Understanding Technology through Design and Psychology
Understanding human psychology provides insights into the human-centered design: made by people for the people.
Without the right technical knowledge, we find ourselves alienated with technology. It need not be complicated; we don’t have to feel frustrated in dealing with the complexity of technology. Often times we are not at fault here, we may just simply be interacting with a poorly designed product. Before we delve into the topic further, I should clarify the use-case of the term product of which I intend to refer as a substitute for an abstract object made by the human mind. More elaborately, it is an artificial product of the mind.
Designed products tell a story, it reveals itself as you interact with it. There is a metaphysical element that should excite us, as the user, and not leave us with frustration and fear when interacting with these artificial products. After all, products are designed and dedicated to serving a purpose.
The element of the unknown should excite, and not daunt, us.
As someone who is into computers, technology has become more relevant to me — that also means that I have to be relevant to technology as well; that is, to know how to use technical languages and make sense with it. Computer science, in universities, does not guarantee your technical aptitude in writing C++ codes, or anything specific. Instead, it teaches you how to learn the mechanism behind new technologies more efficiently — the logic behind while-loops, for example. After all, you learn these languages in the order that you need them. And you interact with technology in the order that they are relevant to solving your problem. The goal is to think by design — which a term that I substitute for thinking algorithmically because algorithms are governed by intent and purpose which is akin to the mechanism of design [at least as I thought it is].
Human-centered design is a collaborative process; it hones the product from the perspective of its end users. There is a language that governs, not all, software systems and User Interface — those are implementations of a well-crafted design that hones itself from the understanding of its users. I intend this article to be useful on both ends: for the user and product designers. For the user, this article should serve as their grounds for interpreting the product more systematically. For product designers, on the other hand, it should serve as their basic understanding with the dictum of beginning with the user in mind.
The Story of Eric amid the Pandemic
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, our friend Eric needs to settle his finances to pay the bills — for electricity, water, WiFi, and groceries. He found that a government agency issued a memo for calamity loans online, so he looked into the website and navigated the whole thing. Sadly there were no clues where to find the link for his application — it was very frustrating for Eric because he is desperate to have his finances settled by the end of the month. The website’s interface is poorly designed. Whether it’s intended to be misleading or not is out of the frame of our analysis. Eric had spent an entire evening testing different possibilities “Maybe it’s in here, it must be somewhere”. He never found what he was looking for. When he told this story to me I could feel his frustration, the look of defeat.
This has happened to me, too. Whenever I use a new piece of technology to help me out on some difficulties I face when I’m coding, instead of helping me get rid of the problem at hand it unravels a series of problems at the expense of time.
How do I get things to work?
Whenever we interact with new technology, the product is coupled with a learning curve that instructs users how to manage them: it should do so effortlessly. More fundamentally, we operate the product through combinations of different actions.
On a high-level the steps are as follows:
- What is our goal? What is our plan?
- What combination of actions does the goal need to have?
- What happened? Did we execute the actions right? What went wrong?
Note that this is an iterative process of trial and error until we found the set of actions that solve our problem. Without a means for feedback, we are in a process of exhaustive search: we are lost in a recursive guessing game. Without constraints, the search space becomes unbearable it costs our time and effort. No wonder why it can be frustrating!
Well designed products should communicate to its user: it is a process of action-reaction. We engage in a dialogue between artificial entities; they should be responsive.
On our end as users, it is our responsibility to navigate the degrees of usefulness of some product, we shall begin with the goal in mind. For the designers, on the other hand, the orientation of the product to the world (its affordances) should be tailored with signifiers and enact a responsive feedback mechanism that interacts with the user. These are some elements of a well-crafted product.
The Machine Knows!
Machines are designed to execute some actions — they are tailored to do a task with precision. They do not know anything beyond their programs.
Let us examine a case where products have been responsive but lacks clarity when it executes feedback. Feedback has to be actionable but it also has to be clear and not ambiguous.
While in the case of Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute there was an element of exaggeration for comedy, it can happen in real life. Mishaps can be a result of a single design flaw in the system, in this case, the proximity guidance on where should we turn right.
The Gulf of Execution and the Gulf of Evaluation[1]
The American Cognitive Psychologist and UX researcher, Donald Arthur Norman introduced the idea that moderates our interaction with products: The Gulf of Execution [how it operates] and Gulf of Evaluation [what happened].
The theoretical foundation of which Norman introduced his conceptual model of interaction is rooted in the Information-Processing theory [2–3].
In the next section, we will develop our understanding of the cognitive process within the Information-Processing framework which shall suffice the necessary background to discuss the psychology of interaction with products.
A little dose of Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as “attention, language use, memory, perception, problem-solving, creativity, and thinking”[4]. The human Attitude is a triad of the Affect, Behavior, and Cognition [5]. In the interest of time, it is important to note that Cognition is a component of the human Attitude. The attitude is a psychological construct that characterizes a person [6].
Information Processing Theory equates the functioning of the human brain with that of a computer system. John William Atkinson & Richard Shiffrin is one of the most influential theorists in the Information-Processing model (1968) [7–8].
“We can correlate thinking with a computer program; the mind’s information storage capacity with the number of gigabytes available on a laptop; forgetting information with the delete key on a keyboard; recalling old information with an internet search engine; intellectually strategizing with using Microsoft tools, and finally making a decision with computer output” (Miller, 2016, p. 323) [7].
Stages of Interaction and levels of processing
Don Norman discussed the two parts of action namely the execution and evaluation. In the previous section, we introduced the concepts that moderates our interaction with technology (or products in general): Gulf of Execution and Gulf of Evaluation. In this section, given our knowledge with the Information-Processing framework, we will breakdown the Gulfs of Interaction and refine our understanding with the psychology of interaction.
Both execution and evaluation require an understanding of how the item works, and what kind of results it produces. The stages of execution are as follows: plan, specify, and perform. While the stages of evaluation are perceiving what happened in the world, tries to make sense of it (by interpreting it), and finally, comparing what happened with what was wanted [1–2].
The specific actions bridge the gap between what we would like to have done(our goals) and all possible physical actions to achieve those goals [2].
It is important to note that not all activity in these stages needs to be conscious e.g. goals may be subconscious, too. We can manifest modes of actions that adhere to an end while being blissfully unaware thereof. It is only when we come across something new or reach some impasse, some problem that disrupts the normal flow of activity, that conscious attention is required [2].
Things are designed to be used by people, and without a deep understanding of people, the designs are apt to be faulty, difficult to use, difficult to understand[2].
Our behavior is mostly subconscious[1–2, 9–11]. We form our subconscious behavior through our interaction with the world, namely our experiences that is formed over time [1,10–11]. For instance, I have learned to associate typing characters using my friend’s laptop without the need to consciously look at the letters on the keyboard because of my experiences in typing using my laptop and other sorts of QWERTY keyboards that I had used in the past. That has led me to input characters without putting too much conscious effort into looking at every letter on the keyboard.
Furthermore, conscious actions are a slow and labored task while subconscious actions rely upon our experiences with the world the patterns that we learned to recognize. The subconscious part that mechanizes modalities to form our behavior is also good at generalization. To illustrate this, given our learned behavior with typing in the QWERTY keyboard on laptop A, typing on the QWERTY keyboard on other laptops is done without too much effort on finding the keys for the right characters.
The designer should orient their product in such a way that benefits both a novice user of their product and an experienced user with the product (or features of their product). That is to say that a conceptual model of the product in the user’s mind has to be put forward in design[1–2].
Our interaction with the product can also be grouped with respect to the concepts of feedforward and feedback. Feedforward interaction corresponds to our part of the dialogue while the feedback is the result of our actions that are conveyed by the product[2]. The design elements that moderate feedforward interaction are signifiers, constraints, and mappings while feedback (the design element) and visibility moderates feedback (the response of the product). In both ends, conceptual models are at play [1–2]. I wrote an entry about this, the key takeaway with my article on design principles that I find relevant to this topic are as follows:
- Signifiers pertain to that which signifies an object e.g. symbols.
- Constraints determine ways of restricting the kind of user interaction that can take place at a given moment.
- Mapping refers to the relationship between controls and their effects on the world.
- The more visible functions are, the more likely users will be able to know what to do next.
- Feedback pertains to sending back information about what action has been done and what has been accomplished, allowing the person to continue with the activity.
If you are interested to check out a more elaborate discussion on this topic, I included the link to my article here as well.
Levels of processing
Don Norman expounded upon the idea of the regions that comprise the emotional system. Therein, Norman proposed that these [visceral, behavioral, and reflective] components influence our experience of the world [1–2].
The visceral level is responsible for the ingrained, automatic, and almost animalistic qualities of human emotion, which are almost entirely out of our control. This level of design refers to the perceptible qualities of the object and how they make the user/observer feel.
The behavioral level refers to the controlled aspects of human action, where we unconsciously analyze a situation so as to develop goal-directed strategies most likely to prove effective in the shortest time, or with the fewest actions, possible. More often referred to as usability, but the two terms essentially refer to the practical and functional aspects of a product or anything usable we are capable of using in our environment. Refers to how users carry out their activities, how quickly and accurately they can achieve their aims and objectives, how many errors the users make when carrying out certain tasks, and how well the product accommodates both skilled and inexperienced users.
The reflective level is, as Don Norman states, “…the home of reflection, of conscious thought, of learning of new concepts and generalizations about the world”.
“…considers the rationalization and intellectualization of a product. Can I tell a story about it? Does it appeal to my self-image, to my pride?” This is the highest level of emotional design; representing the conscious thought layer, where we consciously approach a design; weighing up its pros and cons, judging it according to our more nuanced and rational side, and extracting information to determine what it means to us as an individual.
Summary
In this article, we discussed the psychology of interaction under the framework of information processing theory which equates the processing of the human mind to that of a computer. Moreover, we discussed the primal features of interaction namely execution and evaluation which both require an understanding of the product. We further segmented these components to stages of processing which can also be refined from the feedforward and feedback perspective (note that this perspective is not different from the gulf of execution and the gulf of evaluation). The action that moderates feedforward interaction are those of planning, specifying, and performing towards the product while the actions that moderates feedback are those of preference, interpretation, and comparison. These modalities work akin to a dialogue that simultaneously communicates with the user. Finally, we gave the components of design principles that supplement each dimension of interaction.
I wrote this to expand my knowledge on the subject of design and psychology. I am not an expert in this area. I welcome your concerns and feedback. Thank you!
References
[1] Norman, D. A. (1988). The psychology of everyday things. Basic Books.
[2] Norman, D. A. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Doubleday.
[3] Interaction-Design Foundation (n.d.). The Glossary of Human-Computer Interaction. Retrieved from: https://www.interactiondesign.org/literature/book/the-glossary-of-human-computer-interaction/gulf-of-evaluation-and-gulf-of-execution
[4] “American Psychological Association (2013). Glossary of psychological terms”.
[5] Breckler, SJ (1984). “Empirical validation of affect, behavior, and cognition as distinct components of attitude”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 47 (6): 1191–1205. DOI:10.1037/0022–3514.47.6.1191. PMID 6527214.
[6] Perloff, Richard M. (2010). The dynamics of persuasion: communication and attitudes in the 21st century. New York: Routledge.
[7] Wikipedia contributors. (2020, May 20). Information processing theory. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:39, June 20, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Information_processing_theory&oldid=957744672
[8] Atkinson, R.C.; Shiffrin, R.M. (1968). Human Memory: A Proposed System and Its Control Processes. Psychology of Learning and Motivation. 2. pp. 89–195. DOI:10.1016/S0079–7421(08)60422–3. ISBN 9780125433020
[9] Helander, M. G., & Khalid, H. M. (2006). Affective and pleasurable design. Handbook of human factors and ergonomics, 3, 543–572.
[10] Norman, D. A. (2004), Emotional Design: Why Do We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, Basic Books, New York.
[11] Li, L. (2017, September). The Study on Human-Computer Interaction Design Based on the Users’ Subconscious Behavior. In IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (Vol. 242, №1, pp. 1–4).
