tuhch

To improve people’s experience of technology, we need to understand the point where people “touch” technology – the user interface.  To understand the user interface, we need to understand how people think and communicate.  This is human cognition.

Cognition covers the processes and structures (eg images & words) of mental operation and can be thought of (see what I did there) in terms of the following elements:

• Memory – the way we store useful information
• Vision – the key perceptual system through which we learn about the world around us
• Attention – the way we direct our perceptual systems when dealing with several sources of information
• Language – the way we refine the information we hold
• Skills – our ability to interact with our environment

We’ll look at each of these in turn.

Memory
Our experiences (captured as memories) form the basis of our capacity to plan, make sense of what’s going on and imagine alternative actions.  Given the mass of information with which our digital world bombards us, recalling a specific piece of information can be difficult.  The way we improve access to specific items is by coding them and the more codes we allocate to an item, the greater the likelihood of retrieval (document tagging takes this approach).  Our challenge is that retrieval can be unreliable (there are insufficient cues to allow retrieval), affected by interference (the information available through processing does not match stored information), over-stimulated (there are too many entries with similar cues) and can decay.

Memory is affected by the situation and context in which it is constructed.   If we’re unfortunate enough to witness a car accident, we’ll often remember the most minute details – flashbulb memory.  We also have strong recollections of details that are associated with major events in our lives – episodic memory.

Vision
Vision shows us what things look like, how they’re structured and where they are. When a scene is viewed, the eyes rapidly move from one element to another in a jerky fashion.  These movements are called saccades and at their end, the eyes rest and fixate on one point.  Saccadic movement gives structure and texture helping us to derive greater meaning.  The Gibsonian principle (JJ Gibson, 1979) covers such texture and is the theory behind the narrowing gaps between lines approaching roundabouts that prompt us to slow down.

Gestalt discovered that we perceive the whole before we perceive the parts.  This explains why we will generally read mis-spellings such as “cimena” correctly without realising.

Attention
Attention is the way we direct our perceptual system to selectively focus on particular items of information in the face of several sources.  Arousal describes an ad-hoc event that stimulates the allocation of our cognitive resources – looking at someone when they call our name.  Studies have found that we experience difficulties when performing multiple activities; we’re overloading a particular cognitive resource (eg listening to two conversations at once).  If, however, we can use different cognitive resources for the competing activities, we’re more likely to cope; consider listening to the radio and emailing colleagues as we commute to work.

Language
Language is not only a means of expressing thought (communication) but also influences our perception of the world.  According to Sapir-Whorf, our experience of the world is enriched by the variety of the language used to describe it – Eskimos have a richer experience of snow than that of us in the West – you can ask Kate Bush why.

Let’s deconstruct language to understand it’s cognitive significance.  Semantics refer to the contextual meaning of words, rather than the dictionary meaning.  Semantically, “dead” has a different meaning when prefixing “good”.  The order in which words are applied (their syntax) can be significant.  Consider the following two sentences, each containing the same words, but in differing order; “imagine there’s no heaven” vs “there’s no heaven, imagine”.  Pragmatics reflect the influence of situation.  The words “What’s the problem?” from a nurse to a patient carry a very different meaning when they are from a driver who’s just taken your parking space.

Skills
Everyday tasks such as holding a conversation, playing chess and dancing are abilities that we learn and develop over time.  Cognitive skills (such as playing chess) rely on the use of declarative knowledge (knowledge of “what” is required).  Sensory-motor skills (like dancing) require procedural knowledge (knowledge of “how” to do something).

Developing procedural knowledge involves practice; repetition tunes our neural network.  When we practice, we organise clumps of information to support the task and then execute in sequences of clumps.  Knowledge of results goes a long way to helping develop skills.  Feedback can be intrinsic (spiking a volleyball gives immediate kinaesthetic feedback) or extrinsic (we’ll know how well we threw a dart if it hits the bullseye).

In Categories of Human Learning, Fitts identifies three stages of skill acquisition.  In the Cognitive Phase there is intense concentration and focus, aiding learning.  During the Associative Phase, parts of the skill are tried out with the appropriate actions and elements being assembled into an easy to remember packages.  During the Autonomous Phase, the skill has become second nature, requiring little conscious intervention.  Under pressure, however, autonomous skills may break down, reverting back to the Cognitive Phase.

So…

• If our initial interactions with particular technology are rich, enjoyable experiences we will better remember how to use the technology.
• Our ability to understand and learn how to use particular technology is improved if the information it conveys is sensibly grouped.
• The more irrelevant distractions we encounter using technology, the more difficult we’ll find it to use, regardless of our experience skill level.
• Simple patterns and symbols can communicate information to us quickly making the technology easy to use.
• We can better absorb a mass of information if the technology communicates with us via different senses and methods.
• Technology that utilises our cognitive skills will be easier to learn if it helps us to organise and remember information.
• Technology that uses our sensory & motor skills will be easier to use if it provides opportunities for us to practice without worry.