Sometimes the ‘ivory tower thinking’ of my own usability profession amazes me. HFI are a very serious, very formal and by all accounts very good process and methodology driven company, so what has driven them to a World Usability Day Color Survey?

“Color is one of the most important non-verbal forms of communication. Appropriate use of color greatly impacts user experience. We are conducting a short survey to understand color associations for different kinds of Web sites.”

Indeed. But is this real world stuff? The Wharton School of Business has done some very interesting and complex research on color. But this seems a tad simplistic. Wouldn’t it be silly if all banks had blue logos, and all news (and electronics) was red!

How would HSBC, for example, feel if the Usability Lab results came back that the HSBC shade of logo red just wasn’t thought to be associated with banking, but was seen by users to be much more indicative of beauty and personal grooming? Would that lead to HSBC to change its logo? Or convince the HSBC board to consider a new corporate future as a L’Oreal competitor?

(…with apologies to HSBC)

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The Times recently listed 142 singles that were found in a small box under his desk. Ostensibly ‘Peels Favourites’, a TV programme has been made and shown about them and there has been much discussion. But are we sure these were his absolute favourites? Completely sure?

Well, I saw the programme last night and it was great and the emotion was very real for the great man, but absence of some names is startling. Where is Captain Beefheart? The Fall? Bowie? Einsturzende Neubauten? Instead in the box we got Sheena Easton and Harry Nillson. Were you having a laugh with us, John? Were you having a clear out? Did you forget to tell Sheila about that box you’d put together for Oxfam? Can that explain the multiple copies - three copies of the Undertones’ Teenage Kicks and two copies of The Users ‘Sick on You’? He realised he simply just had too many records and had got fed up with the White Stripes and it was time to get rid.

You having a laugh John?

“Coz, yer gotta ‘ave a larf, har har har har” (thanks, Golinski Brothers for the lyrics!)

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I seem to be reading a lot of books lately about solving problems and how this is done in other ways than traditional rationality. Spock (the First Officer, not the Doctor) would have us believe that by applying rationality and logic to a problem it may be simply and unemotionally solved. In many ways my previous history in this field in Cognitive Science predisposes me to think this way. Cognitive Science is based on a belief that you can model thought and reason. My early works with Phil Johnson-Laird on Mental Models (thats 1983) was all about how we might model intelligence, and then hypothesize and test by experiment. Artificial Intelligence (AI) then emerged from Cognitive Science with it emphasis on ’search’ - in fact AI was once described to me as search algorithms, nothing more. So logic is just search? Didn’t seem quite right, but it was an exciting time none the less.

Out of the flush of excitement of all the AI stuff, you get to see that there was more going on, and that the ‘more’ was also exciting. That man Don Norman popped up with Don Broadbent with Neural Networks. What was that all about? Santa Fe with Complexity Theory, and, groundbreakingly Kevin Kelley with Out of Control to bring it all together, subtitled “The New Biology of Machines”. Fascinating, Captain.

And these odd emergent systems made decisions too, but the decisions ‘emerged’ from their organisation rather than having to be sought out. And there was no ‘why’, there was only the answer.

Sometimes it could go badly wrong. A neural network was trained by the military using photographs to distinguish US tanks from the then Soviet tanks. It did, but only afterwards was it realised that the neural network had made its discrimination on the basis of lighting conditions - the US tanks had been photographed in the morning, the Soviet at night! Thats the thing, you never know with a neural network, its decision is never justified, it just is.

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowieki is about this stuff too. Do I like it? Well, kind of, but next to the Tipping Point or Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, its a bit lightweight and way too observational, with very little analysis. What I did like about it though is the way that it defined what crowds do well and what they don’t. My recent piece about leadership in Interactions sets me up as very ‘anti-crowd’, but I am absolutely resolutely not. I believe that the crowd can create the best decisions, but the right questions need asking and answers coordinating and that was clear from the book, and I appreciated that. Making a film, designing an experience, is not a single problem with a single solution, like guessing the weight of a bull (a Wisdom of Crowds example) but it is a project that requires that many ‘weight of bull’ (!) problems to be posed and then solved simultaneously. Making a film, designing and experience by crowd-committee is like waiting for the monkeys to come up with Hamlet

So, rationality and logic - rip it up and start again? Nope, we need right brain and we need left brain. The time has come to weigh both with equal measure. Let’s take note of Spock when he says “”Logic is the beginning of wisdom; not the end.”

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My daughter who is seven has just got a Tamagotchi for Christmas. Consequently, she spent the whole of Christmas Day pandering to its needs, playing games, cleaning up its mess, feeding it. What a bizarre effect … I mean, its a postage stamp interface, awful green-screen style graphics, three buttons and very obscure interaction design. The worst usability and aesthetics of anything I’ve seen recently, but it ‘got’ my daughter almost immediately, and its had her ever since!

Thats the raw power of generated emotion, the power of visceral psychological cues. Tapping into our deep down need to nurture and care for, is what drives and motivates our children to spend seemingly unending hours pressing tiny buttons and squinting at a grey-green line drawing. Thats the power of it, it can truly motivate to not care about usability, to not care about about beauty. By hell this effect is strong, use with care.

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I sent an email the other day to a colleague and was slightly surprised to get a spam filter email as response. But I quickly rationalised this as a sensible and reasonable thing…I get a lot of spam…I’m not surprised…Maybe something I might end up having to do with an online account. Then I looked at the email and started boiling …

It read (or I interpreted) “You are a suspect…you are not allowed”. Had I really blown something up? I didn’t think so. I thought, I’m sure my colleague can’t know of this …so I clicked on, into more villainy and deceit… the next screen was worse…

So … if my colleague deigns to allow me in … now I’m getting more and more agitated. And the horrible thing is that the effect of this is reflecting on my colleague, not the awful reverse emotional design of this screen. It says “…if so-and-so chooses to allow email from your address”. This screen purports to speak for my colleague. It makes me think these are his words, not the words of this awful site.

The final screen just rubs it in, repeats the ‘choosing’ insult, then asks me if I want more information about spam blocker. Do I hell!

Interestingly, its perfectly usable. Didn’t stop me, and I found all the buttons. But it was definately NOT a good experience. In fact, this is the worst emotional design I have seen, obviously built from ignorance. And there is no need. The design should be focussed on providing a good experience for those like me legitimately trying to be in touch. It should support my rationalisations of security and safety and communicate apology and friendliness. The spammers dont care what you say, but your colleagues do, so don’t alienate them with design like this.

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