• There were several connections between architecture and social design. Both create an ecosystem (one physical, the other virtual) which people act within and on.  The designer’s role is to “pave the cowpaths” – chart out the area with paths for its intended use.
• Because of the duplicity of names, users require more complex forms of identification besides name. This can be a picture, badges, biographical info, etc.
• talk like a human. Designing a social interface should be different than designing a bank transaction. No robo-speak allowed.
• Related to watching how you speak, designers should consider the difference between “me” and “you”.  In the world of social media, propriety of information is still a gray area which one should be sensitive to.
• Competition can be good, if you want to foster competition, otherwise people will game the system for no purpose besides being on top.
• Pay attention to the organic use of your social system, e.g. Friendster failure– fake profiles emerged because people wanted to create associations around things other than real people.
• Related to fake profiles, social media should refer to some social object, an “aboutness”.  Once a user creates a profile, then what?
• Important questions: What is going to be the behavioral norm? What about your power user? Your system has to accomodate the user who never adjusts anything from the defaults but also the user who wants to explore every last feature.
• Humans are unpredictable.

If you’ve ever been called out for “being subjective”, then you know how frustrating it can be. It seems hardly fair that after performing research and forming reasoned arguments, a colleague or partner can shut you down with one phrase, usually putting an end to any rigorous debate or academic inquiry.

Psychologists and designers suffer from a cliched generalization that we engage in a subjective discipline. This half-truth seeks to invalidate the factual and empirical findings which are made in the field.

Are we, in fact, being subjective? Yes and no. The truth is, you can be subjective while being factual.

In their (and your) defense, let us explore this misunderstood claim:“You’re just being subjective!”

We’re somewhat mistaken in how we use the phrase. Subjectivity comes in two flavors : ontological and epistemological. Lets start by distinguishing the two types.

Ontological subjectivity

A discipline can be said to be “objective” in ontology if it studies phenomena that which exists without human beings, and makes claim that remain true and valid without the existence of human beings:

• Natural sciences — rocks, trees, oceans, animals
• Physical sciences — matter, planets, stars, atoms,
• Chemical sciences — material, reactions,

In contrast, disciplines that are “subjective” in ontology focus on topics that rely on human consciousness, and whose claims will be nonsensical without a human being.

• Psychological sciences — emotion, judgment, reasoning, action
• Aesthetic sciences — perception, color, style
• Philosophical sciences — morality, values, knowledge

Are you being subjective? Well, if you study human behavior and action, you probably are. Designers and psychologists (as well as economists, historians, and similar professions) concern themselves with subjective topics. We find human subjectivity, consciousness and decision making more interesting than atoms. However, that does not mean these studies are not based on facts.

“When a pin pricks my finger, I draw away”.

“This shade of green is present in the works of this period”.

“When making decisions, humans are risk-averse and prefer certainty”.

These claims have a subjective ontology, but are based in factual observation. They are nonsensical without reference to a human subject, but this alone does not make them biased or matters of opinion.

We are not Subjective!!… epistemologically

“Psychology is subjective. Design is subjective.” Attacks on design are not ontological (attacks on our subject matter), but are epistemological attacks, questioning the nature & extent of knowledge that the fields produce. Attacking epistemology is saying our conclusions are rooted in opinion, rather than fact.

I whole-heartedly reject this idea. Investigate the statements listed above, and find me the bias in them. As professional, academics, and progressive thinkers, we hope to eliminate any deviance from hard facts. Do critics really believe that designers & psychologists don’t value facts? We ALSO strive for epistemological objectivity!

Am I confusing you yet? Well, my main point is this: It is wrong is to assume that studying humans means we’re only capable of making opinions. Design is NOT SUBJECTIVE. Psychology is NOT SUBJECTIVE. We make factual claims, though we study areas that require a subjective ontology — a knower, a perceiver, a person with opinions, bias, and willful behaviors. This is the human “subject”.

Designers, stop selling yourself short.

One can study human perceptions, emotions, desires & consciousness without being steeped in bias, assumptions, and opinion. You are engaged in an objective discipline. Various debates have fueled the divide between subjective and objective, to the point that subjectivity has become a dirty word in almost all disciplines. So stop associating yourself with that word. It’s confused and muddled and should no longer be effective as a claim.

The *methods* that they [design and psychology] use are another factor that affects people’s judgment. The “hard sciences” can rely on quantifications more than the “soft sciences” are able to do. This is of course partly due to their respective subject matters. Electrons, e.g., are more “reliable” when being measured than humans are

-markus weber-

Yes, studying human beings is a bit like trying to hit a moving target. However, we are still able to make factual claims about effectiveness of a design, the persuasiveness of an argument, the likelihood an idea will be adopted. Perhaps more importantly: isn’t the un-reliability of human subjectivity part of the reason these fields are so fascinating? It’s the reason I’d rather study this than engineering.

• The Mother Nature Network and their idea of the “Lazy Environmentalist”
• Eleanor Rosch’s contribution to conceptual categorization

Framing is a potent tool used by marketers, linguists, business strategists, and designers.  What is it?

A frame is simply the body of concepts, stories, scenarios and values related to a term, phrase or idea.

Pretty simple.  When a person is exposed to an atom of meaning (through listening or reading) a body of concepts is brought to mind, consciously or unconsciously.  Words and ideas do not exist in isolation but are conceptually connected to other words and ideas, a connectivity that arises from our experiences with the world.

Consider the following terms and how they differ

“Camera”

What comes to mind is a device that captures images.  It may be a film or digital camera, it’s probably black or silver, maybe it flashes.  Are these the only concepts that come to mind immediately? Think about cameras for a few more seconds. Are there situations where you’ve used a camera –parties, walks, and travel–that come to mind?  You might also be thinking about the roles involved in photo-taking: subjects, a photographer, a setting.  Are there certain values that come to mind: aesthetics, fine art, voyeurism? The concept camera involves more than just the tangible properties of a physical object. There are a host of other ideas related to cameras, such as typical scenarios and value systems that they invoke.

“LISA SNAPPED SEVERAL SHOTS AT THE PARTY”

We know this sentence is about cameras and taking photos without explicitly stating either. How does that work? Words related to an idea evoke the idea itself. In this case ‘party’, ’shots’, ’snapping’ are all concepts that bring to mind the concept of photo-taking.

“SHAKE IT LIKE A POLAROID PICTURE”

How different is this phrase than the above examples? There’s nothing in the literal meaning of the words to indicate it should be different, yet it is. When you hear this phrase, do you want to dance?

okay so how’s framing involved in this

Our brains engage in a process of reinforcing or re-defining frames. When we speak, hear, or read a pair of concepts, our brains link them together. Through repeated exposure to a pair of concepts, we include new ideas in a frame. When ideas are no longer exposed as a conceptual pairing, our brains exclude them from a frame. This is of course a simplification, some frames can be created non-verbally and there is some evidence that there are innate frames as well.

However, these linguistic examples show us that framing is quite permeable and expansive. The third example shows us that particular frames have the ability to gain dominance through re-use in media and popular culture. If you’ve listened to the radio or watched TV regularly in the last decade, the final phrase exists as a part of your conceptual structure for dancing, where it didn’t exist in the early 1990s. 

The third example also illustrates that words are not un-emotional, they evoke values through their frames. How do you feel about the phrase? Does it make you cringe at this point in your life?

Framing is an act of creating a mental perimeter around our audience’s understanding of the terms we use, and it is a powerful tool to recognize and to use.

Being cognizant of linguistic framing has many applications in creating relevant and powerful messages and products. This could be very useful for User Experience Designers. But before I talk about applying these principles, I will discuss ways we can recognize when framing is being applied to influence the audience’s behavior.  More on this next time.

In Part 2, I’ll be talking about
being active in the way you consume media
recognizing good and bad examples of framing, and
avoiding the manipulation it sometimes implies.

Jim Jones is an altogether different figure than yesterday’s blog subject, Van Jones (no relation), but his story is just as compelling.  Last night I saw for the first time the 2006 documentary, Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple: a chilling tale complete with visuals and recordings of Jones’ sermons, which also provides a human touch to the story by interviewing the people who survived the suicides.  These conversations helped show that Jones’ victims were intoxicated by his influence, but were also normal human beings with families, friends, fears, desires and dreams.

One of the first times I heard the story of Jonestown was in an introduction to a social psychology textbook. Jonestown was used as a compelling example of how moral, intelligent, and passionate people can be lead astray not because they are crazy or weak-willed, but because a social context had been set up that combined strong amounts of peer and family pressures with a potent authority figure.

Social psychology is one of my favorite subjects because it shows us that human behavior being as prone to all sorts of influence from social and cultural contexts.  Human beings are innately information gatherers, and when we are put in unfamiliar or stressful situations, we use a variety of clues from our environment to inform the correct behavior, often at the cost of accuracy.  At Jonestown, the residents were not psychologically distrubed or bizzare, but simply felt everyday social dynamics that all humans encountered, and acted in a way they deemed correct, based on those social dynamics.  In this case, these dynamics were so powerful that they were unable to conclude an alternative solution and course of action.

A UX or psychology researcher can design an experiment perfectly yet yield inaccurate results when their participants fall victim to such social effects.  But wait Jon, we’re testing them in a controlled lab environment, not within a cult! Well, we need only look at two classic social psychological experiments to see this effect in play in a laboratory, and come up with ways to avoid them.

Strapping down Milgram's "shock victim"

Stanley Milgram surprised the nation by showing that even bright and talented Yale University students will administer a deadly amount of electric shock to an innocent person, if a research scientist (a trusted authority) instructs them to do so for an experiment.  A bias towards authority does not necessarily require a fanatical and drug-disturbed pastor in sunglasses: a calm, rational and intelligent man in a white lab coat and spectacles might be just as influential and just as dangerous.

How is one able to avoid authority-based biases? Here are some suggestions:

• Allow a research participant the freedom to express themselves.  Keep instructions to a minimum which will lessen your perception as an authority.  Especially in the field of usability research, every piece of input is valuable.  A “mistake” provides just as much insight into a design prototype as a successful participant, and probably more.
• Keep your experiment informal.  Don’t wear lab coats, be a person.  Don’t hide behind a glass wall or enter another room.

Sound good enough?  Well, we can’t get too chummy.  If you insert friends (or peers) around the participant, Solomon Asch has shown us that peer influence can also guide behavior and the subject is compelled to answer questions in a way that reflects the opinions of the rest of the group.  In many experimental settings, including those with “fellow subjects”, a research participant is under a stressful situation, guided by a desire to find “correct answers” and to appear competent.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6LH10-3H8k]

So we can’t be too authoritative and also not too peer-like. The key here is balance.  We have so much to learn from users, it is imperative they are free to express their input freely.  Both experiments show us how social cues from the environment can cause human beings to act radically different than they would normally.

Please feel free to leave comments on how you’ve struck the balance between structure and freedom in your user research studies.

The power outage did manage to provide some material for the purpose of this post: feedback.  A device requiring user input usually has a built-in mechanism for providing feedback — a means of communicating a message to the user.  The message could be ‘hey user, the system has received your input’ (the buttons on an elevator); ‘hey user, give us a second we’re thinking about it’ (the hourglass icon in Windows or the progress bar in an web surfing application); or ‘hey you screwed up’ (when you get returned to the same page after entering an incorrect password).  With many means of displaying feedback to the user, some elegant (and not so elegant) designs have emerged.

Feedback can be informative, or can be utterly confusing. After the power was restored, of course all the devices in the house had blinking displays reading the imcorrect times (a method of feedback: blinking = incorrect time setting).  As I went to the microwave to reheat some chicken nuggets for lunch, the screen which normally displays the time was unlike the other time-pieces in the house. It now displayed a cryptic two letter message:

PF. What did that mean?  Please fix, promptly find, post-functional, parliament funkadelic?  Provide feedback?  Oh and the microwave worked fine: I cooked my chicken nuggets and the message disappeared afterwards, which further deepened the mystery.  And I still had no idea what was wrong with the microwave or how to fix it.  Bottom line – clear feedback: good for the system, good for the user

More after the jump.

(read more)….

Some examples of questions which employ some degree of categorical reasoning:

Should I get cable or DSL?

Is this piece of code better defined as a sub-class or a class on its own?

Should this piece of content be tagged with this label or that label?

What should I wear to this business casual event?

When humans act in the world, we classify stimuli in the world as belonging to meaningful groups and deduct appropriate behaviors from what knowledge we have about those groups. This is categorical reasoning. If we never reason that the orange and black striped animal is a tiger and figure out we need to get the hell away from it, we’d be a person lacking categorical structure in addition to being tiger-food.

Scholars have long theorized about how categories are represented in the mind and guide human behavior.

• Classical theory: a list of necessary and sufficient conditions
  Problem: no such hard boundaries, too many exceptions and “fuzzy” scenarios.
• Examplar theory: a category is a list of examples.
  Problem: your brain cannot hold that many examples, and we don’t seem to reason by matching new instances to prior ones, which would be resource demanding.

Rosch is responsible for an explanation of categorical reasoning known as prototype theory.  She makes the claim that categories are a graded structures, rather than a category with boundary defined by a definite set of features. Instead, members of the category are structured around a few central members, called prototypes (or best examples). Other non-prototypical members of the category are around the fringe and are ‘a-typical’ to various degrees. Chair, sofa, table are better examples of the concept furniture than are stove, refrigerator or telephone.

Rosch’s experiments show us that people classify an everyday object or experience on an example that they regard as the best representation of the appropriate category.

In addition to developing prototype theory, Rosch notes in her research that many category members are in-themselves categories. Within the animal category, there are many types of dogs, such as. To explain this phenomena of greater or less specificity, she develops a hierarchy of categories, describing them as basic, superordinate, or subordinate.

The middle of the hierarchy is called the basic level, and contains the categories most commonly used in everyday speech. This is because at the basic level, categories are maximally distinct, or minimizing perceived similarities across contrasting categories.  If I were to ask you what you are you sitting on,  you would respond “I’m sitting on a chair.”  The expected response is a category at the basic level, because you only need to specify that you are sitting on a chair and not a bed, or on a pencil, or floor.  My question does not imply a superordinate (I’m sitting on a piece of furniture) or subordinate (I’m sitting on an Ikea NOCHT chair) response, so a description like this would be inappropriate.  Descriptions at this basic level provide the maximum information while requiring the least cognitive ability.

Some points to take home from this discussion:

1) When you’re marketing items or selling a product, it’s important to keep the idea of the prototypical in mind. How similar is your product to the prototypical member of the same category? Companies are often in battle about being the most salient, and prototypical member of their product category. Coke versus Pepsi, Nike versus Reebok,  I’m not trying to tell you to be the same. But make sure you’re managing the space between your product and the main prototype. Are you marketing that difference enough? Often times, people don’t have the cognitive resources to develop such distinctions. You’ve got to know what your audience will consider a distinct item.

2) Know your audience’s basic level of categorization and account for their ability to make distinctions.  Every user population or target market has a level of knowledge they can apply to make distinctions between data items. This applies to you information architecture people. If you’re developing a site for cancer doctors, you can get into fine-grained distinctions. If you’re cataloging all types of diseases, on the other hand, your audience may not require every oncology term.

3) A follow up to point 2 is that cultural trends and movements in the marketplace often affect a psychological category. New products that enter the market are consistently shifting people’s ideas of everyday items. What is a computer versus a mobile device? The divide between them grows thinner with every new SmartPhone. What defines a green product? Standards are always changing. As you position yourself into the market, one needs to be painfully aware of how the majority of people view the prototypical example.

4) There are concepts that have a tricky time being categorized using any of the above theories. A commonly brought up objection is the concept of a “game”. Or what is an experience? Is there a basic level? I mean, we never talk about going outside to “experience the mall”. We say we’re going to meet up friends, or going shopping, or watching a movie. These are specific subordinate categories of expierneces that are all grouped within the “going to the mall” experience. This gives us license to be creative in category formation, to be inclusive of what range of products or services can be considered ‘your category’.

These points are just a small sampling of what can be taken away from Rosch’s ideas as well as the field of categorical researching in general. If you haven’t heard of Eleanor Rosch or her work, you can skim her early work to see how the field began, or read up on categorical reasoning research. I really enjoy the paper because it emphasizes the fact that we are cognitively limited in absorbing all the stimulus out there in the world, and that categorical reasoning is one of many mental apparati which helps us act in the world without needing extensive resources. Her theory confirms our intuitions about how we label objects in the world, create conceptual categories, and navigate our symbolic landscape, and reminds us of the power a prototype can have in definining a niche.

Last month, researchers at MIT unveiled exciting new research developments in gestural interfaces at the TED conference in LongBeach (you can see the video here). In her presentation to the conference, Patti Maes (of MIT) demonstrates a device which reads visual information from the physical environment and uses a projector to create an interface along any surface. This interface is a touchable, interactive display which brings up information about (potentially) any physical item. Representing a quantum leap in the bridge between the physical and virtual worlds, this device has caused professionals and tech-geeks alike to created quite a media buzz. But is such a device more hype than delivery?

The user interface shown at TED is an impressive breakthrough in user interface technology; I do not question that. However, when the presentation emphasizes the point that the device could enter the market at an affordable price of $300 they liken themselves to Microsoft and Steven Spielberg who have visions of making this technology ubiquitous.

Does this device stand a chance of spreading throughout technology markets?

Consumer audiences have been fascinated with gestural interfaces ever since Tom Cruise manipulated a (not so) hyper-futuristic computer database with his fingers in the movie Minority Report. They have also been quick to adopt touch-screen interfaces, which have been integrated into bank tellers, check-out stands, and the ever-popular touchscreen mobile phone (iPhone).

However, they have also been quick to grow frustrated at such technology. Electronic signature pads continue to elude many people, and I am not the only person who grew frustrated at the iPhone touchpad keyboard. A similar technology to that unveiled at TED is the projection keyboard (pictured), which has been available for several years but remains unused and unadopted by the market.

My point of contention is this: the device like many other gestural interfaces provide no tactile feedback in using the device. Taking a cognitive psychologists point-of-view (ignoring all the privacy and moral issues of making technology ubiquitous for a moment), I believe this to be a crucial limitation to the device. I will state my bias here: I like my Android G1 smartphone much more than my iPhone because I make virtually no errors on the keypad where the iPhone touchpad was a consistent source of frustration. However, I still assert that this aspect of our cognitive apparatus is integral to human tool use. Can a tool be used effectively when it cannot be felt and grasped?

Our sense of causation and agency is rooted in tactile feedback. Humans are accustomed to a mode of acting in the world, where a physical state change (a key being clicked, a ball being pushed) creates some reaction. Many of these futuristic devices suffer from feedback issues inherent in a device the lacks this tactile mechanism. A user may move or make a gesture, interacting with the device, and perhaps nothing is registered and the state does not change. In these situations, people don’t know whether it is a limitation of their gesture (an incorrect input) or if the system is not configured or designed properly. Physical feedback removes ambiguity by acknowledging user input, putting the burden on the device. It can act as a reliable source of feedback for the user in any device.

There are many more questions regarding whether the market can bear another leap in user interface development. Let’s just say I have my skepticisms.