Susan M. Weinschenk's Blog

The research is clear that people like having a lot of choices, but that providing a lot of choices not only makes it harder for them to take action, but may also induce stress.

Designers often make decisions based on preference, not performance. Many designs inundate the target audience with choices.

For example, a search for an external hard drive on Amazon brings back 21,287 results. According to the Huffington Post, Starbucks has said there are over 80,000 choices you can make in ordering a beverage.

Designing to reduce the number of choices that needs to be made is called anticipatory design.

Anticipatory design is built on a few key ideas:

Too many choices leads to poor decisions.Many, if not most, choices are unnecessary.Design can eliminate unnecessary choices.

This brings up an interesting question: Is the role of the designer to present the user with all the choices in the easiest possible way for the user to digest and act? Or is the role of the designer to anticipate what choices are really relevant and present only those? Anticipatory design advocates would say the latter is correct. Even more, anticipatory design is about making and implementing decisions for the user—automatically, and without user input. The goal is not to help the user make a decision, but to anticipate what the user needs and just do it.

Note
In the 1950s, Buckminster Fuller taught a course at MIT about anticipatory design—a concept he developed in 1927—but it really means something different. However, if you search online for the term anticipatory design, you’ll likely encounter Fuller’s version of the term.

Takeaways

Anticipatory design doesn’t mean you decide what people want. It means doing enough research that you’re confident that you know what their decisions will be—and then delivering that.Rethink your role as designer. What would you do differently if your role were to relieve the user from making as many decisions as possible?Try out anticipatory design.

I was pretty strict with my children about video games when they were growing up. Because I had never been a gamer I somehow decided it wasn’t good for my children to spend time playing video or online games. We never owned a game console, and I limited their video game time to “educational” games. Now, looking at the research, I realize I may have been wrong about video games (and they ended up being gamers anyway!)

Video Games Can Increase Perceptual Learning

Research shows that playing video games isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are benefits: training in action video games can increase the speed of perceptual processing and something called perceptual learning. It’s possible to train the senses—vision, hearing, motor skills—and improve their capabilities, especially with action games.

When people play video games, it can increase how quickly they’re able to process sensory stimuli. It can increase the ability to filter out extraneous sensory stimuli and focus on one perceptual channel.
Brian Glass (2013) cites research studies showing that when people who are new to video games are taught how to play action games, they can process visual information faster as a result, even outside of the gaming context.

Even Adults Can Create New Neuron Structures

For many decades, it was assumed that the brain has the most flexibility and neurons at birth and that it’s basically downhill from there. There’s the old adage about not consuming too much alcohol, lest it kill the finite number of brain cells you have. Along with this idea came the theory that brain structures become more rigid over time—that as people get older, their brains can’t be rewired. This has all turned out to be untrue. The adult brain has neuroplasticity—its neural structures can change and keep changing and learning. The skills learned from video gaming are an example of neuroplasticity.

Strategy Games Increase Cognitive Flexibility

In addition to the perceptual learning that action video games provide, research shows that strategy games can also improve cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to coordinate four things:

What you’re paying attention toWhat you’re thinking aboutWhat rules to useHow to make a decision

The more cognitively flexible you are, the higher your intelligence and psychological health.

Cognitive Flexibility Is Trainable

Glass took women who were not gamers and had them play games for an hour a day for 40 days. Cognitive flexibility was measured before and after the training. Cognitive flexibility scores were higher after the 40 days.

Takeaways

If you don’t play video games, you might want to try some to improve your own flexibility.If you’re a game designer or planning to become one, look for opportunities to include perceptual learning and/or cognitive flexibility in your games.

For quite a while there has been a back and forth in interface design about whether scrolling is a “good” or usable choice. If you have a lot of information or content on a page, should you present it all on one page and have people scroll? Or should you break it up into multiple pages and have people move forward through pages?

Note
The term “the fold” comes from newspaper design. When a newspaper is folded in half, there’s text above the fold and text below the fold. Online there’s the same concept, but “above the fold” refers to what people can see on the screen without having to scroll.

One rule of thumb in online design is that if it’s important, it should go above the fold—that is, if you require people to scroll past the fold, they won’t and therefore information below the fold won’t be seen. Is this true?

Chartbeat analyzed data from 2 billion website visits and found that 66 percent of the visits’ time were spent below the fold; in other words, visitors had scrolled.

ClickTale analyzed 100,000 visits to websites and reported that people scrolled on 76 percent of the pages and went all the way to the bottom on 22 percent of the pages.

Note
People are used to vertical scrolling, but horizontal scrolling is still a bad idea. (I’m distinguishing between a swipe and scroll.) Horizontal swipes are much easier to perform than horizontal scrolls.

Takeaways

It’s all right to create a page that requires vertical scrolling.Avoid horizontal scrolling. But horizontal swiping is OK.Even though people will scroll, make sure to put your most important information above the fold.To encourage scrolling, keep showing great and useful content.Avoid “dead zones,” places that are so uninteresting that people tend not to scroll any further.

Video has become such an important medium online, yet video interface design is given surprisingly little attention. We have special devices and software for presenting text and images, but it seems we think of videos as being something we embed on a page, but can’t alter in any way to make it more usable.

When a video is short—2 to 3 minutes—it probably makes sense to just watch it from beginning to end. But what if the video is 20 minutes long, or an hour, for example, a conference talk or an online course?

In the last few years new tools allow people to browse, scan, and skim the contents of a video. A video digest is a way to partition a long video into chapters and sections within a chapter. For each segment and chapter, you can read a short summary about that part of the video, and see a thumbnail. It means that, as a user, you can skim through a video and even click on the thumbnail and watch that part of the video. All of this is created post-production, meaning that existing videos can be turned into digests.

Users appreciate the ability to scan and skim videos similarly to how they would scan and skim text or images.

Takeaways

When you provide a video that’s longer than 5 minutes, offer a video digest to make the video more usable.Use thumbnails and summaries to help people digest the video content quickly.

Let’s say you decide to let your 18-month-old daughter play some learning games on your tablet. You have a couple of apps you’ve downloaded and you’re trying to decide which one to give to her: The one that introduces number and letter concepts with music but is pretty serious? Or the one that makes her laugh with the silly animals that keep popping up and running around the screen?

Since you’re not sure that “screen time” is a good thing for young children, you choose the serious one. At least she’ll learn, you think. Actually, the one that makes her laugh is the better decision.

Rana Esseily (2015) conducted research on babies as young as 18 months old. There are many research studies that show that when children laugh, it enhances their attention, motivation, perception, memory, and learning. But this study was the first to try out the idea on children as young as 18 months old. The children in the group who did a task in a way that made them laugh learned the target actions more than those in the control group who were not laughing during the learning period.

Note
The researcher hypothesizes that laughter may help with learning because dopamine released while laughing enhances learning.

Takeaways

When you’re designing learning apps or products for children, include plenty of opportunities to get the children to laugh.Make sure you test your apps with children in the target age range. What makes you laugh may or may not make them laugh.

The Pew Research Center surveys parents in the US to get information on technology use for children ages 0 to 11. Here are some of the recent findings:

Almost half of the children below the age of 2 regularly use a smartphone. The number is 62% for children ages 3-4, 59% for children ages 5-8, and 67% for children 9-11.

Seventeen percent of the children under 11 have their own smartphone.

Thirty-six percent of the children under 12 interact with voice activated assistants, mainly to listen to music and get information.

As much as 30% of the 9 to 11 year olds use social media.

Takeaways

The age of target audiences is getting younger and younger.If you haven’t been asked to design for very young children, you may be asked before too long.When you design for young children, you have two target audiences—the young children and their parents—because the parents of very young children make the purchase/use decision initially. Make sure you’re designing for both.Test your designs with both children and their parents.

If I told you that as people age their neuroplasticity declines—as they get older, they’re less able to learn new things, create new neuronal connections, and retrieve memories—you’d probably nod and say, yes, you’ve heard that’s true. It’s a piece of conventional wisdom that everyone seems to know, and seems to make sense. Except that it’s not true!

Dayna Touron (2015) has researched memory in older adults and found that memory often does not decline as much as everyone thinks, but that older adults aren’t confident in their ability to make new memories or retrieve old ones.

When Touron had people learn a new route with a GPS device, the younger adults learned the route and then stopped using the GPS much faster than the older adults.

It’s not because the older adults took longer to commit the route to memory. It turns out that the adults between ages 60 and 75 hesitated to give up the GPS and rely instead on what they’ve learned.

Touron has found this reluctance to trust one’s own memory to be true of older adults in many different situations and contexts, including verbal tasks (recognizing word pairs), and mathematical tasks (solving equations). In the mathematical tasks, older adults went over the same calculations many times rather than relying on their memory of how to solve the equations.

Interestingly, if she offered a small cash prize in return for a quick answer, then they did rely on their memory.

Touron believes that older adults aren’t confident in their memory abilities, and so will stick with other methods even if they’re inefficient. She also believes that older adults underestimate just how inefficient they’re being, don’t think that using their memories will be much of a shortcut, and don’t believe their memories are entirely accurate.

This lack of confidence in memory may be why older adults take longer to do tasks with technology than younger adults. We tend to think it’s because they think more slowly, or their memories are poor. It may actually be that they don’t have confidence in their ability to make new memories or retrieve old ones.

Takeaways

Assume that older adults may take longer to complete some tasks.Encourage older adults to use their memory of how to do something rather than following instructions.

Jim is 70 years old. He’s setting up an account to listen to music with an online music app. He’s on the security screen and the form asks him to pick security questions to set up an account and type in the answers. He has to pick two questions from the following choices:

Who was your third-grade teacher?What was the name of the first school you attended?What was the name of your first pet?What is your father’s birthdate?What street did you live on when you were born?Who was your best friend in high school?What was your nickname as a child?What was your first car?

To the 27-year-old who created this set of security questions, these sound like reasonable questions. After all, the user only has to pick two of them. Certainly two of them have to work for everyone, right?

For Jim, who is 70, it’s been over 50 years since he had his first car, and he’s had dozens since then. It’s been 62 years since he was in third grade. It’s been 70 years since he was born. It’s unlikely that someone who is 70 would know the answers to two of these questions.

It’s Not Just Age

It’s not just age that can make these types of questions hard to answer. For example, I moved a lot when I was young. I lived in the apartment where I was born for three months. I attended 12 schools before I graduated from high school. My parents died when I was young, so I don’t remember their birthdates. I would have a hard time coming up with two questions out of the set above that I had actual answers to.

Even if Jim had a great memory he might not have answers to these questions. Maybe he (and I) could just make up some answers. But the problem with making up answers is that we won’t remember them. (I’ve tried doing this.) Just write them down, then, right? But isn’t the idea of security questions that you wouldn’t have them written down somewhere where people can find them?

Takeaways

Don’t ask people to remember information from many years ago.Don’t assume that people’s lives are standard and permanent.Don’t ask security questions that require long-term memory.

Unlike vision, motor skills don’t decline until the mid-60s. (One exception is if you have a disease that affects motor skills, such as Parkinson’s.) Priscila Caçola (2013) tested young, middle-aged, and older (over 65) people. She had them perform various fine motor movements, including finger tapping, while having to recognize and order numbers. She tested people in three levels of complexity.

There were no differences between the young and middle-age participants, but they both performed faster than the older group. The good news is that the decline wasn’t until people were in their mid-60s. Unlike vision decline, motor decline starts later.

So much of technology use requires fine motor tasks: moving and clicking with a mouse, using a track pad, touching and swiping a smartphone. Many people over age 65 will start to have problems using technology because of motor decline.

Takeaways

When your target audience includes people over 65, be aware that motor movements become more difficult at that age. If possible, build in voice interactions so people don’t have to do as much fine motor manipulation.Don’t assume that older people are taking longer to complete a task because they aren’t thinking as fast. It might be more motor control than cognitive ability.Leave space between things on a screen that people have to hit as a target either with their mouse or finger to reduce accidental selecting.The larger the target, the easier it is to hit. Make buttons at least 9.6 mm diagonal measurement and maybe even larger if you have a primarily older target audience.

A total of 365 million people globally have hearing problems, and one-quarter of those (90 million) are over age 65.

If you’re designing a product that has an auditory component, be mindful that not everyone will be able to hear it. This is especially problematic if you have audio or video that’s critical to using your product.

Make sure people can control the audio levels, and consider captioning your content.

Takeaways

Five percent of the people in the world have hearing problems, and that number increases if your target audience is older.Consider using captioning for your audio and video files so that text transcripts are available for people with hearing problems.Provide people with as much volume control as possible.