do not get humilated by the UI, they will definately be better at using it.

My first real experiences in scientifically designing software user interfaces date backs to the early 90’s when I was at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

I attempted to design and build a User Interface for the WordPerfect 5.1 word processing software using knowledge about the word processor that I had extracted from a sample of expert users of the software.

I used the pathfinder algorithm (Schvaneveldt 1990) and cluster analysis to identify and organize a set of expert-based semantic relationships between word-processing concepts in the WordPerfect 5.1 domain. I used the results from this analysis to design two user interfaces a hierarchical index and a local semantic browser.

These interfaces were scientifically tested on both experts as well as novice users of WordPerfect 5.0. The performance and strategy measures of this experiment suggest that the semantic user interface improved the accessibility of information for novice users without hampering expert performance.

This study is published later in the journal of Behavior and Information Technology.

This was my first real experience in applying science to the design of User Interfaces and made me realize the shallowness of our current knowledge and processes for designing good user interfaces.