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Interface DevelopmentAs German mathematician, Bernard Riemann stated, "The presence of matter determines the structure of space." This means that when an object exists in space it changes the entire spacial equilibrium—not just the area that the object displaces. Moreover, the introduction of one object affects the relationships of other objects as well as all the space in between.
In the same way that most people don't understand the principles, laws and dynamics of physical space on a very deep level, most people producing content for the screen space don't understand its principles, laws and dynamics very deeply either. For me this area of study should be fundamental to any who engage in the design and development of information for digital, interactive mediums. Considering that at this time we're actually beginning to design interfaces for augmented reality (AR) applications, this statement has never been more true.
This area is devoted to the exploration of the principles, laws and dynamics that govern how the human mind perceives, interprets, understands, and otherwise connects with what I call the time/screen-space continuum. My hope is that this will spur fresh dialogue, new thinking and cutting edge innovation.
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05.00.00 Productive Originality—Understanding the Role of Creativity Online
Save some of the more persnickety usability experts, most other experts acknowledge that creativity plays an extremely important role in getting people excited about information. The correct application of creativity in terms of meeting people’s perceptual, cognitive, and emotional needs, however, is less well understood. In order to understand creativity’s role in guiding people into comprehension, we must first understand what creativity is. What is creativity, and what role does it play in our online messages? |
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05.00.01 As has been outlined in the first four chapters, professionals are at odds regarding what creativity is and how it should be employed online.
In one camp, we have those who subscribe to the usability point of view. Some of the more extreme Web usability writing amounts to a carte blanche condemnation of creativity. In the other camp, we have those who are “graphic-arts centric” and who generally defend the use of creativity even when they can’t substantiate the reasoning behind their perspectives.
The aim of this chapter is to help those from both vantage points to understand that there is a moderate position that rises above the two extremes. This position is that not only should creativity be employed in the design of our online messages but also it must be employed if the successes of our online messages are to be maximized. But it’s not the mere employment of creativity itself that will make the difference. It’s the appropriate employment of creativity that will do more good than harm. This appropriate use of creativity strikes a balance between the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional parameters of people, and the ever-evolving parameters of the technology that we use to deliver our messages. See Note |
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05.00.02 Why do we need to have a chapter that supports the use of creativity in our online messages?
Isn’t this need self-evident? It must be (and I’m being ironic) because online resources are filled with graphics—right? Some of the most vocal usability gurus certainly don’t seem to think that there’s much of a role for creativity on the Web; maybe you’re thinking that this chapter’s meant to take aim at the perspectives in that camp?
Although I do think that there’s some insight here for those in the usability camp, I also think that there’s as much, if not more, insight in this chapter and the next for those who are advocates of the use of media in our online resources. The reason is (and there are those in the graphic-arts camp who really need to understand this) that usability experts are often justifiably concerned about the way that media are being used on the Web. We’ve given them almost infinite evidence that concern is warranted. There’s a lot of crap out there on the Web in terms of misapplication of media and creativity in general. You’ve produced some of this crap and so have I.
After you’re done gasping—hold on for a moment and give me a chance. I’m not waffling here. It’s important to understand, however, that some of the more extreme usability rhetoric—while not being very helpful—does exist for a reason. Where my philosophy parts ways with that of leading usability consultants regards the respective solutions that we see to this problem. Their answer is often to abandon the use of creativity and the use of multimedia in general. I really think that this is a drastic position—one that’s unfortunate, unnecessary, and wrong.
With this said, I believe that past mistakes and misconceptions— whether those of usability experts, yours, or mine—shouldn’t define or limit the future. The Web is a fledgling medium, and people have been experimenting from the garishly pedestrian extreme that usability consultants so hate, to the overly simplistic and desolate extreme that they offer as an alternative and which the graphic-arts crowd so hates. The point isn’t what the Web has been in its adolescence but what we need it to be when it grows up. It’s not too late to steer it in an effective, yet more moderate direction so that it can live up to its greatest potential. |
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05.00.03 The role of creativity is often misunderstood.
Although many graphic designers confuse creativity with the modes within which it operates (e.g. they think being creative simply means using graphics, sound, or motion), an online resource can have elaborate media elements that are in no way, shape, or form creative. Usually people think that the role of creativity is to add pizzazz to an online resource. Although it’s true that the initial role of creativity is to capture attention, many do not realize that it plays an equally important role in managing both attention and comprehension.
How, for example, do we use creativity to hold attention without distracting people from concentrating on the central focus of a message? How do we use it to inspire people’s thinking throughout each of the attract, inform, and invoke stages of our online messages which were outlined in Chapters Two through Four? These are the issues that we’ll be addressing in the remainder of this chapter. |
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05.00.04 Creativity often is erroneously used as diversion when what people really need are aids to comprehension.
Instead of inspiring thinking, many Web enterprises erroneously use what they view as creative media to add “entertaining” diversions to their online resources. Usually this is a cover-up for the fact that their messages aren’t all that engaging. It’s as if they were saying, “Look, we know that the substance of our message is really boring, so we’ll make you a deal. If you’ll agree to sift through our mangled, marginal messages, we’ll provide some diversions to entertain you along the way.” This is a really shallow and ineffective approach.
Don’t misunderstand me. Adding ingredients that offer entertainment value can be productive if doing so serves the greater purpose of effectively informing people of the ideas contained in the online messages. Usually, however, Web enterprises don’t work hard enough to find this better approach. Instead, gizmos and gee-whizbangs are stapled onto the side of the relevant content, and all that they tend to accomplish is to distract people from the information flow that they’re already struggling to follow. I think that organizations that do this are doing it because they don’t currently have a greater vision for their online messages. This is a situation that I hope this book will—to some degree—help to remedy.
The fact is that the interruptions to concentration that these diversions inherently create destroy the continuity of a message and make it much more difficult for people’s minds to properly interpret and encode meaning. Although the people interacting with Web enterprises are often amendable to this practice, they often don’t realize that the overall value of their interaction with an online resource’s messages is dramatically diminished. |
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05.00.05 Creativity can address problems with concentration.
Before we look at how creativity must function in our online messages, we must first remember that the people who interact with our online messages aren’t “users,” they’re people. In line with this, we must remember that people don’t effortlessly absorb information like computers do. We as people think consciously, organically, and introspectively—ever striving to solve problems by making connections with existing conceptual reference points. Although this type of thinking is one of our greatest strengths, it also creates problems for us because it’s somewhat unpredictable.
Our mission in designing effective Web experiences must be to identify and address these problems, and then figure out ways to help people overcome their limitations and frailties. Dr. Donald Norman views this as the chief aim of the tools that we create for people. We must supplement the cognition that people are inherently “bad at” so that they can spend more of their time engaged in cognition that they’re really “good at.”
This being the case, there’s one impediment to people’s ability to “think” that the application of creativity to our online messages can aid above any other. This problem concerns the inability of people to maintain focused concentration on a stimulus for extended periods of time—which generally amounts to anything longer than fifteen seconds. “Fifteen seconds” sounds a bit arbitrary, but in reality I’d guess it’s pretty normative. Is there a way that we can more accurately assess how long people can maintain their concentration? The answer is that it depends on the product of two variables:
Sustainability of Focus = Mental Capabilities x Character of Stimulus
A person’s ability to maintain quality focus is the product of his or her own mental capabilities multiplied by the character of a stimulus. And this, my friends, is where creativity comes into play.
Creativity is the strategy we use to shape the character of a stimulus in order to not only establish interest, but also achieve the desired comprehension when multiplied by the projected mental capabilities of a given audience set or subset. |
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05.00.06 Creativity can prevent experiences from becoming mundane and therefore cognitively blurred.
Since our aim, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (see 04.00.10), is to provide a “sustained, optimal experience” which is based on “a continual flow of focused concentration,” we must create Web experiences that allow people to keep their minds activated and engaged in the flowpaths that our online messages are taking. The problem is that when the stimulus that we want people to focus on becomes monotonous, their minds increasingly try to set the stimulus aside as being familiar and therefore mundane and peripheral.
It’s like listening to a boring lecture in school. As each minute goes by, we become increasingly restless and are almost in pain because of the persistence of the unbroken stimulus of the stoic lecturer’s voice. Either our minds wander to other internal (distracting thoughts) or external stimuli, or we begin to fall asleep. The quality of focus is low because the character of the stimulus is flat—lacking dimension.
Remember the explanation in 03.03.02 regarding the nature of the monotonous? I stated that the word monotonous is derived from the word monotone, or single-tone, and that it’s very difficult for people to maintain concentration on a single, sustained tone. There are numerous strategies that can be used to break this monotony, from introducing rests (or pauses) as well as other tones to achieve both rhythm and polyphony.
As a tone becomes familiar, it becomes mundane to us.1 To our minds, the stimulus melts into the other familiar stimuli in our environment. Combined, these mundane stimuli begin to blur together into an unconscious background pattern that serves as a backdrop when some other stimulus comes and takes center stage. This same principle relates to stimuli that affect all other senses, including the senses of touch, smell, taste, and sight. When we try to maintain focus on any stimulus that’s overly sustained and that, therefore melts into a perceptual background pattern, we have to really fight because our minds are extremely prone to wander to any stimulus that imposes itself in front of that pattern. See Figure |
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05.00.07 Creativity must help people distinguish ‘figure’ from ‘ground’ so that they can maintain content focus.
Because these mundane stimuli do form a pattern, our minds try to deal with them as they would with any pattern in general. In a visual pattern, for example, it’s very difficult to zero in on any one instance of the figure that the interleaved elements, such as tiles, form. This is especially true from a distance, where a multitude of these uniform figures fill our fields of view. When each figure is equally weighted, it’s very difficult for our minds to perceive a difference between the figure we’re trying to focus on and the ground that the figure appears upon. As we fight to pull a specific figure to the forefront of our minds, our perception fights back and insists that it’s not a figure at all, but a component of the background.
As an example, this is why it’s so difficult to see a phone number on the two-page spread of the white pages. With four to eight columns of black text on white paper and with letters and spaces being almost equally weighted, we perceive what seems more like a gray background than what it really is—an array of separate black information chunks. Because our minds are not geared to cope with lists of more than about nine items (let alone several hundred), we cognitively blur the information into one of these mundane patterns.
Although we attempt to single out a unique figure, we struggle immensely. We can look right past the listing we’re looking for and not even realize it because our brains aren’t interpreting it as something unique enough to break the pattern of the mundane. After four or five passes up and down a column, the listing suddenly jumps off the page as if from “thin air.” This effect is what Krome Barratt refers to as “the dazzling effect of plenty.”
We need to do whatever it takes to prevent people from having to work so hard to maintain their focus on the ideas that we’re trying to convey to them. |
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05.00.08 Our strategy in using creativity in our online messages is to break these patterns of the mundane that people subconsciously blur into the background of their conscious thought.
The essence of creativity’s role in this process can be seen in this simple example:
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Immediately we notice the break in the pattern.
Imagine the line representing a stream of information that’s become monotonous to our minds. It all looks the same. It all sounds the same—even though it’s not. Now compare this to the types of stimuli that people are exposed to in a typical Web experiences— HTML text on a flat-colored background—“page” after “page” after “page.” Or maybe it’s the latest trend in Web design with gratuitous eye candy—“page” after “page” after “page.” Eventually we become numb to it all! We go into “scan mode,” where we blur our minds and rush through information until a perceptual alarm goes off that tells us to stop and take notice.
In the end, we find that we have low comprehension of the messages we’ve experienced and an even lower level of motivation to respond to the message in some way. See Figure |
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05.00.09 People don’t choose to blur stimuli that are constant out of their minds; it’s an involuntary phenomenon.
To the contrary, we often fight tooth and nail to stay engaged in a message. In the earlier example of the student listening to a boring lecture, the student understood that the professor had important facts buried within the drone of the lecture, yet he was unable to latch onto them because he couldn’t stay “tuned in” to the message even though he tried.
Some of you may be thinking:
“Nice philosophy—so…how does creativity solve the problem if eventually any type of stimulus becomes mundane if it’s sustained? What difference is there between a presentation that’s based more on text than it is on graphics or other media?”
The beginning of the answer lies in the definition of the often misunderstood word creativity itself:
Creativity—productive originality, or producing and interposing something unique into a flow of stimuli that’s constant. |
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05.00.10 The essence of creativity lies not in the specific qualities of a design, but in the fact that it introduces something unique and juxtaposes it to the other stimuli in the sea of that which has become perceptually, cognitively, and emotionally mundane (or blurred).
In the example from 05.00.08, not only did I avoid the use of “graphics” to introduce creativity into the pattern of the mundane, but I also avoided using any stimulus at all! I demonstrated that the expression of creativity can be the absence of any stimulus whatsoever. Why? Because the absence of “line” in that moment introduced something unique to you that broke the pattern of the mundane within the flow of the column.
Did it work? Did you attend to my antistimulus? Did you ponder the reason for its existence? Did your mind become engaged enough to comprehend, not so much the antistimulus, but the meaning that I’ve been trying to convey in these last few notions? |
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05.00.11 Creativity breaks the pattern of the mundane so that people are not only willing but also able to attend to our messages.
This is the primary role that I believe creativity plays in the way we communicate with people through our online messages. Their innate and conditioned responses to perceiving unique stimuli shocks them into awareness simply because a unique stimulus breaks the pattern of the mundane. This must take place not only at the onset of our messages—when we’re attracting attention—but also throughout the development of our messages—when we’re guiding people into comprehension. In the inform and invoke stages discussed in the previous three chapters, creativity becomes a powerful force to hold people’s interest by making our messages more engaging and therefore more meaningful and compelling.
Well—there we have it! If only it ended there, it would be simple. Unfortunately, decorum and good taste would have us not resort to merely any tactic. For one thing, the unique stimulus that we present must contribute to and not detract from the message that we’re trying to convey. For another, different people are equipped to maintain concentration in different ways. What might get the attention of one person would seem mundane to another. What might attract and hold the attention of a ten-year-old person is not likely to have the same effect on a thirty-year-old person (although it might). What might appropriately be used to attract people’s attention at home might get them fired at work. Additionally, a stimulus might get negative attention versus positive attention.
The lesson? We must still strive to understand with whom it is we’re interacting and then try to reach these people by shaping our creative ideas to be not only engaging to them but also appropriate for their situation and needs. |
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05.00.12 The application of creativity is a subtle art.
Now that we’ve crystallized the role of creativity in our online messages, I don’t want to make the practice of breaking the pattern of the mundane through productive originality sound like a neat and tidy task. It’s not. For one thing, being creative the way that I’ve framed it in this text is an extremely subtle art. Just like the melody of a song must avoid the frequent use of extreme intervals to have the proper effect, the qualities and characteristics of our online messages must more often than not take subtle steps in order to provide a sense of continuity, progression, development, and elegance.
Not surprisingly, a song has stages of communication just as other types of messages do. Just as with a musical composition, our creative themes must develop and evolve as well. To be done effectively, this requires practice and mastery of many principles. Some of these principles will be presented in the remainder of this chapter. Others will be presented in Chapters Six and Ten. See Figure |
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