86: People Make Errors When They are Under Stress

#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 angry or any kind of negative emotions.

People Make Errors When They Are Under Stress

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)

Takeaway

If people are performing a boring task, then you need to raise the level of arousal with sound, colors, or movement. If people are doing a difficult task, then you need to lower the level of arousal by eliminating any distracting elements such as color, sounds, or movement, unless they are directly related to the task at hand. If people are under stress, they won't see things on the screen, and they'll tend to do the same actions over and over, even if they don't work. Do research to find out which situations might be stressful.  Make site visits, observe and interview the people who are using your product, determine the level of stress, and then redesign if stress is present. If someone is an expert at a well-learning task, then performance stress may cause errors.