Today on Radio Johnny, Chris Baum talks with Peter Stahl, Senior Interaction Designer for Cisco. Peter thinks we are at a crossroads in the design profession, with tools and deliverables that are optimized for static experience. Peter explores the distinction between rhythm and flow; how flow could work across channels; how flow can be a lens to reflect on the success of our projects and as designers; and finally, the ways our deliverables might morph to encourage flow for all involved on our projects.

Quotes

“I’m interested in coming up with some theory of what we’re after as user experience designers. The best user experiences are the ones where the user is no longer aware that they are participating in something that has been designed. Csikszentmihalyi’s theories, backed up by a great deal of research, resonated with me.”

“I find that, particularly as I work with younger designers, I’m hoping to use some sorts of principles that they can consult to decide whether they are going in the right direction rather than flailing about blindingly or using some random techniques from some random website to understand if they’re moving the ball forward, or downwards, sideways, or backwards.”

“We need new deliverables that reflect the new world of what our products are. They are no longer a series of static pages, so the deliverables need to evolve to reflect that. If we come up with a tool or a series of tools that help us accurately convey the vision of what our designs represent to a wider scope of people with less effort, then I think we’ll have really advanced the practice.”

Notes

* Follow Peter on Twitter @pstahl
* Find out more about Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that inspired the presentation.

The distinction between a ‘lean forward’ and ‘lean back’ medium apparently began with interactive television. The terms have commonly been used by hand-wavers such as marketing people, media theorists, and futurists. The distinction has very little real scientific basis. There isn’t any clear idea what these terms really mean.

Still, there’s something going on here. Jakob Nielsen, in studies of reading via print versus the web, found major differences between the two. To the question of “How readers read on the web,” Nielsen answers: “They don’t.”

According to Nielsen, “People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.”

There is now a big move to migrate news, magazine, and video content and applications from the print world, the (PC-based) Web, and television to the tablet. But the tablet is a different medium than print, the PC, and television. The ‘lean forward’ and ‘lean back’ distinction seems to be important in understanding how the tablet is different, but we need to go beyond it to better understand the tablet and its differences from other media.

To do this, we need to do two things.

First, we need better language to describe what is happening. ‘Lean forward’ seems to imply paying more attention, or, maybe, just getting closer. ‘Lean back’ has an image of someone relaxing on a couch with beer-in-hand, veging out. But the main ‘lean forward’ media experience, the PC-on-the-web, is more typically someone multitasking so much he is stupider. And ‘lean back’ is supposedly the mode that people read the newspaper in. The terms also seem to imply distance from the medium, although that distance is short for print and long for television, both supposedly ‘lean back’ media.

Leaning back or forward? (copyright Apple)

Second, we need to understand why users go into a particular way of engaging with a medium. It’s not just because that they are using a particular platform, or sitting a certain distance from it. Nielsen has also done studies of readers reading an Ernest Hemingway short story on a PC, Kindle, iPad, and printed paper, obtaining essentially the same reading comprehension on different media. The main differences were that readers in some conditions were slower and that readers hated reading on the PC. If readers actually read when it is a short story, but scan instead of read if they are browsing the Web, then it seems clear that engagement style isn’t just about the platform.

New Language

When we use the terms ‘lean forward’ and ‘lean back’ what we are really talking about is what I call ‘engagement style.’ Readers that are actually reading a story have a different engagement style than readers that are browsing the Web.

I would further suggest that a user browsing the Web on a PC be regarded as having a high activity engagement style. A high activity style is one of switching tasks frequently. This style is associated with relatively low sustained attention.

A user reading a print newspaper, in contrast, would be regarded as having a high absorption engagement style, one of concentrated and long-term sustained attention. The terms ‘high activity’ and ‘high absorption’ would replace the corresponding terms ‘lean forward’ and ‘lean back’ that are used today, because they better describe the experience. These terms also allow for different values for each dimension of engagement style. Reading a newspaper is high absorption but low activity. Web browsing on a PC is high activity but probably something above the lowest level of absorption. Watching television is low activity but perhaps something less than the highest absorption, depending upon the program

Each of these categories might have subcategories. Thus, a high absorption style might be either thoughtful or passive.

‘Passive’ is the couch-potato, beer-in-hand style that is often associated with television. It involves little conscious thought. Users are very relaxed, vegging out. Readers might be reading a formulaic mystery or a police procedural novel, or watching one of the more mindless blockbuster Hollywood movies. There is thinking going on, but it is primarily unconscious, passive absorption of content.

‘Thoughtful’ also takes place in a comfortable, relaxing environment, but conscious thought is involved. Readers might be reading long-form journalism or the sort of novel that results in the reader constantly drawing inferences, like Gravity’s Rainbow. Users are relaxed, but hardly comatose.

There are important differences between these styles that have implications for the design of tools for the tablet. For example, an app designed for a passive style of engagement would provide very minimal, simple, easy-to-use tools. A video player that they just turn on to watch for a long time, or a book reader that they just swipe or press a button to get to the next page. It might have quite sophisticated software underlying it to suggest which programs to watch, and some users might initially be in a high activity style to use these tools, but once a program or reading material was selected, they would go into high absorption style. During this period actual operation of any tool would be very simple.

In contrast, thoughtful readers may well want more tools, although still simple, while they are engaging in the thoughtful style. They may want the capability to easily get the definition of a word or to make the online keyboard come up to make a brief note. They also might want significant tools to help them choose which media to interact with, and might briefly use more complex tools. Once they choose media to interact with, the tools would be very simple and unobtrusive.

An example of the balance between activity and absorption.

Factors that Influence Engagement Style

What causes a person to go into a particular engagement style? Many factors are involved: The user’s intention, the platform, the particular task or application the user has chosen, the distance between user and platform, habit (including skills and setting), and set. Much of what has been seen as a particular style due to the platform or distance is the result of habit, mediated by a practiced skill and/or a particular setting.

Tasks like reading are complex skills. Skills require considerable learning and practice to obtain high levels of performance and fluency. In the early stages, these are highly conscious; in later stages much of the skill becomes unconscious and the user doesn’t necessarily have full conscious control. A user can’t fully adjust his or her reading speed and manner. Instead, users develop modes, and switch from one mode to another. One mode might be for the careful reading of, say, long-form journalism article. Another mode might be use for scanning a print newspaper to decide what story to read. Still another might have been developed for scanning Web pages as part of achieving a particular goal. Users will choose a mode, and they may adjust it slightly, but if they go too far out of the parameters of that mode they will lose fluency and become uncomfortable.

Setting and set also play a role. If a user has spent a lot of time in a particular office sitting on a particular chair with a particular computer, performing multitasking with email and Web browsing with a video in background, the user will get used to that engagement style under these conditions and cues. That user may become very uncomfortable if he or she attempts to concentrate solely on a single task such as reading a long-form article. The user may feel deprived of sufficient stimuli. The user may well print the article out and go elsewhere to read it.

Distance also matters. In designing a reader for the iPad, Craig Mod divided reading distances into three categories. These were: (1) Bed (Close to face): “Reading a novel on your stomach, lying in bed with the iPad propped up on a pillow”; (2) Knee (Medium distance from face): “Sitting on the couch or perhaps the Eurostar on your way to Paris, the iPad on your knee, catching up on Instapaper”; and (3) Breakfast (Far from face): “The iPad, propped up by the Apple case at a comfortable angle, behind your breakfast coffee and bagel, allowing for hands-free news reading as you wipe cream cheese from the corner of your mouth.”

Mod used a relatively small font (and wide margins) for the near-distance  “Bed” case, a larger font for the medium-distance “Knee” case, and a still larger font (and small margins) for the far-distance “Breakfast” case. Distance, and corresponding font sizes, will become part of the setting
for a particular style.

Platforms can also influence an engagement style. A PC has multiple windows and thus invites multitasking and high activity, while most tablets effectively have a single window. The iPad, particularly, has usability guidelines that emphasize simplicity, which is also likely to reduce activity. Print promotes a high absorption style because you can’t do much else while holding a newspaper. Television has in the past promoted a high absorption style, but the phenomenon of people using their PCs and tablets while watching TV is changing that.

Understanding engagement style better will be important in designing user experiences for new media such as tablets. And I hope this article is a good start.

Our field is moving slowly but steadily into the world of behavioral psychology. We’ve started to realize that it’s not just about designing good-looking products with usable interfaces, but about a deeper level of involvement. Dan Lockton has been thinking about that area for quite some time, with his Design with Intent toolkit as the highlight. In his most recent article he explores a new approach: behavioral heuristics, where “asking users questions about how and why they behaved in certain ways with technology [leads] to answers which [are] resolvable into something like rules.”

In the article Lockton explores his own thoughts on behavioral heuristics. He shows examples from a recent workshop he did at Interaction 12 and how this worked out. As an example he takes apart an example from Amazon, where social proof is a way of persuading people. What were the assumptions made and how do these translate into heuristics?

Screenshot taken from danlockton.co.uk

Behavioral heuristics - Image from danlockton.co.uk

There are lots of models of human behaviour, and as the design of systems becomes increasingly focused on people, modelling behaviour has become more important for designers.

The aim, really, is ultimately to provide a way of helping designers choose the most appropriate methods for influencing user behaviour in particular contexts, for particular people.

Read the entire article ‘If…’ here

Persuasive design is a popular topic in user experience these days. In fact, our posts on how your coffee mug (amongst other things) is controlling your feelings was one of our most talked about posts of the year.  For those that would like to take a deep dive into the psychology behind it, Psyblog have an 18 part blog series that’s worth checking out.

As you might expect, some are more easily relatable to UX than others (though it’s handy to know that you can help your cause in convincing someone by getting them wired on caffeine and talking into their right ear). Some of the more transferable tips include:

• If you’re trying to convince someone to do something, presenting a balanced argument will help. Repetition does too … so long as it’s in the background and reasonably believable.
• Men generally respond better to email messages than face-to-face; women are the opposite (thanks to gender conditioning).
• Or if you want the tl;dr version, there’s a list for you: 20 Simple Steps to a Persuasive Message.

Full series here. For those that want a more direct link to design, take a look at last year’s UX Mag piece on persuasive design, or some of our posts on persuasion profiles,  images, or  returning.

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Arrow image NC-BY-CC from Three Legged Cat

I know that brands want to figure out how to use social media to do their branding work. And being brands, and generally well-0versed  in the dark arts of marketing and sales, skilled brand professionals know that consumers respond out of psychological interest and not out of material need.

There’s nothing intrinsically loathsome about this — the arrangement is equally familiar to the consumer. Who, in his more lucid moments, believes himself to be playing tricks on the marketers, and to have figured out just exactly how the machine works.

Well then, I’m in a state of chronic nonplussedness when it comes to brand involvement in social media. For it strikes me that brands continue to look for themselves in this medium. A medium full of users — nay, of people who consume shit all day and even night long — and talk about it, too. With their friends.

It’s like brands want to change the channel. Dig that remote up out of the bowels of the corporate sofa and find, all lit up like Christmas in Vegas, the chromed shine of their own brand image shimmering on a screen like a hot desert mirage.

Brands have figured out why people want things. They’ve nailed the imagery, the messaging, even the copy. They know how to mediate desire, how to intensify it, raise it up high and with celebrity pedestal amplitude, work the seductive power of distance and altitude. Brands know why people like what other people like, and how to work this dynamic with Shakespearian precision.

So then why have they not figured out how to go social? What’s holding them back? Why the silly games, the useless rewards, the getting behind the stuff people do on social that’s only “as if” if meant something? A revelation of what’s deep in the brand’s heart and calculating mind — that it doesn’t matter, as long as the numbers come out right. Or fooled, perhaps, by the pitching gearheads whose claim to understand what the user wants is possibly doubly corrupt (for it’s bankrupt too). Shiny person, meet shiny object. Likey likey.

I don’t get it. Why brands would want to get behind the smallest shit that people do online, the little itty-bitty clicks of point-less-this and double-plus-ungood save-and-share-and-like… Because all that counts is what they can count? Why diminish brand value and fork brand equity by scrunching it into little votes and likes and points and badges and other diminutive things because people do them just because they’re in the habit of doing them. Why? Because that’s the best they can get? If, then, because that’s the best we’ve been offered?

It works, this social. It works for high brow purposes and just as equally for the trivial silly and the redundant banal. It works because it’s of and by and for the people who use it. Sell into the small acts, the ones you can count, and you get small branding. Yes it’s distributed, yes everyone gets it, yes it’s the hot thing on mobile and web and pad. But pack a brand into bite-sized activities and you’re going to get bite-sized brand messaging. Sound bytes the value out of brand equity.

Small acts and gestures, the lowest common denominators in a medium whose real value is its stretch and span — relationships on a thread, no distance, spanning time. Think small and get small. Acts, you can see. Just look. Activity, takes vision. Where is it then? Where, the new narratives? Stories we can put ourselves in. Forms of expression shared with friends and rich with meaning that grows. History, past, archives, memories. Or future, hopes, plans, promises. Where, brand people, are we the people? What we care about and find interesting. Not profit motive — real motive.

I’d like to know. Companies have responsibilities on this planet. The people are not opposed. Such a shame, this business underwhelming.

The Surgeon General of the United States says that “youth violence is an ongoing, startlingly pervasive problem.” Despite the fact that “the majority of aggravated assaults, robberies and rapes are never reported to the police,” one out of every 3,000 youths aged 10-17 are arrested for serious violent crimes – homicide, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault – each year. While the predictive risk factors include family aspects we might all expect – low socioeconomic status, poor parent-child relations, broken home – many of the individual risk factors apply only to males and the most predictive risk factor of all in this troubling laundry list is simply “being male”.

By now you are surely wondering, “Um, isn’t this supposed to be an interaction design publication?” Yes, of course, it is. But the domain relevant to digital products that is most important, least understood, and represents the greatest opportunity for remarkable growth and advance is the degree to which we understand our users.

To be sure, a focus on users is nothing new. In computing devices it dates back at least to the long-standing Scandinavian tradition of cooperative design, later applied to IT artifacts around 1970. There is an entire subculture in the digital design community built around the idea of user-centered design. Memes about narrative, storytelling and ethnography punctuated the 2000s, and we generally believe we have refined, evolved framing and methods for considering users as part of the product development equation.

Hardly.

Divining Human Understanding

Going back to my opening about the epidemic of violent crime in young males, how well do we understand that problem? It is certainly recognized as a problem, by the highest governmental authorities. A litany of risk factors and predictive models exist, so people more likely to participate in violent crime can be identified by parents and teachers and kept track of as they wind their way through adolescence and young adulthood. Yet, as a society, we dismiss such perpetrators as criminals, animals, evil and inherently bad. We do this despite the fact that there is overwhelming evidence that their gender – a coin toss at birth – and socio-familial situation are the drivers behind their destructive behaviour.

Let’s break those two things down: why gender? To better understand that we need to learn a little about endocrinology, the field of medicine focused on our hormones. Androgen is the term for hormones that stimulate and control the development and maintenance male characteristics, including those in the Surgeon General’s laundry list of risk factors. There is a long history of castration in human cultures all around the world, as even before the science behind it was understood, people learned that men without testes were far less aggressive. Enlightenment era heroThomas Jefferson even created legislation in the state of Virginia after the Declaration of Independence was signed making castration the punishment of choice for a handful of crimes. The amount of testosterone production varies widely from one man to another, and indeed those who are – from the standpoint of modern civilization – cursed with very high levels of testosterone are far more likely to prove unable to stay within the behavioural bounds dictated by our society.

Another critical discipline for understanding behavioural differences by gender is neuroscience. Like most of the United States sick care system, the preponderance of investment in and attention to neuroscience has to do with the work of neurologists, curing brain tumors and other diseases. But it is also the field that best understands from a mechanical perspective how and why we function. Male aggression is actually one of the more complex dynamics within the brain, involving all of the amygdala, hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, hippocampus, septal nuclei and periaqueductal grey of the midbrain. While the complexity of each of these disparate brain factors’ impact on male aggressiveness is beyond the bounds of this article, needless to say there is a startling amount of science and real understanding into mapping observable brain structure, condition and operation to many critical human behaviours, male aggressiveness that leads to violent crime being only one.

Now, let’s consider the other main group of predictive risk factors for violent behaviour, socio-familial background. As just one example, MIT’s Abhijit Banerjee and Harvard’s Sendhil Mullainathan have done wonderful work on the psychology of why people can’t escape poverty. In a nutshell, they illustrated that since buying small, everyday comforts is far more costly to the poor than to the wealthy – representing a substantially larger proportion of their net worth – that poverty limits free will and in the process has a resultant drain on one’s overall willpower. Needing to make tough decisions and sacrifices much more frequently than their more affluent neighbours makes it far more likely that the poor will have willpower issues in other contexts. Such as, say, testosterone-fueled moments that spiral out of control. These are economists, studying issues of psychology and sociology, deconstructing behaviour in remarkably insightful ways.

While socio-economic status is only one vector of the socio-familial milieu, the example highlights the ample research and science which illuminates the conditions that finally culminate in serious violent crime. And it underscores an important point: while some criminals might be “bad” in some objective way, many of these criminals are simply very unfortunate people who are victims similar to those they’ve victimized: they happened to be born male, they happened to have high testosterone levels, they happened to be born into poor or broken families. Armed with this knowledge, surely we as a society can do better?

Truly Understanding Users

I’ve chosen the issue of serious violent crime in young males as my example because it nicely applies to all of the five sciences that should be essential learning to anyone serious about understanding users: endocrinology, neuroscience, economics, psychology and sociology. In each of these, crucial pieces of the human behavioural puzzle are provided:

• Endocrinology: the study of the endocrine system which secretes hormones into the bloodstream and regulates the body;
• Neuroscience: the study of the central nervous system which uses neurons to coordinate our actions;
• Economics: the study of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services – crucial to the understanding of individuals in a fiercely capitalistic, free market society;
• Psychology: the study of people and groups in order to best understand them;
• Sociology, the study of a society in order to best understand that society and its inhabitants.

Needless to say that the role of some of the more social sciences on this list – particularly psychology – are already seen as having a role in successful user studies and understanding. However, the preponderance of research and publications on user studies deal more with principals and practices of the discipline and less with understanding the users themselves, much less in a deep, multi-disciplinary scientific way. The future of design will belong to those who are able to untangle what people do and why, even those who can predict and understand – using a scientific basis – what people are likely to respond to and why and how, as opposed to simply making gut decisions.

As it is a fairly straightforward matter to untangle the objective dynamics behind serious violent crimes in young males using these approaches, imagine the impact you can have on your product, service, company, market or even society if you have the vision, rigor and discipline to start truly unpeeling that most complex and layered of onions, ourselves.

Interaction 12

Dirk Knemeyer will be one of the presenters at Interaction 12. It is the fifth annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Dublin, Ireland.

How does one end up in UX after counseling delinquent girls and brain injured individuals? This question is one I am asked frequently once people find out the somewhat unorthodox route I took towards my career in UX. With some explanation, the connection between the two areas becomes much clearer and there is greater understanding for how my background in psychology has laid the groundwork for a career in UX.

Others Who Have Followed A Similar Path

It is difficult to think of the connection between psychology and UX without thinking of Donald Norman, as he is the person who set the stage for incorporating aspects of Cognitive Psychology within Interaction Design, one area of User Experience.

Certain basic principles of cognitive psychology provide grounding for interaction design. These include mental models, mapping, interface metaphors, and affordances. Many of these are laid out in Donald Norman’s influential book The Design of Everyday Things.

from Wikipedia

Susan Weischenk, “The Brain Lady” also comes from a background in psychology. She has written books, including Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?, online articles such as “The Psychologist’s View of UX Design” and has her own blog “What Makes Them Click” where she applies psychology to understanding people for better design.

What I Did

So, how exactly does Psychology relate to User Experience in the practical sense and why did I make the transition from helping people in one context to designing for them in the other? After earning my Masters Degree from Columbia University, Teachers College, I left New York City and moved back to Philadelphia where I worked briefly with juvenile delinquent girls, between the ages of 9 and 13 years old, living in a group home.  With a great mentor and supervisor, I learned how to provide the specific kind of counseling that these girls needed. Lurking beneath the “tough” girls who often threatened others with violence were artists, poets, and overall creative souls. The tough girl behavior was a defense mechanism and how they survived in their world. The girls learned to trust me and share their more tender side. Skills that I learned and started becoming comfortable with during my training in graduate school such as active listening, observation, empathy, and collaboration, I focused on and improved in this setting as well as in my next job. (For more on what dealing with delinquents can teach you about UX, see Brett Lutchman’s post on that very experience). My other job, and one I held for many years, was as an outpatient case manager and clinician in the Drucker Brain Injury Center’s Community Re-Entry Program at MossRehab Hospital. I managed care, therapies and provided counseling. These clients had transitioned from an inpatient stay and were ready to return to career, school, or activity pattern based on their prognosis and level of injury. Frequent collaborative meetings were held to discuss treatment plans and make changes as necessary. On a daily basis, I observed people in various settings, including their own natural home and work environments, to better understand what they were experiencing and their specific difficulties to develop a plan that would help improve their lives. These are the same approaches I bring to my work as a UX designer.

How I Moved Into UX

After the birth of my first child, I needed to find a career that offered more flexibility; one that did not take as much emotional energy and allowed me to work part-time. Working with a brain injured population was one of the most rewarding, yet difficult experiences I have ever had in my life, so the decision to leave did not come easily. I worked with incredibly smart, talented people from different disciplines, within a collaborative environment, much like the team I currently work with as a UX Designer. As I searched options, I decided that web design could be a fun and flexible career. I began taking classes at Penn State Abington for website design.I learned C++, Javascript, Flash, HTML, User Interface design, and usability (among other classes). Once I finished that program, I began to design and develop websites for small businesses. I learned more about user experience, an area related to what I was doing with web design, but involving what I had learned and practiced in the field of psychology. I realized that the skills I had used in my “other life” in Psychology were so aligned with what is practiced in UX that it was a very natural fit.

What I Brought With Me to UX

Ability to understand people’s motivations

Psychology is the study of people’s behavior. Behind that behavior are motivations why someone is doing what they are doing. UX is very similar. We need to understand the “why’s” to design for the behaviors we are trying to elicit, all while making the user feel good about their experience so that they repeat these behaviors.

Research

To understand behaviors that help make our product useful to our clients and their users, we need to conduct research. My background conducting research almost daily in graduate school helped me ease into this part of user experience.

Problem Solving

There is never just one way to solve a problem. Every problem has multiple solutions. Being able to think quickly and offer useful solutions to accommodate multiple variations and desires of the client while satisfying their users is a skill overlapping psychology and  UX. I had a brain injured client who revealed that following her brain injury, her partner began to abuse her. Helping her to develop a variety of options, quickly was important. While the solutions I am expected to come up with in UX are not life-threatening, they can help improve the interactions with a client’s product.

Listening

This skill is one of the most important to learn in life, and oh, so hard for many of us. To make a proper psychological assessment, use of active listening skills helps gain insight into someone’s motivations. Graduate programs in psychology provide a great deal of training and practice in the use of active listening, indicating the level of importance it brings to assessments and therapy. So too, in UX, listening and assessing what our users are saying (or not saying) is one of the most important skills used to assess their behaviors and motivations for performing certain actions.

Observation

As with listening, being able to observe behavior provides such important clues into what a person’s motivations are. Staying out of the users’ way and allowing them to figure things out is a very difficult thing to do, but necessary to see if our design is doing what it was intended to. The only way to do this is to observe and allow the natural process to occur without our influence confounding the results. Evaluations of incoming brain injured clients allowed me to practice this, as it was solely based on observation. The plan of action that needed to be taken became clear, just by watching someone engage in daily activities, such as trying (and often failing) to cook from a written recipe.

Staying out of the users’ way and allowing them to figure things out is a very difficult thing to do, but necessary to see if our design is doing what it was intended to.

Written and oral communication skills

The ability to communicate clearly and effectively is another skill where there is overlap between Psychology and User Experience. This enables an atmosphere of trust and respect to be created which helps get approval from clients concerning design recommendations that are made. The main difference between the two is in the mode of communication. Where I mostly wrote daily notes and reports in Psychology, I now design wireframes with annotations, prototypes, sketches, personas, and storyboarding to explain my process and thinking.

Empathy

Whether in a therapy session or designing for our users, identifying with them through empathy only makes us better at what we do by stepping outside our mindset and into that of another. Whenever I sincerely empathized with my clients and their particular situation, whether a teen girl trying to protect what she believed to rightfully belong to her or a brain injured person who could not remember a conversation he had the night before, it became evident that I cared about them and wanted to help. By demonstrating empathy, I gained a wealth of information that improved the therapeutic process. This naturally translates to UX as showing we care about how the user interacts with our products helps to improve how they interact with our products.

Whenever I sincerely empathized with my clients and their particular situation, whether a teen girl trying to protect what she believed to rightfully belong to her or a brain injured person who could not remember a conversation he had the night before, it became evident that I cared about them and wanted to help.

Collaboration

Probably one of the most enjoyable aspects has been the collaborative process, both on a transdisciplinary team of therapists and working as the user experience designer on a team with designers, developers, product managers and marketers. There is nothing like many individuals expressing themselves (much like a really large, loud family) in the design process to make it fun while coming up with the best solutions for the users.

Iteration

Any time there is a plan of action, there needs to be the ability to change course when things are not working as planned. This is true both in a therapeutic setting as well as when designing. Life is ever changing, as should our work.

Looking to Make the Move?

With an open mind and a great deal of willingness to learn new skills and improve existing ones, transitioning from Psychology to UX can be smooth. My best advice is to network, find a mentor, participate in local groups, attend conferences and read. No matter what discipline you may be coming from, think about the tasks you performed in a generalized way and how they may transition to the field of UX. —- Brain image CC-by-NC from labguest

Paper prototyping, usability testing, and a cute kid. What’s not to like here? (/via @leanuxmachine)

Duration: just under 8 minutes

Gamification is on the rise of late, but Sebastian Deterding suggests that many of the current implementations are rather superficial, and that we have a way to before we really get it right.

Duration: 50 minutes

Here’s a wonderful talk about how our unconscious mind controls our online behavior, from Susan Weinschenk of HFI. (From UX Lisbon 2010.)

Duration: 36 minutes