ETech Day 4: Life Hacks and the Brain for Designers

Day 4 of ETech was just as energetic and caffeinated as the previous three days. As much as I love ETech, I am really looking forward to getting a full nights sleep when the conference is over. On day 4 I attended presentations that focused on human aspects -- both from the personal perspective as well as the perspective of the people for whom we create web pages/user interfaces.

First up was "Life Hacks Live" by Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann where Danny started out with reviewing the changes in the industry since his "Life Hacks" talk at the last ETech. A number of things he wished for happened (or were pointed out): Email search -- GMail, Outlook search, Tiger spotlight; social filesharing for everyone -- Flickr, Novell iFolder, Groove. And a few things didn't: easy webscraping and intelligent keyboard macros for Win/Linux like Quicksilver for Mac.

Both Danny and Merlin had a good number of life hacks like 43 Things to share with us, but in the end simple advice such as "turn off the internet" and "shut off your instant messaging client" stuck with me. They argued that email and IM are primary causes for interruptions that detract you from getting things done. They both referred to the concept of flow, which is the state in which you are focused on a task and actually making progress on the task. Getting into flow takes some time -- "Peopleware" suggest that it takes 15 minutes to get into flow. Danny and Merlin suggest that taking 30 seconds away from your task to answer an email is a lot more expensive than 30 seconds -- more like 15 minutes and 30 seconds. To me, this is solid advice -- I agree with what they are saying and I think I will make more of an effort to shut out distractions when I need to work on a long task.

However, in order to keep themselves on schedule Danny and Merlin used a kitchen timer to time 10 minute chunks of their presentation. They planned to cover 4 ten minute chunks for a 45 minute session and I think that should've been my first indication that things were about to go wrong. For the first two chunks both Danny and Merlin were quite on time -- only seconds off. But when the third segment went over by at least 5 minutes, they didn't adjust their timer and just kept going. No big deal -- Danny and Merlin are funny and the next session is lunch, so there were no other speakers to encroach on. Once the session let out, a full 15 minutes late, Paul Hammond from the BBC walked up to me and said: "Isn't it ironic that the people who are telling you to turn off your mail client in order to stay focused and get your stuff done would overrun their presentation by 15 minutes?" Yes, indeed it was. Danny & Merlin: I loved your presentation, but please loose the timer and pay attention to a clock!

Finally, I attended Matt Webb's "It's not rocket science: The brain for designers". Matt's talk was quite abstract and thus could be applied to many kinds of design -- graphic design, web design and user interface design. Matt covered how the human brain deals with perception, attention and affordances. For each of these areas, Matt outlined how the various brain functions can be broadly categorized as fast and slow.

During the design process the designer should be aware of what brain functions are fast and which ones are slow. Most of the time the designer will want to create an effective design that maximizes the aspects that allow the brain to grok the design's message quickly and avoid the aspects that are slow. While talking about perception Matt outlined how a designer can target fast perception by making visual elements of the design stand out more for the eye. For instance, when tasked with counting two types of circles where some where white at the top and black at the bottom and others were the exact opposite, the brain works slowly. Given the same scenario, but were the circles are smoothly shaded instead of black and white, the brain perceives some circles to pop out from the design and some to appear as divets in the design. Since the shaded circles are visually distinct, the brain can count them much faster than the unshaded circles.

Matt went on to outline similar brain functions in the areas of attention and affordances. The most eye opening bits for me were his points on attention -- namely that it takes 10ms for the brain to switch its attention to another area. And once the eye has switched away from one area it doesn't like going back to a previous area. Also, using attention takes time -- he tasked us with finding a non-descript name in a list of names. He tricked us by including the name "Tim O'Reilly" two lines above the name he wanted us to find. Matt claims that the brain's attention doesn't work well for about 1.5 seconds after attention has been used. In this case, our attention is drawn to Tim's name since we all recognize his name. Once we realize that this is not what we're looking for we keep scanning, but the next two (or so) lines fall within the 1.5 seconds where our attention doesn't work well, so we're likely to miss the name we're scanning for -- at least in the first pass.

Matt offered up these 5 points to consider during design:

1. Know what is easy and what is hard to sense (slow changes -> hard; fast and light changes -> easy)
2. Avoid irresistible snags (flashing user interface elements draw the eye and may distract unnecessarily)
3. Follow the physics of attention (switching your attention takes time, attention works badly for 1.5 seconds after attention was used)
4. Accept that nothing is irrelevant (every element of the design is important)
5. Possibilities are just as visible as color (the eye can pick up possible user interface elements quickly, so it is important to make clear which ones are important and should be used)

I'll try and internalize Matt's lessons more on the drive home and attempt to apply them to my current web and user interface design projects. I can already see a number of improvements I need to make in a few areas. Thanks to Danny, Merlin and Matt for teaching me a number of valuable lessons about my brain!

If you made it to these sessions, do you have any comments??