Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Designs
Notes from Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Designs with Jared Spool at SXSW.
Our field is now deeply into a stage known as Experience Design. To do this work we need our teams to possess a number of skills but the one we're going to talk about today is "Magic."
The idea here is that magic brings a level of delight that we don't see in other places. So what we're going to do here is go through a few magic tricks, deconstruct them, and talk about how this can apply to design.
Jared is doing magic tricks. Awesome.
Magic creates experiences that are different from what is actually occurring physically. Illusion separates the user's model from the designer's model.
This is different than most design. Typically we try to make these models be as similar as possible. In an illusion we don't want to communicate what is actually happening.
When magicians talk about tricks they talk about the effect. Think about the Haunted House at Disneyland. You leave the Haunted House having seen ghosts and floating candelabras and all the other amazing sighs and sounds. The designers have a completely different perspective. They are focussing on how the effects are created. The sounds designer doesn't want you to know that he or she is even there. They are designing for full immersion, for an experience that isn't designed because it is real.
Think about deleting a file and the crunching noise that Apple makes when you delete. There aren't "files" and there isn't deletion. The disk has data all over it where "files" are split up all over the place. Moving, copying, and deleting are all illusions and its been that way for years. Its just how it works.
When we build things like this we have to understand that users only know what to do when they believe that there is a file. All kinds of things fall into this category.
Spool plays audio of Marissa Mayer talking about how Google Search works.
The point here is the balance between simplicity and complexity. What happens when you hit search is amazingly complex but for the user the search is amazingly simple and fast.
The user doesn't need to know what's actually happening to accomplish their goal. They hit search, get results, and that's the end of it.
At flickr the same magic happens. The URL of everyone's homepage is www.flickr.com and as you navigate the site you get nice pretty URLs that include your name. This has nothing to do with their actual data storage system.
The Netflix recommendation system works in a similar way. They don't really know what movies you like, they're just doing data analysis and showing a guess. The problem is that people don't realize how magical the system is, users dismiss it as simple when it is actually very refined.
Designers can suggest a mental model that is different from actual implementation. When done well it can simplify but when there are holes the user will not believe and intuit something else.
Perception is the most important piece of illusion.
Excellent trick where you see a rotating spiral and then switch to looking at someone's head. The effect is that the head first shrinks and then enlarges as your eye muscles react
Perceived performance is how users interpret the length of time that an activity takes. In a study, users across a number of interests agreed about the perceived performance of sites. Amazon, the slowest site in the study, was consistently perceived as the fastest in the study.
When they mapped perceived performance against task completion they saw the cause of the perception. When users are able to complete their task quickly on a slow site they will perceive the experience as fast. Time passes quickly when you are accomplishing your goals.
At YouTube they take advantage of this by autostarting the video while it is still loading. You get pieces of the film before you can watch the whole thing. This creates the illusion that it is faster than it would otherwise be.
How far apart can you separate elements before they no longer appear to be related?
When Facebook changes the News Feed they initially confused users. People started seeing names that they didn't recognized and misunderstood what was happening.
Designers must understand how users perceive designs. Simple tricks can make a design feel more responsive than it is.
Look up the Kano Model, a two-by-two measuring user satisfaction and quality.
In the Performance Payoff, as you add more features and quality you get more satisfaction from users. But there is also a scenario where you add more things but can never improve satisfaction. The third area is called Excitement Generation where you are able to combine the right features in a way that creates genuine delight.
One way to create delight is to be whimsical. Twitter, for example, has had error messages involving cats fixing servers. Flickr has a dialog that reads "Embiggen small photos to fill screen."
Another way to get delight is through attention. When you plug a pink iPod into a Mac, iTunes shows a little pink iPod. At Best Western's website, they let you type in a city and then it autocompletes the other fields for state and country even if they don't have an hotel in that city.
The last way to add delight is through functionality. ProFlowers.com works not only because the site is nice but because the flowers are amazing. Farecast also does this by showing you data and occasionally tells you to wait to purchase. You can even buy a guarantee.
The idea of delight is really quite important but you need to get the basic expectations in place. No matter how great the sound is, a clock radio needs to keep time.
Things that are delightful today before basics over time.
The important point is that designing for magic involves creating a mental model for users that is different than what is actually happening in the background.
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