April 30, 2017 at 13:46First time (sketches from one workshop)
Intelligent Man - always frightened researchers with his incomprehensibility. All these emotions interrupting logic; these ancient instincts that dominate rational behavior; plus children's deprivations and unpredictable subconscious associations.
Fortunately, designers and usabilityists of the last century found a temporary way out: instead of a living and unpredictable living person with billions of neural connections, they displayed a Character in a test tube: a cardboard man with a single crinkle and simple and flat needs (from his Creator). And in the last 30 years, any design of an information system began with reconciling the thoughts of the designer with this inanimate doll to confirm his own point of view through a ventriloquism session. And to this day, such a scheme of shifting one's thoughts (and responsibility for the result) into the heads of fictional characters works everywhere.
Our conversation is based on the anticipation of a different era in the design approach, a premonition of the onset of the First Time, when the umbilical cord of the designer’s own desires and personal experience about the project being created will be cut once and for all.
Why it was so important to write this one hundred thousandth article about “turning to the face of a simple user”, which has been overwhelming the entire Internet for five years now. Yes, because simply turning the design head in the other direction is clearly not enough. New bold approaches are needed.
For example, one of the methods that are close to ideal is to commit the act of killing the designer in yourself, drown out your own thoughts flow, stop your own desires, and repeat at least a thousand times with your hands, let through the body the very processes that we are going to improve for the user - and only then that magic will happen when the pain of others, ideas of others come to life through practice.
Simply put, the designer will never be able to write an application for cleaners, having not worked for less than a month with this same cleaning lady and trying to fulfill all her daily duties without exception. It is through such a mental suicide of the designer that he will come to the Russian market now, and not “smuzievo” usability. Only by living someone else's life, someone else's pain directly, with your body assessing inconvenience, fatigue, fatigue and letting through yourself the gradual mechanical memorization of complex operations.
A person is not a video camera, and can tell only slightly embellished; and write a little trick. But its consumer should not write and say anything in a good interface, just use it for its intended purpose.
The user of the interface, the buyer of the product should not do anything that the system does not imply. If the interface is not voice - the user should not talk about it, if it does not contain questionnaire screens - there is no sense in questioning about it, taking a person out of the very stream in which he should stay according to the initial idea.
A well-asked question always contains 90% of the answer, which means that having prepared the questions really well, the designer already knows all the answers to them. But words are worthless when there are deeds.
A year ago, it seemed that the salvation of the primary Ignorance of the designer can be in text interfaces. Like, to read and write using the keyboard, the majority of people are already trained and used to it, which means that it will be quite simple for them to turn any of their desires and needs into a coherent text.
The truth in these words is, it’s really easier for a person to write a couple of lines without distracting from their global thoughts:
- launch the program you need,
- book tickets for tomorrow,
- compare revenue by year with a breakdown by month ...
But the machine is too difficult to recognize and adequately execute such commands. Too many languages, words, meanings, tenses, even intonations exist. Therefore, until the emoji revolution is over, when humanity is finally transferred to communication only with pictures, pictograms and unambiguously interpreted hieroglyphs - there will be as much sense in chat interfaces as they were 30 years ago when they were invented (that is, none).
But it seems that the way out will be found not in the written answers on the portals of auditors / respondents / design evaluators (only yesterday they left the Paris barbershop), but due to technical progress: now any person can already deduce the process of conflict of different parts of his own in real time brain in the process of making a current decision.
Science has more than ever come close to the riddle of man, and technology allows you to receive not only prepared template answers from the user, but also to observe all his processes outside and inside the body 24 hours a day, which push him to make the right decision.
In theory, it seems that the design of the 21st century, armed with such amazing technologies, should go out of the cardboard world into the open space of an infinite number of neural and social connections, but for many years such expectations turn into mega-disappointment - nothing of the kind has happened.
The UX designer is still looking for the answer to the question “where does the person look”, and not “how he realizes (interprets, interprets, evaluates physiologically (including the reaction of the sweat glands, changes in muscle tone and pupil size) - this is the only graphic object that this the millisecond is in the focus of his attention ”
We can already do much more than just track the pupils, but we don’t even make a hundredth of this.
Have you ever wondered why people go to shopping centers today? Without conducting cursory surveys, but just a couple of weeks silently wandering among thousands of people. They are able to buy a pair of socks for every second on any working day, but they spend their whole legal day off on the same thing. Why throw away your long-awaited day off - wandering the corridors, the torment of choice, the endless analysis of the price / quality ratio?
For the same reason that modern men go fishing. In fact, filling your house with fish is extremely simple: can it be bought three steps from the house, ordered with delivery, get raw or already cooked, with a recipe, with bonuses, with miles to the card? What is wrong with these living people?
Evolution is wrong with us. Nature has not designed us for coworking, tablets and online stores. We are hunters and gatherers, and our only duty to the Universe is to wander back and forth, looking for affordable food and females, simultaneously killing all the animals that came to hand. Everything else is pure unplanned improvisation, one might even say a system failure.
Yes, wandering around aimlessly, exuding smells, sometimes making sounds, lashing out at food — such is a simple recipe for an ideal human pastime. And our whole body, each of its features - was imprisoned precisely for this. And how do you now evaluate this uncomfortable truth on a ten-point scale?
So, when you plan to create another site for a shopping center, or a mobile application for visitors to a mega supermarket, you need to take into account a few simple truths that ordinary users do not mention in the questionnaires, but their body simply shouts about it to every researcher who respects himself:
- People do not perceive cards , do not understand the numbers - they ponder them and realize them gradually and not entirely.
- People do not instantly read thought from an infographic, from a table or summary. We see them, we comprehend them with the mind, but do not perceive them instantly. Because this is the second signaling system, a thin underdeveloped layer on top of stable centuries-old reflexes,
- People want information from simple verbs: Run, Kusai, Nalevo, Vote with your heart ...
Therefore, it is so useless to ask directly: “And what other functions with swipe, push, vape and craft fillets do you miss in life.” Ask to commit an act:
Human time and phone memory are two resources that each of your new developments is encroaching on, so analyze whose place you are claiming in the human daily routine. Measure how many degrees the temperature of the user will change after the proposal to oust Zuckerberg in his life. This will be the first real genuine UX.
Before the painful stereotype that people interact with the world only through visual symbols, it was much more interesting to conduct full-scale studies of the user experience. For example, for many centuries in the eastern bazaars, getting the right price for the goods was a whole duel, battle, versus between a cunning trader and a wise buyer.
It used to be that the whole city would come running to watch another show about getting a discount, chanting “Fifteenth century, fifteenth century”.
It was a great time, the golden time of usability. There, everyone received their individual price, earned by their own skills and social status, and no one left offended - and now discounts for everyone, just like that, without effort, without searching?
Today, a whole culture of bazaar fights is forever buried by soulless algorithms. The result was simply the sale for the tenth time of the same piece of code with the right logo on the next grief-customer, which does nothing to make human life any better.
Our life is filled with meaning only in the process of searching for something, during the path to the blurry goal that attracts in the distance. There is nothing better than a hunch of luck, when we still do not know exactly what fate will give us in a couple of seconds - delicious prey or a pack of predators. This is our life, purpose and passion. This is an interest, an element of gamification. One of the designers who will be the first to realize this in 15-20 years will get the whole market for themselves.
Of course, the primitive questionnaires available today allegedly show that people themselves ask for more information about all the goods and discounts; And also a chat room with those who make a purchase in the next fitting room; and the “Panic Button” option in the megamarket’s application to call the guard (it’s convenient: I took out the phone, caught Wi-Fi, downloaded the application, launched it, went to the menu, clicked on the fact that a person has a stroke in the corridor - only 15 minutes of effort to help the person ), and people also need convenient navigation, because they don’t want to stray, and in 3 seconds to find and buy the right product ...
And children with a sore throat always want ice cream. One hundred servings, and to immediately a tablespoon. Will give
So how to improve and simplify the buyers their day off in the mall with the help of modern technologies, but how can they simplify the purchase of goods?
On Ozone, people buy goods when they have three seconds, and in shopping centers people need to spend the whole day hunting.
On Ozone, people buy goods when they have three seconds, and in shopping centers people need to spend the whole day hunting.
On Ozone, people buy goods when they have three seconds, and in shopping centers people need to spend the whole day hunting.
On Ozone, people buy goods when they have three seconds, and in shopping centers people need to spend the whole day hunting. DO YOU HEAR ME, DOMESTIC MASTERS OF USABILITY?
People go to fishing, to hypermarkets, and generally to any kind of motive — for the motive itself, for the sake of the process, for the feeling of oneness with other members of the herd, for the sake of drowning out their own obsessive thoughts about the aimlessness of being and the death of God.
Imagine a sudden release of endorphins from a layman who suddenly finds a money purse on the ground. Is it comparable to an email newsletter that right now somewhere in Altufevo a person has lost his wallet? And then do an experiment:
a) First, just tell your wife that tomorrow in Milan in one of the shops a red dress will be 15% cheaper than usual and watch whether she rushes to order tickets to fly for this purchase. Record her behavior on the video, record all search queries in the evening, evaluate pupils and sweat glands.
b) In a month, just buy your wife tickets to Milan for shopping without mentioning anything else. Write down her reaction on her return, her pupils, her story about how she “accidentally found this premium dress in a boutique with a 15% discount”.
Then compare the two videos.
The costs are the same, the result is identical, so why on the video in front of you are almost two different women with different postures and even gait: a panther happy from prey and an ordinary housewife?
Actually, after finding answers to the above questions, each of you can safely be awarded the title of Minister-Master in Design, Usability and Sociology , because this experiment alone speaks about the nature of living people a hundred times more than all the articles on the method available on the Internet today Characters and inventing from the head a diverse flow and even customer journey maps.
This experience alone, of course, will not be enough. There should be more experience with practice, and all of them should record the final changes in revenue.
You can test the colored navigation bars directly on the floor or price versuses in the main hall, or maybe people would like to touch three-dimensional mannequins, pointing to their bodies that they would like to buy from clothes. But what, children's toys with touches are very popular, for children in general, the tactile way of cognition has long dominated the visual.
So why not test the theory that adults, too, subconsciously want to touch not only the flat surface of the smartphone, whisking away another notice, but to the bodies. Ideally, of course, to the bodies of living fashion models: “I would have to buy such panties for my wife on March 8 with laces here.”
Who knows what will happen in the end, who tested, who at least tried to go beyond push notifications? The time of the first in this market has not yet come. Theory has never been supplanted by practice. And this is just mega disappointment.
Thank you for your time!
- Yes, here's how to work with all this?
Fortunately, designers and usabilityists of the last century found a temporary way out: instead of a living and unpredictable living person with billions of neural connections, they displayed a Character in a test tube: a cardboard man with a single crinkle and simple and flat needs (from his Creator). And in the last 30 years, any design of an information system began with reconciling the thoughts of the designer with this inanimate doll to confirm his own point of view through a ventriloquism session. And to this day, such a scheme of shifting one's thoughts (and responsibility for the result) into the heads of fictional characters works everywhere.
Our conversation is based on the anticipation of a different era in the design approach, a premonition of the onset of the First Time, when the umbilical cord of the designer’s own desires and personal experience about the project being created will be cut once and for all.
You can’t enter the river without soaking your feet
Why it was so important to write this one hundred thousandth article about “turning to the face of a simple user”, which has been overwhelming the entire Internet for five years now. Yes, because simply turning the design head in the other direction is clearly not enough. New bold approaches are needed.
For example, one of the methods that are close to ideal is to commit the act of killing the designer in yourself, drown out your own thoughts flow, stop your own desires, and repeat at least a thousand times with your hands, let through the body the very processes that we are going to improve for the user - and only then that magic will happen when the pain of others, ideas of others come to life through practice.
Simply put, the designer will never be able to write an application for cleaners, having not worked for less than a month with this same cleaning lady and trying to fulfill all her daily duties without exception. It is through such a mental suicide of the designer that he will come to the Russian market now, and not “smuzievo” usability. Only by living someone else's life, someone else's pain directly, with your body assessing inconvenience, fatigue, fatigue and letting through yourself the gradual mechanical memorization of complex operations.
“But why so complicated?” The man himself will tell.
A person is not a video camera, and can tell only slightly embellished; and write a little trick. But its consumer should not write and say anything in a good interface, just use it for its intended purpose.
The user of the interface, the buyer of the product should not do anything that the system does not imply. If the interface is not voice - the user should not talk about it, if it does not contain questionnaire screens - there is no sense in questioning about it, taking a person out of the very stream in which he should stay according to the initial idea.
A well-asked question always contains 90% of the answer, which means that having prepared the questions really well, the designer already knows all the answers to them. But words are worthless when there are deeds.
- Can I clarify here? And what if ... although no, thanks, no longer needed.
Write - Do Not Write
A year ago, it seemed that the salvation of the primary Ignorance of the designer can be in text interfaces. Like, to read and write using the keyboard, the majority of people are already trained and used to it, which means that it will be quite simple for them to turn any of their desires and needs into a coherent text.
The truth in these words is, it’s really easier for a person to write a couple of lines without distracting from their global thoughts:
- launch the program you need,
- book tickets for tomorrow,
- compare revenue by year with a breakdown by month ...
- No, it’s necessary: make everyone in the world well-fed and happy! Alright !
But the machine is too difficult to recognize and adequately execute such commands. Too many languages, words, meanings, tenses, even intonations exist. Therefore, until the emoji revolution is over, when humanity is finally transferred to communication only with pictures, pictograms and unambiguously interpreted hieroglyphs - there will be as much sense in chat interfaces as they were 30 years ago when they were invented (that is, none).
But it seems that the way out will be found not in the written answers on the portals of auditors / respondents / design evaluators (only yesterday they left the Paris barbershop), but due to technical progress: now any person can already deduce the process of conflict of different parts of his own in real time brain in the process of making a current decision.
We can a lot
Science has more than ever come close to the riddle of man, and technology allows you to receive not only prepared template answers from the user, but also to observe all his processes outside and inside the body 24 hours a day, which push him to make the right decision.
In theory, it seems that the design of the 21st century, armed with such amazing technologies, should go out of the cardboard world into the open space of an infinite number of neural and social connections, but for many years such expectations turn into mega-disappointment - nothing of the kind has happened.
The UX designer is still looking for the answer to the question “where does the person look”, and not “how he realizes (interprets, interprets, evaluates physiologically (including the reaction of the sweat glands, changes in muscle tone and pupil size) - this is the only graphic object that this the millisecond is in the focus of his attention ”
We can already do much more than just track the pupils, but we don’t even make a hundredth of this.
- Why? Too expensive?
Spotlight on the mall
Have you ever wondered why people go to shopping centers today? Without conducting cursory surveys, but just a couple of weeks silently wandering among thousands of people. They are able to buy a pair of socks for every second on any working day, but they spend their whole legal day off on the same thing. Why throw away your long-awaited day off - wandering the corridors, the torment of choice, the endless analysis of the price / quality ratio?
For the same reason that modern men go fishing. In fact, filling your house with fish is extremely simple: can it be bought three steps from the house, ordered with delivery, get raw or already cooked, with a recipe, with bonuses, with miles to the card? What is wrong with these living people?
Evolution is wrong with us. Nature has not designed us for coworking, tablets and online stores. We are hunters and gatherers, and our only duty to the Universe is to wander back and forth, looking for affordable food and females, simultaneously killing all the animals that came to hand. Everything else is pure unplanned improvisation, one might even say a system failure.
Yes, wandering around aimlessly, exuding smells, sometimes making sounds, lashing out at food — such is a simple recipe for an ideal human pastime. And our whole body, each of its features - was imprisoned precisely for this. And how do you now evaluate this uncomfortable truth on a ten-point scale?
So, when you plan to create another site for a shopping center, or a mobile application for visitors to a mega supermarket, you need to take into account a few simple truths that ordinary users do not mention in the questionnaires, but their body simply shouts about it to every researcher who respects himself:
- People do not perceive cards , do not understand the numbers - they ponder them and realize them gradually and not entirely.
- People do not instantly read thought from an infographic, from a table or summary. We see them, we comprehend them with the mind, but do not perceive them instantly. Because this is the second signaling system, a thin underdeveloped layer on top of stable centuries-old reflexes,
- People want information from simple verbs: Run, Kusai, Nalevo, Vote with your heart ...
Therefore, it is so useless to ask directly: “And what other functions with swipe, push, vape and craft fillets do you miss in life.” Ask to commit an act:
Practice 1
Show your phone. Remove any of your applications with me now to make room for a new design feature for shopping at your favorite supermarket. Maybe we’ll sacrifice VKontaktikom or Yandex.Taxi so that your personal time and phone memory are filled again with the exact signs of our trading pavilions, discount notifications, and recommendations about promotions.
Human time and phone memory are two resources that each of your new developments is encroaching on, so analyze whose place you are claiming in the human daily routine. Measure how many degrees the temperature of the user will change after the proposal to oust Zuckerberg in his life. This will be the first real genuine UX.
Usability of the past
Before the painful stereotype that people interact with the world only through visual symbols, it was much more interesting to conduct full-scale studies of the user experience. For example, for many centuries in the eastern bazaars, getting the right price for the goods was a whole duel, battle, versus between a cunning trader and a wise buyer.
It used to be that the whole city would come running to watch another show about getting a discount, chanting “Fifteenth century, fifteenth century”.
It was a great time, the golden time of usability. There, everyone received their individual price, earned by their own skills and social status, and no one left offended - and now discounts for everyone, just like that, without effort, without searching?
Today, a whole culture of bazaar fights is forever buried by soulless algorithms. The result was simply the sale for the tenth time of the same piece of code with the right logo on the next grief-customer, which does nothing to make human life any better.
Our life is filled with meaning only in the process of searching for something, during the path to the blurry goal that attracts in the distance. There is nothing better than a hunch of luck, when we still do not know exactly what fate will give us in a couple of seconds - delicious prey or a pack of predators. This is our life, purpose and passion. This is an interest, an element of gamification. One of the designers who will be the first to realize this in 15-20 years will get the whole market for themselves.
Of course, the primitive questionnaires available today allegedly show that people themselves ask for more information about all the goods and discounts; And also a chat room with those who make a purchase in the next fitting room; and the “Panic Button” option in the megamarket’s application to call the guard (it’s convenient: I took out the phone, caught Wi-Fi, downloaded the application, launched it, went to the menu, clicked on the fact that a person has a stroke in the corridor - only 15 minutes of effort to help the person ), and people also need convenient navigation, because they don’t want to stray, and in 3 seconds to find and buy the right product ...
And children with a sore throat always want ice cream. One hundred servings, and to immediately a tablespoon. Will give
So how to improve and simplify the buyers their day off in the mall with the help of modern technologies, but how can they simplify the purchase of goods?
On Ozone, people buy goods when they have three seconds, and in shopping centers people need to spend the whole day hunting.
On Ozone, people buy goods when they have three seconds, and in shopping centers people need to spend the whole day hunting.
On Ozone, people buy goods when they have three seconds, and in shopping centers people need to spend the whole day hunting.
On Ozone, people buy goods when they have three seconds, and in shopping centers people need to spend the whole day hunting. DO YOU HEAR ME, DOMESTIC MASTERS OF USABILITY?
People go to fishing, to hypermarkets, and generally to any kind of motive — for the motive itself, for the sake of the process, for the feeling of oneness with other members of the herd, for the sake of drowning out their own obsessive thoughts about the aimlessness of being and the death of God.
Seek a woman (another practice)
Imagine a sudden release of endorphins from a layman who suddenly finds a money purse on the ground. Is it comparable to an email newsletter that right now somewhere in Altufevo a person has lost his wallet? And then do an experiment:
a) First, just tell your wife that tomorrow in Milan in one of the shops a red dress will be 15% cheaper than usual and watch whether she rushes to order tickets to fly for this purchase. Record her behavior on the video, record all search queries in the evening, evaluate pupils and sweat glands.
b) In a month, just buy your wife tickets to Milan for shopping without mentioning anything else. Write down her reaction on her return, her pupils, her story about how she “accidentally found this premium dress in a boutique with a 15% discount”.
Then compare the two videos.
The costs are the same, the result is identical, so why on the video in front of you are almost two different women with different postures and even gait: a panther happy from prey and an ordinary housewife?
Actually, after finding answers to the above questions, each of you can safely be awarded the title of Minister-Master in Design, Usability and Sociology , because this experiment alone speaks about the nature of living people a hundred times more than all the articles on the method available on the Internet today Characters and inventing from the head a diverse flow and even customer journey maps.
- But what, based on this data, should you create an application?
This experience alone, of course, will not be enough. There should be more experience with practice, and all of them should record the final changes in revenue.
You can test the colored navigation bars directly on the floor or price versuses in the main hall, or maybe people would like to touch three-dimensional mannequins, pointing to their bodies that they would like to buy from clothes. But what, children's toys with touches are very popular, for children in general, the tactile way of cognition has long dominated the visual.
So why not test the theory that adults, too, subconsciously want to touch not only the flat surface of the smartphone, whisking away another notice, but to the bodies. Ideally, of course, to the bodies of living fashion models: “I would have to buy such panties for my wife on March 8 with laces here.”
Who knows what will happen in the end, who tested, who at least tried to go beyond push notifications? The time of the first in this market has not yet come. Theory has never been supplanted by practice. And this is just mega disappointment.
Thank you for your time!