“Life is too important to be taken seriously.” For me, Oscar Wilde’s quote reflects the humor I always see in life. Being a designer is more of a way of life and not just my profession. To be innovative and creative, you have to always look at the humor and the details no one else pays attention to every day.
I remember when I was first out of college; I put a bullet on my resume stating, “Ability to inspire creativity in others.” It’s funny how some things sound so good when they are in your head, but in reality just become controversial and embarrassing. Sometimes the world can't always see your vision. I always believed in taking risk though and I'm not afraid to make mistakes. Over time, I have found that Woody Allen’s quote “90% of life is just showing up” is impact enough.
I used to spend a lot of my time forcing myself to do things, like overcoming my fear of public speaking or fear of heights. But the older I become, I realize that I may never get over my fears; maybe life is just a series of compromises. Life is the journey.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Wire Rings
Little did I know or ever realize how much I would need “Boy Scout Survival Training” while I was spending all those wasted hours in Campfire Girls. We spent, long and tedious hours making bookmarks endorsed with our names made out of alphabet soup letters and those useless wire rings! I have spent a lot of time pondering what wire rings ever had to do with fostering a sisterhood of play, work, and healthy values to shape us into active, modern women. My wire ring collection includes just about every size and color a person would want. The closest I came to learning “real” survival techniques were weaving together strips of newspaper to make a forest mat which we neatly enclosed in a garbage bag tapering the excess edges to fit the size of the mat by taping or stapling the edges. But, with the newspaper industry virtually disappearing into online formats, it is highly unlikely we will carry our personal stacks with us deep into the forest ever again.
From these early experiences, survival never had a personal meaning. As an adult, my husband always compensates for me wherever we go to make sure we never forget anything because he was a boy scout. I have often teased him about bringing the kitchen sink but just last weekend we were out on an unexpectedly long hike at Cougar Mountain because we became lost on one of the 67 acres of trails. As the brief dusk abruptly went to dark, it quickly overshadowed all the fun we were having. Several moments of fear and panic overtook me as I realized I had absolutely nothing except the house key and one tissue – not water, not an ounce of food and certainly not a light. As bats started diving over me, I threw on my hood and quickly ran frantically up the trail looking for any familiar trail names which may tie back into the ones we knew. I was imagining all that could go wrong and all of the animals lurking in the shadows waiting to attack us. This fear all comes from a part from our most recent experiences in the jungle. I can see survival is becoming a reoccurring theme for us. After a while I settled into knowing there were no any deadly snakes or wild animals ready to pounce on us, rather just the woods we grew up in and know well. Our very own Northwest woods became the marked turning point in my personal survival responsibilities. Here is where I want to pass down my lessons to you. Learn to be prepared even if it doesn’t seem natural. You could be out on a hike like us, expecting only to be out for a half hour which could turn into much more than you bargained for. Heed the Boy Scouts’ motto: Be prepared!
While most people probably follow some of the suggested basics, this could be new territory for others who may have shared similar experiences as me. It’s not even that I haven’t been aware of them, it comes from a belief like, “We are only going for a short hike -- I really don’t need to bring anything” until you find yourself in unexpected circumstances. REI suggest the following 10 essentials for day hiking for safety, survival and basic comfort.
1. Navigation like a compass and map
2. Sun screen protection: lotion, glasses, hat
3. Insulated clothing and shoes
4. Illumination: flashlight or headlamp
5. First aid supplies
6. Fire: matches in a waterproof case or a fire starter
7. Repair kit and tools: knife, tape
8. Nutrition: energy bars, trail mix
9. Hydration
10. Emergency shelter or blanket
Going beyond just day hiking into thinking about emergencies or natural disasters, I have found some great advice from the Survival Center:
Planning is important, but rehearsal is when you will test your plan and identify flaws. Rehearsal is simply pretending you are in a survival situation and acting accordingly. Here are some survival examples to try:
1. Try living for a weekend without electricity. You can do this the real way by shutting of the breaker (to prevent cheating) or the easy way by just "pretending." If you do the latter, you should fine each other for violating the rules. The exercise will teach you that boiling water over a camp stove or a fire in the back yard just to make you're morning coffee can really wreck your normal morning routine. But hopefully the experience will also help you identify missing supplies, bad ideas and develop a new, stronger plan.
2. Try to evacuate your family to another location (anywhere from a friend or relatives to a motel 100 miles away). Give yourselves 20 minutes to pack. Once you've reached your destination make a list of everything you forgot and then add it to your bag. Once you've settled in at your destination, take a minute to think how you would feel if everything you left behind was destroyed by a fire or if everything below the second floor was damaged or destroyed by a flood. Revise your storage and survival plans accordingly.
3. Go for a drive one Saturday in the fall. Pull over in a remote area (if it's safe) and spend the night there with only the supplies on hand in your car.
4. Try eating only your survival foods for a weekend or even a week. This is a good one if you're ready to rotate out some of your food. It also has the added benefit of letting you identify any dishes you can't stand or to realize you need to add some spices and a cook book to your stash.
Lastly, to develop a survivalist mentality, you must think through scenarios. Play scenarios through your head and rehearse your options and actions. For example:
• If you are stuck in traffic, imagine what you would do if a large earthquake struck. Where would you go? What would you do?
• If you're traveling out of town or in any unfamiliar area, think about what you would do if you were stranded due to a breakdown or if the area was suddenly hit by a flash flood. What would you do to increase your chance of survival?
Perhaps through my survival exploration, I will eventually find a purpose for all of those useless wire rings, but at least they hold a strong reminder of what to keep in my head next time we are out on another hike or deep in a jungle in another country. Don’t get rid of those perceived useless relics you may have, they may hold a key to helping you change your behavior and become a survivalist.
From these early experiences, survival never had a personal meaning. As an adult, my husband always compensates for me wherever we go to make sure we never forget anything because he was a boy scout. I have often teased him about bringing the kitchen sink but just last weekend we were out on an unexpectedly long hike at Cougar Mountain because we became lost on one of the 67 acres of trails. As the brief dusk abruptly went to dark, it quickly overshadowed all the fun we were having. Several moments of fear and panic overtook me as I realized I had absolutely nothing except the house key and one tissue – not water, not an ounce of food and certainly not a light. As bats started diving over me, I threw on my hood and quickly ran frantically up the trail looking for any familiar trail names which may tie back into the ones we knew. I was imagining all that could go wrong and all of the animals lurking in the shadows waiting to attack us. This fear all comes from a part from our most recent experiences in the jungle. I can see survival is becoming a reoccurring theme for us. After a while I settled into knowing there were no any deadly snakes or wild animals ready to pounce on us, rather just the woods we grew up in and know well. Our very own Northwest woods became the marked turning point in my personal survival responsibilities. Here is where I want to pass down my lessons to you. Learn to be prepared even if it doesn’t seem natural. You could be out on a hike like us, expecting only to be out for a half hour which could turn into much more than you bargained for. Heed the Boy Scouts’ motto: Be prepared!
While most people probably follow some of the suggested basics, this could be new territory for others who may have shared similar experiences as me. It’s not even that I haven’t been aware of them, it comes from a belief like, “We are only going for a short hike -- I really don’t need to bring anything” until you find yourself in unexpected circumstances. REI suggest the following 10 essentials for day hiking for safety, survival and basic comfort.
1. Navigation like a compass and map
2. Sun screen protection: lotion, glasses, hat
3. Insulated clothing and shoes
4. Illumination: flashlight or headlamp
5. First aid supplies
6. Fire: matches in a waterproof case or a fire starter
7. Repair kit and tools: knife, tape
8. Nutrition: energy bars, trail mix
9. Hydration
10. Emergency shelter or blanket
Going beyond just day hiking into thinking about emergencies or natural disasters, I have found some great advice from the Survival Center:
Planning is important, but rehearsal is when you will test your plan and identify flaws. Rehearsal is simply pretending you are in a survival situation and acting accordingly. Here are some survival examples to try:
1. Try living for a weekend without electricity. You can do this the real way by shutting of the breaker (to prevent cheating) or the easy way by just "pretending." If you do the latter, you should fine each other for violating the rules. The exercise will teach you that boiling water over a camp stove or a fire in the back yard just to make you're morning coffee can really wreck your normal morning routine. But hopefully the experience will also help you identify missing supplies, bad ideas and develop a new, stronger plan.
2. Try to evacuate your family to another location (anywhere from a friend or relatives to a motel 100 miles away). Give yourselves 20 minutes to pack. Once you've reached your destination make a list of everything you forgot and then add it to your bag. Once you've settled in at your destination, take a minute to think how you would feel if everything you left behind was destroyed by a fire or if everything below the second floor was damaged or destroyed by a flood. Revise your storage and survival plans accordingly.
3. Go for a drive one Saturday in the fall. Pull over in a remote area (if it's safe) and spend the night there with only the supplies on hand in your car.
4. Try eating only your survival foods for a weekend or even a week. This is a good one if you're ready to rotate out some of your food. It also has the added benefit of letting you identify any dishes you can't stand or to realize you need to add some spices and a cook book to your stash.
Lastly, to develop a survivalist mentality, you must think through scenarios. Play scenarios through your head and rehearse your options and actions. For example:
• If you are stuck in traffic, imagine what you would do if a large earthquake struck. Where would you go? What would you do?
• If you're traveling out of town or in any unfamiliar area, think about what you would do if you were stranded due to a breakdown or if the area was suddenly hit by a flash flood. What would you do to increase your chance of survival?
Perhaps through my survival exploration, I will eventually find a purpose for all of those useless wire rings, but at least they hold a strong reminder of what to keep in my head next time we are out on another hike or deep in a jungle in another country. Don’t get rid of those perceived useless relics you may have, they may hold a key to helping you change your behavior and become a survivalist.
Breaking Codes
My favorite “meaning of life” answer was given by Curly in “City Slickers” when he held up his index finger and Billy Crystal said “Your finger?
It would be convenient if everything packaged up nicely to explain the meaning of things. It is, after all human nature. There are more answers, however, in studying the complex and messy details of everyday life. Right now there is a growing interest in the marketing industry to get to that “one thing”, the essence of what will motivate to users to buy. The answers are in the details of life.
For user experience professionals, like myself, to understand users can help predict the human behaviors in almost anything. We study users to understand their emotion, context and meaning of their motivations because motivations shape behaviors. Motivations can lead to the triggers that lead to desirable user behaviors which help drive what is really important.
Recently, I was told about a researcher, Dr. Rapaille who has brought science to the business world through his work in archetypes. He has been profiled in many national media outlets, including 60 Minutes II and on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Styles section and works for fifty Fortune 100 companies.
An Archetype can be thought of as a path that is imprinted in our unconscious and guides our actions. The emotional energy created during your first experience with a given product/concept determines the pattern of behavior to be used throughout your entire life in relation to this product/concept. These experiences, which are the essence of all our behaviors, vary from culture to culture. The permanent underlying structure of these experiences, deeply rooted in our unconscious, is the key to understanding fully what people do and why. This structure is the Archetype.
Dr. Rapaille began as a child a former child psychologist specializing in Autism. Imprinting is a rapid learning process that takes place early in life and establishes unconscious behavior during a critical time of life after it is next to impossible to imprint.
He believes individuals with common cultural backgrounds will share reasonably convergent mental models, ideologies and institutions. People with different learning experiences will have different theories to interpret their environment.
He moved science into the business market by breaking “codes” like that of culture, luxury, leadership, globalization, etc. His work has proven successful into providing guidance into meeting the unanticipated needs of users; this is a powerful way to differentiate products. These codes reveal which elements can be used successfully by companies to trigger a “premium” perception in consumers’ minds in the case of luxury.
For me, this research is fascinating and can be applied across disciplines. In user experience, archetypes, or personas, are also models of behavior which are strongly rooted in cultural codes. If there is a shift in these mental models, it is “Curly’s index finger to the meaning of life” response. Cultural forces are powerful and are a strong platform for identifying change, improvement, new product design and innovation.
The logic of emotion derived from Dr. Rapaille’s “Cultural Code” Study breaks down the following cultural descriptions that drive consumer choices:
Chinese: Symbol – womb, verb: Entitlement
French: Ideas
British: Class Structure
American: Autonomy, verb: Just do it!
From a user experience perspective, using these codes will enable us to deal with strong uncertainty at the individual level and will help to us to understand user motivations and behaviors on an even deeper level.
It would be convenient if everything packaged up nicely to explain the meaning of things. It is, after all human nature. There are more answers, however, in studying the complex and messy details of everyday life. Right now there is a growing interest in the marketing industry to get to that “one thing”, the essence of what will motivate to users to buy. The answers are in the details of life.
For user experience professionals, like myself, to understand users can help predict the human behaviors in almost anything. We study users to understand their emotion, context and meaning of their motivations because motivations shape behaviors. Motivations can lead to the triggers that lead to desirable user behaviors which help drive what is really important.
Recently, I was told about a researcher, Dr. Rapaille who has brought science to the business world through his work in archetypes. He has been profiled in many national media outlets, including 60 Minutes II and on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Styles section and works for fifty Fortune 100 companies.
An Archetype can be thought of as a path that is imprinted in our unconscious and guides our actions. The emotional energy created during your first experience with a given product/concept determines the pattern of behavior to be used throughout your entire life in relation to this product/concept. These experiences, which are the essence of all our behaviors, vary from culture to culture. The permanent underlying structure of these experiences, deeply rooted in our unconscious, is the key to understanding fully what people do and why. This structure is the Archetype.
Dr. Rapaille began as a child a former child psychologist specializing in Autism. Imprinting is a rapid learning process that takes place early in life and establishes unconscious behavior during a critical time of life after it is next to impossible to imprint.
He believes individuals with common cultural backgrounds will share reasonably convergent mental models, ideologies and institutions. People with different learning experiences will have different theories to interpret their environment.
He moved science into the business market by breaking “codes” like that of culture, luxury, leadership, globalization, etc. His work has proven successful into providing guidance into meeting the unanticipated needs of users; this is a powerful way to differentiate products. These codes reveal which elements can be used successfully by companies to trigger a “premium” perception in consumers’ minds in the case of luxury.
For me, this research is fascinating and can be applied across disciplines. In user experience, archetypes, or personas, are also models of behavior which are strongly rooted in cultural codes. If there is a shift in these mental models, it is “Curly’s index finger to the meaning of life” response. Cultural forces are powerful and are a strong platform for identifying change, improvement, new product design and innovation.
The logic of emotion derived from Dr. Rapaille’s “Cultural Code” Study breaks down the following cultural descriptions that drive consumer choices:
Chinese: Symbol – womb, verb: Entitlement
French: Ideas
British: Class Structure
American: Autonomy, verb: Just do it!
From a user experience perspective, using these codes will enable us to deal with strong uncertainty at the individual level and will help to us to understand user motivations and behaviors on an even deeper level.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Two Paths To Determine a Direction for a Design
The following questions are representative of the two paths in User Experience to determine the direction for a design.
Architecture
1. What are users’ primary goals, and how can they achieve them using the application?
2. How do users get from place to place?
3. What rules exist that users have to work around?
4. How are product features and components branded?
5. What is the optimal scope of the application’s feature set?
6. How does the UI roadmap and product roadmap position the application?
7. What is the application’s search mechanism?
Interaction
1. What layout pattern would work best?
2. Which features and information are of higher importance, and how do I draw users’ attention to them?
3. How should I incorporate the user feedback I am getting from user research, user surveys, and formative and summative usability testing?
4. What behaviors occur on dragging and dropping, on mouse over, etc?
5. How can I communicate the strengths of a feature or application?
6. How can I satisfy users’ primary needs and support the tasks that let them achieve their goals?
7. How can I draw on users’ intuition to get them to the next step?
8. How can I ensure users are aware they’re performing a subtask that’s part of a greater task they’ve started?
9. How can I use the UI components that are available to me—such as grids, tabs, and panels?
10. How can I maintain consistency throughout the application?
Architecture
1. What are users’ primary goals, and how can they achieve them using the application?
2. How do users get from place to place?
3. What rules exist that users have to work around?
4. How are product features and components branded?
5. What is the optimal scope of the application’s feature set?
6. How does the UI roadmap and product roadmap position the application?
7. What is the application’s search mechanism?
Interaction
1. What layout pattern would work best?
2. Which features and information are of higher importance, and how do I draw users’ attention to them?
3. How should I incorporate the user feedback I am getting from user research, user surveys, and formative and summative usability testing?
4. What behaviors occur on dragging and dropping, on mouse over, etc?
5. How can I communicate the strengths of a feature or application?
6. How can I satisfy users’ primary needs and support the tasks that let them achieve their goals?
7. How can I draw on users’ intuition to get them to the next step?
8. How can I ensure users are aware they’re performing a subtask that’s part of a greater task they’ve started?
9. How can I use the UI components that are available to me—such as grids, tabs, and panels?
10. How can I maintain consistency throughout the application?
On Creating a Conceptual Model
Albert Einstein once said, "Make it simple, as simple as possible but no simpler." This is the goal of user experience. As easy as it sounds, it is not easy. I usually start by looking for visual representations of problems and solutions and draw only the essential items of the system and the relationship they have to other elements. The tasks themselves begin to reveal themselves, that is where the workflows begin and end.
The challenge is to get developers to view the solution from the users perspective, from the task rather than from how the software will function. Once I can do this, the question becomes, how do I present this functionality in a way that is obvious to the user, perhaps through a familiar analogy. This, by the way, is clearly the most difficult job of user interface design, creating the balance between the obvious user tasks and the system functionality. Analogies usually become the basis for the UI conceptual model.
A map is the artifact resulting from the conceptual model and is used for extracting information from the user's task domain as well as the implementation domain. It is useful in so many ways including a tool for tracking unnecessary features, inappropriate assumptions as well as unnecessary functionality. In interaction design, I transpose this model into a visual communication of wireframes as a communication tool. As a designer, I find the structure in information that is useful for an intended audience.
The challenge is to get developers to view the solution from the users perspective, from the task rather than from how the software will function. Once I can do this, the question becomes, how do I present this functionality in a way that is obvious to the user, perhaps through a familiar analogy. This, by the way, is clearly the most difficult job of user interface design, creating the balance between the obvious user tasks and the system functionality. Analogies usually become the basis for the UI conceptual model.
A map is the artifact resulting from the conceptual model and is used for extracting information from the user's task domain as well as the implementation domain. It is useful in so many ways including a tool for tracking unnecessary features, inappropriate assumptions as well as unnecessary functionality. In interaction design, I transpose this model into a visual communication of wireframes as a communication tool. As a designer, I find the structure in information that is useful for an intended audience.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
With or Without a Flashlight
“What is that? Hurry, hurry, hurry turn on the flashlight I said to Michael who was almost asleep and to myself, too stricken with fear to find it in the dark when it had mysteriously disappeared. It felt like the climax to a suspenseful movie, where you are on the edge and holding your breath. Don’t move, did you hear that? It sounds like everyone below us is eating everyone around them!” Night blindness can leave you uniquely vulnerable as we discovered. We were staying in a jungle lodge with only paper thin boards separating us from ‘them’. The Amazon’s sudden, inexplicable sounds can be terrifying at night, especially the first one and, well the rest of the nights as well.
Life in the jungle is immediate in every sense of the word. It certainly is not a ride in Disneyland even though you want yourself to believe it. Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey – The River of Doubt describes the jungle so vividly, “So complex and interdependent was the ecosystem he and his men had entered that the jungle itself could appear to take on the attributes of a living being…the screams, crashes, clangs, and cries of the long Amazon night were all the more disturbing because they often provoked apparent terror among unseen inhabitants of the jungle themselves. In the fathom canyons of tree trunks and the shrouds of black vines that surrounded the men at night, the hum and chatter of thousands of nocturnal creatures would snap into instant silence in response to a strange noise, leaving the men to wait in breathless apprehension of what might come next.”
Those are the perfect words to describe what we felt when we experienced the Amazon Jungle on trip last September. We had excellent guides who knew exactly what to do in every situation. We realized we knew very little about real survival. It was also amazing to us how easy it was to let go of the stresses of our jobs and lives when we found ourselves on high alert to our immediate surroundings.
We are sure you are now asking yourselves, why go there – there are safer, more relaxing places to go on vacation. That’s true, there are, but how alive do you feel everyday in your safe routines? This trip heightened our senses, forced us to face our fears and gave us an extreme view of different cultures and survival. It was exhilarating. Just as Theodore Roosevelt realized the unexpected magnitude of their trip and how unprepared they were, we too were in the same dugout boats they used back then and still use today. BIG REVELATION: Without our guide, I’m not sure we still would have a chance of surviving by ourselves in the Amazon.
Despite all of the surprises in the jungle, the opportunities of fringe travel, as I call it, increases the opportunity you have to really live in the moment. These life skills sharpen your senses and help you operate in the world on a different level. My personal experience in the jungle gave me a gift of a new kind of empathy about perspective. Rather than using a negative judgment about something, understand the principles of the context in which something exists rather than judgment based perhaps solely on fear. This new metaphor of being in the jungle is a new perspective of surviving and not at the lowest level in Maslow’s hierarchy but in self-actualization.
Maslow learned to distinguish “special talent creativeness” from “self-actualizing (SA) creativeness," which springs more directly from the personality, and showed itself in the ordinary affairs of daily life. Self-actualizing humans “do not neglect the unknown, or deny it, or run away from it or try to make believe it is really known…they do not cling to the familiar, nor is their quest for the truth a catastrophic need for certainty, safety, definiteness, and order.”
This year, I believe we have all been provided these kinds of opportunities, especially in the economic conditions and the uncertainty in which we live. I have used these lessons from the jungle in business to help focus on being in the moment by visualizing the bigger picture while examining immediate things going on underfoot. The corporate world is a lot more primal than you could have imagined!
Life in the jungle is immediate in every sense of the word. It certainly is not a ride in Disneyland even though you want yourself to believe it. Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey – The River of Doubt describes the jungle so vividly, “So complex and interdependent was the ecosystem he and his men had entered that the jungle itself could appear to take on the attributes of a living being…the screams, crashes, clangs, and cries of the long Amazon night were all the more disturbing because they often provoked apparent terror among unseen inhabitants of the jungle themselves. In the fathom canyons of tree trunks and the shrouds of black vines that surrounded the men at night, the hum and chatter of thousands of nocturnal creatures would snap into instant silence in response to a strange noise, leaving the men to wait in breathless apprehension of what might come next.”
Those are the perfect words to describe what we felt when we experienced the Amazon Jungle on trip last September. We had excellent guides who knew exactly what to do in every situation. We realized we knew very little about real survival. It was also amazing to us how easy it was to let go of the stresses of our jobs and lives when we found ourselves on high alert to our immediate surroundings.
We are sure you are now asking yourselves, why go there – there are safer, more relaxing places to go on vacation. That’s true, there are, but how alive do you feel everyday in your safe routines? This trip heightened our senses, forced us to face our fears and gave us an extreme view of different cultures and survival. It was exhilarating. Just as Theodore Roosevelt realized the unexpected magnitude of their trip and how unprepared they were, we too were in the same dugout boats they used back then and still use today. BIG REVELATION: Without our guide, I’m not sure we still would have a chance of surviving by ourselves in the Amazon.
Despite all of the surprises in the jungle, the opportunities of fringe travel, as I call it, increases the opportunity you have to really live in the moment. These life skills sharpen your senses and help you operate in the world on a different level. My personal experience in the jungle gave me a gift of a new kind of empathy about perspective. Rather than using a negative judgment about something, understand the principles of the context in which something exists rather than judgment based perhaps solely on fear. This new metaphor of being in the jungle is a new perspective of surviving and not at the lowest level in Maslow’s hierarchy but in self-actualization.
Maslow learned to distinguish “special talent creativeness” from “self-actualizing (SA) creativeness," which springs more directly from the personality, and showed itself in the ordinary affairs of daily life. Self-actualizing humans “do not neglect the unknown, or deny it, or run away from it or try to make believe it is really known…they do not cling to the familiar, nor is their quest for the truth a catastrophic need for certainty, safety, definiteness, and order.”
This year, I believe we have all been provided these kinds of opportunities, especially in the economic conditions and the uncertainty in which we live. I have used these lessons from the jungle in business to help focus on being in the moment by visualizing the bigger picture while examining immediate things going on underfoot. The corporate world is a lot more primal than you could have imagined!
Using Information in Bigger Way
Have you ever wondered how a Website captivates you? It is more than likely it is because the content on the site looks like a good meal and indicate that it’s an easy catch. This intent is very purposeful from the designers who want their site to be caught and visited. Web designers who know about the foraging theory, or adaptive strategies understand how to make your interactions faster and stronger.
Pirolli was one of the founding fathers on the Information Foraging Theory and worked at Palo Alto Research Center in 1992. The idea a few years back was deliberate in trying to keep you on the page longer. Now, as the Web audiences have matured, Website content has also changed:
· Support short visits to your website
· Be a snack (fast downloads and create stickiness)
· Address user's immediate needs
Like animals foraging for food with time and energy constraints, humans forage for information looking for answers. The problem is that we in a glut of information with no time to sort it all out. Humans have naturally adopted adaptive strategies to optimize their intake of useful information per unit cost. The Information Foraging Theory aims to model and predict our evolutionary behavior in adapting to an increasingly complex world. The book both models our behavior in mathematical formulae and validates its predictions empirically to refine the model. Armed with this knowledge, designers can make informed decisions on web designs before they make a heavy investment in implementation.
What Is Information Foraging?
Unlike cognitive engineering models of the early 1990s where tasks were analyzed in well-defined domains and user interfaces, people seeking information are largely shaped by the structure of the content, that is, their information environment. People routinely sift massive volumes of information under deadline pressure to make complex search decisions under uncertain conditions. We are constantly evaluating the expected costs and benefits of our actions in this largely probabilistic textured information environment (Brunswik 1952) to maximize our gain of valuable information. Pirolli calls this behavior information foraging.
Information foraging strategies optimize the use of our time and effort to gain valuable information. We satisfice, getting a good enough outcome under uncertain and limited conditions (bounded rationality). As in the real world where animals forage for food, the online world of the Web is a patchy environment with information arranged into clumps. Patches of useful information reside in different websites, it is our job as "informavores" to seek out the richest patches and extract useful information. As we forage for more information, it becomes harder to find additional useful information as we pick off the "low hanging fruit." Diminishing returns cause us to "feed" at a patch until our rate of gain of useful information falls below the perceived average. Once we think the grass is greener in another "patch," we switch pages, websites, or search criteria, seeking out more fruitful patches of information. Pirolli's mathematics describe the environment and predicts with some accuracy our behavior in the Web's patchy environment.
The optimal information forager "maximizes the value of knowledge gained per unit cost of interaction." We select designs that improve our returns on information foraging. This natural selection implies that sites that have high information scent and usability would fare better than sites that have lower scent and usability. This gives an entirely new meaning to the survival of the fittest when applied to the Web.
Experts in the usability industry: Spool, Perfetti, and Brittan (2004) have also supported that users searched for a scent trail and followed it toward their content. "As the scent got stronger, they grew more eager. When they lost the scent, they backtracked until they picked it up again."
Spool and his colleagues recommend using trigger words that will be recognized by the user. Here are some of Spool's recommendations from the "Tao of Scent" (2004)
Use Search Analytics
Using search analytics helps to "close the loop" between designer and user expectations. Giving users what they are searching for, in the terms they are searching with is one way to ensure higher conversion rates. Regularly analyzing search results is one way to ensure you are not missing topics and "trigger words" that your customers are searching for. Scent is as much an issue in search as it is in navigation."
Pirolli was one of the founding fathers on the Information Foraging Theory and worked at Palo Alto Research Center in 1992. The idea a few years back was deliberate in trying to keep you on the page longer. Now, as the Web audiences have matured, Website content has also changed:
· Support short visits to your website
· Be a snack (fast downloads and create stickiness)
· Address user's immediate needs
Like animals foraging for food with time and energy constraints, humans forage for information looking for answers. The problem is that we in a glut of information with no time to sort it all out. Humans have naturally adopted adaptive strategies to optimize their intake of useful information per unit cost. The Information Foraging Theory aims to model and predict our evolutionary behavior in adapting to an increasingly complex world. The book both models our behavior in mathematical formulae and validates its predictions empirically to refine the model. Armed with this knowledge, designers can make informed decisions on web designs before they make a heavy investment in implementation.
What Is Information Foraging?
Unlike cognitive engineering models of the early 1990s where tasks were analyzed in well-defined domains and user interfaces, people seeking information are largely shaped by the structure of the content, that is, their information environment. People routinely sift massive volumes of information under deadline pressure to make complex search decisions under uncertain conditions. We are constantly evaluating the expected costs and benefits of our actions in this largely probabilistic textured information environment (Brunswik 1952) to maximize our gain of valuable information. Pirolli calls this behavior information foraging.
Information foraging strategies optimize the use of our time and effort to gain valuable information. We satisfice, getting a good enough outcome under uncertain and limited conditions (bounded rationality). As in the real world where animals forage for food, the online world of the Web is a patchy environment with information arranged into clumps. Patches of useful information reside in different websites, it is our job as "informavores" to seek out the richest patches and extract useful information. As we forage for more information, it becomes harder to find additional useful information as we pick off the "low hanging fruit." Diminishing returns cause us to "feed" at a patch until our rate of gain of useful information falls below the perceived average. Once we think the grass is greener in another "patch," we switch pages, websites, or search criteria, seeking out more fruitful patches of information. Pirolli's mathematics describe the environment and predicts with some accuracy our behavior in the Web's patchy environment.
The optimal information forager "maximizes the value of knowledge gained per unit cost of interaction." We select designs that improve our returns on information foraging. This natural selection implies that sites that have high information scent and usability would fare better than sites that have lower scent and usability. This gives an entirely new meaning to the survival of the fittest when applied to the Web.
Experts in the usability industry: Spool, Perfetti, and Brittan (2004) have also supported that users searched for a scent trail and followed it toward their content. "As the scent got stronger, they grew more eager. When they lost the scent, they backtracked until they picked it up again."
Spool and his colleagues recommend using trigger words that will be recognized by the user. Here are some of Spool's recommendations from the "Tao of Scent" (2004)
- Communicate information scent through explicit links, those which match the information found in the link
- Trigger words cause users to click, users expect these words on the destination page
- Link text should be between 7 and 12 words long
- Links should lead to information that is more specific
- Links should accurately describe what the next page contains
- Provide feeback about where the user is in the site structure
- Avoid jargon and cute marketing terms (use short words)
Use Search Analytics
Using search analytics helps to "close the loop" between designer and user expectations. Giving users what they are searching for, in the terms they are searching with is one way to ensure higher conversion rates. Regularly analyzing search results is one way to ensure you are not missing topics and "trigger words" that your customers are searching for. Scent is as much an issue in search as it is in navigation."
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