Week 2 — Perception
#universitydiaries
New things
New things I discovered this week and that I had never realized:
They say it’s all about your perception. This is also true in UX. This comes as no surprise as interface design is then “seen” and then “perceived” by our human eyes. User interface guidelines are based on psychology — this includes design rules: how people perceive, learn, reason, remember, and covert intentions into action. By understanding the possibilities and constraints of human perception and cognition, we as designers can best facilitate and support behavior with our designs.
What I learned
This is what I learned about this week:
Perception is heavily biased by at least 3 factors:
- The past: (our experience) e.g. “This is what I’m used to seeing so this is how it should look.”
- The present: (the current context) e.g. “This is how I see things because of everything that is surrounding me”
- The future: (our goals) e.g. “I’m here to search for one thing and I will look specifically [on the website] that will lead to the one thing I’m looking for. Everything else I will ignore or barely notice.”
These perceptual biases have implications for user interface design:
- Designers should avoid ambiguity — To ensure that the design is clear, designers should conduct user tests to verify that all users interpret the display in the same way.
- Designers should be consistent — Information and controls should be placed in consistent locations.
- Designers should understand the goals [of the user] — By understanding user goals, designers can ensure that all points of interaction and information is available and clear for the user.
User interface guidelines are based on human cognition.
Don Norman, a “Guru of Workable Technology” and expert in the fields of design, usability engineering, and cognitive science — based his early design guidelines on users’ cognition. He is especially interested in the cognitive errors that users often make and how computer systems can be designed to lessen or rid such errors.
Together with Jacob Nielson (“Guru of Usable Web Pages”), Norman leads designers in research-based UX.
Yuki Gu defines,
“A guideline is a visual language communicating the design goals to the team, it is important to make sure that everyone can understand it and to enforce its usage.”
On the left of this table, we can see Nielson’s earlier guidelines which are still very much relevant today and are the base of many newer guidelines.
Many companies also have their own guidelines, these are designed uniquely for their own products e.g.
Gestalt theory of perception, these principles provide a useful basis for guidelines for graphic design and user-interface design.
(Gestalt Principles are principles/laws of human perception that describe how humans group similar elements, recognize patterns and simplify complex images when we perceive objects. Designers use the principles to organize content on websites and other interfaces so it is aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand. The word gestalt literally means form or pattern, but its use reflects the idea that the whole is different from the sum of its parts.)
The importance of visual hierarchy in UI can also be referred back to Gestalt’s principles. For example where and how to place design components on a web page, in what way to order them, and how to guide the user to focus on them. It is important to have a good information architure e.g. navigation on a website so that users are not left taking hours looking for something or are so frustrated that they cannot find what they are looking for and end up clicking out and looking elsewhere.
Curious about
I wanted to know more about … and I found it (in literature, on YouTube, on TED talk, etc.):
I was interested in learning more about if perception varies across different cultures and read a research article about culture and point of view.
From the research I learned that different cultures have different cognitive processing styles:
- “Westerners are inclined to attend to some focal object, analyzing its attributes and categorizing it in an effort to find out what rules govern its behavior.”
- “East Asians are more likely to attend to a broad perceptual and conceptual field, noticing relationships and changes and group-ing objects based on family resemblance rather than category membership.”
In this study, researchers asked participants to report what they saw in under-water scenes. The results were:
- Americans emphasized focal objects (i.e. large, brightly coloured, rapidly moving objects).
- Japanese reported 60% more information about the background (e.g., rocks, colour of water, small non-moving objects) than did Americans.
It was really interesting to me that people from different backgrounds have different visual focus points.
Usage in UX design
This is how I can use … in experience design:
- Good design is invisible — With our learning from HCI, designers nowadays strive to create even more seamless interaction between technology and users. Good design as Rams says is: invisible. This means that we should strive to create experiences with technology whereby the user experience is optimised in a way — where users don’t feel like they are facing an interface or computer. Rather the interaction should be human, easy, and enjoyable with minimal interference.
- Balance visual design with usability — Good UX should be complemented with beautiful UI as well but UX should always come first and serve as a foundational backbone. The relationship of UX/UI are tightly knit and one should not exist without the other. For example, one can imagine a solid UX to be the skeleton of a design and the flesh and skin to be the UI. After all, users wish for digital products that are not only stunning on the surface but also friendly and great to use.
- Keep in mind UX theory — design students learn theory in school for a good reason. Design principles should therefore not be overlooked and when implemented into practice can produce even more user friendly products. Not only should we practice our UX craft but we should also look back and reflect it to the theory e.g. like referring to a dictionary. This way we keep learning and extending our horizons.
