instinctaneous*

We have a problem at Microsoft…

Our users don’t notice our basic warnings signs. The signal-to-noise in the average user interface is so low that any important message has to be brought to their attention by extreme, forceful means:

- Using large, bright banners of uncommon colors (same strategy as advertisers do).

- Placing them in their visual path, sometimes even blocking legibility or functionality (Which users, jaded them, learn to ignore anyway after a while).

And you know what? They still don’t work! Our users are inured to most extraneous messages (stimuli) they are NOT seeking for (Same symptoms as Jan Panero Benway & David M. Lane’s Banner Blindness malady).

My proposal? Using the “Threat Detection” ability innate to humans.

Yes, I am talking about the same congenital mental switch what William James and Henry Holt formulated in the Principles of Psychology as early as 1890 (which in itself was the direct evolution of Williams’ Theory of Emotion in the 1880’s). The same inherent reaction corroborated in modern studies such as the legendary “Emotion Drives Attention: Detecting the Snake in the Grass”. They all agree on the human mind pre-determination to pay immediate attention to those forms that we deem more dangerous (fear-relevant). Their studies showed that we can distinguish the sinuous form of a snake or the wheel and spokes shape of a spider out of a background of visual noise than say, any other non-threatening form (fear-irrelevant) such as a flower or geometrical form.

The spider’s form (and “other vermin” as William duly notes in his chapter about Instinct) is imbedded in our brain due to a drive for self-preservation.

My proposal, again, is to use this ancestral response to our advantage.

In a typical warning system based on High, Medium and Low importance… The simple adoption of fear-relevant imagery would improve the relevance of the warning systems.

And just to reinforce the issue, I chose black as the background of high-level warnings as I deem the usual red too over-used in marketing and therefore diluted… besides the point that it triggers the wrong response. (According to Theroux in 1998 “Mere perception of red color enhances the human metabolism by 13,4 %”-???) On the other hand, black is associated with death, evil, and mystery. William highlights our fear for “Black things” (and I quote) “from the fact that we easily suspect that dangerous beasts may lurk in these localities“.

I personally hope the connotations of a predatory, carnivorous insect prowling in the dark could be nicely associated to the practices of phishing, spam, and computer virus.

To be consistent, the Medium-level messages will be presented by another bug, a domestic fly in this case. Bothersome, but not threatening. Since it is considered an eyesore within any context… it may provoke users to acknowledge and answer its questions in order to get rid of it as expeditious as possible.

 

Instinctaneous High Level Warning

Instinctaneous Mid Level Warning

Instinctaneous Low Level Warning

These “natural message carriers” will make for a more intuitive caution-inducing system… And the users my feel compelled to interact with them even if just to tell them to bug-off.

Granted, the specific samples below may or may not prove the usefulness of “Thread Detection” in UI (That is, which of the two is more annoying and attention-demanding)… but further usability tests with different variations on the idea should be performed if my proposal was to be taken serious (color vs. size vs. form vs. animation). The main intent of this idea though is to simply make use of what Donald A. Norman identifies in his book “Emotional Design” as “bottom-up behavior”: A positive or, in this case, negative affect that stimulates our visceral processing, which in turn modifies our behavioral, and then our reflective one. As he points out, visceral procession is a faster, more immediate (more effective?) reaction. Perfect for the task at hand.

I say we bring back the value of instinct into software experience! One small swat at at time.

Classic High Level Warning

Instinctaneous High Level Warning