Joe Leech | UX, Psychology and your Product | UI Special, CSS Day 2019

hi everybody how you how you're doing I love the way psychology of designers I don't study the psychology of how designers are it's psychology for designers anyway before I start do you mind do you mind if I take a quick photo of you all because my mum doesn't quite believe what I do and I'm like you're going to Amsterdam to do what and I'm like yeah mom look right so can you'll get in you will in yeah there we go good shots thank you everybody thank you very much right okay so a quick show of hands then so hands up if you have a fact you know we should give a round of applause so far tour organizers sorrow PPK they've done a great job so far tonight this is a great conference and I'm having a lovely time so thank you everybody so far it's been great okay show of hands so hands in the air have you ever bought anything on eBay before hands up we've done that before yeah have you ever bought a train ticket in the UK yep done that before online yet ever booked a hotel through Marriott or maybe Ritz Carlton high rollers hotels calm people like there okay every search of princesses on Disney V view in here right so pretty much everybody in this room is used something that I've designed over the last sort of 14 15 years or so so um I I'm going to talk to you today about psychology is sarah said my backgrounds in neuroscience it started with me with a book alright as these things always do my mother is a psychologist all right just let that sink in for a second imagine if your mother was a psychologist as you were growing up anyway for me it was a lot of IQ tests as I was growing up my sister's got a score two points higher than me which is some source of resentment to this day anyway for me it didn't quite understand the psychology thing and tell us about 15 years old and I found this book on my mother's bookshelf and I suddenly thought yes here we go 15 year-old boy here is the manual the secret hidden manual to people all right more specifically I thought to teenage girls I had a disco coming up I thought I'd try this book how do you think that went the perfect outlines how to read a person like a book reading body language honestly is the hardest most challenging thing I've ever done is trying to look at people and took them and understand what they were doing and basically it was an important lesson for me in terms of psychology it told me that anything you read in a book when it hits the real world it doesn't quite always work and so today I'm going to talk to you about a lot of psychology and about how we humans are a funny bunch of people how we interact weirdly do strange things do unusual things have weird behavior but I'm also going to talk to you about framework that we could all use today to design both interactions as a lot of stuff we talked about today like buttons and search boxes the real nuts and bolts of stuff but also how to use psychology to design big transformative user experiences so how to take simple psychology of how we all think and scale it up and design fantastic products going forward I started pretty much from doing this kind of stuff which was used of research in UX about 14 years ago I hear this quite a lot heard this and use a research the punch list website in the face heard this quite a lot and here specifically what I do now is I coach and I mentor product team so people like yourselves to do the right things in the right order for the right reasons help you manage stakeholders help you manage users requirements so you're doing building the right stuff that's what I do these days I wrote a book it's good anybody bought my book so I need only $3.00 right those who bought it did you read it not I really care a lot of people buy it cuz it's $3.00 don't feel like you have to read it's quite sure my favorite review of my book is it's wonderfully short bit like me I've also was technically difficult for three there's a new book just come out for books from slight point on user experience he's all basically about getting you up to speed quickly on user experience skills like analytics forms prototyping there's one user research you read these in the weekend come in on Monday morning you can do some great work alright so let's talk then about psychology so I mentioned that book earlier on that I read I then subsequent I study neuroscience a few years ago and they also have a master's in human-computer interaction to HCI that about four years ago I feel old now I'm gonna talk to you a lot about what I learned on my psychology studies and all of that psychology that I've applied over the last 14 years but some of the people I just mentioned and give you some tips about how to do it and things to watch out for which is where I'm gonna start all right part zero this is my one and only nod to you technical folks as I started with zero rather than one I stopped doing HTML when you stopped having two clothes line break tag so we haven't a clothes line break tags inside it that's when I stopped doing HTML which is a long time ago anyway question for you October 2011 Dubai police noted a 20% drop in car accidents in Abu Dhabi it was 40 percent why what happened in October 2011 come on cast your minds back it was a big deal why did this happen do you think nope it was not women allowed to being allowed to drive and believe I'm repeating that one back nothing like that no here is what happened in 2011 remember blackberry the BlackBerry service went out for about 48 hours this is the start of their demise car accidents went down when the black free service also went down what does that tell you about humans well we all know we're stupid that's fairly obvious what does that tell us specifically about what we're doing in our lives wait we're back see voice of Holland what is the number one thing people are doing when they watching voice of Holland here in Amsterdam do you know what they ask this in the UK people like having a cup of D texting yes the biggest thing that people are doing when they're watching TV something like half of all smartphone and tablet users use these devices while watching TV yeah you must be all the same true you're probably doing it now aren't you stop doing that now concert on me yeah what does that tell us about the apps and the websites we're designing for mobile devices and iPads these days Oh have our users got 100% full attention on our apps of course not hopefully they're not driving without using our apps at the very least unless you're designing but that's what's going on is people have not got full attention on the stuff we're designing okay well there's wonderful interactions you've seen today great when you're sat here with a hundred percent full focus on that so if you get that's brilliant but again if you're watching the voice of Holland while this stuff's going on you've not got full attention to what's going on really common and I see this a lot in the user research that I do and this is a gentleman called Clifford Nass whose fantastic cognitive psychologists very very smart chap neuroscientist and he he's done a lot of research on multitasking sadly passed away a few years ago but he's very entertaining man the research is almost unanimous it says that people who chronically multitask so an enormous range of cognitive deficits okay so anybody out here like to listen to podcasts while doing work yeah you were a lot better everybody's got a lot better and knows this stuff these days we humans think we're good at multitasking like driving and checking our blackberry messenger or watching the voice of Holland while taking out our car insurance the reality is is we are really bad at multitasking we do both things worse than if we were doing them individually all right we think we're good at it we're not all right so again put your cell phones down folks joking right so the first thing we talked about that was distraction this is going on people are utterly distracted when they're using our stuff all the time all right if we're designing our insurance sites our banking sites people are booking holidays they're almost certainly doing something else whilst they're using your stuff other things that are going on I'm tired I've had a hard day I hear this a lot when I've done a lot of work in insurance I really find banking in money stuff really fascinating here's some research user research I did on them some insurance products the last thing I want to do is my car insurance okay watch this piece of user research with 20 people designing stuff for many supermarkets it's a big insurance company in the UK everybody's shoulders just deflated when they heard this but this is the actual truth of a lot of the products that we're working on people don't want to do it their motivation is severely low when you think what psychology can you use for motivation now if any of you thought immediately Maslow's hierarchy you come across this Maslow's hierarchy of need quite famous psychology what's the problem with Maslow's hierarchy of need absolute rubbish okay as Brad would say obviously it's certainly much more in America but there's no clear evidence for Maslow okay back to that book that I told you at the start of this stuff just because you've read about it on the internet or a creative director wearing a pair of Crocs and some glasses puts this into a pitch from your agency it does not make it true all right there's no evidence for this stuff this is classic psychology bullsh it's a myth I've written about a few of these things as well okay let's probably up to some of you recognize myers-briggs hate the thing left-brained or right-brained ah Miller's number seven plus or minus two all of this these are psychology myths okay be careful what you read about psychology because what people tell you about psychology cetme obviously not all of it is true here's some good stuff if you are interested in in motivation this is a fantastic model by BJ Fogg looking at how to get people to do stuff online brilliant I'm not going to talk about it now more reading for later I used to be a school teacher so I will check your homework please do read this and again back to this people motivation is extraordinarily hard for people people wanting to do the stuff we want them to do this seems mathematical it's like not but this formula can help you get to the root of what motivation is motivation is an incredible problem with when it comes to user research and people using the stuff we're doing so motivations hard alright let's talk about Jam shall we you have Jam in Holland I thought asleep that was a joke here's a study that was done in the United States of America they did they set up a stall in a farmers market every Saturday one Saturday they sold six types of juice in the top corn so don't forget it six types of jam one Saturday this next Saturday thirty types of Jam six the following Saturday thirty the next Saturday which of the two experimental conditions six or thirty types of Jan when users were offered that choice did they sell more Jam you're good you're good clever people right now also is part of this I mean this is the clever bit of this study they also undertook a survey and they asked people would you prefer to choose between six types of jam or thirty types of Jam unanimously pretty much what did the survey come back as yeah see you're smart people what does that tell us about choice people want choice but they're not they can't deal with lots of choice all right that's a reason to stop using surveys to get user responses okay people respond in talking Steph mentioned it earlier on I have to choose more stuff that can often come from surveys it's not brilliant people are not very good at reporting back their own behavior right this study perfectly sums that one up all right let's talk to you about how to solve that because I'm here to help solve problems as well this is the best piece of psychology I've ever come across I'll tell you why in a second so I'm taking to respond versus number of options it's a perfect linear time there okay the time it takes two users to choose from a choice of thirty or six if there's less choices they take less time to do it okay simple stuff this is called Hicks law this is brilliant look mathematics at the top there they know what that means don't really care looks really impressive but that's not the best thing about Hicks law what's the best thing about Hicks law when you're deciding how many things to show on a page what's the best thing about Hicks law you pulled that out in a meeting it's a law you lay that thing down and amou things like Hicks law tells us to do this people like you okay choices made seamless stakeholders like alright the law the law Hicks law was a fantastic piece of psychology fit to helping you decide how many options to offer in choice less is always more Hicks was a great great great piece of psychology all this stuff leads up to what you've probably heard and read about is a thing called cognitive load okay too many choices too much thinking too much reasoning too much deciding too much distraction not enough motivation or have a massive impact on cognitive load all of these three things dramatically have a strong impact on cognitive load and all of this leads to this stuff well you just get frustrated because usability or something is very difficult to use because they're not 100% focused on what you're doing okay let's do a choice they're distracted they're not motivated it means that getting through a challenging interaction is really really hard so what I'm going to help you with now they're gonna give you a little psychology framework to design better interactions this is part one if you've been counting or part two if you a normal computing counter normal counter like me sorry your drink okay let's talk about this website you know this website recognize this this is Wikipedia from about 2010 its we Reese Witherspoon's birthday that's a special reason she's a featured on the front and the page here that's not relevant that can tell you that there's one there's quite a few UX usability problems on this page here is one particular one over here look at this little bad boy over here I'll search look at that oh now instinctively we know this is bad don't we're looking at this going that that's that's bad that's on Wikipedia okay so still huge millions and tens of millions hundreds of millions of people are using this every day and struggling with that thing there so to to deal with this and to figure out why cuz we all know that's bad what psychology can help us do it to framework and describe why it's bad so let's talk about the points of the compass so I'm not very good at Reming the points of the compass north and south that's easy I can do that bear that is that right how do you remember them points of a compass your English you'll know this one never eat shredded wheat America say never eat soggy waffles is there a Dutch equivalent now you're just good remembering things and Holland aren't you German any Germans in the house anybody German ones French there's a few of these Australians talk about them lots of languages have what called mnemonics to help you remember the points of a compass okay never eat shredded we each steps that one reminds you of step two reminds you of step three reminds you of step four okay this is a mnemonic this is how new monix work remembering individually the names of each point of the compass this is called declarative knowledge okay it's hard going back to our friend Wikipedia here what wait remember the difference between those two buttons is declarative knowledge what do they do what happens if you type in Reese Witherspoon and hit go goes to her page ones idiots you type in Reese Witherspoon hit search it's a list of all of a page it's like Legally Blonde Wong Lee blonde to anybody no need Reese Witherspoon's do you get that you get the point so what this allows us to do what declarative knowledge can help us do is to understand and to figure out we're not very good at this stuff humans are not very good at remembering facts ok what's the capital of Uganda Kampala yeah that is declarative knowledge that's remembering a fact facts hard for us humans to do for us to remember which is why we create mnemonics like never eat shredded wheat to help us put a framework around what we remember okay so facts are difficult sequences what we call procedural knowledge is much much easier this is how our brain is wired Steph talked about some of this stuff earlier because we've got a context around how we stick put memories together one of the ways we do this is encoding stuff with procedural knowledge which is a process or a flow of steps step one helps us remember step two step three step four and so on each step helps us with the next step helps us with the next step happens for the next step this is procedural this is how we humans are wired okay we are good at procedural knowledge we are bad at the clarity of knowledge except one very important group of people who are good at declarative knowledge which group of humans are very good at remembering facts computer scientists I hear you say yes so lots of us in this room are probably thinking well I know either I'm really good at facts I can remember everything we are slightly different to the normal part of society most humans that I all that effectively sound that bad most of us have much better at remembering sequences of stuff okay we've been taught through our whole education and our jobs to remember the names of things okay I can't remember if it's font wait was it text wait to put things in bold and CSS icon number for the life of me that's declarative knowledge is remembering which one of those it is right us humans are not very good at it unless we do it's part of our job we have to remember lots of stuff our education teaches us memory skills we are much better at being a declarative than we are procedural but most people find procedural knowledge much easier let's take an example of this in practice here is two slightly out of date phone and locking systems here we've got iPhone on the right which you have to remember a number and you've got Android on the you're right to remember the shape left and right how'd you move which ones you know when you're screwing in a screw how do you member which way to turn it left lefty-loosey righty-tighty that's another mnemonic remembering which way to turn a screw lefty loosy right that's remember that it's really useful this is gonna stay with you lefty loosey righty tighty okay that's declarative lines we're using it were converting it into procedural engine helping us remember it's part of a pneumonic okay so I win that with a pattern over here one of these is more declarative and one of these is more procedural iPhone is that declarative or procedural knowledge having to remember a number declarative very good the shape declarative or procedural it's procedurally step one helps you remember step two step three step four Step five step six interestingly knowing about procedural which what's the most common Pascal or what there's no common shape on our Android was it start 95% they start and Holland in the UK top left why reading we're taught to read that way and again understanding procedure ID can help us understand how this stuff is flawed and break through security all right we're predictable as humans okay the psychology of procedural it teaches us how to predict what codes people will put in what happens after a while yeah this is declarative remembering the number for your screen what happens after a while in a knocking your phone with the number if you remember those days you're good in it weren't you what does it become over time declarative knowledge becomes procedural you remember your number always the most common unlock code on those phones one two three four it becomes procedural as us humans converting declarative knowledge into procedural declarative knowledge is hard as soon as we put more cognitive load on I use there we try and convert it to procedural knowledge because we are distracted we're tired we're not motivated become be bothered to learn a complex security number so we just convert it to procedural knowledge to make it easy for us to use it and remember it in the future okay that's classic procedural edge to help understand what went wrong here right so back to Wikipedia they desire they redesigned the search box course they it's horrific let's talk about the procedure lines flow what's the procedural knowledge flow of a search box where should it be on a classic desktop site come on on this page where should it be move to top right or the top top right exactly right instinctively you knew that all right that's step one that's where it should live right step one in procedure on step two is what are you looking for when you're looking for a search box a box yeah okay so step two as you look for a box what do you do when you see a box you type into it you can't help you like you have to see seen an empty text box you have to type something in it we are programmed to do that okay that's classic procedural knowledge all right what's step three we hit a button don't wait yeah okay right big tip for you don't take the button out all right put a button in what happens if you remove the button what do you break you break the procedural is where's the button gone oh I can just press ENTER who just presses enter to submit form apart from everybody in this room everybody in the real world doesn't know you can press ENTER to submit a form they don't know all right they're taking their fingers off they're just missing the keyboard they're pressing the button they're doing this they're taking the fingers on the trackpad and doing this that's what they do in the real world all right all right we got two buttons here instinctively which is the better one think about procedural which one's the best one what's the what's the problem when the magnifying glass icon as many can you be 100% sure so think about it maybe a billion people use Wikipedia can you be sure all 1 billion people know what that icon means no you can't can you be sure they want to read the words such probably if they're using Wikipedia they can read hopefully I'm getting the whole world you are going to step up write problems with the magnifying glass this is Microsoft Word this is the current version of Microsoft Word for Mac there is the problem with a magnifying glass right there all right okay you cannot rely on icons alone to communicate meaning you cannot do it because look they using the icon twice within a few centimeters of each other for two different things it's exactly the same icon well its inverted in colors anyway that's the problem with icons in one screenshot right there alright don't use them on their own so yeah this is the best one that up there search empty search box search button that's what classically if we can refer to as a design axiom and that seems a useful word to use to describe this stuff it's a statement of proposition which is regarded as being established accepted or self-evidently true okay can you be 100% sure every single user gets this all right different from a design pattern that I'm patent is a way of doing something design axiom is the way you can be sure that people gonna be able to get through and do that alright try and include this in your conversations you're talking about UI elements it'll help frame the conversations if people understand this stuff or not alright let's keep going oh hey ho hamburger menu is this a design axiom is this 100 percent understood by people we wish it were but it certainly is not ladies and gentlemen it's really really not no this is not the start of a procedure on this journey if you're looking to change the language on the website buy tickets from museum do this certain the other this is not the natural place to start for doing that stuff alright I left Hamburg this is something I got was quite pixelated this picture I took of my club card piece of paper that came in the post it's got hamburger menu on it I just love that it's on paper I just think I love her left a bit of that muesli when they talked about that oh sorry forward-thinking putting a hamburger oh yeah anyway I was lucky enough to work for the Museum of Modern Art in New York this is a gig I did a couple of years ago well mean heritage we start like this is what we start with minimalist okay art people love minimalism they're like we don't want too much stuff on there but we want to sell more tickets we want to reduce the lines of people queuing outside the moment okay we can help that quite quickly what's the one thing we did to sell more tickets online and reduce the keys before people arrived what do we get rid of which of these two is going to perform better you don't need maybe tests to tell you do you which one's going to perform better yeah of course it is all right stop hiding stuff away in hamburger menus just because it's cleaner all right it's not how good design works okay you're confusing art and design MoMA did we talked about it it's cool now this is the place we went to again we're not much bigger uplifting people going to exhibits and events we had a bigger uplifting people buying stuff from the store all of the stuff was really positive in terms of just showing what they did rather than hiding it away all right this stuff works better you can hide stuff of course in the air menu we call that stakeholder debt so nobody finds it useful it alert therefore you're back to Wikipedia so round of applause ready for this I'm gonna build some tension here Wikipedia relaunch they redesign their search interface all right they redesigned their search interface commenting on building attention for something was launched like nine years ago do wanna see what they did is what they did ah it's better isn't it's better so on the top right yeah they've got rid of the go buttons there's no declarative knowledge remembering which ones that which ones which the button all right we'll forgive them on the button because it's a lot better than it was before but it's better than it was before isn't it I mean come on yeah it is better all right all right well we can be mostly Connor still the same one they've got to this day by the way what happens to existing Wikipedia users did they like this change no oh there's outrage beautifully the designers won't wrote one of these wonderful blog posts our creative process in redesigning the search page and it just got just trolled to death by the Wikipedia users why why did people react to this badly why we broke their existing procedural knowledge flow they were used to go into the bottom left they were used to having the Go button to get to Reese Witherspoon's page they were used to having that choice there they had built up a perceived knowledge flow on Wikipedia but they've been using day-in day-out George Schultz is an editor at Wikipedia he edits like hundreds of documents a week he hates it because it broke his existing procedural knowledge flow okay this is a useful lesson to all of you when you change things in your app all right even if it's better far better and your user research is great nobody loves it your existing users will still hate it all right one of the biggest jobs I do I I act as a kind of people call me when stuff goes wrong on that site so then relaunch something and it just goes south it goes horrible what it's about to go south leading to a big site it goes horrible I've worked in a couple of big high-profile ones in the UK when they've relaunched and it's gone badly for a big supermarket where it's on one last year relaunched it went badly why this okay because they change so much in one go people the existing procedure knowledge photos of how and the last site they had before was all for the usability of their whole online supermarket befores all for the new one was much better but if you're buying your groceries every week from the same grocery store it's really really difficult to use okay when it's early--you they change even it's better for new people existing people will hate it and you'll get loads of press coverage and it'll be awful alright change is difficult people always hate change again with your CDs stakeholders tell them the wikipedia story and they'll feel better about it Oh a little help with that by the way ebay bit of a myth eBay I'm not sure if it's chilling on eBay in their early days used to have a yellow lemon a yellow background they changed it one day for white about the same time as they got some early funding and all the original wiki Bay users were like oh my golly Bay you've gone from beautiful yellow to plain whites you've gotten so corporate we hate it eBay relented changed it back never change you back but one clever developer wrote a tiny bit of code over the incremental period of about three months changed it little bit from white to yellow over the course of about three months did anybody notice to change no all right maybe that's a myth maybe it's not it's an interesting story but it tells us what to do about change small incremental change over a period of time people accepting big changes people don't like very much oh how we will do in everybody so I've just given you a bit of a framework there to design user experience phases okay think about procedure knowledge flow step one step two step three step four design your interactions bit by bit by bit by bit and and by the way don't you eye is not the place to innovate classic interactions like navigation search boxes all that stuff is not the place to run your innovations okay you need to get people through those interactions as quickly as possible do the really interesting stuff on your site okay basically do what everybody else does and you'll be okay thank you very much good no just just joking that sounds really boring a really dull but when it comes to interactions do that all right but let's talk about big stuff let's talk about innovation using psychology to change the user experience a big level all right feel free to have a little sip of drink now because this stuff's gonna yes I can feel my mouth I texted my mum that picture I can feel she just texted me back that's good to know all right then so let's talk about innovation and then we can talk to start talking about that in terms of cafes this is a wonderful cafe in Paris it could be actually be any cafe in Amsterdam as well how do you order a coffee here what do you do what the steps you go through that are meet with a friend what you're gonna do what's the first thing you do at a cafe like this what's the first thing you did it's a clue there's a big clue when you're dressed in black and white to tell you what to do yet you either ask to be seated you go and take a seat don't you right go and take a seat what happens next after you've taken a seat what happens next waiter comes to you chapter 10 she said what would you like sir will they bring the menu I'd like a coffee please okay what happens next caught me waits coffee comes to you drink your coffee hardly what happens next when you finished your coffee well the bill please waiter waiter brings the bill to pay for the bill didn't change anyway you basically that's it that's in essence that's how a cafe works here Samy Amsterdam and Italy the same way you're all very familiar with using cafes like this what's the big problem here a lot of Americans a lot of Brits walk away from this cafe without paying why why we dishonest people brexit notwithstanding sorry company buddy mention that I'm sorry edit that one out the transcript please we're light on this we've all learned to drink coffee in this place which is Starbucks right how do you order a coffee in Starbucks are you don't I love that yes it's overcooked horrible stuff yes it is all right how do you order cup a coffee like drink in Starbucks you go in what's the first thing you do you queue up and you pay first of all I mean maybe mentally but you queue up what do you do you order your coffee I'm a coffee please then what you do you pay then what you do click call your name you click you're going take your coffee you go and sit down you drink your coffee ok you pay before you do it this is your mental model and this is how Brits Americans have learned to order coffee we expect to pay when we order the coffee so we come an account and go to someone like this our mental model is all screwed up we're used to a mental of how a Starbucks works and we apply it to a cafe thinking oh it'll be the same thing and again it doesn't quite work like that all right which is why we expect to give our many when we bought a coffee which is why we think we've paid and we leave you if we paid yeah that sort of stuff happens in these kinds of places wheeler and this is basically this is what we psychology is called a mental model and we build mental models of the world around us to help us understand new and novel situations so go Oh coffee shop model go into the next coffee shop oh it's a coffee shop modeling and apply that same one you can take a hotel model you apply it to the new hotel you take an elevator or a lift model you apply it to the next lift or elevator you're in we all do this stuff ok it's like procedure on a really large scale we take models of the world around us in our heads we map the situation we apply it to new situations to reduce the cognitive load to make things easier for us to remember all right classic example of this is have you ever moved house before you've done that haven't you ever ever left work or school and absent-minded before you know it you're like mostly at your old house ever been that situation oh I don't live here anymore I live that's mental models at work ok because many mothers our subconscious you're not aware of the fact you're doing it you think I'm on my way home think about we can have a dinner what your boss said to you you're not thinking about you're going on what you're doing because again subconscious thought lower cognitive load mental mother's helped us reduce cognitive loads help us to stop thinking and help us be able to do other things at the same time this stuff's really powerful because it doesn't act at a conscious level all right let's do it digitally example of one of these let's do a product based on this so going away for the weekend you've all been on holiday for the weekend okay I've done loads of use of research on this now let's break it down into what how people plan holidays away really quickly so you decide what kind of holiday you can do let's do a beach city ski that's Amsterdam I think spa you'll decide on what type of holiday it's gonna be I fancy a bit of culture maybe Museum or I fancy relaxing on the beach maybe some skiing you decide what type of holiday you're gonna you're gonna do at one of these for you decide when you're gonna go you think well maybe I'll go for weekend in May yeah it sounds good maybe the third or the third first of a third weekend be a we've got that wedding on the second weekend then we've got oh let's take a long weekend what's what's a Dutch long weekend look like what days long we can start here what's that Tuesday - Tuesday yeah Thursday to Sunday Friday to Monday long weekends there's no ice so definition of a long weekend it doesn't simply doesn't exist okay a long weekend differs depending on where you are from in the world all that kind of stuff okay if you in New York City a long weekend starts about Saturday evening lasts till Sunday morning you kinda get the point they're different in different countries for different cultures okay so a long weekend is different all right do you want to go away if it's you and your partner and your friend you want to go away in the school holiday school vacation time No why not expensive full of kids I've got kids so I understand it's expensive it's you don't want to travel with kids if you don't have to its expense to me it's you want to know when holidays are so you tend to avoid holidays if it's a weekend away a romantic weekend away you'll avoid holidays school holidays for that all right where what how we only go road for the weekend what do we say - we say should we go do you fancy going 500-mile ah meters or 800 kilometers oh what's that how do we decide in distance terms about how far to go away on holiday duration do we favor I fly for two hours three hours drive for two hours three hours that's how we define distance when it comes to travel comes to travel and travel companies all right dry fly or train this is this is the mental model of how we book a vacation or holiday away okay pretty simple stuff all right you've all seen this before you'll recognize this as a conversation you've had with a partner about going away for the weekend all right so this is might be the output let's go to the beach fly maybe three hours on the first or the third week in May okay that's a mental model roughly of how you want to book a holiday okay this is how I want to book a holiday in the old days you go into travel agent and say this okay what happens when this hits the reality of modern travel websites how sorry if you work for Expedia I do apologize I have worked with Expedia before what happens when this hits does this support that mental model in any in any way what's the problem with things like we got stuff like here DeeDee almost fell off the stage then nobody been funny DeeDee mmm why why why what's the problem with that if you were trying to put a long weekend in does that work it's fixed do you often know what a long weekend might be or maybe we'll take the Monday off maybe take the Friday off not sure let's see what prices come back there's no flexibility there whatsoever about a long weekend what about going to the beach I mean nothing nothing says holiday or vacation more than city or Airport does it ah yes it's your Airport I can just feel the Rays of the Sun on my face right now no all right there's nothing there helping you decide where to go there's nothing about beach holidays there's nothing about maybe the first of the third weekend in May is very fixed dates there's nothing about this distance how do you know three stuff it's three hours away from Amsterdam how you gonna find that from here you'll know all right interestingly they introduced things to do which I loved up there so oh yeah they've done things to do things to do Oh enter a city name or an attraction come on Expedia please come on there's nothing in here helping you to do this at the top there's nothing there that's helping you do it so we can use mental models we've got a mental model like this one at the top we can use the mental model to evaluate how our product or our competitors product is performing okay we don't care about the search buttons here again from a procedure knowledge flow point of view this is really good if you look at the procedure on for ent details search if I go look I'm searching for a holiday here on this page I know what I've got to do yeah to adults kids this is great procedural knowledge wise very well-put-together from a UI point of view extremely well-put-together very optimized very well done in terms of a procedural knowledge flow very you know good well done Expedia for that but when it comes to something new or innovative or different in terms of what they're trying to do it's not here it's not matching our mental models of how we book travel in the real world they are missing a trick if you ever want to get involved in a travel start up do that at the top if you're trying to innovate your product ahead of your competitors find the mental model and design to that so you can evaluate immediately how well your competitors are doing oh yeah or your own product is doing oh yeah we're valuating it great from the procedural point of view it's fantastic from a mental model point of view however our experience could be a lot better than it is so mental ones are evaluative okay you can take them but you can also generate new ideas from it all right any ideas how would you design a travel website to help you choose stuff that's three hours away from you in Amsterdam what would you what would you put in the UI layer on the front of the page a map map showing what sir concentric circles with hours away from where you are oh I put in Amsterdam I see concentric circles two hours drive three hours drive four where else drive the same with flights suddenly you've got a huge world of choices about where you can go you're helping people understand how to book stuff you'll get into them earlier in their decision-making process and like Expedia right there at the end when you've made all the decisions if you is your innovative product can get there earlier in that lifecycle you're going to get them before Expedia gets them Expedia I'm not helping you unless you know exactly what you want your products can do that sort of stuff mental models can help you generate new in it of ideas use them they're great how we will do in folks all right then so I've cut I just talk to you then about two very different new uses of psychology user experience through mental models to really truly transform and send your product into new and innovative spaces I've talked about procedural knowledge flows as ways of redesigning and redefining your user interface the steps you go through to a very very basic interaction okay I've talked about how to innovate and how to get people through a really challenging and difficult interaction up front psychology can really help you as designers and product managers to define exactly what's going on so you take one thing away from today know that never eat shredded wheat it's the thing to take away from today just joking don't take that just that way from today think about in these terms so designer a product manager a developer who doesn't understand psychology is going to be no more successful than an architect who doesn't understand physics this building beautiful but it will never work it seems true if your products and if you understand how humans think behave view the world when walls of the world your product is not going to be successful you could hire me that would help but in this world you've got to understand how psychology works to really truly understand how your users work to get this through this stuff in the future this fits into a tweet picture as well if you want to take it with me in it come on this is my social media strategy right here take it if you want anyway and stay in touch everybody and these are my details drop me a line might slides a video of this talk is at that address there find me on Twitter drop me an email if you've got any questions about this do you want to work with me on stuff my website's got loads of resources on all of this stuff I my books pretty good too so thank you very much for your time everybody thank you Joe so first of all that was amazing oh thanks oh I'm very much into practical kind of stuff and I really loved how you showed the problem with the website and then you combine it with all of the psychology concepts that you were talking about and then we were able to literally solve the problem by combining those two things together so do you like what do you recommend or us as designers or as developers if we want to learn more about this kind of stuff and more specifically combining be practical with the psychological where can we learn all about that it's a good book out there and I'm just joking and the thing to do this this a lot of it seems quite obvious when I'm putting together and talking about it like here the thing to do is to do you user research and to watch out for and look for procedural knowledge in terms of way people in approach interactions if they're doing something on your website watch how they use it put together procedural flow based on user experience if you've got tools like hot jar or tree jack or stuff that records user sessions watch the user sessions to understand the procedure lines flow that people are trying to use through your site trying to understand what's going on through user research and any screen recordings you've got of your users using your site you can see what your perceive already is probably breaking down the user research can help you find what the procedure knowledge should be for each of the interactions you're looking at when it comes to mental models though the best kind of research is out in the wild so going into people's homes into people's workplaces the stuff I showed you there around the mental model of booking a holiday I did that by going into people's homes and sitting with them while they booked a holiday listening in the conversations that they have as families about booking a holiday away noting down all the conversations they have outside of any interactions or any products a Steph talked about earlier on a wider context of what people are going and understanding will help you define and understand what that mental model is and give you those clues as to how to innovate and jump ahead of your competition ok but well as a freelancer I've gotten to work with a few clients and sometimes those clients they don't they don't prioritize the budget or the time to do that kind of user research so what what can we do in that case I mean I think Jared Jared talks about this really actually I mean the thing to talk about is not the user research itself but the outcomes you're going to get from doing it so if you talk about that mental model it's about attaching either a KPI or a monetary value to the work that you're going to do so a lot of organizations will want to talk about being innovative and you said great let's be innovative we can look at boosting our bottom line by this amount of money or increase these kpi's by doing this work talking about it in terms of the structure of the business that you're trying to work with rather than saying we want to do user research which is expensive and time-consuming you base it around the results you're going to get off the back of it and you justify it based on the results to the final product rather than the tasks you've got to do to get there okay so just a quick question regarding icons you said not to use icons on their own and sometimes we absolutely need to so there is this this idea of progressive reduction what do you think about it so you start with the icon and the text and then Kenny is it safe to assume that the user is going to learn the meaning of those icons with time and then it's will be said would be safe for us to remove the words or possibly but possibly not if we're removing the words ourselves it shouldn't be our choice to do it so again I still struggle with the screwdriver to remember which way is left and right and I've been using an unscrewing thing so many years could have missed quoted me on that right anyway but the problem being is that I'm I know if I'm ever gonna get that right so as his design saying after knob which in about three months we're gonna in the UI remove those icons themselves that should be the users choice to do that stuff yes yes absolutely do it but don't expect us to be able to take the users on that journey on their behalf that's an excellent idea because the only time that I saw anyone talk about progressive reduction it was the designers decision to make the reduction not the users yeah excellent yeah thank you so much for the insights so thank you very much Sara thank you much [Applause]

Channel: Web Conferences Amsterdam

Views: 13,187

Rating: 4.875 out of 5

Keywords: ux, psychology, user centered design, product design, design

Id: MdwO6LhA4_4

Length: 45min 41sec (2741 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 16 2019