Designing for Your Users' Brains

A crafted and thoughtful product experience can deliver dividends in value. It can make the difference between a visitor abandoning your product in anger or becoming a happy customer. But we can't dictate the experience a user will have. We can, however, encourage users to adopt mindsets that harmonize products with users' expectations.

We've all been there at some point, while frustrated and annoyed, hearing that bubbly voice on the other end of the line, "Well, how's the weather out there, today?" And this is the fourth time you've called customer service to return yet another pair of shoes you bought online that doesn't fit, and the last thing you need is an exaggeratedly happy voice trying to cheer you up. The customer service reps at Zappos really try to live by the company's mantra of happiness, but sometimes those conversations don't always jive with your mood.

Uncontrollable Nature of Experience

This is a fundamental problem when trying to design for experience. You can deploy all the design patterns you want, but each one might be perceived or used differently depending on a user's state of mind.

Experience with any product or service can be broken down in this way:

As designers, controlling what a user perceives is core to what we do. Visual designers and interaction designers rule here; they deploy principles and patterns to prompt users to action, make affordances evident and intuitive, etc.

But users' mindsets are what we should be paying closer attention to and attempting to prescribe. If a product's behavior doesn't accommodate or cue a user into an appropriate mindset, he or she can get frustrated really quickly. (In fact, as far as interfaces go, one could consider this a definition of frustration.) We've all tried to author important emails only to be interrupted by an ad or app update.

While designers can't control a user's mood, they can direct users into particular mindsets tailored for the goals they have and then design accordingly. So how can we start to describe mindsets, which can provide a crucial link between perception and emotion?

A Mindset Example - Learn by Doing

We've all heard the phrase, "learn by doing." This is a familiar mindset that when phrased this way links goals ("to learn") to methods ("by doing"). Its effectiveness comes from leveraging the power of association. By doing (instead of watching or listening), we start to associate gesture (swipe, tap, click, etc.) to action (follow a link, send an email, etc.).

To turn this into an actionable tactic, however, we first must decide that "learn by doing" is the right mindset to design for. Maybe what we're designing is new enough that we need to associate gesture with actions, but not intuitive enough that standard visual cues do the job for us. The drag-down-to-refresh behavior is something we were all taught by clever tutorials in the first iPhone apps that deployed it.

Once we've picked the right mindset, we can craft an interaction model that helps user adopt it. One technique is to drop a user into a "walk-through tutorial." This interaction pattern prompts users to tap, swipe, pinch, etc. to learn important actions and employs such techniques as lightboxing to encourage them to focus on specific areas. In this sense, we can say that a "walk-through tutorial" pattern embodies a learn-by-doing mindset.

In general, we can evaluate an interaction model by whether it contributes to particular mindset or detracts from it. If it does, we can design in order to telegraph to a user what mindset we're attempting to employ. If we do our job correctly, they'll pick up on it, and thus will (hopefully) have appropriate expectations.

But most important is the fact that whatever mindset we employ, it must help a user achieve his or her goals. Some Common Mindsets

If we had a catalog of mindsets to play with, derived from our experiences with common products, websites, and apps, we could start understanding, categorizing, and redeploying them. Here's a first stab:

Learning

The learning experience is always present in a piece of software; the more complex the software, the more important learning becomes. Some people like to avoid instructional materials (e.g. videos) and attempt to learn a product by actually using it, and others like to study collections of tutorials and documentation:

Perception and Understanding

Helping users quickly grok a product's conceptual model should be one of the primary goals of experience design. Without visual clarity and relatable terminology, interfaces can easily become cryptic and frustrating. Here are techniques that apps have embodied to help users understand:

Focus

In the days of incessant digital distraction, websites and apps have an opportunity (and perhaps, a responsibility) to cultivate users' mental focus. But it's not only about optimizing productivity.

Artificial Intelligence and Automation

One promise of modern technology is making our lives easier by acting more as we do. Is it possible for a machine to pretend that it knows what we're thinking?

Emotion

Perhaps a mindset can target a specific emotional state.

Multitude of Experiences

All products, digital or physical, are a pastiche of multiple experiences. People must learn to use a product, use it in context, troubleshoot it when things go wrong, get help if needed, etc. Each can have different mindsets assigned to it, and design process takes over from there armed with valuable, explicit, experiential goals.

And finally, since the phrases used for mindsets, like "understand at a glance," are so simple and familiar that they can even be used to include stakeholders, managers, and other non-designers in the design process as well, opening many possibilities for collaboration and inclusive design process.