BayCHI Monthly Event: A Psychologist and an Interaction Designer
I went to the monthly BayCHI event at PARC tonight, and it was a great set of talks. And Don Norman was there in the second row, keeping the presenters honest.
John Pinto, a usability researcher and psychologist, gave a talk about user studies and how social factors bias not just the subjects but also the researchers that conduct the tests. Essentially, he gave 7 or 8 examples of psychological studies of the kind where the findings are so contrary to what you’d expect that you almost don’t believe them, but you love the result and tell everyone you know about “this one study” when the topic comes up in conversation. In something called the Hawthorne experiment, factory workers increased productivity any time a change was made (more breaks, fewer breaks, brighter light, dimmer light), showing not that people will work faster no matter what you change, but that being watched changes people’s behavior. In another study, one user and 8 people pretending to be users compared two big cards, one with a line and one with three lines, one of which was the same length as the line on the other card, and went around the room saying which of the three lines matched the length of the line on the other card. When the “plants” all started telling a lie, saying that an incorrect line matched the line on the other card, three-quarters of users went along with the group. And most of them later said that the group had no bearing on which line they thought was the matching line. Check out John Pinto’s website. If that’s not the website of a usability researcher, I don’t know what is. It’s less cluttered than useit.com and the font is just about as big.
Joy Mountford gave the second talk, and I can’t believe that I hadn’t heard more about her before. She was the creator and manager of the Apple Human Interface group for 8 years. Yeah, really.
She talked mostly about her envy of the mature field of Industrial Design as compared to User Interface and Interaction Design. And she uses the term industrial design to mean things that are designed and built out of physical materials, whether it’s cars or refrigerators or HotWheels cars. Companies realize that products that look great sell for a higher price and sell better, but interaction design doesn’t yet garner the same respect.
I have to mention that about the third through sixth slides of her presentation were about the Sculpture/Lemon Juicer that is on the cover of Don Norman’s new book Emotional Design, which is a great example of something that just makes you want to buy it, even if you don’t know if it actually works well as a juicer. She got Don Norman to tell the people there that he bought a gold-plated version of the juicer that came with a specific warning, “Do not use for juicing.” The acid would have damaged the gold plating. He also said that the juicer isn’t in his kitchen, it’s in his entryway, and when she asked if it started any conversations, he said, “We’re having a conversation about it right now.” Pretty cool.
Anyway, she was great. She’s 100% an Interaction Designer, and she threw out little ideas along the way about how she really wants to design a hotel that would know what kind of restaurants you might be looking for and would help you find them, and I thought about how, just like I do, interaction designers have these kind of ideas, all the time. She really struck a chord with me when she talked about the things she wished interaction designers had, like as great a way to showcase interactions as photographs are to showcase physically-designed products.
She talked about how attractive and palpable the things that Industrial Designers make are, and how Interaction Designers should be able to make names for themselves based on what they design the same way that a designer’s name gets attached to furniture and cars and stunning-looking juicers. Apple has recently promoted the fact that the designers of the new iMac G5 were also the designers of the iPod, and although the computer has some to do with the interaction, they are really still promoting their industrial designers.
It all just makes me want to design things that people will love.
September 15th, 2004 at 4:57 pm
Awesome notes, Darren. You broke my heart for not going. I direct my bitterness at my project which kept me here and working until 1 am last night. :(
The note about how any change causes an increase in productivity actually reminds me of the Google search results redesign. Did taking away the product tabs make them more visible and likely to be clicked? I really think it just made people notice something was different and they noticed that the tabs were gone. And then there’s that line where change becomes a constant in itself (and a distraction). So many fine lines.
September 19th, 2004 at 10:39 am
Working until 1AM is *totally* lame. For shame.