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#83: People Feel More Positive Before and After an Event Than During It

Terence Mitchell did research showing that people are more positive when they are going to their holiday or special event but are negative when they are on their special trip. People start to get negative then they are when they are shortly into their trip.  This is because it conflicts with their emotions until they are negative about the whole trip. People began to lose their memories of their trip and become a hazed memory.

#83 Takeaways

When designing an interface for people that are planning for something in the future, they will be more positive for the experience the longer you can draw out the planning phase. If you measure satisfaction or other feelings, realize that you'll get more positive ratings if you ask people a few days after the interaction, than you ask them while they're interacting with the product or website.

Why Are We Loyal to Certain Brands? (Embed)

People Want What's Familiar Marieke De Vries says in his research that people will buy brands that they are more familiar with. People want what they already know so that they won't get scared or sad. People are willing to try something new and different when they are tired or not happy with the product they are using anymore. The Desire for The Familiar is Related to The Fear of Loss Craving for the familiar and a preference for the familiar brand is tied to the basic fears or loss. When people get sad or scared, the old brain and the mid-brain are on high alert.  A quick way to cope with this is to be safe is to go with the brand and logo they know.

#84: People Want What is Familiar When They're Sad or Scared

Caption: : Watch this for more understanding of why people are loyal to a brand.

#84 Takeaways

Brands are shortcuts.  If someone has had a positive experience with a brand in the past, then that brand is a signal of safety to the old brain. Brands are just as important, or even more important, online.  In the absence of being able to see and touch the actual product, the brand becomes the surrogate for the experience.  This means that brands have a lot of power when people are making an online purchase. Messages of fear or loss may be more persuasive if your brand is an established one. Messages of fun and happiness may be persuasive if your brand is a new one.  

Own your mistakes | Cristel Carrisi | TEDxZagreb (Embed)

Assume That Something Will Go Wrong The reality is that something always goes wrong.  Everyone makes mistakes. It's very difficult to create a system that is free of all errors, and that guarantees that people won't make mistakes. The more costly errors there are, the more you need to avoid them. The more you need to avoid them, the more expensive it is to design the system. If it's critical that people are not making mistakes, then be prepared. You'll have to test two or three times more than usual, and you'll have to train two or three times longer. It's expensive to design a fail-safe system.  And you will never fully succeed. The Best Error Message Is Not Error Message Error messages is the part of a device or software program that gets the least amount of time and energy, and that might be appropriate. The best error messages are no error messages. But when something goes wrong, it's important that people know what to do about it.

#85: People Will Aways Make Mistakes; There is No Fail-Safe Product

Caption: : This tells why you need to why people make mistakes and why you need to own up to them

How to Write an Error Message

Use the following steps to write a message to people who needs error-correcting: Tell the person what he or she did Explain the problem Instruct the person how to correct it Is written in plain language using active, no passive, voice She an example

#85 Takeaways

Think ahead to what the likely mistakes will be.  Figure out as much as you can about the kinds of mistakes people are going to make when they use what you've designed.  And then change your design before it goes out so that those mistakes won't be made. Create a prototype of your design and get people to use it so you can see what the error are likely to be. When doing this, make sure the people who are testing the prototype are the same people who will be using it. Write error messages in plain language and follow the guidelines above for clear error messages.

#86: People Make Errors When They Are Under Stress

Using A Website Under Stress When seeing a website that is making you frustrated, it is best to step away from it for a few hours then get back to it. You don't want to work on something that is making you angery or any kind of negative emotions.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law Research shows that stress (called arousal in the field of psychology) can help you perform a task, because it heightens awareness. Too much stress, however, degrades performance. Robert Yerkes and John Dodson first postulated this arousal/performance relationship, and hence it has been called the Yerkes-Dodson law for over a century.   Arousal helps up to a point The Yerkes-Dodson law states that performance increase with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. Research shows that the optimal amount of stress/arousal depends on the difficulty of the task. Difficult task requires less arousal to reach optimal performance, and will start to break down if the arousal level is too high. Simpler task requires more arousal and don’t fall off as fast. Task Are More Stressful Than You May Think Don’t assume that people will use your product in a stress-free environment. Things that may not seem stressful to you as a designer might be very stressful for the person using your product in the real world. Men and women may react differently to stress. When stakes go up, errors may appear.  

Graph Of How Arousal Affects Individual Performances For An Easy And Hard Task Myers (binary/octet-stream)

Caption: : The Yerkes-Dodson Law

People Make Errors When They Are Under Stress

#87: Not All Mistakes Are Bad

Dimitri Van der Linden studied that people employ when learning how to use computers and electronic devices. Der Linden also says that errors has consequences.  But not all consequences are negative. Sometimes, making an error has a negative consequence, it's also likely that error has a positive or a neutral outcome. Sometimes, making an error has a negative consequence, it's also likely that the error has a positive or a neutral outcome. Errors with a positive consequence are action that do not give the desired result, but provide the person with information that helps him or her achieve an overall goal. Errors with a negative consequence are those that results in a dead end, undo a positive consequence, send the person back to a starting point, or result in action that cannot be reversed. Errors with a nutural consequence are errors that have no effect on task completion.

#87 Takeaways

Although you don't want people to make lots of errors when using your product, errors will occur. Since you know there will be errors, look for and document them during user testing.  Note whether each error conserquence is positive, negative, or neutral. After user testing (and even before it), concentrate on redesigning to minimize or avoid error with negative consequence first.

#88: People Make Predictable Type of Errors

In addition to thinking about the consequence of errors, as in the Van der Linen study described, there is another usual error taxonomy.  The Morrell taxonomy classifies two types of errors: performance and moto-control. Performance Errors Performance errors are mistakes you make when you've going through the steps to complete a procedure. Commission Errors Taking additional steps that were unecessary Omission Errors You've only set up the outgoing ones.  In this case you omitted steps. Wrong-Action Errors You took an action at the appropriate point in the procedure, but it was the wrong action. Moto-Control Errors Motor-control errors are those you make while using the controls of a device. You may have diffrent errors that you want to track as you design or conduct user testing. The important thing is to decide ahead of time which types of errors you think people will make, and which are important for you to detect and correct.

The Swiss Cheese Model of Human Error

James Reason wrote that errors have a cumulative effect. It starts with an error in the organization, which then leads to additional errors in supervision, which leads to even more errors.  Each error makes a hole in the system until the end when you have Swiss cheese (lots of holes), eventually leading to a human error that is a mishap.

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Caption: : The Swiss Cheese Model

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The Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS)

Scott Shappell and Douglas Wiegmann wrote a paper on HFACS for the U.S. Office of Aviation Medicine.  They focused on preventing errors in aviation, such as pilot error and control tower error.

Caption: : The HFACS Flow Chart

#88 Takeaways

People will make different types of errors in learning about and using your product.  Before you conduct user testing or user observation, decide on the possible errors you are most concerned about. During user testing and observation, collect data on which category of errors people are making.  This will help focus your redesign efforts after testing. If you’re in a field where errors are not just annoying or inefficient, but actually may result in accidents or loss of human lives, then you should use a system like HFACS to analyze and prevent errors.