Map your brain to your designs (Matt Web)
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.
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.
). 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”
Audio recording

June 14th, 2005 at 10:41 pm
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!
June 14th, 2005 at 10:41 pm
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!
June 14th, 2005 at 10:49 pm
Can you.. go on a bit? Joseph Ledoux?
June 14th, 2005 at 10:49 pm
Can you.. go on a bit? Joseph Ledoux?
June 14th, 2005 at 11:04 pm
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? ;) )
June 14th, 2005 at 11:04 pm
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? ;) )