Map your brain to your designs (Matt Web)

Posted: June 14th, 2005 | 6 Comments »

Audio recording

Author of Mind Hack. This guy’s job is to work on improving the relationship between how your brain functions and computer interfaces. His point is that our brains work a certain way wether we like it or not. It’s important that we first understand these ground rules at first so we can design effectively afterwards. He compared his approach to crime: crime always starts with small things like a broken window. Then slowly but surely conditions degrade and insecurity rises. To fight crime you better fight the little things first because that will fix the big picture.

  • Our brain perceives via various channels: – vision (color, shapes) – linguistic
    etc…
    We constantly have competing stimuli arriving to the brain. He gave the famous example:
    Read this: red blue black green.
    This will be harder: red blue black green.

    Another exercice that I can’t reproduce here but trust me it’s true: imagine the following setting.

    The pluses will turn into a colored dot

    ● +

    and you have to press the appropriate button. If the colored dot is on the same side than the button, you’ll systematically be around 5% quicker to press it. Just because it’s closer to how your brain works.

  • Example of an aberration in software when you consider how our brain works: the visual buffer. When you watch something usually it’s aspect does not change in a millisecond. Things transition between their states. A door opens before it’s opened you get the point. In web browsers you sometime have the page reloading, 95% of the screen is the same but 5% has changed and you’ll need time to find what has changed if you don’t get strong hints from the UI.

  • Example of a good (yet imaginative) interface. Matt played a few minutes of Minority Report (with the express consent of his local Blockbuster ). Tom Cruise is playing with pieces of video on a transparent screen. I’m not going to describe this as it’s obviously visual. This interface has at least three very interesting characteristics: – it works with pre-attention -> when items arrive for Cruise to watch, they stand by on the side of the screen for a while until he picks them up. – the user has to voluntarily center things when he is paying attention to them – closing is not immediate, it happens with visual clues that scream “this thing is actually closing right now”

  • Matt then talked about bodymaps, how stuff can actually extend a person’s feeling about it’s capacity to operate. Give me a sword and my brain will start thinking outside of my body as it knows I can reach further than my arm. Designers create bodymaps.

  • Bottom line is: design will eventually have to work the way the brain works.

    • 6 Comments on “Map your brain to your designs (Matt Web)”

    1. 1 nicolas said at 22:41 on June 14th, 2005:

      The red/blue/green phenomenon you mention at the beginning of your post is called the “stroop effect” named after J. Ridley Stroop who discovered this cognitive phenomenon.

      Besides, Webb is true. neuroscience is the next trend in design, we will see neurocognition-oriented designers in few years… Which is good since cognitive processes are an important thing that sould be taken into account (it’s easy for me to say so after 7 years in the field but… it’s true ;) )

      Stefano is right to look at what Joseph Ledoux wrote about emotions!

    2. 2 nicolas said at 22:41 on June 14th, 2005:

      The red/blue/green phenomenon you mention at the beginning of your post is called the “stroop effect” named after J. Ridley Stroop who discovered this cognitive phenomenon.

      Besides, Webb is true. neuroscience is the next trend in design, we will see neurocognition-oriented designers in few years… Which is good since cognitive processes are an important thing that sould be taken into account (it’s easy for me to say so after 7 years in the field but… it’s true ;) )

      Stefano is right to look at what Joseph Ledoux wrote about emotions!

    3. 3 Laurent said at 22:49 on June 14th, 2005:

      Can you.. go on a bit? Joseph Ledoux?

    4. 4 Laurent said at 22:49 on June 14th, 2005:

      Can you.. go on a bit? Joseph Ledoux?

    5. 5 nicolas said at 23:04 on June 14th, 2005:

      About Joseph Ledoux (an american neuroscientist who work on brain imagery/cognitive processes/emotions): http://www.cns.nyu.edu/home/ledoux/

      But as I said to Stefano, I won’t jump into cognitive science with this.

      Mind Hacks is a relevant introduction since it summarizes a wide bunch of research and put it into more concrete results

      (it’s a shame your comments feed does not work – tu utilise tjrs pas ichat? ;) )

    6. 6 nicolas said at 23:04 on June 14th, 2005:

      About Joseph Ledoux (an american neuroscientist who work on brain imagery/cognitive processes/emotions): http://www.cns.nyu.edu/home/ledoux/

      But as I said to Stefano, I won’t jump into cognitive science with this.

      Mind Hacks is a relevant introduction since it summarizes a wide bunch of research and put it into more concrete results

      (it’s a shame your comments feed does not work – tu utilise tjrs pas ichat? ;) )

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