1.
@mrjoe
or 3 predictions from psychology
for the future of web design
@mrjoe
http://neuroimages.tumblr.com/post/20131555516
Psychology for designers

2.
@mrjoe
Hello, I’m @mrjoe, but
you can call me Joe
If you have ever bought a train ticket online? booked a hotel? chances
are you’ve used something I designed.
UX 10 years with cxpartners, a UX agency in Bristol, UK
I work with people like Disney, Marriott & theTrainline.
My background in psychology. I studied Neuroscience and MSc
Human Communication and Computing.

3.
@mrjoe
So I wrote a book. Only £2. $3 €3
http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/
products/psychology-for-designers

4.
@mrjoe
I want to talk about the
future of web design
I want to talk about the Future of Web
Design. Specifically I want to make
three predictions based on
psychology for the future of web
design

5.
@mrjoe
They travelled back where 23rd
century man had never gone before.
To a mad, crazy, outrageous time.
1986. How does the future compare to
now?

6.
@mrjoe
Hello computer. This should be the
now. Scotty’s right we should be
talking to computers. Why aren’t we?
http://
www.youtube.com/
watch?v=v9kTVZiJ3Uc

7.
@mrjoe
I use one of these to with my phone
when I’m on my bike, so no screen.
Just talking. I love listening to music
especially on random crazy I know,
that’s the kinda guy I am. Here’s the
problem. So here I am on my bike.

8.
@mrjoe
Siri get’s it wrong, searching for the
term I used not telling me what was
playing

9.
@mrjoe
Here’s what should have happened. I
should have said what song is this
playing? silly me.
I’m not the kind of guy who lets this go. I
wanted to know why Siri got it wrong.
Why are computers terrible when it
comes to conversation?

10.
@mrjoe
What is going on? Let’s look at the
psychology of conversation.
HP Grice’s ideas on the logic of
conversation in
lectures delivered at Harvard University
in 1967. Published in 1975
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/studypacks/Grice-Logic.pdf

11.
@mrjoe
1. Maxim of Quantity:
-Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary.
-Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than necessary.
2. Maxim of Quality:
-Do not say what you believe to be false.
-Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
3. Maxim of Relevance:
-Be relevant (i.e., say things related to the current topic of the conversation).
4. Maxim of Manner:
-Avoid obscurity of expression.
-Avoid ambiguity.
-Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness).
-Be orderly.
Grice’s Conversational Maxims
Grice’s maxims, a useful way of analysing
conversations.
And do you know what? It wasn’t Siri that was
breaking one of these laws it was me.
Conversation between real people. We don’t talk like
this.

12.
@mrjoe
The problem is we don’t use Grice’s maxims, in fact more
often than not we ignore them, we like, well, a bit
subtlety.
Here’s a funny sketch from Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore
where they talk about, well, um, the uh, well the facts of
life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=d0Z1QGpTZSo

13.
@mrjoe
Turns out we has humans have
high expectations from
conversation.
If we followed the rules exactly
we would end up, well like
Sheldon from Big Brother.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fJSxbVSKLw

14.
@mrjoe
About you
Please enter your address
MrWhat is your title*
JohnWhat is your first name*
SmithWhat is your last name*
7Date of birth* 7 2012
Gender* I am a MALE
I am a FEMALE
Please select...Status*
Please complete the form, please ensure you complete all the f
here, then press the button at the bottom of the screen. Under
circumstances we will your details on to third parties.
What is / was the
name of your first pet
when you were young
1. Maxim of Quantity:
-Make your contribution to the conversation
as informative as necessary.
-Do not make your contribution to the
conversation more informative than
necessary.
2. Maxim of Quality:
-Do not say what you believe to be false.
-Do not say that for which you lack adequate
evidence.
3. Maxim of Relevance:
-Be relevant (i.e., say things related to the
current topic of the conversation).
4. Maxim of Manner:
-Avoid obscurity of expression.
-Avoid ambiguity.
-Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness).
-Be orderly.
So why have I wasted time telling
you about Grice’s maxims?
Well it turns out they are great
for assessing the usability of
forms.

15.
@mrjoe
What’s this playing?
Was that sarcasm?
I love you.
Take it or leave it.
Who would say such a thing?
So what is going on with
Siri?
These are pronoun is a word
or form that substitutes for
a noun or noun phrase. They
are notoriously hard to
compute. Us humans are
built to understand them,
computers less so.

16.
@mrjoe
What’s this playing?
We as humans are good at this stuff,
we can hold pronoun meanings in our
working memory.
But here’s where are really good at it.

17.
@mrjoe
On the iPod This?
What’s this playing?
It’s Del the Funky Homosapian,
well actually it’s Delton 3030
(sweety)
In psychology this is called Grounding. Grounding is the collective process by which participants try to reach a mutual belief
Once we have formulated a message we need to do more than simply send it off. We need to ensure it has been understood.
Grounding is the most important thing in conversation, not some prescriptive set of rules like those produced by old Grice.
We have more than one level of interaction. We ask questions. Understand replies. If we don’t understand we ask.

18.
@mrjoe
About you
MrWhat is your title*
JohnWhat is your first name*
SmithWhat is your last name*
7Date of birth* 7 2012
Gender* I am a MALE
I am a FEMALE
Please select...Status*
Please complete the form, please ensure you complete all the fields
here, then press the button at the bottom of the screen. Under some
circumstances we will your details on to third parties.
Errors
There errors on this page:
- Please enter status
- You cannot be born in the future
Computers do try and do this. But
more often than not it’s clunky like
errors on forms.
Not very human.

19.
@mrjoe
Three or more synchronous
interactions
Future Prediction #1
Designing like Conversation

20.
@mrjoe
PHONE PICTURE
Last December at the cxpartners Christmas party. Picture the scene.
I never like to leave early so was there until the end. Michelle my
girlfriend, who is in the audience today and couple of others needed
a taxi. I phoned maybe 4 companies before getting one. They said
they’d call when the taxi was outside. The call never came. The taxi
left without us. We were out, slightly drunk on a cold December
evening with 3 miles to walk home
Well it did, I even put my phone on the table, face up so we wouldn’t
miss it. What happened?

21.
@mrjoe
Turns out the my do not
disturb settings were on.
Normally I don’t want any
notifications, calls or
whatever after 11pm.
But this Thursday was
different. I missed the call.
Now do not disturb is turned
off.

22.
@mrjoe
This isn’t a new problem.
This is from a AutoProfiles, a symbian series 60
app from 2005.
It looks at your calendar and turns your phone
to silent if you are in a meeting. Clever. Well no,
you turn it off pretty much after the first time
you miss an important call because your phone
is on silent.
The concept of chronofencing is clunky.
It gets turned off pretty after the first time it
goes wrong.

23.
@mrjoe
Geofencing, activating a behaviour based on
context. Works slightly better.

24.
@mrjoe
CONTEXT
Context is buzz word at the moment. Context
is everything we know about our user.
From where they are, to what there plans are.
Even down to how they are feeling and what
they had for breakfast.

25.
@mrjoe
Andrew Heaton http://understandinggroup.com/
2013/03/some-simple-models-for-user-context/
Andrew Heaton amongst others is doing some
good work in this area.

26.
@mrjoe
First International Symposium, HUC’99 Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27–29, 1999 ProceedingsFirst International Symposium, HUC’99 Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27–29, 1999 ProceedingsFirst International Symposium, HUC’99 Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27–29, 1999 Proceedings
1999
Context isn’t new, this is 1999 model. Context
modelling isn’t the answer. We already have a
structure to study this.
We can track many parts of context. From
location, to calendar to feelings from tweets
and other media.
Even down to how they are feeling and what
they had for breakfast.
Nothing has moved on despite this being a well
defined problem.
Let’s look to psychology to see how we humans
deal with the problem.

27.
@mrjoe
5∘
10∘
15∘ 20∘
25∘
mental model
30∘
This is the thermostat in my house. My old flatmate
used to come home feeling cold and turn up the heat to
25 degrees so the house would heat up quicker. Flawed
thinking. That’s not how a thermostat works.
Compare that to a the heating element on a gas hob. It
does work that way. Not flawed thinking but a flawed
mental model.

28.
28
I didn’t see them [the asterisks].
There’s nothing that explains
what they mean.
How did you hear about us?
*
How old are you? *
http://www.cxpartners.co.uk/cxblog/the-ux-of-html5/
From my FOWD talk
last year. UX of
HTML5
This isn’t a usability
problem this is an
incorrect Mental
Model problem.

29.
29
Many of users have
mental models from
offline situations.
Like completing a
paper form.

30.
@mrjoe
I need to speak to my wife
Our littlest is sick and is
at home
It’s 10.48am on a Monday
That’s the time of the weekly ops meeting which runs from 10am
-11am
I know from Find My iPhone that she’s not in the office.
When this happened last time and I didn’t call she was worried.
It’s urgent.
I take a guess that she’s not in the meeting or won’t mind if I call.
So back to our context problem.
In the same way we build mental models of objects we build
mental models of situations.
And the thing here. It’s not the first three things that make the
difference. It’s the last two.
Computers are good at problems 1, 2 and 3 but poor at 4 and 5.
But they are getting better.

31.
@mrjoe
CONTEXT
RELEVANCE
It’s not a context modelling problem we have. Rather a problem
of recognising patterns of relevance.

32.
@mrjoehttp://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3733375/Spooky-face-appears-in-clouds.html
Turns out, humans are good at this. We have a huge part of our brain focused on
recognising patterns, identifying relevance. In this case faces.

33.
@mrjoe
GOOGLE NOW
We are getting there Google Now is not half
bad. It uses one or more context.
-location
-recent searches
-driving conditions
It aims to be your personal assistant.
Think about the human comparison, you trust a
human with this information, your full diary,
likes, dislikes. My personal assistant is great at
booking the perfect hotel for me. My assistant
knows my likes and dislikes all the important
details that make me who I am.

34.
@mrjoe
ALWAYS
BE NICE
This is Niccolò Machiavelli. He
wrote the The Prince.
Machiavellian psychology,
detach oneself from
conventional morality and
hence to deceive and
manipulate others.
We need to be able to trust our
digital assistants won’t betray
that trust. They will collect all
this personal information
about us. Can we sure they
won’t use it to manipulate us.
In my book, I defined an
approach, exhaustively, to deal
with this problem. Summarised
into: Always be nice.

35.
@mrjoe
Two or more elements of context
are needed to define relevance in
a mental model
Future Prediction #2
Designing with Mental models of relevance
Otherwise known as getting to know you
better. Or give away your privacy.
The very thing that makes this stuff useful
depends on the very information you are
nervous about giving away.

36.
Thinking
(Cognition)
Feeling
(Emotion)
Instinct
(keeping you
alive)
I promised you a third
prediction for the future of
web design.
This is Olfactory Bulb. It’s
close to the emotional centres
of the brain. It’s why smell is
so evocative.

37.
@mrjoe
http://sensoree.com/smell-interfaces/
Smell will be big. Well maybe ;)

38.
@mrjoe
https://www.google.co.uk/landing/nose/
This was of course an April
fools joke from Google.
Shame, I think it could have
been more a of a success than
glass.

39.
@mrjoe
We will design smell
based interactions
Future Prediction #3
designing with Olfaction
Forget glass folks, noses. All about noses. Google had it right.
But seriously. We can use memory of smell to do this.
The act of remembering a smell is almost identical in the brain to
actually experiencing that smell.

40.
@mrjoe
Future Prediction #1
Designing like
Conversation
Future Prediction #2
Designing with Mental
models of relevance
Future Prediction #3
designing with Olfaction
So to review. 3 predictions. One of which
is a little like a bad episode of Tomorrow’s
World.
But the first two have a commonality.
Social. We build models of the world
based around interactions with other
people.

41.
@mrjoe
http://psych.colorado.edu/~tito/sp03/7536/Dunbar_1998.pdf
The brain is as big as it is as a huge amount of
our brain power goes on modelling and
analysing social situations.
http://psych.colorado.edu/~tito/sp03/7536/
Dunbar_1998.pdf

42.
@mrjoe
Theory of
Mind
Other wise known as THEORY OF MIND.
Huge amount of brain power focused on mapping others. Creating
mental models of how others think and predicting how they will
behave. We invest huge amounts of mental power trying to
understand how other people feel, what they know. It’s called a
theory of mind.

43.
@mrjoe
Socially
Shared
Cognition
Both interaction and mental models rely on a concept from Social Psychology.
Socially shared cognition.
Practically. We need to know this theory.
I know what you know. You know what I know. If either of us don’t know, we ask.
Other things that are related to Socially Shared Cognition.
-Story telling
-Education (I had to predict what you guys knew to write this talk)

44.
@mrjoe
Socially
Shared
Cognition
How
can I
help
you?
We need a shared model of cognition. I know what my computer knows.
My computer knows what I know. If either of us don’t know, we ask.
A shared model of the world and people around us.

45.
@mrjoe
A designer
who doesn't
understand
psychology
is going to be no
more successful
than an architect
who doesn't
understand physics
Image: http://victorenrich.com/archives/155
Thank you.
@mrjoe

46.
@mrjoe
psychologyfordesigners.com