This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 4:02 am and is filed under All Posts, Family and Parenthood, Usability and Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Light My Fire
My stove has four knobs linearly arranged for controlling the four burners, which are arranged in a rectangle:
From left to right, the knobs control:
1 = left front.
2 = left back
3 = right back
4 = right front
My mental mapping of the knobs looks like this (colors show which knob is paired with which burner):
I mentally pull the top two burners inward and the center two knobs upward to correlate knobs to burners without having to think about which knob to use.
My mother’s knobs work this way:
1 = left back
2 = left front
3 = right front
4 = right back
This means that I have some trial and error every time I light the stove at her house. I have put some conscious effort into creating a usable mental map for her stove that will help me to use it more easily. It looks like this:
The consciously created mental map does not work very well. I still find myself lighting two burners each time I wish to cook something at my mom’s house. Is my difficulty with her stove a result of the difference between it and my own? Maybe, but the model for my own stove was created without effort, whereas for my mother’s I had to make a conscious effort. Also, I have had trouble with her stove knobs from the time she moved to this house, a good 10 years before I got the stove in my own home. Which all leads me to suspect that the problem is more fundamental than that I am just “not used to it”.
Is it because I have an inherently different view of the “natural” interpretation of the direction in which those lines should be distorted, which matches the inclination of the designer of my stove, but not that of the designer of my mother’s? If so, what is the basis for that difference? Is it a cultural difference? A left-handed brain vs. right-handed brain difference? A stupid mistake by the designer? An idiosyncratic (and random) preference?
As a designer, how do I know if my unconscious assumptions about relatedness are universal? How can I discover and/or predict which assumptions will cause usability trouble in the real world?
As a user, how much testing do I need with a product to reveal frustrating interfaces?
Some stoves just physically lay out the knobs and burners to correlate visually with the burner layout.
But these don’t.
December 21st, 2007 at 3:59 am
Hopefully, both stoves perform consistently. Otherwise you’ll be needing a new stove!
Therefore over time your brain will learn the mental model applied by the engineers — (not the designers!) — to get it right every time. However I’m guessing you use your mother’s stoveless often. So you have the issue of short term vs long term recall. With your own stove your learning is re-inforced almost every day I would guess, so that learning you did when you first moved into your place or when you bought the stove becomes habit. With your mother’s stove, you don’t get that luxury. So it’s harder.
As a designer, how do I know if my unconscious assumptions about relatedness are universal?
Well, I’m guessing that you don’t need me to tell you this, but, whatever… You’ll want to regularly climb inside the minds of the people who use your stuff by using user centred design tools like ethnographic research, personas, usability testing and crucially, iterative prototyping.
How can I discover and/or predict which assumptions will cause usability trouble in the real world?
You use iterative prototyping and usability testing. You put stuff out there for people to use and get feedback to build into the next version. Simple as that!
Enjoying your site… (but unfortunately not the Captcha spam doohicky)
Regards
DJ