One third to a half of all people fall on the Introversion scale – and one of them is Susan Cain. In this brave–and wonderful speech to TED ‘The power of Introverts‘ she talks of how the educational system and society systematically undermined her true nature and how she reflexively sought extravert goals in order to ‘prove’ her value.

She describes how both introverts and extraverts are most effective and creative when in their own ‘zones of stimulation’ but says that introverts are subject to this deep and real bias from an early age and  - and describes how schools and workplaces are designed for extraverts.

She argues that this is not only a loss to the individual – but a loss to the world, and that we must try and find a better balance. She says it’s particularly important for creativity and cites examples of celebrated problem solvers and creative minds–Darwin, Steve Wozniak and Dr. Suess–the latter who was even found it difficult to spend time with the children reading his books.

She says there is zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas and urges us to push away from the ‘madness of constant group work’ and be freed from the distortion of group dynamics.

All this reminds me of the great number of books and people out there encouraging us to ‘group think’ all of our problems away. Indeed I have a book in which I can come up with games for differing numbers of people to solve just about any business problem.

It’s important to say that she does not disregard group think – and from my experience a well facilitated session can actually allow the voices of introverts to be heard – whereas a standard meeting would hear those voices fall silent.

Instead she calls for a re-balancing of our values and cites the transcendant power of solitude in solving problems.

I think these is definitely a risk that we as a web community are putting too much focus on the group think and not enough on power of individual thinking.

As luck would have it, a Carthaginian quinquireme ran aground as it tried to blockade the Romans who were trying to ferry across to Sicily in borrowed boats. Once caught, this enemy ship is supposed to have provided the Romans with the prototype they needed. In fact the build of the ship was so structured (numbered pieces)  - for the Romans it was almost like putting together a piece of flatpack furniture. As a result the Romans were easily able to copy and reproduce the warship and set their sights on the seas.

But war at sea requires far more than simply the tools, the method for defeating the enemy involved ramming the enemy ship which in itself required a great deal of skill and experience from the crew.

The Romans didn’t have these skills but instead modified the design to allow for the battering element to become a bridge – to allow their troops to quickly gain access to the enemy ship and effectively take part in a land based style battle (something they were much better at). The rest as they say is history.

So let’s remember not to re-invent the wheel, but instead build on others success, but at the same time if we want to be truly successful we must add to the solution with something that’s new – something which might just change the entire game.

So I will be asking on my next project – what am I doing that is new and innovative to build on those great foundations provided by others. If I’m not – I’m probably likely to lose the larger battle.

• Fluency studies demonstrate how we have the potential to make big improvements in the performance of our communications
• It has been found that students remembered and retained information better when it was presented in a disfluent (ugly) font.
• You may be able to increase users memory retention of detailed product information by presenting it dis-fluently.
• Could dis-fluency affect design too?

Background

I heard a fascinating interview on the Radio4 the other morning. On it the blogger and researcher Jonah Lehrer was describing a recent study into memory retention.

Here’s the current thinking –  “Many education researchers and practitioners believe that reducing extraneous cognitive load is always beneficial for the learner”. Therefore it has been widely accepted that simpler, more readable fonts – should reduce congnitive burden and therefore aid memory.

Well that seems very logical.

But Jonah had an aching worry – that – as it becomes easier to consume information, the less information will be retained. In his blog post “The future of reading” he describes his thoughts.

Scientific corroboration

In a follow up post “The benefit of ugly fonts” he reports on a recent scientific study – in which students were given supplementary material in a variety of disfluent fonts (Monotype Corsiva, Comic Sans Italicized and Haettenshweiler) while the other group was taught with the usual mixture of Helvetica and Arial. The font size remained the same.

After several weeks of instruction, the students were then tested on their retention of the material. In every class except chemistry, the students in the disfluent condition performed significantly better than those in the control-fluent condition. Here are the scientists:

This study demonstrated that student retention of material across a wide range of subjects (science and humanities classes) and difficulty levels (regular, Honors and Advanced Placement) can be significantly improved in naturalistic settings by presenting reading material in a format that is slightly harder to read….

The potential for improving educational practices through cognitive interventions is immense. If a simple change of font can significantly increase student performance, one can only imagine the number of beneficial cognitive interventions waiting to be discovered. Fluency demonstrates how we have the potential to make big improvements in the performance of our students and education system as a whole.

Jonah went on to talk about the impications this might have on graphic design and therefore web and user experience design – which immediately woke me up on my drive through the rain into work.

So what are the implications?

On the face of it this could mean that all visual communication where we want people to remember our message should be in a disfluent (ugly) font.

Hmm – are we jumping the gun here?

I think there is one big difference between the control group and the type of communications marketers and advertisers are involved in.

Within the school setting people are reading material they ‘want and desire to read and retain’, and it seems, from this study conclusive that in these circumstances retention can be increased.

But in the world of marketing communications we are often trying to ‘capture’ peoples attention – they don’t have to read our messages – and are probably distracted with a load of different cognitive burdens. So maybe putting our main marketing messages in disfluent fonts won’t help increase response rates. The key for this type of communication is simply ‘communicating the message at all’ and therefore the simpler the message the more likely it is to communicate.

The design and use of fonts should all act in a way as to communicate the message as a whole. A disfluent font might be appropriate or inappropriate for any given communication.

An example

An organic farm shop’s might produce some labelling for a product. The use of  flowing fonts with ligatures and complex shapes will help communicate the nature of the product. In fact, if the packaging was in minimalist Helvetica, and poorly executed I might have second thoughts on the quality or authenticity of the product.

The opposite might be said for a company selling super modern minimalist furniture.

But wait a minute there IS something to this. Maybe its when we come to presenting detailed information (like product information and technical information) that we can start considering more awkward and disfluent fonts. After all at this point the person has made a commitment to read the information – just like the students – and is therefore likely to be more willing to retain the information and recall it later.

Conclusion

When marketers and designs are trying to capture a person’s attention, or communicate a very important message , the focus should be on the message, which the use of typography should support.

When a user is reading though longer pieces of material – and have made a commitment to read (think product description and details), then maybe we should consider presenting the information in a more disfluent font.

Parting thoughts

As the scientists say – “The potential for improving educational practices through cognitive interventions is immense”. Could fluency affect both design as well as type? On the face of it as a designer I would say no. Design is all about balance, harmony and rhythm – is that fluent or disfluent?

As a user experience designer I spend every moment of my working life trying to reduce cognitive burden by making information more accessible and ‘easier’ to consume – but if disfluency applied to design too then is this could be turned on its head?

According to a Smashing Magazine article on pagination “In most cases pagination is better than traditional “previous – next” navigation as it offers visitors a more quick and convenient navigation through the site. It’s not a must, but a useful nice-to-have-feature.” And there are plenty of examples and design patterns out there some of which give really powerful control to users. But there’s a problem…

The problem with some pagination

The problem that the majority of websites and design patterns fail to address is to cater well for the default behaviour whilst giving people all then options they might desire.

Consider the design of the TV set. Manufacturers and designers have realised that although it’s important to be able to adjust the contrast without a remote control, it is not a default behaviour – and therefore it is ok to hide the controls at the side of the set, maybe even covered by a discreet door.

Well, coming back to pagination, how many users are going to need to go to exactly page twenty two, or twenty three or twenty four? (On a side note – if people are forced to remember page numbers to locate an item then you’re probably already doing something wrong in your user interface). I often find it hard – particularly when using mobile devices to activate a tiny > link when its crowded out by ten other page numbers and other links.

Designing using the normal distribution curve.

Throughout product design and architecture the design brief is shaped by what’s called the normal distribution.  It all gets a bit statistical and mathematical but in lamens terms it is a term used to describe how/where the majority of people fit within a normal distribution curve.

If you look at the heights of a group of adults, you’ll probably notice that most of them look about the same height. A few may be noticeably taller and a few may be noticeably shorter. This ’same height’ will be near the average (called the ‘mean’ in statistics) and is shown in anthropometry tables as the fiftieth percentile, often written as ‘50th %ile’. This means that it is the most likely height in a group of people. ¹

The beauty of the normal distribution curve is that it is so universal in its application. Chart people’s average height and you will get a normal distribution curve. How about weight, music taste, there are so many things it will describe – because it in itself is describing a random distribution around a mean/average value.

In other words it “is a continuous probability distribution that is often used as a first approximation to describe real-valued random variables that tend to cluster around a single mean value”. ²

So what does that mean for design

Well in the world of furniture design for example – you may not be able to make a workbench ‘height adjustable’ – so what you do it make sure that it caters for as many people as possible.

Deciding whether to use the 5th, 50th or 95th percentile value depends on what you are designing and who you are designing it for.

Usually, you will find that if you pick the right percentile, 95% of people will be able to use your design. For instance, if you were choosing a door height, you would choose the dimension of people’s height (often called ’stature’ in anthropometry tables) and pick the 95th percentile value – in other words, you would design for the taller people. You wouldn’t need to worry about the average height people, or the 5th percentile ones – they would be able to fit through the door anyway. ³

Hypothesis on how this applies to pagination

So how would a normal dictribution curve apply to our pagination. Stats on pagination are pretty difficult to come by but  I believe it could look something like this.

Now in this case the curve would actually be rather squared but I just wanted to illustrate how it fits with the normal distribution model.

Possible solutions

So for pagination it would seem to make sense to design for the 50th percentile – which is likely to cover  95% of use. But thats not all – we can actually cater for the final 5% of users by giving them less prominent options – just like in the TV example.

Therefore I propose that designers should provide people with large, usable and pleasing hit areas for the default behaviours of moving backward and forward and then supplementing this with the feature rich pagination toolkit of their choice.

My preferred solution

I believe that any solution should be designed to fit the specifics of an interface. That said simply highlighting the back and next and then adding in any complex pagination features into an overlay would seem like a good place to start. I’d love to know what you think.

• ¹Anthropometry – step by step – http://www.ergonomics4schools.com/lzone/anthropometry.htm
• ² Normal distribution – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution_curve
• ¹Anthropometry – step by step – http://www.ergonomics4schools.com/lzone/anthropometry.htm

Users in the wild sketchnote from @uxbrighton

Following James May and Sabrina Page’s presentation at UX Brighton I have certainly been trying to take the time to consider the entire context from which people approach and use the websites and experiences I design. And opening an eye to users in the wild really  underlines the importance of super duper usability.

First impressions, clean, simple and smart. Young and fairly unemotional.

I just booked a flight on JetBlue’s new website. It was the most awesome experience I’ve had in a long time. “Tada!” http://bit.ly/cf0xm7

• The primary ’search’ function really stands out of the page giving users a clear indication of where they should start.
• The main real estate to the right of the search contains a number of promotions BUT they all take a visual step back from the search panel in terms of design and visual weight.
• Easy going tone of voice immediately makes me feel relaxed.
• I wonder how many people realise there is more than one promotion, and is that a problem?
• The palette feels a little bare on repeat visits

Destination overlay

I found the airport ajax overlay easy to use and liked the way I’m able to see all the vast array of options before having to select anything.

Interstitial

I thought this was worth including as it’s so often overlooked. If you’ve got some USP’s that you need to communicate to your customers, use this vital few seconds whilst you’ve got their full attention. Good copywriting here.

Search results

• Visually good heirachy makes this complex page easy to understand
• I like the use of the very polished tabs showing differing date options. I know from experience that this is particularly difficult to achieve and its lovely to see it done with such a level of polish. I think part of what makes it work well is the fact that the ’selected’ options has been made larger both in terms of font size and the removal of the abbreviation for the week day.
• Scarcity – I like the info showing how many seats are left at that price, although couldn’t understand why it didn’t show for all prices.
• Your itinerary shows the connecting flights in a format that is incredibly space efficient and reasonably easy to comprehend.
• Call to actions are clear and well differentiated.

Choose a seat

• Apart from being ‘very clever’ it’s clear and easy understand.
• I did get stuck when I escaped out of one of the overlay/pop-ups.
• Nice tone of voice upselling ‘wiggle room’ will add to the feel good factor of purchasing.

Overall it’s a very good example of where travel sites should be heading to, and although it’s not as complicated as a full ‘holidays’ purchase I think there are still learnings to be had. Unfortunately once you venture into the full holiday’s section the design falls back to what I am presuming is an earlier iteration of the current website.

Background

As a designer for a large travel outfit I have now spent quite a few years working on the intricacies of online travel and know first hand how difficult it is to get right. In fact I think most people who are expert in this field would agree, nobody has really got the user experience for booking holidays online completely right yet. For that reasons I’m always on the lookout for good examples of user experience in travel.

And it’s not the first. I’m thinking Cut Copy, James Yuill and others. The simplicity of the sound, the clear synthesis, the games console sounds – all harks back to early experimental dance music. And I love it. I can’t for the life of me recall the particular track ‘When I grow up’ reminds me of but for some reason I can’t help about thinking about a time in the early nineties and lots of time spent at outdoor all-night parties mostly around the woodlands and downs where I lived.

Anyhow, check out the track and if it rings a bell with you let me know. Oh, and did I even mention the video – ok it might be just a tad disturbing at first but really…on reflection, it is pretty special, I hope you’ll agree.

All good stuff, particularly the carnival, although it works wonderfully in ‘The Bathtub’

Bathtub V from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

It kind of made me want to go and shoot the Notting Hill Carnival this year.

I had set up a couple of jCarousel arrays and found that one one page (which had it’s won unique styling) the carousel animation seemed to glitch, dragging the background with it in a jumpy, jaggedy manner.

The solution

Having searched online I couldn’t find any other instances of this. After half a day of de-constructing the page I finally found that the css file was to blame. It wasn’t the contents, but the file itself, which must have somehow become slightly corrupt or contained some hidden characters.

Either way I managed to find an earlier source file, save a new version and copy all the styles over.

Strange, but true and hopefully this post might save someone out there a great deal of time.

Background: Since I can neither afford the luxury of an Apple OS or stand any longer the bloated and slow Windows I thought it was about time to try out Linux on a computer at home. Since the majority of use of this home computer will be browser based (and since soon I believe a great deal of applications will be browser based) I figured that there was nothing to stop me giving it a go.

Well I have to say that once I got the installation complete I was most pleased with myself, and very happy with my zippy new computer.

What you will need
- Your Ubuntu installation CD
- Your windows drivers/hardware drivers cd

It is just fabulous the way that Ubuntu automatically detects all hardware and everything just works automatically – that is – everything except my wireless USB and thus my connection to the internet.

My wife and I both have a deep seated hate of wires and that combined with a quirky house means that wireless is the only way to go for us.

Unfortunately Ubuntu simply did not see my wireless adapter, and there appeared to be no way of actually installing it.

In a flustered state I managed to get our other computer online and tried to look up how to get ubuntu to work with a wireless usb and found a wealth of articles, and forum posts, most of which seemed to involve going to the command line and writing an essay in code.

Of course everything I tried threw errors and exceptions and to this day I have no idea of how to login as ‘root’.

But having looked a little further I found out the solution was fairly simple, so I thought I would write a post on it in the hope it will save somebody a lot of time.

It might not work for everybody but could be a good place to start before you get your handy dirty in the Terminal window.

The solution

You will need to get a few programs running to get your adater working. One is a program which I think controls and ‘helps’ wireless networking run and the second is a graphical user interface which converses with the first program without the user having to use the command line. Follow these steps

1. Go to: System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager
2. Search there for: ndiswrapper-utils, ndiswrapper-common and ndisgtk
3. If nothing is found then Insert your Ubuntu CD
4. You will now need to add the CD to your ‘Souces’. In administration ‘Manage Sources’ and add your cd/dvd
5. Now in Synaptic Package Manager click on “Source” (This means the Ubuntu Source CD I think!?)
6. Again search for ndiswrapper-utils, ndiswrapper-common and ndisgtk
7. You should now be able to tick these items and save the Package Manager, which will then install the three programs
8. Go to System > Administration > Windows Wireless devices (This is the new program you’ve just installed ndiskgt thanks to Sam Pohlenz)
9. Now Click on Insert New Driver
10. Insert your cd which came with your wireless device
11. Browse to the cd and look for the .inf files.
12. Select the .inf file
    Note: Normally these will be in a config forlder or an inf folder and will probably be oranised by Windows Operating System. I chose Vista driver as this was most recent but with one adapter this didn’t work. I think it will probably be a case of ‘if at first you don’t succeed’
13. Install

Voila, you should see an icon appear next to your volume control which is your Network Manager. This will allow you to select a Network, and tweak your wireless settings.

If you are at this stage and still Ubuntu des not see your wireless USB it is time to either try another driver, or look for alternative solutions.

I could now see the wireless Networks but still could not connect?

Grr, I was trying to connect to a Secured network using the default WPA/WPA2 connection which worked fine under Windows. I found that by disabling Security on the actual Router (which makes the network unsecure and no passsword is required) I was able to connect.

This can be done by

1. creating a wired ethernet connection to your router
2. Logging into your router in your browser (mine was at http://192.168.1.1)
3. Changing the wireless security option to ‘Disabled’

This is highly unsatisfactory since it means that not only can anyone use my network, but also everything I do online can potentially be detected and intercepted and that in theory someone listening in could get my credit card details.

I spent a day messing around with the WPA settings and WEP and others but have not yet managed to connect using these protocols.

So at the moment I have just decided to risk it. I will however be looking for a solution to this asap. If anyone has any suggestions I’d love to know.

That said I am now connected wirelessly and writing this article on my shiny new Ubuntu OS – lifes good!