Thinking about the psychology behind design

When we are examining interface design another aspect we have to think about is human nature and the psychology behind how we as human beings use things.

In “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman he relates a story about the testing of a computer program years ago and how the return button and the enter button did two different things. For most programs they operate the same but for this particular program hitting the wrong one would wipe out your data. He found this frustrating and was absolutely destroyed by the programmers with them explaining that he “should read the instructions” and that the company’s secretaries who had been using that program for months have never said anything.

Norman approached the secretaries and asked them about the program.

“Oh, yes,” said the secretaries, “we do that a lot.”

“Well, how come nobody ever said anything about it?” we asked the secretaries. After all, they were encouraged to report all problems with the system.

The reason was simple: when the system stopped working or did something strange, the secretaries dutifully reported it as a problem. But when they made the “return” versus “enter” error, they blamed themselves. After all, they had been told what to do. They had simply erred.

This boils down to a simple philosophy in regards to design, “if an error can occur it probably will be made”.

When people develop a site or an application they need to keep a few things in mind during the process:

-Having a good conceptual model for the users
-Good mappings, so people can understand the relationship between the actions and the results
-Feedback, people need to receive continuous feedback about the results of the action.

In the example above the software system failed in the first two steps during the design process.

Another subject that Norman goes into is memory. I am not going to dive into the subject too much but I wanted to touch on something that I found interesting in his work because I think it plays into intuitive design. When people were polled about what the letters and numbers were on what button of their cell phones, a major majority didn’t have a clue. The same goes for people when quizzed about the layout  of the keyboard, and this goes for users that were typists.

People learn things by doing and repeating, if you design something that is going to function in a different manner than what a learned function is you are setting yourself up for trouble.