Psychoergonomics

    :-)

    In a war with extra clicks and inhibitory applications, we often forget about the perception of the end user through the eyes. Let me explain what this means with a simple example: MacOS hid the console with the boot protocol, but Windows didn’t. As a result, MacOS seemed easier to people far from IT.

    Experience with the perception of the end user has been accumulated in various fields - from the production of robots to diapers. I picked up a few illustrative examples.


    The headlights of the car are perceived as “eyes”, the radiator grille is “mouth”, and the body is something like a fifth point. Therefore, cars, firstly, are animated, and secondly, they come up with a character. The girl, even if she did not hear that Micro is a woman’s car, will still not go to Almera in the cabin, but will choose mikra, because she has “round eyes”, she’s all so “cute” and “pretty”. Note that this is not a grudge against the girls, this is in favor of Nissan - they created a machine that meets the female ideas about design.

    Another example: robots. There is a great movie about how Honda engineers thought through the design of ASIMO.



    The bottom line is that not only technical parameters were evaluated, but also psychology, which is important. Somewhere on the man’s subcortex, there is a terminator, an uprising of machines, Frankenstein and other horrors. Therefore, when a person sees a walking humanoid robot, he does not like it at once. To cope with this, ASIMO designers tried to give the robot the most safe look: they reduced it to 120cm, made a helmet instead of a face and created rollers where ASIMO, all so cute, weighed 1/4 of the bow and walks by the handle. And how would he look like a two-meter one, with a silicone face and a suit?

    Now about something else. Let's talk about diapers. Have you seen an advertisement for all these diapers with ducks and pink ruffles? Do you remember yourself in two years? Even if not, do you think that you cared for these ruffles and ducks? No, you were worried about writing less, because it became disgustingly wet in the diapers, even if they were white, even purple with specks. Ducks are made for happy parents who believe that this is all connected with childhood and tenderness. If you think about it, the pampers duck of serial production is not connected with tenderness in any way, but it’s easier for parents.

    All this to the fact that in everything - from diapers to cars, from programs to robots - not only functionality and usability are important, but also psychological compatibility, I would call it psychoergonomics. These things are more difficult to count and express in millimeters and degrees, but their weight is very high.

    Therefore, when developing an application for housewives, imagine them and think what is better for them - a stylish button “launch a gadget” or the inscription “Recipes” and some duck with a colander on your head that will truly delight the heart of your target audience.

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