It doesn't matter what users think. It matters what they don't.

Whenever people find out that I majored in Psychology, they ask how I ended up “in computers”, since in most people’s minds psychology equals couch plus notepad. As soon as I break into my usual speech about UX being little more than a digital branch of Human Factors Engineering, and about HFE having evolved from Psychology, they cut me off: “Ah, right, UX is about knowing what users think”. This makes me wish I could refer them to prof. Nachshon Meiran from Ben Gurion University, who in 2002 wasn’t yet a full professor but “just” a PhD.

Back in 2002 it was the first day of my undergraduate studies. It was marked by the following series of seminal events: At 8am I met my wife to be, who didn’t know this at the time, but I did already suspect (I’m awfully suspicious by nature). At 8:15 the class “Introduction to Physiological Psychology - I” began with this statement by Prof. Ora Kofman: “Many students are scared of this class. I can assure you that the only scary thing about it is me”. At 10:15 Dr. Nachshon Meiran walked into Lecture Hall 6 and opened the class “Introduction to Psychology - I” in a very disappointing way. He said: “Whoever enrolled to Psychology studies with the assumption that after 3 years and an undergraduate degree, or after 5 years and a graduate diploma, or after god knows how many years and a Ph.D, they’d be able to read people’s minds - I must disappoint them. Nobody can read minds. If you leave class right now, you’ll only lose the deposit”.

I don’t really know whether he was telling the truth or maybe I just didn’t take the right classes, but it appears that at least up to the graduate degree he got it right. We really suck at reading minds. No clue at all as to what’s going on in there. But as UX professionals we’re in luck, because “what people think” really doesn’t matter all that much. This is because human beings, as a bunch of lazy f...  as an economic-minded species, passionately hate thinking. And I mean all of us, not just people who voted for [you know whom], or die-hard fans of [that sports team]. Instead of thinking we are constantly busy inventing shortcuts which can spare us this tiresome task.

And speaking of shortcuts...

Do you remember this famous image, officially known as “The Mona Lisa of the Museum of Sham UX”? Well, if it were showing cognitive shortcuts instead of a physical one, we wouldn’t be seeing this little beat path. We’d be seeing something closer to the George Washington Bridge, complete with its two levels and twenty-nine lanes. Because the traffic in the “shortcuts” route is a thousand times busier than in the “let’s think about it for a moment” path. The upside is that it’s relatively easy to monitor and study, as opposed to the “thinking” route which is apparently hidden away in some underground tunnel completely impervious to observation by modern technology.

The big problem with these cognitive shortcuts is that they aren’t really like a road, they’re much closer to a water slide - once you get on it, there’s no going back or getting off halfway -- you will only get out at the other end, and you’ll get there really damn fast.  In psychology talk, a stimulus that fits a certain template will always elicit a predefined response. This will happen automatically, with no chance to pause and think whether this is really what should be happening.

To put it in more concrete terms - is the volume on my PC really so loud that Microsoft had to paint the slider red?

Well, no, it’s really not. Windows 10 has this nice little feature that lets you automatically adjust the accent color in your menus to your wallpaper image. Apparently this is what caused my menus to turn red. I’m perfectly aware of this, and I always notice when the menu changes color following a change in wallpaper, which happens all the time. It doesn’t get any more aware than this. And yet, as soon as I opened the volume controller and saw it colored red, my first thought was “Why did they make the entire thing red when they should’ve only marked the edge of the slider, where it’s dangerous”. So I didn’t even ask myself “does the color mean that it’s a warning”, I automatically assumed so, and my only concern was with the “flawed” UI. It’s possible that this was induced by my wearing headphones at the time - which is something I often do with my smartphone - which does have  a “dangerous volume” warning, although it’s not red. So all this happens completely automatically, and had I given it any actual thought, I wouldn’t have reacted this way.

BTW, here’s the same in green (following a different wallpaper) - isn’t it nice that I’m in the “safe” zone of the volume?

You’ll say “OK, you’re making a mountain out of a molehill. So you've had some instinctive fleeting thought, you’ve apparently only had it once, it didn’t cause you to make any mistakes, you’re really fussing over nothing”. And right you may be. So here’s another tricky shortcut that actually causes me to fail every couple of days - and I’d love to know whether it happens to you too, or should I get my head examined again.

We’re using MS Outlook at work. Almost every time I send someone a meeting invitation, it doesn’t go out. Instead, it pops the confirmation message “Do you want to send this meeting request without a subject”? This always catches me off guard, because I know that I’ve just typed the subject in, so where the hell did it go? I close the pop-up message, take another look at the invitation form and here’s my subject right there - invariably in the “Location” field.

You must agree with Outlook that “location” is a strange place for the Subject line. Well, why did I type it there? I did it because statistically, for every meeting invitation that I send, I also send about 10 new emails, using this form:

So I’m very used to having Subject be the third field in the form, and I tab through to it automatically as soon as I got the recipient in place. If you think about it, the two forms are actually quite different, the invitation form has a whole additional block of fields at the top.

But that's the whole problem right there - it only shows when you “think about it”. The people who “think about it” are either beginners or casual users, so they might actually read the field labels and avoid stupid mistakes, which are sometimes reserved for power users, whose lazy brains have gotten tired of thinking about the same steps over and over again, and have constructed a little shortcut to make things easier. The shortcut says “I’ll treat all new items in Outlook the same way, and if it looks like a duck I won’t stop to check whether it also walks like a duck - I’ll just tab through to the third field in the form and type the subject there. Once in awhile I’ll get a clip round the ear from Outlook, but it’s worth it”.

So two of the predictions cast on that morning in 2002 have proven true, and as to the third one - I admit I’m still a bit scared of prof. Kofman, so I’ll just keep my opinion to myself for a change.