It’s a little embarrassing, but I get a lot of my insights from watching TED presentations. Blame it on the combination of my 2 hour commute, iPod Nano and TED providing video podcasts.

In a fascinating presentation by neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran, he talks about how the brain works with sensory input. What stuck with me was towards the end of his talk:

Something very interesting is happening in the angular gyrus, because it is the crossroads between hearing, vision and touch and it became enormous in humans. I think it is the basis of many uniquely human abilities as abstraction, metaphor and creativity.

With interfaces, it is important to get sensory feedback. For example, right now, I am typing on a keyboard. This action creates a tactile feedback (it depresses), an auditory feedback (it clicks), and a visual feedback (letters appear on the screen). Unknowingly we feel satisfaction when these sensory feedback is properly provided. When typing on a keyboard does not produce letters on the screen, or the letters are somehow delayed, we have an emotional response - one of frustration.

Touch experience on the iPhone and LG Prada phone

With the iPhone there is no tactile or haptic feedback. (Some phones do have haptic feedback in the form of light vibrations)  In order to compensate for the fact that it is missing the one of three feedback that is necessary for a good interface, it provides strong feedback through the remaining two. When you use the dialer on the iPhone, it provide a strong color change (visual feedback) and the dial tone (auditory feedback) whenever you touch they keys. Same thing happens when you use the on-screen qwerty keyboard. In order to compensate for the fact that is is no tactile key-pressing sensation, iPhone provides visual feedback in the form of the keys popping up, and auditory feedback in the form of a tapping sound.

Compare the iPhone experience to the LG Prada phone experience. LG Prada phone provides haptic feedback (you feel a slight vibrarion at your fingertips) and visual feedback, however the color change in the interface is weak (trying to stay “cool” by using grey tones), and auditory feedback is aways the same no matter what you do (it’s the same bell sound). This results in the Prada phone having a less satisfying touch UI experience over the iPhone.

A large part of the satisfaction when using a touch UI is based on providing appropriate feedback. Another large part is based on what metaphor from everyday life you adopt and present to the users. Watching Ramachandran’s talk made me realize is that there is a deeper neurological basis for what consitiutes to a satisfying touch UI experience: Our brains are wired to take in sensory feedback and develop an emotional response to it (sometimes without us realizing it).

Data-driven personas

Todd Warfel has an inspiring presentation on persona creation. Go to the presentation on slideshare and view it full screen. In case you are wondering what those geen and blue lines are on his personas, here’s the answer.

Another of Todd’s persentations I enjoyed was, Goal Oriented Data Driven Design which incorporates parts of Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice in explaining design based on usability not capability.

Progressive disclosure is quickly becoming a staple in my user experience vocabulary. It’s one of those impressive words that causes people to say “ooh!”. It has an authority about it that seems to squash the ever-recurring user experience dilemma: how to fit complex functionality into limited screen real-estate.

This is how Jakob Nielsen describes it in his Alertbox column:

Progressive disclosure defers advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn and less error-prone.

Progressive disclosure works wonderfully well with search engine interfaces, and Google has used this to its full advantage making it its trademark with its zen-like front page that only displays a search bar.

This also seems like an ideal solution for mobile handsets that are always suffering from increasing complexity but needs to fit all the functionality into a screen the size of a business card.

Not so fast. As with all seductive terms, one has to be cautious. It is not a silver bullet for UX woes. It does not provide license to forgo careful study of how users use devices and interfaces: what are the core set of features that should be displayed on the initial screen? How and when should the secondary screen with the advanced features be accessed?

Simplicity is always what interface designers strive for and user want. Simplicity is never simple, and certainly not an excuse to be lazy.

In his thoughtful article, Intuition, pleasure, and gestures, Jonathan Korman of Cooper crafts the most elegant definition of the word “intuitive” I have ever come across:

Intuitive: Easy to explain, powerful in its implications, impossible to forget.

I went to buy a microwave the other day. I thought it would be simple. But then is anything really simple these days? I had three factors I decided to consider: Price, Design and Usability.

Price:  A microwave is an everyday appliance and hence I wanted it to be cheap. The cheaper the better.

Design: I wanted a microwave with a simple design. No Cuisinart stainless-steel. Just something I could bear to look at in the kitchen.

Usability: I think most of the time I use only 3 features on a microwave. 1) For heating small things up I usually guess 20 seconds and if it’s not heated I try another 20 seconds. Heating something has never been a precise science ever for me. No one measures the mass of a slice of frozen pizza from last night. 2) Sometime I heat larger things which I guess in 1 minute increments. 3) I also heat the occasional popcorn and frozen meal. Both have instructions and I need a way to input precise timing.

So why is it so hard to find something that fits those things. When I find something that is simple, it’s totally unusable. Why do cheap things have to have really ugly design? What was suspiciously annoying was the fact that this was the same case with all the major Korean brands.

In the end, as it usually is, it is a trade-off. Either pay dearly for something that is unusable, or pay for something that is moderately usuable, cheap but ugly. Most Korean would choose the more expensive and better designed product over the more usable one. I am finding out that Korean generally have a strange bias towards things that are “pretty” (which isn’t always the same as “well-designed”). I have overheard conversations at work where people say, “I don’t use that [website, phone etc] because it isn’t pretty”, and not because it is unusable. People here are more forgiving if it is pretty. Don Norman agrees that people generally perceive attractive things to work better.

[A]lthough poor design is never excusable, when people are in a relaxed situation, the pleasant, pleasurable aspects of the design will make them more tolerant of difficulties and problems in the interface.

Product designers in Korea must know this, and they must work with the marketing department to make sure that the products that are at the lower end of the price scale look ugly so that people don’t buy it and buy the product that is more expensive not because of any added functionality or production cost, but simply priced higher over the “ugly one.”

Bruce Tognazzini observed something similar when he wrote:

What a strange situation. You take a mediocre product and rework the design to make it better. Your design is a success, by any reasonable measure, but the resulting new release is actually worse. You redouble your efforts and matters become untenable. It doesn’t matter how brilliant and effective your designs, the more they improve the product, the less usable the product becomes.

The clean design but expensive and unusable	The ugly but cheap and usable

What people consider “pretty” is culturally subjective. What one culture considers cute and pretty, another culture considers childish. Cyworld as wildly popular social networking site made this mistake when they launched in the US, maintaining their “pretty” aesthetic which was part of their success in Korea. This alienated a lot of the teen, youth audience who viewed Cyworlds avatars and wallpaper to be more fit for a pre-teen audience. Now they have more photos and less “prettiness”. This is why it is acceptable for grown adult women to don Hello Kitty accessories in much of East Asia whereas it will be viewed as plain freaky in the much of the US or Europe.

In the end, I settled for the  cheap and ugly microwave. For better or worse, the usability professional in me prevailed.