@mrjoe

or 3 predictions from psychology for the future of web design

@mrjoehttp://neuroimages.tumblr.com/post/20131555516

Psychology for designers

@mrjoe

Hello, I’m @mrjoe, but you can call me Joe

If you have ever bought a train ticket online? booked a hotel? chances are you’ve used something I designed.

UX 10 years with cxpartners, a UX agency in Bristol, UK

I work with people like Disney, Marriott & theTrainline.

My background in psychology. I studied Neuroscience and MSc Human Communication and Computing.

@mrjoe

So I wrote a book. Only £2. $3 €3

http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/products/psychology-for-designers

@mrjoe

I want to talk about the future of web design

I want to talk about the Future of Web Design. Specifically I want to make three predictions based on psychology for the future of web design

@mrjoe

They travelled back where 23rd century man had never gone before. To a mad, crazy, outrageous time. 1986. How does the future compare to now?

@mrjoe

Hello computer. This should be the now. Scotty’s right we should be talking to computers. Why aren’t we?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9kTVZiJ3Uc

@mrjoe

I use one of these to with my phone when I’m on my bike, so no screen. Just talking. I love listening to music especially on random crazy I know, that’s the kinda guy I am. Here’s the problem. So here I am on my bike.

@mrjoe

Siri get’s it wrong, searching for the term I used not telling me what was playing

@mrjoe

Here’s what should have happened. I should have said what song is this playing? silly me.

I’m not the kind of guy who lets this go. I wanted to know why Siri got it wrong. Why are computers terrible when it comes to conversation?

@mrjoe

What is going on? Let’s look at the psychology of conversation.

HP Grice’s ideas on the logic of conversation in lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1967. Published in 1975

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/studypacks/Grice-Logic.pdf

@mrjoe

1. Maxim of Quantity:-Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary.-Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than necessary.

2. Maxim of Quality:-Do not say what you believe to be false.-Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

3. Maxim of Relevance:-Be relevant (i.e., say things related to the current topic of the conversation).

4. Maxim of Manner:-Avoid obscurity of expression.-Avoid ambiguity.-Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness).-Be orderly.

Grice’s Conversational Maxims

Grice’s maxims, a useful way of analysing conversations.

And do you know what? It wasn’t Siri that was breaking one of these laws it was me.

Conversation between real people. We don’t talk like this.

@mrjoe

The problem is we don’t use Grice’s maxims, in fact more often than not we ignore them, we like, well, a bit subtlety.

Here’s a funny sketch from Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore where they talk about, well, um, the uh, well the facts of life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0Z1QGpTZSo

@mrjoe

Turns out we has humans have high expectations from conversation.

If we followed the rules exactly we would end up, well like Sheldon from Big Brother.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fJSxbVSKLw

@mrjoe

About you

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1. Maxim of Quantity:-Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary.-Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than necessary.

2. Maxim of Quality:-Do not say what you believe to be false.-Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

3. Maxim of Relevance:-Be relevant (i.e., say things related to the current topic of the conversation).

4. Maxim of Manner:-Avoid obscurity of expression.-Avoid ambiguity.-Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness).-Be orderly.

So why have I wasted time telling you about Grice’s maxims?

Well it turns out they are great for assessing the usability of forms.

@mrjoe

What’s this playing?Was that sarcasm?I love you.Take it or leave it.Who would say such a thing?

So what is going on with Siri?

These are pronoun is a word or form that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase. They are notoriously hard to compute. Us humans are built to understand them, computers less so.

@mrjoe

What’s this playing?

We as humans are good at this stuff, we can hold pronoun meanings in our working memory.

But here’s where are really good at it.

@mrjoe

On the iPod This?

What’s this playing?

It’s Del the Funky Homosapian, well actually it’s Delton 3030

(sweety)

In psychology this is called Grounding. Grounding is the collective process by which participants try to reach a mutual belief Once we have formulated a message we need to do more than simply send it off. We need to ensure it has been understood.Grounding is the most important thing in conversation, not some prescriptive set of rules like those produced by old Grice. We have more than one level of interaction. We ask questions. Understand replies. If we don’t understand we ask.

@mrjoe

About you

MrWhat is your title*

JohnWhat is your first name*

SmithWhat is your last name*

7Date of birth* 7 2012

Gender* I am a MALE

I am a FEMALE

Please select...Status*

Please complete the form, please ensure you complete all the fields here, then press the button at the bottom of the screen. Under some circumstances we will your details on to third parties.

What is / was the

ErrorsThere errors on this page:- Please enter status- You cannot be born in the future

Computers do try and do this. But more often than not it’s clunky like errors on forms.

Not very human.

@mrjoe

Three or more synchronous interactions

Future Prediction #1 Designing like Conversation

@mrjoe

PHONE PICTURE

Last December at the cxpartners Christmas party. Picture the scene. I never like to leave early so was there until the end. Michelle my girlfriend, who is in the audience today and couple of others needed a taxi. I phoned maybe 4 companies before getting one. They said they’d call when the taxi was outside. The call never came. The taxi left without us. We were out, slightly drunk on a cold December evening with 3 miles to walk home

Well it did, I even put my phone on the table, face up so we wouldn’t miss it. What happened?

@mrjoe

Turns out the my do not disturb settings were on.

Normally I don’t want any notifications, calls or whatever after 11pm.

But this Thursday was different. I missed the call. Now do not disturb is turned off.

@mrjoe

This isn’t a new problem. This is from a AutoProfiles, a symbian series 60 app from 2005.

It looks at your calendar and turns your phone to silent if you are in a meeting. Clever. Well no, you turn it off pretty much after the first time you miss an important call because your phone is on silent. The concept of chronofencing is clunky.It gets turned off pretty after the first time it goes wrong.

@mrjoe

Geofencing, activating a behaviour based on context. Works slightly better.

@mrjoe

CONTEXTContext is buzz word at the moment. Context is everything we know about our user.

From where they are, to what there plans are. Even down to how they are feeling and what they had for breakfast.

@mrjoeAndrew Heaton http://understandinggroup.com/2013/03/some-simple-models-for-user-context/

Andrew Heaton amongst others is doing some good work in this area.

@mrjoe

First International Symposium, HUC’99 Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27–29, 1999 ProceedingsFirst International Symposium, HUC’99 Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27–29, 1999 ProceedingsFirst International Symposium, HUC’99 Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27–29, 1999 Proceedings

1999Context isn’t new, this is 1999 model. Context modelling isn’t the answer. We already have a structure to study this.

We can track many parts of context. From location, to calendar to feelings from tweets and other media.

Even down to how they are feeling and what they had for breakfast.

Nothing has moved on despite this being a well defined problem.

Let’s look to psychology to see how we humans deal with the problem.

@mrjoe

5∘

10∘15∘ 20∘

25∘

mental model

30∘

This is the thermostat in my house. My old flatmate used to come home feeling cold and turn up the heat to 25 degrees so the house would heat up quicker. Flawed thinking. That’s not how a thermostat works.

Compare that to a the heating element on a gas hob. It does work that way. Not flawed thinking but a flawed mental model.

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I didn’t see them [the asterisks]. There’s nothing that explains what they mean.

How did you hear about us?*

How old are you? *

http://www.cxpartners.co.uk/cxblog/the-ux-of-html5/

From my FOWD talk last year. UX of HTML5

This isn’t a usability problem this is an incorrect Mental Model problem.

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Many of users have mental models from offline situations.

Like completing a paper form.

@mrjoe

I need to speak to my wifeOur littlest is sick and is

at home

It’s 10.48am on a Monday

That’s the time of the weekly ops meeting which runs from 10am -11am

I know from Find My iPhone that she’s not in the office.

When this happened last time and I didn’t call she was worried.

It’s urgent.

I take a guess that she’s not in the meeting or won’t mind if I call.

So back to our context problem. In the same way we build mental models of objects we build mental models of situations.

And the thing here. It’s not the first three things that make the difference. It’s the last two.

Computers are good at problems 1, 2 and 3 but poor at 4 and 5. But they are getting better.

@mrjoe

CONTEXTRELEVANCE

It’s not a context modelling problem we have. Rather a problem of recognising patterns of relevance.

@mrjoehttp://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3733375/Spooky-face-appears-in-clouds.html

Turns out, humans are good at this. We have a huge part of our brain focused on recognising patterns, identifying relevance. In this case faces.

@mrjoe

GOOGLE NOW

We are getting there Google Now is not half bad. It uses one or more context. -location-recent searches-driving conditions

It aims to be your personal assistant.

Think about the human comparison, you trust a human with this information, your full diary, likes, dislikes. My personal assistant is great at booking the perfect hotel for me. My assistant knows my likes and dislikes all the important details that make me who I am.

@mrjoe

ALWAYSBE NICE

This is Niccolò Machiavelli. He wrote the The Prince.

Machiavellian psychology, detach oneself from conventional morality and hence to deceive and manipulate others.

We need to be able to trust our digital assistants won’t betray that trust. They will collect all this personal information about us. Can we sure they won’t use it to manipulate us.

In my book, I defined an approach, exhaustively, to deal with this problem. Summarised into: Always be nice.

@mrjoe

Two or more elements of context are needed to define relevance in

a mental model

Future Prediction #2 Designing with Mental models of relevance

Otherwise known as getting to know you better. Or give away your privacy.

The very thing that makes this stuff useful depends on the very information you are nervous about giving away.

Thinking (Cognition)

Feeling (Emotion)

Instinct (keeping you

alive)

I promised you a third prediction for the future of web design.

This is Olfactory Bulb. It’s close to the emotional centres of the brain. It’s why smell is so evocative.

@mrjoe

http://sensoree.com/smell-interfaces/

Smell will be big. Well maybe ;)

@mrjoe

https://www.google.co.uk/landing/nose/

This was of course an April fools joke from Google. Shame, I think it could have been more a of a success than glass.

@mrjoe

We will design smell based interactions

Future Prediction #3designing with Olfaction

Forget glass folks, noses. All about noses. Google had it right.

But seriously. We can use memory of smell to do this.

The act of remembering a smell is almost identical in the brain to actually experiencing that smell.

@mrjoe

Future Prediction #1 Designing like Conversation

Future Prediction #2 Designing with Mental

models of relevance

Future Prediction #3designing with Olfaction

So to review. 3 predictions. One of which is a little like a bad episode of Tomorrow’s World.

But the first two have a commonality.

Social. We build models of the world based around interactions with other people.

@mrjoe

http://psych.colorado.edu/~tito/sp03/7536/Dunbar_1998.pdf

The brain is as big as it is as a huge amount of our brain power goes on modelling and analysing social situations. http://psych.colorado.edu/~tito/sp03/7536/Dunbar_1998.pdf

@mrjoe

Theory ofMind

Other wise known as THEORY OF MIND.

Huge amount of brain power focused on mapping others. Creating mental models of how others think and predicting how they will behave. We invest huge amounts of mental power trying to understand how other people feel, what they know. It’s called a theory of mind.

@mrjoe

SociallyShared

Cognition

Both interaction and mental models rely on a concept from Social Psychology. Socially shared cognition.

Practically. We need to know this theory. I know what you know. You know what I know. If either of us don’t know, we ask.

Other things that are related to Socially Shared Cognition. -Story telling-Education (I had to predict what you guys knew to write this talk)

@mrjoe

SociallyShared

CognitionHow can I help you?

We need a shared model of cognition. I know what my computer knows. My computer knows what I know. If either of us don’t know, we ask.

A shared model of the world and people around us.

@mrjoe

A designer who doesn't understand psychology

is going to be no more successful

than an architect who doesn't

understand physics Image: http://victorenrich.com/archives/155

Thank you.

@mrjoe

@mrjoe

psychologyfordesigners.com