Making Better Design Decisions Through Understanding Decisions

Good Guesses:
Making Better Interaction
Design Decisions

Dan Saffer
dan@adaptivepath.com

“It depends.”

the elements of user experience — 29 february 2005 2

How many of you are on a mailing list where someone asks a
question like, “Where should the cancel button be placed?”
and this is the answer that invariably pops up. I hate this
answer, because the next question should always be, well,
what does it depend on? That’s what this talk is all about.
As designers, we spend an inordinate amount of time
making decisions, both small and large. Everything from
what should we label this dial to should we be making this
product at all? We need to make decisions.

Good Guesses 3

But when it comes to making those decisions, we’re
like the mathematician here in Sydney Harris’
cartoon. A miracle occurs. Even if we follow a rigid
design process, there will be moments when we
have to do something that some people are
uncomfortable with and yet is essential to the work
we do. We have to make a guess. Then a miracle
occurs, in other words. Step two.

I have hunches.
Of course, it's not enough merely to
have hunches. They have to be good
hunches. My hunches have to be
better than the hunches my clients
have—that's why they hire me.

Jesse James Garrett, ia/recon

Here’s my colleague Jesse James Garrett in his
inﬂuential essay called ia/recon, written about 5
years ago. In it, he admits his secret, and here it
is. He has hunches. And I’m going to admit to you
here today the same thing. My name is Dan Saffer
and I’m a designer. I have hunches. And I bet you
do too.

Good designers
have good hunches.

They make
good guesses.

I’m going to make this claim here today, which I think, in the era of
the iPod and the iPhone, is pretty easy to defend. The best designers
aren’t the ones who are the smartest or are the best trained or do the
most research or have the most experience. The best designers are
those that make the best guesses. This should be a comfort to some
of you (those like me who aren’t an Ivy League genius who has been
designing for 30 years) and a shock to others, I’m sure. Now, I’m not
saying that training or intelligence or research or experience aren’t
important. They are. What I am saying is that a good hunch--a really
good hunch--might sometimes come up with a better design.

How do we
improve our guesses?


So this is the big question. If the way to
becoming a great designer is to make great
guesses, how do we do that? How do we
improve our guesses?

...in a method-
agnostic way?


I don’t want to simply offer up another method
to you either. Personas! Do more research!
More card sorting! Draw comics! Yes, these are
all great techniques, but I want to get at the
heart of what we do AFTER and WHILE we’re
doing other techniques: making guesses.

Understand how we
make decisions.

Consider many factors
in making decisions.

Here’s my suggestions and the outline of this talk. By
understanding a little about the structures and
mechanisms of decisions, we might not do them differently
than we do them now--although perhaps not. Part II of
this idea is how we set about making those decisions. What
should we as interaction designers consider when we make
decisions? Perhaps a pause--an extra second or two--for
every decision we make will have us make wildly better
decisions. But ﬁrst, how do we make decisions.

UNDERSTANDING DECISIONS


I’m going to preface this section of the talk by saying that I’m
not an expert in cognitive psychology. Most of what I’m
presenting here I’ve shamelessly cribbed from other sources,
particularly a textbook called Cognition by Daniel Reisberg.
Most of the examples and sources come from that book and
from various locations around the web. There is, as you’d
imagine, a whole body of literature from a large number of
ﬁelds about how we make decisions all of which are clustered
around what’s called Decision Theory.

RAPID VS. CONSIDERED DECISIONS
Good Guesses 10

You can’t talk about decision-making these days
without talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s book
Blink. In it, he makes the case that rapid, snap-
judgement decisions can be as effective--if not
more-so--than reﬂective, considered decisions. He
uses the example of the Aeron chair which users
initially hated but went on to be a huge best-seller
and design icon.

From Blink:
When you start becoming reflective
about the process, it undermines
your ability. You lose the flow. There
are certain kinds of fluid, intuitive,
nonverbal kinds of experience that
are vulnerable to this process.
Malcolm Gladwell

While I agree that slowing down the process breaks
the ﬂow, I also want to note that I think, especially
for knotty problems, slowing down and deliberately
considering them can also yield dividends, especially
for knotty problems in which a solution is NOT
immediately apparent. Which is of course, most of
the problems we have to deal with.

WICKED PROBLEMS
Good Guesses 12

The types of problems we as designers face are what have
been named Wicked Problems by design theorist H.J. Rittel.
Here’s the characteristics of Wicked Problems and see if
they don’t describe most of the projects you work on:
1. The problem is not understood until after formulation of
a solution. 2. Stakeholders have radically different world
views and different frames for understanding the problem.
3. Constraints and resources to solve the problem change
over time. 4. The problem is never solved.

MACRO- AND MICRO-DECISIONS
Good Guesses 13

These Wicked Problems can take many forms, big and
small. During the course of a project, we’re asked to solve
both macro and micro problems. Macro problems are those
of design strategy: Should this product be made? What
features should it include? Micro problems are those of
tactics: should this button be red or blue? Can the user
upload more than one ﬁle at a time? We can even have
these wicked problems IN our process: should I do user
research?

The Structure of Decisions

Discover Frame Assess Consider
Act
a Problem the Problem the Problem Solutions

Good Guesses 14

This process can take years or milliseconds.
1. A problem is discovered or simply presents itself.
2. Framing the problem. We need to put some sort of boundaries
around the problem before we can solve it. We’ll talk more about
this in a minute.
3. Assess the problem. Is it a huge problem or a small one? What
kind of resources do I need to make a decision here?
4. The heart of the matter, at least for designers. Considering the
solution. We’re going to talk a lot more about this in a moment.
5. Act. Execute the decision, for good or ill.

Design
The Structure of Decisions
Strategy Scope
Prototype Build
Research Discovery
Discover Frame Assess Consider
Act
a Problem the Problem the Problem Solutions

Good Guesses 15

It’s kind of weird how the decision making process
is like a hologram of the design process. It’s the
same at the micro level as it is at the macro level.

What I’m mostly concerned about is how we
consider solutions, but it’s awfully hard, as we’ll
see, to break this process apart.

DECISION FRAMING
Good Guesses 16

How we make decisions depends strongly
on how those decisions are presented and
constructed. Framed in other words. The
choices we make can be completely
inconsistent simply depending upon the
context we encounter them in.

I’m giving you $300. You have to
choose between:

1. a sure gain of another $100
or
2. a 50% chance to get another
$200 and 50% to get nothing

Here’s an example. Pick 1 or 2.

I’m giving you $500. You have to
choose between:

1. a sure loss of $100
or
2. a 50% chance to lose nothing
or a 50% chance to lose $200

Now again, do the same thing.

The decision is identical.

1. $400
or
2. $300 or $500


As you might have guessed, the outcome in both is
identical. They both leave you with the same amount
of money. But when the question was framed as a
“gain” more people (72%) chose option 1. When it
was framed as a loss, more people (64%) chose
option 2. Obviously, HOW you frame the problem can
change how you think about the answer to that
problem.

METAPHOR TO “NAME AND FRAME”
Good Guesses 20

Even the words we use to talk about a problem can
change the solution. This is the late Donald Schon who
wrote a number of books about problem framing such as
The Reﬂective Practitioner: How professionals think in
action. His famous example was about a troubled urban
housing project. When it was referred to as a “blight on
the community” or a “disease” the solution to it seemed
obvious: blights should be removed and diseases should
be cured.

W
ha
W

ti
sd
ha
ti

isl
sl

ike
ike

d
d sed
t is u
ha
W

What is wanted What is unused

n
n ow
is k
h at wn
W k no
un
t is
ha
W

Good Guesses 21

Luckily, as designers, we have some pretty good tools
at our disposal for framing decisions: namely
visualization. We can take abstract ideas and give them
form. This, for example, is a model of an intranet. It
framed the problems with the intranet nicely and it was
easy (or at least easier) to see what needed to be done
to ﬁx the intranet: we had to move the lines!

WHAT WE USE TO DECIDE: REASON
Good Guesses 22

So what goes into considering solutions? Three
ingredients:

We like to think we’re reasonable, logical people
and that’s how we make decisions. That
discounts...

WHAT WE USE TO DECIDE: EMOTION
Good Guesses 23

Emotion. How we feel about a decision, what
we value, and how much we value it are
inescapable to making decisions.

WHAT WE USE TO DECIDE: COGNITION
Good Guesses 24

Cognition: how people pay attention,
remember, and think.

Let’s see how all these combine into two
major theories of decision-making.

PRESCRIPTIVE (“UTILITY”) THEORY
Good Guesses 25

Utility or Prescriptive Theory says that each decision has costs
to it. Costs meaning consequences (this will take a long time,
say, or will injure 1% of the users). Each decision also has a
benefit to it. These benefits can move us towards our goals
(like finishing a design) or provide us with things we value
(like, say, money). When we decide, we weigh the costs vs.
the benefits. When we have several options available to us, we
take the one that has the most beneficial mix of benefits to
cost. Almost every decision, no matter how minor, will have
some sort of tradeoff. Seems...logical, right?

SUBJECTIVE UTILITY
Good Guesses 26

Except that most of the time, we have to compare things that are
nearly impossible to weigh objectively. Is there more beneﬁt to
using the colors red and green or is the cost of color blind people
not being able to see it too high? Umm...

It comes down to subjectivity, ultimately. How much each factor
means to the individual. It might mean more to me to have the
color red than for some people not to see it because I value the
clarity of red more than a small percentage of the population. This
sounds callous, but we make these sorts of trade-offs all the time.

Expected Utility =
(Probability of Particular Outcome) x
(Utility of Outcome)


But of course, most decisions aren’t so easy to determine--it’s
very hard to predict the future. Game theorists John von Neumann
and Oskar Morgenstern came up with this formula in the late
1940s to account for risks. Utility here means “something that is
important to you.”

With this model, you predict the expected risks based on the
likelihood of it ever happening times how great the utility is. So
even though the probability is extremely low, the utility of winning
the lottery is so high people will still buy lottery tickets.

PASCAL’S WAGER
Good Guesses 28

The most famous example of this sort of decision
making is Pascal’s Wager. According to Pascal, the
question is whether or not God exists. We don’t
know. However, the reward for belief in God if God
actually does exist is inﬁnite. Therefore, however
small the probability of God's existence, the expected
value of belief exceeds that of non-belief, so it is
better to believe in God, according to Pascal.

UNSTABLE VALUES
Good Guesses 29

The major ﬂaw with Utility Theory is that our values are
unstable and difficult to measure. One day we can believe
one thing, the next day another. Our emotions can lead us
one way or another, and, as we saw earlier, how a problem
is framed can cause us to change our position.
If I asked you what is more important, crime prevention or
$500, you’d probably say crime prevention. But if I said, give
me $500 for crime prevention, you might respond differently.

HIGHLY ILLOGICAL
Good Guesses 30

If I said, for example, you can trade in your wedding
ring for a new one, you logically should say yes. A
newer gold ring seems to have more utility than an
old one. But you’re likely to say no. Something more
than reason is going on.

DESCRIPTIVE THEORY
Good Guesses 31

This brings us to the second major theory of
decision-making: Descriptive Theory. If utility or
Prescriptive theory is about how we SHOULD make
decisions, Descriptive Theory is about how we DO
make decisions.

AVOIDING REGRET
Good Guesses 32

One of the strongest forces in choosing is a desire to
avoid future regret. We don’t want to regret the
decisions we make, so we have a coping mechanism
called...

JUSTIFICATION
Good Guesses 33

Justiﬁcation. We justify our decisions so we won’t
have regrets afterwards. With this theory, even if the
decision brings us utility, but makes us feel bad, it
was the wrong decision.

SATISFICING
Good Guesses 34

There’s one more concept I want to talk about in regards to decision-
making, dealing with cognition, and that’s a term coined by the late
Nobel Prize winner Herb Simon: satisfice. Human beings lack the
cognitive resources to know all the relevant probabilities of outcomes,
and we can rarely evaluate all outcomes with sufficient precision. Our
memories are weak and unreliable. Thus we have to satisfice, or make
quot;good enoughquot; choices given the short amount of time and huge
amounts of data we have. Satisfice is a mechanism for managing the
world, because, Simon argues, there is too much information and thus it
is impossible to model the entire environment of any given problem.

All decision is a matter
of compromise. The alternative
that is finally selected never permits
a complete or perfect achievement of
objectives, but is merely the best
solution that is available under
the circumstances.
Herb Simon,
Administrative Behavior the elements of user experience — 29 february 2005 35

Here’s Herb in his own words.

And this is what we as designers (and as humans),
ultimately do, right? We satisﬁce, making the best
decisions we can given what we can know at any
given moment.

This again should be comforting to many.

MAKING BETTER
INTERACTION DESIGN
DECISIONS


Now that we at least understand a little bit more
about the structure of how we make decisions and
the factors involved in decision-making, we can
approach speciﬁc decision points and look at them
from an interaction design perspective. I’m
approaching this as a series of Socratic questions
that we can ask ourselves when we get stuck on a
problem.

UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENCE
Good Guesses 37

Doing this will be natural to some of you, who might
automatically--Blink-style--go through all these things in your
head in an instant. For the rest of us, it’s going to feel a little
awkward at ﬁrst. The idea is to move us all collectively towards
an unconscious competence with IxD decision-making. So that
we begin to have a base for making good decisions that doesn’t
rely on any particular method to achieve good designs. And like
I said earlier, for knotty problems, it might be good to simply
take the time to step through these questions in a more
methodical way than you normally would.

Is the solution I’m considering...


So here’s the questions I think we need to
consider when making a guess. When a
solution presents itself, you can rip through
these questions, either formally or
informally and brieﬂy. I content that doing
so will help our hunches.

FIT A CONVENTION IN OUR FIELD?
Good Guesses 39

The first thing I ask myself when I get stuck is: Is there a good solution
we’ve seen elsewhere in our field? Have other people solved this
successfully and can we draw upon their solution? After all, there is no
need to reinvent the wheel every time, for every little thing. This was one
of the issues with Flash when it was first introduced--all conventions
went out the window. I usually follow Alan Cooper’s rule here: if there is
a standard or a convention, I better have a better solution that will
provide some significant increases in usefulness or usability before I
break it.

This solution, however, should still be able to pass the test of the other
questions, however, or else it might be a lousy standard.

FIT A CONVENTION OUTSIDE OUR FIELD?

If there isn’t a convention in the digital
realm, perhaps there is in physical or
mechanical realm that we can adapt for our
use. One of the reasons I started a
collection of

Just what is interacting, anyway?

FIT WHAT’S KNOWN ABOUT THE USERS?
Good Guesses 41

Do they have any behaviors, expectations, or
motivations that would make this a bad choice?
If I’m not giving them what they expect, am I
working with the MAYA principle? This is where
user research can play an important role is in
ﬁnding this out. (But even with user research we
might still be guessing here.)

FIT THE BUSINESS AND PRODUCT STRATEGY?
Good Guesses 42

Does my guess ﬁt the business strategy and
goals? We shouldn’t forget (nor be overwhelmed
by) the big picture for the company providing
the product or service. We need to ensure the
goals of our clients, be they internal or external,
are also met. A brilliant feature that detracts
from the overall strategy may not be so brilliant.

Texture

CULTURALLY-APPROPRIATE?
Good Guesses 43

Products and services have to be culturally
appropriate. The Yahoo Hong Kong page
looks like this not only because the
characters are different, but because the
colors, clusters, and page density are
appropriate for China.

Texture

CONTEXT-APPROPRIATE?
Good Guesses 44

When and were will this be used and under
what circumstances? Is it one-time use and
thus has to be simple, or will it be
something used frequently, daily? Is it
mobile or stationary? Small screen or large?
Is there a screen at all?

FIT THE ACTIVITY?

Activities are actions and decisions done for
a purpose. Does the solution provide the
necessary tools and information to complete
the activity?

FOLLOW KNOWN LAWS?
Good Guesses 46

Does the solution follow known interaction design
laws like Fitts’ Law? Just because you have a
gorgeous “designery” solution doesn’t mean you
should ignore what is known and tested.
Hick’s Law: Users will more quickly make decisions
from a list of 10 items than from two items of ﬁve.

FOLLOW THE POKA-YOKE PRINCIPLE?
Good Guesses 47

Poka Yoke means preventing error. Does the
solution I’ve come up with prevent
inadvertent errors by the system or user?

TOO COMPLICATED?

Tesler’s Law of the Conservation of
Complexity states that for every process
there is a core of complexity that can’t be
overcome, only moved between the system
and the user. Are we making users do
something the system could handle?

TOO SIMPLE?

The ﬂip side is too make sure you didn’t
just remove all control from the hands of
users, especially your power users.
Simplicity is great, but sometimes users
need the control that complexity gives
them.

Ludic

ENCOURAGE EXPLORATION AND PLAY?
Good Guesses 50

Being playful allows you to explore options.
Users need to feel safe in order to try out
features. Can what I’m proposing be
undone? And if so, how and how easily?

ELEGANT AND APPROPRIATE?

Is the solution overly disruptive? Does it manifest
itself at the correct time and in an appropriate
way? (Clippy isn’t elegant or appropriate.) This
comes down to importance: how important (and
thus how prominent) should this be? How much
of the users’ valuable time should it take up?

FIT THE COMPANY’S BRAND?

Does the solution work with the company’s
brand? As much as usability gurus tell us
otherwise, pure utility simply won’t work for every
company. Imagine if Tiffany’s website looked like
Ebay or Amazon.

Moore’s Law

NOT DOING AS MUCH AS IT SHOULD?
Good Guesses 53

Smart products and services do for us what we
could in no way do for ourselves. Things like
advanced calculation, data crunching, gathering
of information that would take us forever to
ﬁnd, if we even could. Like Amazon’s What do
Customers ultimately buy? Can the solution do
more using what the user is already doing?

SENSE AND RESPOND TO INPUT?

Does the solution make an attempt to
personalize the application for each user, slowly
over time?

Isn’t there just one right way to do
interaction design?

GOOD?

The last thing (or maybe it should be the
ﬁrst thing) we should ask: Is the solution
just? Does it preserve the dignity of the
users? Is the interaction pleasurable for
both the initiator of the action and the
receiver?

HOW DO WE KNOW IF WE’VE
MADE A GOOD GUESS?


The $64,000 question. After I’ve done all
this, how do I know if I guessed correctly?

Well, I have some bad news.

TIME
Good Guesses 57

Time is the only ﬁnal arbiter of good design.
Does your design last? Even if it is improved
upon? The design of a fork took hundreds of
years to perfect. All designed objects, Henry
Petroski asserts, leave room for improvement.
Nothing is perfect. Even things that have been
quot;perfectedquot; over a millennia such as tables and
chairs can be improved upon.

ONE IMPLICATION


One implication of thinking about guessing
and guesswork as the core of design returns
the focus of design back onto the designer,
away from tasks and from users. Some
people are uncomfortable with that.

RESEARCH IS A TOOL NOT A METHODOLOGY

Research, especially, is de-emphasized with this
design stance. Research is more about ﬁlling in
the gaps in the designer’s knowledge than an
activity to be done for its own sake. But perhaps
that is how it should be viewed.

How a problem is
framed affects the
possible solutions.

The Utility Theory says
that each decision has
associated costs and
benefits to be weighed.

Good Guesses 60

So to summarize

The Descriptive Theory
says that we justify
decisions we make in
order to avoid regret.

We have to make
“good enough”
decisions all the time.
Every decision is
a compromise.

Good Guesses 61

Examine proposed
solutions to see if the
characteristics and
qualities are what they
should be: examples of
excellent interaction
design.

Good Guesses 62

References
ia/recon, Jesse James Garrett
Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
Cognition, Third Edition, Daniel Reisberg
The Evolution of Useful Things, Henry Petroski
The Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schöen
Administrative Behavior, Herbert Simon

Thanks to Flickr and its contributing photographers
for the images.

Here’s some works I cited in this talk.

Making Better Design Decisions Through Understanding Decisions

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Similar to Making Better Design Decisions Through Understanding Decisions

Similar to Making Better Design Decisions Through Understanding Decisions (20)

More from Dan Saffer

More from Dan Saffer (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Making Better Design Decisions Through Understanding Decisions