 I'll just yell and you guys can yell back at me and tell me if it's good or loud or what. Hi, yeah, thank you. OK, my name is Marissa Epstein, and I am a UX designer over at Lullabot, which I love. Maybe you've heard of us already, but Lullabot is a Drupal consultancy and we offer strategy, development, and of course design for some big brands like Sci-Fi and the Grammys. So today I want to talk to all of you about an approach for better understanding users using psychology so we can design for their brains. So by now I'm assuming that you're pretty oversaturated with the user experience doctrines, researching your audience to create personas and using big data for little details and having empathy for users. I'm teasing that, and I do not mean to knock UX. I obviously love it. But my point is to approach your design problems with a psychological perspective as well. Not meant to be a contradiction, but a supplement. Yes, we should not overgeneralize when talking about people, but it is essential to have a core understanding of the fundamentals of human perception, cognition, behavior, especially as this is relating to how humans function online. You guys can hear me? Is it good? OK, so to put this in context a little bit, I just want to look at the UX origin quickly. So user experience design is a term that was actually coined by a cognitive psychologist, Donald Norman, when he was over at Apple back in the 90s. If you aren't familiar with him, I love him, I would say he's a true UX teacher with tons of books and a very insightful perspective. So considering his background in cognitive psych, I think helps us see how we can utilize psychology as part of our own design practice. And it's a really great way to understand our users, their motivations, needs, tasks, and how they're really behaving and thinking. My favorite of all the books, by far, is design of everyday things. So in this book, he essentially writes that the principles of psychology will remain the same as will the design principles based on psychology. So I really love this idea of these timeless fundamentals because they're universal truths that are applying to everybody. So hopefully you can agree it's kind of important to think about. And I also think that approaching your design problems from this kind of psych background can add a lot of dimension to the UX team and as a result to the experiences you're creating. So hopefully you're convinced. And I encourage you to put on a psychologist hat as you solve your usability problems. And I'm excited to report that if you Google image search psychologist hat, you get a picture of a wizard. So thank God I checked. So my plan is to walk you through some of the fundamental errors, biases, and limits of your users. So we can hopefully be a little better equipped to design for them. And I'm gonna go through some of these fast, but I already put my slides online. So don't worry about scribbling. Now, I do hate to stand up here and dump on people, but we do need to be honest with ourselves. There are some things about our bodies, our minds, and our habits that really kind of suck. So I found this gift and I really just wanted to present this as my whole talk, but it's not long enough. But I think it makes my point perfectly. It's just titled users. So even smart people that we expect to know, better online just don't always get the water in the mouth. So I've gone ahead and totally old fashioned, you know how we used to make up personas with no research. I've made up two personas for you in the hopes of giving you a new perspective. So the first one is elderly Eleanor. This is my grandmother for being honest. If you wanna picture somebody that you know, think about someone that started experiencing computers first, maybe like pre Windows 98, but especially pre Google, they exist. I mean, just imagine trying to do anything in DOS. I know that putting this up here, some of the developers are laughing at me and they're just like command line, but this is terrifying. So you have no search engines, no customer support, no Siri, so if you need help with a mistake that is really too bad for you. And some of the mistakes are irreversible. So it's no wonder that some of these older users are a little more reserved when using technology, right? I mean, younger users like us are fearless for the most part because we've grown up with helpful, well-designed OS and these responsive sites in our pockets that have all the answers. But back to elderly Eleanor here. So she has a PC, she has an iPad that she reluctantly accepted as a gift and uses them well enough to get the information that she needs. She looks up the snow predictions in Maine and has, you know, connects with family. But she also holds her iPad like this when she uses Skype and she doesn't exactly understand where the camera is despite many conversations. And so I mean, if you saw the quote, it was like just don't, please don't explain it to me. So another example that I love is I ordered a replacement part for her on eBay for something that she assumed would just continue to stay broken forever. And she didn't understand where it was coming from. Like she didn't go to the store, why are they? Where's it? So yeah, so I admit this is not your standard user. This is an extreme case. So I wanna move on to our second persona, which I also stole right out of my family. Good old Average Joe is my father. So, sorry. I figured that's better than the Google image searches of like stock photos and stuff. So Average Joe is way more familiar with technology than Eleanor, yes. And he even tries new things sometimes. He tried one of the very first floppy disk cameras, if you remember that. And devices play a pretty big part in his daily routine, and a lot of times he's using more than one at once. And I have to say Joe is very smart. He's an architect. He owns his own business. I would consider him to be quite intelligent, but then he gets online and he really struggles. So part of this is maybe he's using his phone in the car. He uses it while he's supposed to be listening to his wife tell stories. And it's really easy for him to forget what he's doing and just give up quickly, hit a snag, and just think that that's the end. And so it can really be difficult. You should have seen us trying to set his Fitbit up. So I mean, you can just imagine with that story. So anyway, this second persona, along with a lot of us, really hate anything that can be interpreted as distracting to our goals. So even onboarding that we think is so helpful and fantastic might look like a pop-up to Joe and he's just swatting it away. And the truth that I don't love is that many of us just don't care about the interfaces. We just don't wanna learn about them. It's not worth it to learn something new. A lot of people really do just wanna go online. Point A, point B, get off. So I mean, I think this group is a lot more inclusive than my first one, right? I think a lot of us are guilty as well. Which it makes sense. You can see here an aversion to technology is pretty mainstream. I think these last three sections are something like 84% of us. So the early adopters are pretty rare. So the rest of us and Joe are gonna wait until something is really commonplace. And even then when we learn to use it, it's gonna be super backwards. Now, I'm not saying all of this to suggest that we just human proof. I don't want this to be so negative as dumbing things down for a lowest common denominator. Rather, I want to have a little more positive spin. But enhanced usability and reduced mental effort required for everybody, not just our Eleanor's. We wanna make our websites so simple that we're streamlining the visits even for our power users. So to illustrate this point, I think a pretty good example of accessibility enhancement would be the curb cut. Hopefully you've seen these. They keep sidewalks wheelchair accessible. So they're helping people with disabilities, but also people with suitcases and children and dogs and heels and bicycles and on and on. So a lot of people are benefiting from this aid. And this principle applies to not just physical spaces. So think about big clickable touch areas, right? I mean, they're helpful for those with big chunky fingers or old slow hands and everyone. So let's embark on this goal together of enhancing usability. And I wanna start with just learning about our users' needs kind of quickly from a super high level. Have you guys seen this before? Thank you. Okay, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So really quickly, man fundamentally seeks to satisfy the most basic desires first. So we have physiological desires like food and shelter. And then as these are met, we move up the pyramid to emotional needs like love and eventually to self-actualization. There is some debate here on how these stack if you can maybe jump up a little bit. But I do think there's some give. But my point is just, I think that we can see there's an order for the most part and that we should be matching our offerings to the right need. Also, I found this great design hierarchy of needs on Smashing Magazine. So I had to show this as well. So instead of physiological needs, we have functionality and we move all the way up to creativity. One point I wanted to make here is simply that creativity is at the top. So please make things work before you make them pretty. Also, it's a little sad really when we look at this and realize how much is being taken for granted because I'm sure many of you know the effort required to just make something like mostly work. And yet that's a very low value that we're getting here. And this brings me to the Kano model. This was created back in the 80s but I think it's still pretty relevant. So we have our basic needs at the bottom with the must haves, wants or performance needs. And then finally, latent needs or delayters. So you can see we have this left to right threshold of satisfaction and our must haves are completely below it. So functionality, reliability is just a bare minimum and no one's even appreciating it. But users will delight at thoughtful experiences that are meeting higher emotional and intellectual needs. So before I get into the nitty gritty too much, I just wanna add that there are thousands and thousands of tenants of psychology that we could discuss today, many of which have their own books or entire fields of study devoted to them. All of which I'm going to tell you about right now. Obviously that's not true. So this is a very high level starting point and I just sort of wanted to say that because I know that I have less than an hour now. So I've done my best to try to distill the bulk of human interaction into a pretty simple system. So as humans, first we discover something in the world and experience it. Next we think about it and try to understand. And finally we respond with actions, decisions and often mistakes. So each of these seemingly simple steps are actually pretty complex. So I'm gonna break each one down with a few examples, fundamentals and hopefully some good takeaways for you. I'm also going to take really awkward water breaks. Okay, so one of our hardest steps here is the very first, which is just getting users to even notice all of your hard work. Sadly, it's also really hard to keep their interest but I'll get there as well. So hopefully you've heard of Steve Krug, awesome information architect, real UX pro, but I really like his way of describing the situation. The user's reality is Billboard going by at 60 miles an hour. You probably don't need me to tell you this, bless you. But humans are overwhelmed with a fire hose of information. We're dividing our attention between so many distractions that as a result we really have a hard time focusing on any one thing. So there are a few issues to consider here, well there's a lot, but I'm breaking it down to vision limitations, attention spans, reading issues that are all getting in the way as we're trying to discover content in the world. So this problem starts right in our anatomy, literally with our eyeballs. So here you can see how we see, obviously very oversimplified, but the point I wanna make is sort of to show these receptor cells here. So in the center we have our cone receptor cells and these are creating what's known as our foveal area. This is a very small one to two centimeter area of focus right in the center of your vision and this is where you're reading and really putting your attention. So the rod cells around the outside are not as great and they're a little weaker at distinguishing color and shape, so this is what's creating our blurry peripheral vision. The point being that most of your site is being seen in this blurry peripheral. So it's getting pretty glossed over while users are hunting for one thing at a time with that little foveal area. So it's pretty common for users to overlook your small errors or updates. So please help site visitors scan pages by creating clear visual hierarchies. Be decisive in what you're drawing attention to because if you make everything really loud then they're not gonna really hear any of it. And if you can, keep your feedback either right in proximity to a recent action like clicking a submit button or if you have to put it in the periphery try to make it bright and flashy so that people will actually notice it. And obviously be careful when I say that I kind of thought, oh no, I want marquees. So if something is super important, be careful but do think about adding really strong visual cues like animation or sound because you know that you're gonna hesitate if you hear that horrible error chime. Now once we finally do notice something, our second hurdle here is to keep our attention. So fun fact, I had to keep changing the slide because the key's getting worse. That makes me really sad. So almost half of users will give up if a page takes three or more seconds to load we'll just bounce. Now whenever I hear this statistic I always laugh and think of a Louis CK joke about how spoiled the technology we all are just browsing on our phones and I did debate doing like a really bad impression of him but instead I would love it if you guys could just read it. So I wish this whole thing was a joke but it is real and sad. So our attention usually spans just a few minutes and again, how many exactly is debatable because it keeps going down. I think it was 12 and then 10 and now I think it's around eight but it depends who you ask. So just a few minutes and then even this is broken up by distractions. So you can really only expect like eight focused seconds of unbroken attention at a time and even that used to be 10 seconds that we lost to. So I just think it's really baffling how lame we can be, especially online. So I just wanna take a little tangent here and I'd love some hands. Just comparing the sort of brick and mortar experience to online shopping. Do any of you guys go into a target, get a cart, bill it up and then after a few minutes just walk out and leave that cart in an aisle? No, why? Okay, I think I got two hands which honestly I'm okay with that. Okay, compared to the 67% that we are suffering from online. So yes, we're busy and distracted but that's not actually the full focus issue that we're dealing with. So even when we're paying attention humans are still just focusing to a minimum and we're learning just as much as we need to to get by. Research shows we're actually relying on incomplete descriptions of things even if they're important and we need to remember them. So maybe you're familiar with this logo. I'm actually looking at quite a few of them. So the Apple logo is pretty easy to recognize, right? But not to recall. So in a study participants were asked to draw it from memory and they're not really, yeah, exactly, thank you. So they're not really that close. I mean, like most of them remembered that it's an Apple which was in the brief. Half of them have a bite but you can see my point which is that we're missing a lot of the remaining details. So this is how we rely on salient cues and then just generalize the rest of them. And it's just one example of how humans have learned to ration our attention and intentionally ignore things like parts of websites. So, just stop looking at these notifications. That's no good. Heat maps show us how humans skimmed on the left side of the page here in the red in a sort of an F shaped pattern. And you can see here that we suffer from banner blindness. So the green ads and all that stuff on the right over there because we've been exposed to so many ads in the past that we're just learning to ignore them. Now you've probably seen this but what I am so amazed by is that this has actually grown to the point of what's known as carousel blindness. I apologize for the quality but you get the point which is that even this site specific content which might be exactly what your users want is gonna be ignored because it looks just enough like an ad that it's generating the same blindness. So carousels end up wasting lots of space. Thank you. No, I honestly I just wanted to make that very clearly so that you all have another point for your next kill the carousel witch hunt. Please say it. Okay, so obviously as designers we have to embrace and accommodate these attention spans there's a few things we can do. Simplify your designs to reduce hunting and just reduce the cognitive load in general and I'm gonna keep saying that. Again, keep pages easy to scan if you can. White space is a great way to focus a user on something. Just like scrolling is really cheap. I hate arguing about that. But white space is great also because it can increase comprehension on the content it's in by as much as 20%. So break up your type into clearly labeled chunks. Use bulleted lists, infographics if you're feeling really sassy, title things but at least just make it really scannable again. Break up your tasks as well into smaller manageable chunks. Remembering that we have eight seconds of micro task. So really break the flow down. For a user flow where you get a lot of drop off like the online cart think about forcing focus even further by removing more and more options. So ads and even the navigation all together there's no shame in just until the transaction is complete. So there's one more level of complexity for discovery when it comes to website content. So usability consultant Jacob Nielsen pretty much sums up that we don't read. We're not readers, we're skimmers and as I've said already we're ignoring a lot of site content. Of all the statistics today this one blows my mind the most. Users have the most, at most the time to read 20% of the words on a page during an average visit. So put less please. Humans are wired for language but the problem is that evolution just hasn't kept up with us. Like how long ago was the printing press compared to all those other evolutionary milestones. So we're wired specifically for speaking language but not for reading it. And that's not even considering almost half of the country but is suffering from some form of low literacy. So when humans need to understand something instead we're hunting for visuals. Images, videos, icons and these are great because they give us a break from the reading or they can just simply reinforce the text. Which is also great because spoiler we also have terrible memories so a little repetition does not hurt at all. But obviously you're still gonna have some copy on your site and people will still have to read it. So the biggest thing you can do is just make sure that that type is legible enough for them to read really comfortably. Maybe you guys have heard of Jason Palmontal. He's from my neck of the woods in New England but he is an ambassador for legible type on the web. And this is just a tiny sample of his fantastic type scale which is essentially a good place to start when you want to figure out type sizes and spacing for your particular content in a particular context. So yeah, please go look it up. But my point also here is to find a balance between type sizes that are large enough to read comfortably but not so crazy big that there's so much scrolling that it's actually affecting scannability. Also please use some design basics. I'm not gonna get into that too much but don't set the type in some ugly hard to read display font. I would love that. And just be careful about your type setting. So even using all caps can actually really slow your readers down because we're using the tops of the letters to skim. And yes, I know. That was a nice moment this week. So lastly, you need to consider the words themselves. This is another area where you can simplify. Using short, clear words. Please do not get cheeky if you're gonna make your calls to action unclear. I know people wanna say let's go but where are we going? So also please make sure that you're phrasing and the nomenclature that you're using is correct for your audience and what their tasks are. So I'm gonna talk a little more about this in the next one but for now just consider that humans are scanning with that little foveal area for specific keywords. So either because it has to do with our task or something about us, we love our names. And also we really like the word free. So use these sorts of things to your advantage. Okay, so it's not all negative. I love people because we really, really do try to understand, we want to figure it out. We do have an innate desire to learn. So we try to create order and sort of navigate this complex world around us and we'll seek patterns but sometimes when there aren't any, so I hope it's no surprise to hear that as we go over thinking as well, there's a lot of shortcuts that we're taking and these can cause some misunderstandings. So I wanna run through a few basic concepts with this one to try to help us understand how humans understand. So mental models, also known as schemas are our greatest cheat sheet. So essentially they're conceptual models that individuals hold that are formed by how they believe that something works which may or may not be true. So for example, if you were taught as a child or saw in a book the stereotypical domination as the dog and learned that this is a dog, it's pretty easy to expand our model when we see this dog and quickly understand that it's part of that same system. So this is how we can kind of tap into existing comfortable mental models to teach something new. So to bring it a little closer to home, the floppy disk is great to symbolize saving or was great because it's a real world comparison and now people are like, what is that box? So the trash can is still great though. I love this example because it's so much easier to relate to people that were learning to use computers for the first time to just throw something out than having to explain the concepts of like clearing drive space and deleting files. So those are great to consider when teaching something new but if you can help it, please don't because nuisance systems of interaction require a lot more attention and effort. So users are gonna often struggle with them. Building off of the site patterns that people are expecting can really enhance communication. So really there's no shame in reusing them well, within moderation, right? For example, you can use the tried and true inverted pyramid approach. This is originally from newspapers but essentially you see that the most important information is at the top and it kind of goes down in hierarchy from there. Even though that is print and we're working in a digital space, humans have adapted our short form content pattern and we do expect to see prioritized content in the top third of the page. Please try to put information but especially the links where your users might actually go looking for them, where they expect them. So your cart probably goes in the top right. It doesn't have to be special. Like I don't wanna have to find it. We look for the, most of our links in the header obviously but some we might expect in the footer. Support jobs, et cetera. But if you do have navigation that's really unique, consider an activity like card sorting to better understand users' mental models. So you write the navigation items on flashcards and then you ask users to group them. So literally sort cards. And you just wanna make sure that everything ends up where they're actually gonna go looking for it. So another huge concept to understand when understanding this whole modeling idea is affordances. Can you guys show me if you know what I'm talking about? Okay, this one's not that hard even though it can sound it. This is another Donald Norman concept that he introduced many years ago and then has sort of continued to tweak because I think a few people misunderstood but essentially affordances define what actions are possible based on an object's properties. So for an example, this door affords several actions as possibilities, right? Knocking, opening, closing, slamming, turning the handle are all affordances here. So most of this is pretty straightforward because for the most part we know how doors work usually. But my point is that most of us know this because we've already created a mental model of doors and you didn't have to examine it to get in here. But sometimes we do need to learn something new and these affordances aren't always so well established with us. When we are lucky, we have perceived affordances that can be clearly understood. But during novel experiences, it's more often that they're hard to discover. So if affordances cannot be inferred, as designers we have a responsibility to provide what Norman calls a signifier. So this can be almost anything, it's usually a copy, a little messaging or a graphic or something. But good signifiers communicate what actions are possible and also maps out where they're taking place. So shower handles. Affordances of handles are pretty clear. You turn it and something happens. Hopefully it's water. But the colored signifier here is indicating hot or cold, right? And then of course there's a lot of them that can show you tub or shower and there's lots of extra special features since they're all unique. So this is how humans are using cues to better understand how to interact with objects and the world. And we need to make sure that these cues are clear online. Please make links look like clickable links. Remember when they were all blue and underlined and everything was in Times New Roman and there was no question. I know it was ugly, but it worked. Buttons need to look like buttons. I know this sounds really obvious, but I had to say it because I think as designers we've really taken the signifiers out of our interactions because we're sort of chasing this like sexy flat UI and everything. And now the banner and the title and the H1 and the call to action all look the same. And we're hurting a lot of usability and adding a lot of unnecessary confusion for our users. But not all of the confusion is our fault. I should say that. So as humans are mapping out the world around them it's really easy to draw our maps differently which isn't always wrong or an error. But what you think your site looks like might be way off from what visitors are seeing. So remember we're all coming from different backgrounds with different experiences and have formed different mental models. Especially if you're coming from a different culture or place it's common to interpret something differently. So that's actually right. Let's take red for example. This has some universal meanings, right? McDonald's. But a lot of the cultural meanings are contradicting each other actually. So red symbolizes luck in China. But mourning in South Africa. Masculinity in Greece. But the feminine childbirth in Japan. So this is another reason to do your research and make sure that what it means is what you think it means. Especially if you're branching out to a new market. And you also wanna make sure that your audience has the right amount of experience or the right background. Because you really wanna be careful if you have some experts coming to your site but we're not all experts. Because you can alienate people with kind of industry lingo. Now sometimes these mental models aren't in this sort of gray area. Sometimes they're totally black and white wrong. And the problem is often that we learn things wrong in the first place. So God forbid maybe some of you learned that black and white animals are dogs. So if those were dogs, yeah, this is a dog. So these kind of errors are really tricky because they seem to be validated even when they're wrong, right? So they can be especially hard to pinpoint and correct. Another one that we really struggle with is cause and effect relationships. Part of this is because of the emphasis that humans put on timing. So if two things happen within 0.15 seconds or less, which is pretty fast, we're often gonna assume that the first one causes second. So in the same vein there, if the website doesn't react in some sort of way during that period, we're often gonna wrongly assume that our actions didn't have any consequences. I'm not saying the page has to load but like give us something. So that is why it's so easy to submit a form a second and a third time. So remember please to clarify your relationships as much as possible with informative, fast feedback. So remember that humans are seeking all the time to understand the impact of their actions. So progress bars, loading states, especially confirmation messages go a really long way. Okay, I feel so bleak up here. I know it's not super rosy so far with the struggles that humans have but we do have one more usability minefield left today. Simply put, humans act on misinformation and make irrational decisions. And I know that can be kind of hard to hear because we all think that we're rational but we're not. Humans do have really complex brains and we are equipped for great intelligence and creative problem solving but that's not the issue. The issue is that often we're just taking an easier way out instead of using our brains completely. So I'm gonna butcher this and do this really quickly but I just wanted to show you some of the sections of the brain and their functions. So at the base here we have kind of some of our most primitive areas of the brain. So the brain stem with the spinal cord going down and then on the right we have the cerebellum sort of known as our little brain. But these are controlling bodily functions like breathing, walking, but they're all tasks that we complete without any conscious effort. So our brains are really helping us phone it in. Next, the limbic system does a ton of regulation. Some of it unconscious, some conscious but specifically I just wanted to point out that little amygdala. So this is sometimes known as our primitive lizard brain because this is where our anxiety and fear live. So this is where we're still making those sort of caveman fight or flight decisions. And then finally, of course, we have our main evolved cortex which is divided into four lobes. So in the frontal lobe or tons of functions and one of them is making judgments. But it's not really as simple as saying that all of our decisions come from this little part of our brains because brain scans actually show us that decision making activates tons of the different sections that I've gone over today. So yes, sure, some of our thoughtful decisions are coming from a big evolved brain but a lot of them are being made below and more primitively. So in truth, our brain is processing most information completely outside of our awareness including some of those judgments. So really think about this one for a second because I think it's easy to deny we want to. It takes around 100 seconds to make a thoughtful, critical decision and that's in a pretty fast thinking situation. So just take a second for me and think about how long that is and then how fast most of your decisions actually are and if they're faster than that. I consider just like waiting for 100 seconds but I'm not gonna do that. So snap decisions we're making with emotion, unconscious decisions we're making with instincts but we're not really using logic in that little timeframe. And what's even worse is that there's a lot of evidence accumulating to show us that the greater purpose for logic is not for the decisions themselves but to justify them to ourselves later. So we're rationalizing any bad decisions away and reducing cognitive disness and feeling better about ourselves. So yes, we are rational, we're also judgmental. People really do judge books by covers and we judge sites in less than a second. So a study shows us that web users form first impressions of web pages in a 20th of a second and maybe you're wondering like I did what is shaping these first impressions. So according to a Stanford study the most cited factor used in evaluating a website as credible is the appeal of the visual design. So the right layout, typography, color is making a huge impact and it's making it immediately and I love sharing that if you're maybe in like a very dev heavy world or dealing with a difficult client because it kind of validates the significance of good design for the site's success. So hopefully this is clear. Humans love shortcuts and we continue to take them even after that first impression. So as I've said, we don't always care about doing things the right way. We're rushing around and as a result we're satisfacing making mistakes and slipping. So I wanna break each one of these concepts down a little more. Satisfacing is essentially a lot of the key points that I've made today but it's choosing the first reasonable option instead of the best. We would be much happier doing something we've learned to do even if it's a lot slower. As long as it's getting done we don't care. My favorite example of this is how people will go to Google and search for a URL and then click on it instead of just putting it into the browser. It's like, I know it's just an extra click but it's always an extra click. So when we talk about mistakes a lot of times we're actually grouping a lot of things together but specifically mistakes are made when we misunderstand rules or knowledge and so we don't know any better. So we're intentionally doing the wrong thing mistakenly if that makes any sense. So slips are unintentional, they're just accidents. These are based on memory or motor malfunctions like when you accidentally tap an ad on mobile. Nobody wants to do that and then decided it was a bad idea. But here's where this all gets really sad. Often we're making these errors because of poor user experiences that didn't consider every single situation and yet humans will almost always blame themselves. And so this can cause what's known as learned helplessness. Maybe you've heard of this from the behavioral psych studies but essentially users won't even try to complete a task if they've failed it in the past because they assume that they're the problem and they're not gonna succeed and that they shouldn't even bother. And it's kind of hard to catch these because people are embarrassed. They're not gonna complain about themselves so it's hard to correct these usability issues with user feedback. So my suggestion here dealing with this is twofold. We want to, well I can't move at all, we wanna combat these effects not only by trying to reduce the errors using a lot of the things I've talked about just making a simple, simple user experience. But we also have to acknowledge that the mistakes and the slips are going to happen and we just need to keep them as cheap as possible. So consider that the back button accounts for something like 30 to 40% of all web clicks. So allow for backtracking and if you have a really complicated system, maybe build in multiple undoes but please just don't make anyone start over. So this is something that I'm really fascinated with. I'm not sure exactly, I think this came out of researching plane crashes and they were trying to figure out what was like causing these horrible things to happen and how to obviously reduce them. So it's not that these huge losses are occurring because of a freak disaster. Usually it's a result of lots of little mistakes in succession. So James Reason gave us the Swiss Choose model to sort of illustrate that and you can see here how adding extra layers of defense can actually block these little mistakes from becoming a big loss. So keep your mistakes from going bad to worse with design redundancy and obviously lots of user testing. Okay, so we've seen today many of the problems that people have with interacting with the world, trying to figure it out and really doing anything about it. Now to be clear, I did not tell you all of this so that you could just feel bad about yourselves and go home and try to fix it. I'm telling you so you can accept it, expect it from users and adapt as a designer. And we should really appreciate all of these shortcuts because in reality, life is really hard. Life is so overwhelming that we need shortcuts even with their shortcomings. We're really lucky that our minds will gloss over the detail and keep us moving. So I actually do have one more persona for you today but this one's a little different. This one's a web savvy millennial that grew up with Google and is so in tune with website patterns that she once balked at the idea of somebody not knowing that you could click on a logo to get to the homepage. I asked my dad, I asked Average Joe actually how to get back to the homepage and he said you hit escape. So, but you see where I'm going here I'm sure except that this persona does not just represent me. I have a feeling that it represents a lot of you in this room and I just really don't want you to design for us anymore. I think it's really easy for us to misjudge these intricate interaction patterns that we might create as common sense just because we understand and you know I would encourage you to really stop and really think about if we're giving our users too much credit. I'm not saying that you should assume that everyone's an idiot please but let's just be a little more realistic. So for example plan for that moment when they're gonna swat away that useful onboarding information that they need and then plan again for the moment when they realize that they need it. If you only take one thing away it's just to simplify you know reduce complexity as much as possible. I love the way that Steve Krug put it he titled his user experience by Bible don't make me think and you should read it if you have not but that is not my point. My point is just to make things easy please. So reduce friction and excuse me cognitive load as much as possible and again we've talked a lot about this already create clear hierarchies and messaging maintain consistency across your site with familiar website patterns and you know common sense really helps. And also reduce choices if you can and I know that this one seems counterintuitive especially if you are doing user interviews because people really think that they want this but they don't and often users will suffer from what's known as analysis paralysis. So my favorite example of this is a psychological study with two sample tables of jam one with six kinds and one with 20. So consumers were trying more samples from the table of 20 but they were buying way more at the table of six because it was a lot easier for them to decide which one to actually pick up at the end. So the more choices that were given the more difficult the decision. Now I know this is a really tall order and it's easy for me to just stand up here and say this all but we do need to use our research as best we can to understand our users needs and really carefully prioritize them to the fundamental needs that we absolutely have to solve and the latent needs of delight and kind of work our way up from the basics. If you can just keep reminding yourself make a post-it to just return to their underlying goals and one way to break a problem down to find these underlying goals is to just keep asking why, why, why until their ultimate cause is clear and then make sure that these goals translate into the right tasks and micro tasks. I think it's easy to start like sketching the interface and here's where the button is but just make sure that like why is it even there and what do they wanna do. I really love the way that Theodore Levitt puts this. We need to remember that people don't want to buy a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. So please streamline the flow wherever you can if you can and let your experience really get out of the way of the sort of A to B journey we've talked about. But again, if you can, if you have the time, the budget, et cetera, go beyond the task completion here and really aim to meet the higher needs of your users, aim to delight them. Think about like Freddie the Mailchimp, I love him and he's so funny and that was extra, that's just fantastic. So these enjoyable experiences can be caused by a range of things but pleasing aesthetics, incorporating humor, creating flow for your users are really solid places to start. I add novelty but we just have to be a little careful but defying convention can really arouse curiosity or satisfy a desire to learn so it can be a great one too. Another fantastic thing about creating enjoyment is that it can actually help with satisfying some of the basic needs. Enjoyable experiences are also perceived as easy to use and efficient even if they aren't and a fun, relaxed environment increases flexible thinking and problem solving. So one, this helps users to excuse any hiccups in the flow they might be having because they're having a great time or they might be so creative as to just work around them on their own. So I did my best to cram a lot in today but even so, I'm sure that you get that this is very high level and it's just a taste. So I challenge you all to dig a little deeper on your own and learn a little bit more about these psychological fundamentals. Please work to understand the fundamentals of human needs and behavior and combine them with your specific persona needs and knowledge to understand those problems more holistically. To truly solve a user's problem, we need to make ourselves familiar with the realities of this rocky usability terrain and adapt. Or put more eloquently by my favorite Donald Norman, we have to accept human behavior the way it is and not the way we would wish it to be. Thank you. So amazingly, we do have time for questions. If you guys wanna step up to the mic and ask any, otherwise you can get at me here or online. Yeah, thanks again. I thought you were just leaving really fast. I just wanted to add, is this on? You hear me? Yeah. That Donald Norman has an online course now at udacity.com and it's called the design of everyday things. Oh, fantastic. Actually grade your assignments and all that stuff. Thank you. How do you usually justify the addition of more scrolling when you could condense something more mostly to stakeholders? So how do I justify adding more scrolling when stakeholders think that no one goes below the fold? I think that that's tricky. But you know, I think the simplest thing is that we just say that scrolling is very cheap. The act of just the flick is very simple. And I know there's a statistic that I don't remember at the moment because I think in the past, people did used to struggle. They were used to the newspaper with the fold. But over time, we've gotten a lot smarter about it. And so I would encourage you always, when you can, to have a statistic and say actually, 2% of users can't figure it out. Whatever it actually is. How do you feel about hamburger icons? Can we stop recording? That's hard. I think that you really do need to think about your audience. So this is very funny to me because we're actually in the final throws of the process of redesigning lullabot.com, which uses a hamburger icon. And we kind of came to the conclusion that we can take a few liberties because we're dealing with, you know, we did our research and talked to our users and we are dealing with more technical clients that are, again, a little more in our space that are understanding. But otherwise, I don't recommend it. I think the greatest thing is, I think the first one I saw was maybe Squarespace. It says menu next to it. And that's so obvious. Like that's great because now you're touching all the people that get the hamburger thing and you're hitting everybody else with menu or nav or something. So I would suggest usually adding something else and just making it super obvious, you know, hover states and the like. One of the things I ran into in redesigning our website was we wanted to do that when you're talking about reducing choices. So you take this huge mess of a menu we had before and reduce to the small thing. But then the pushback was from people that they were expecting this individual thing in that menu and they don't see it there. And we come up with these, you know, canines for the different categories that we think they fill that, but then everyone has a different idea of what that thing is. That is very tricky. I think that, you know, I'm hesitant to say this, but if you have, you know, accordions or hover or something where you can actually expand them and it's easy for people to see all the options, I think that's great. Again, like I said, if you have the capacity to do more user testing and do card sorting and see what are the words that people use for them, what are the groups that they might put them in, you know, it might help with people finding them. But yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, sometimes you do need to have a gigantic menu, like Amazon or something that does show all the offerings, you know. I worked with an e-commerce site that had all these random products that don't match and you do have to have something to click on at pretty much every point that they're gonna sort of recognize is what they're looking for. I hope that's helpful. One other question. What are your thoughts on hover for desktop? Is it something we should keep doing or? Oh yeah. Is that like, did someone say not to or? Well, I know Bootstrap is switching over to like click menus and dropdowns, so what are your thoughts? I see, okay, I see what you're saying. So I think that hover states are for showing that things do things, but not always for doing the thing, if that makes sense. So I made this mistake, honestly. I created a website where you hovered over the navigation and it pushed everything down with this big menu, which means that if you get too close, you just like, you know, on the ocean and it's like really terrible, rocky thing. And so yeah, I think that if you can have a little teaser come out or a little something, maybe something fades in that's a little copy that's helpful, an animation color change, but yeah, I mean it depends, of course. So we could talk more about this for sure, like where, because if it's a little thing, you hover over a photo, you get a little information, I think that's great, but if it's real like navigation, I don't think that that should appear. I'm more referring to like a primary navigation. Yeah, I mean I do think that it makes sense to explore with like sub menus, you know, you can just click through. I see what you're saying now, yeah, absolutely, you don't wanna make people click and reload the page. And that is, that's horrible. Because then it should not take them more than 10 seconds, so just figure out all the things that are on the site by just hover, hover, hover. So I see your point, yeah. And so, you know, I've dealt with that before where there's so many things that you have to click to see all of the subnav for that individual page, and it's just creating so much extra loading. You think about how much does each one take to load and the manual effort of them to click every one, and it just, it seems like a pretty easy no-brainer to just make that a quick exploration task for them. Thanks. Yeah, I don't wanna talk about that one. Yeah, that's really, no, no, I'm just teasing. I mean, that is really hard. And so you, obviously, if you can translate it to tap, for everything, that's great, but I know that's really finicky because tap and clicker are pretty gray. Nobody else? All right, well, thank you so much. Thank you. Hang it up in cords here. Thank you. I was worried.