Most of us in the software world have had our GDPR times recently. I am not sure if this dialog was created on this website for GDPR or it has always existed but for those who don’t know, GDPR is a new set of rules designed to give EU citizens more control over their personal data. It aims to simplify the regulatory environment for business so both citizens and businesses in the European Union can fully benefit from the digital economy. To that effect, websites are expected to make cookie policy transparent and provide ways for the user to control their own data.

A website typically collects various kinds of data from our browsing such as usage and interests so that they can provide a better experience for their users by learning about them. Usabilitygeek is one of the websites that I refer to for case studies on certain UI patterns to kickoff my primary research process. I was on the website to look at any research related to usability of Tabs UI and I was shown popup dialog as shown in the image above. First of all, I really appreciate the company attempting to be as transparent as they can be about their cookie policy providing explanations to what they collect and why.

What caught my eyes was the prompt on the top of the dialog that says “You can use the toggles to enable or disable them. If you see the text ‘ON’, then the respective cookies are enabled. Conversely, if you see the text ‘OFF’, that means that the cookies are disabled”. It was certainly a “what?” moment for me and it took a minute for me to really understand the toggles even after reading the prompt.

UI has to be self-explanatory with prompts provided as and when needed. That should not mean one complicates it and gives an explanation. Switch/Toggle UI is great for on/off-ing a feature in a software and is a very common pattern where there is a binary decision that has to be made by the user. Where it gets tricky is the execution. I do not intend to offer any “better solutions” in this series but the designer could have achieved the same goal by a simple radio button group — “Yes, I agree and No, disable them”. This would have been much intuitive for any kind of user, tech savvy or not and, would have been quick to interact with.

UI is like a joke was originally published in First Impressions on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Having said that, not all 5-star ratings are unsuccessful. There are implementations that work very well in some contexts. An example that works for me is restaurant ratings on Yelp. Being a foodie, I try to go to a different place every time I want to go eat outside (you can assume that is the case with most Yelp users. They installed the app because they can discover places around them that they can go and have fun at). Over time I established a benchmark that works for me — I would try a restaurant that serves Indian cuisine if it has a 4+ rating. This data is user generated and as a provider of a given service, it’s so hard to request this subjective feedback from a user and show that as a qualitative measure to the rest of the world.

For an average user with no negative or positive emotion after using a service, picking the right star is a task in itself. And I was fascinated when I saw this pattern on this survey I got after I bought my new car.

After answering a series of questions, the software filled a value for the rating based on my answers and let me change it if I wanted to. Honestly, I am not sure if it’s effective or influencing my brain in some sense but it definitely is an interesting interaction to explore. I could not use the survey multiple times but I am assuming it would calculate a different rating if my answers were different.

Self rating. How about that? was originally published in First Impressions on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We all have seen them. Some of them are full screen pop-ups, some of them fade-in from all directions of the screen and some are ads. They are frustrating, almost always not requested by the user and are basically attention seeking. Here’s what the inventor of pop-up ads has to say, according to Wikipedia:

Ethan Zuckerman claims he wrote the code to launch advertisements in separate windows as a response to complaints of displaced banner ads. He didn’t invent the pop-up window. Zuckerman later apologized for the unforeseen nuisance pop-up ads had evolved into.

Not all of them ads. Not all of them are intrusive and in the face. Some of them have good intent and others are for legal purposes, such as the cookies notification. For example, I have recently come across a challenge at work to come up with a solution to get more feedback on our documentation website so that the authoring team can improve the documentation and better serve the users. Bringing a full screen pop-up to ask for feedback is definitely not the answer — the user is there on a knowledge base website to troubleshoot a problem in your product, not to give you feedback on how you are doing (if the documentation is completely useless, sure).

But anyways, I am here to show some interesting examples that I saw recently:

1. Trickery

Deception is the word. The designer here is mimicking the pop-up windows that appear in MacOS. There are so many of them that come up in various scenarios in the OS that we just Allow because of the trust we have in Apple. Tricking users is into clicking “Allow” perhaps is not the answer.

2. Humor

The creator here is trying to bring some humor to this irritating experience and being transparent about how they are going to use a user’s email address. Is being transparent enough to get a sign-up?

3. Confession

They agree that popups are horrible but give one anyway.

4. What about Honesty?

5. Or Transparency?

Irrespective of what kind of pop-ups we see on the internet, we have developed an interesting behavior — Close them. We search for the close button as soon as we see them. We don’t want to read them. That’s probably because of the over usage and abuse of pop-ups. Having them in some corner of a website is not the answer always, as they are ignored too.

What are some ways of asking something without being intrusive?

The Attention Seekers was originally published in First Impressions on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I recently had to clean install Windows 10 on my Surface Book. Even though I like Edge (don’t judge me!), I need Google Chrome when I work on writing code for my portfolio because the developer tools in Chrome is second to none. So like everyone with a new OS installation, I opened the default browser i.e Edge and searched from “chrome” in the default search engine Bing.

The above image shows what happened — Microsoft promoting it’s own ad about the advantages of using Edge. This was the first time I saw this promotion and it caught my eye. Windows 10 in fact has several ways to do this. Here are some other ways:

I started thinking about the rationale behind these design decisions. Folks at Microsoft probably might have been put under pressure to promote Edge when users are using other competitive browsers. Keeping aside the verdict of whether the solutions are effective, this is a very interesting problem to solve:

• How would you promote something or increase the visibility of your own product when there are competitive products that are people are used to and/or are familiar with?
• How frequent should these notifications come up so that they are not interrupting?
• When should they show up in the first place?
• How should the content (copy, imagery) read and look like to be effective?

My analysis

The notifications (Windows calls them as Tips) appear whenever there is a decision that the user made (in this case, opening Chrome or Firefox instead of Edge or Downloading Chrome when you have Edge) and are timed periodically just like cookies on a website that expire after a given amount of time. Looking at the screenshots above, it’s safe to say that these are ads. This kind of intervention could be an effective conversion as it is timed at the moment of decision making as opposed to ads that follow you everywhere you go on the internet and just frustrating you more than anything else.

By the way Google does this on the other side. So which browser is faster? :)

How would you solve this problem if you were the designer? Comment below :)

The Browser Wars was originally published in First Impressions on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Framing the problem

Problem framing is very essential in design. It unlocks innovation.“Healthy aging” could mean anything. But what does it mean to us as individuals and what does it mean to people who we know. As a team, we started with reading out the prompt and writing down the keywords which we think are very crucial in understanding the problem landscape(the middle part of the picture). Then we wrote down our first thoughts around what are those problem areas that could be solved by technology. This gave us a general understanding of what is our perception of the scenario.

How does it help?

We are using the list of things on the board as a tool for thinking outside the box. “If it’s not any of these, what is it then?”. And if anything else that we come up with does not make sense or does not work, we have 10 areas of which we can choose one. At this point, it’s very essential to come out of our own knowledge zones and ask people what they think about the problem.

We’ve two kinds of subjects for our interviews — people who have access to our target audience and people who are our target audience.

Interviews

We came up with a short list of questions to understand what’s their perception of the problem is. The questions are semi-structured in a way that the answers are not constrained to the questions we are asking. Here’s a link to the list of questions for the target audience, the elderly — https://goo.gl/forms/1oYqmK3H3xtzjro52. The questions were asked in a passive voice when we talked to the indirect audience — people who have access to the elderly.

In parallel, we are conducting interviews with the people who fall under the age bracket of 60+. We will have the findings in our next blog post.

Hours 1 and 2 : Research was originally published in Team CORE @OzCHI24 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was excited to drive the car, I sat in it and took a glance over all the controls and realised that the levers beside the steering are swapped here. So indicators on the left and wipers on the right. I tried to tune my brain and was telling myself — “dude! forget there is a lever on the right side. Otherwise you will end up switching on the wipers instead of the indicators”. I started driving and I had to take a turn. Subconsciously, I used the right-side lever and switched on the wipers despite all the mental training I had for myself. This happened several times and I am sure the whole thing still did not sit in my brain yet. What is happening here? I have a model of how to drive a car from my experience back in India and by default what I know is what I expect to happen.

So what are mental models?

Mental models are basically a person’s understanding of how things work based on past experiences, acquired knowledge and common sense. They are usually beliefs rather than facts and they are embedded in the brain rather than being sourced from external environment. New experiences can change existing models or create new models.

How are they relevant to UX?

Imagine that you never used a Kindle before. I gave you one and I told you that you can read books using it. What do you do? You use your mobile phone everyday. You know that any electronic device has a power/unlock button to switch it on. You search for the button. You switch on the device. Since I told you that you can read books using it, you would look for a book to open and read. At this point, you’d have certain assumption about how to use it such as turning the pages, bookmarking etc. You created a model for yourself about how to use something like this and you have some expectations set in your mind.

When any of the above does not match the user’s mental model, things start getting strange. This results in confusion which in turn can cause the experience as a whole to be negative. The consequences are huge and dangerous. Users get more reluctant to use the product the next time, may look for other alternatives. Even worse, they may potentially complain about the product to their friends and strongly discourage them to buy.

Today we have more mobile devices than desktop computers. We are making devices more personal and important. What we have at stake is that we are giving these devices to more and more people who’ve never used a computer before. In fact, the “next billion” users probably did not see a computer before. The biggest challenge here is how do we deal with this problem. How do we help create a mental model or how do we change an existing one?

Changing a mental model

The biggest challenge in changing an existing mental model is the learning curve involved in adapting to the new model and the resistance to accept the change. We all are tuned to follow certain procedures to execute an action. Even a change in one of the steps in the sequence involves learning and getting used to it.

Changing a mental model is difficult and not everyone can successfully do it. The new model has to be better than the existing one in terms of usability and adaptability. When Apple released the iPhone, the first reactions were that no one would want to use it, it does not have a physical keyboard, business customers will find it hard emailing and so on. But Apple was successful in turning the existing mental model around. It took about 2 years from the first iPhone to get mobile-first apps like Instagram etc. I am sure the same will happen with wearables like the Apple Watch. We as designers have lot of room to think about as new models and interactions emerge.

This makes me want to talk about my first coursework project I did in my Masters in HCI at Indiana University, Bloomington. Briefly, the challenge was as following: ( click here for full project and the design process)

When people come home on a hot day, they often walk over to their thermostat and greatly lower the temperature (e.g., to 60° F, 15° C) thinking that it will get cooler faster. Thermostats, however, do not work this way, and ultimately it costs the consumer more money to operate their system in this manner. Challenge is to design an interactive thermostat display/device that reflects how people think about thermostats without changing the basic operation of the thermostat or the home’s heating or cooling system.

Our Design

Our design consists of 3 primary modes that can be switched manually. The settings for each mode can be set inside ‘settings’.

Key ideas

• People are used to seeing numbers on their thermostats. Pressing the up/down buttons increases/decreases temperature and this is how thermostats have been looking for decades. Hence the mental model.
• We believe that promoting a new mental model for how to think of temperature easily, while the normal interactions are delayed will help create an efficient mindset
• If we are taking off the numbers from the screen, there has to be some control that users can use. The 3 primary modes will help transitioning to the a new model and eventually help in efficiency.

( Note: This is a coursework project and the number of users we testing this design was very less. Even though response from them was positive, I’d expect mixed responses if we had tested it with much larger volume. I highly appreciate if any Interaction Designer here on Medium could leave me feedback on this project. )

Conclusion

Mental models are crucial in user experience since they define the natural course of action that the user executes. Designers and companies can create great experiences by following the user, designing to suit their mental models and listening to their feedback.

Think about the user. Great experiences will follow

Let me hear your thoughts and opinions. Thanks for reading!

Hi, I am Nava Teja. This is my first ever public post on Medium or anywhere else regarding UX design. I am currently in the first year of Masters in Human-Computer Interaction & Design at Indiana University, Bloomington. Please feel free to view all my projects or contact me on my website http://navateja.me.