Last week I attended Jared Spool’s talk for the BayCHI Interaction Design BOF Event at Yahoo!, Magic and Mental Models. Man, the colors there at Yahoo, I was nauseous after 5 minutes, I can only imagine the feeling if you’re working there.
But my merry band and I persevered and made it to Classroom 5 (we’re still in school, kiddies!).
Mr. Spool is a sleeper. And no, I don’t mean he puts you to sleep. He gives the appearance of someone who will be reticent and muttering, but is anything but. He’s animated and entertaining (though if he’s thinking of a second career in magic, I would have to caste a vote of caution on that count).
Here’s a good example he gave of “magic” in computer interfaces. You know how satisfying it is to drag a file to the trash on your desktop, and how even more satisfying it is to hear that crunching sound to know that your file has truly been trashed? Well, think a moment. There is no such thing as a file. A file is 1’s and 0’s distributed willy-nilly all over your hard drive. When you open a file, it’s drawing from all these scattered bits. But users don’t want to know that or think about it. In order to do the complex tasks we need to do, we need to think of files in a simple way.
Another take-away: in a study of perceived download times for different sites, users consistently rated the slowest sites the fastest, and the fastest sites the slowest. Why? Because often the sites with the longest download times enabled users to *complete their task* more quickly than the sites that had fast download times. Winner: Amazon.com, with a 30-second+ download time, but the quickest task completion rate. Loser: About.com. Downloads were quick, but users had to click and click and click to get to what they really wanted.
New (to me): the Kano Model. You can wikipedia it, but basically: features that generate excitement (like Twitter) can markedly increase customer satisfaction, but over time, excitement turns into basic expectation (kind of like love).
And just for kicks, check out Hans Roslings’ Gapminder. Notice how the blue dots (African nations), always stay at the bottom as the chart morphs.
To conclude, the absolute best thing about the talk was when he brought out a piece of round cardboard with a spiral painted on it. We stared at it spinning for a while, then looked at the face of a volunteer. I won’t tell you what happened, but I can tell you it happened to everybody and it was the biggest response of the night.
