The Blindness of Locals
My mother had just shown up at our new house in the rental car she had gotten at the airport. “Wasn’t that easy?” I asked.
“Well, no Peter. You forgot something kind of important.”
“What do you mean? You just get on I-80, go east until you hit Highway 49, go north until it turns into Highway 20, then turn left on our road. Hey presto!”
“Peter.”
“Mother.”
“You forgot the part about I-5 at the beginning.”
I paused for a moment because I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. Then my brief flush of shame quickly turned to annoyance. (“If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.”) “Well of course you have to go south on I-5. THEN you go east on I-80. How else would you get here?”
As a UI designer, I had just committed a common yet egregious sin: The Blindness of Locals. When we become accustomed to a place or a way of thinking, we forget what it’s like to experience it for the first time. For designers, it is incumbent on us to always put ourselves in the mindset of the newcomer.
In the field of VUI design (Voice User Interface,) the punishment for failing to work from this perspective arrives quickly and clearly. Unlike static interfaces that a user can gaze at for a while until the options become clear, the temporal nature of dialogue means that a decision must be made almost immediately after a question has been posed. Not only that, but the user has to remember the details of the question, which in many cases are far more complex than a simple yes/no.
Because of this, a well-designed VUI includes robust error handling for, at minimum, no-match and no-input events. If they’re written well, the user won’t even perceive them as error conditions. The considered use of discourse markers such as “two questions for you,” “first,” “next,” “and finally,” etc. help give the user a sense of location and progress when there’s nothing for them to look at.
Describing new concepts before you ask questions about them is a process I call “front-loading.” It takes a bit more time, but allows new ideas to settle before the user feels pressured to make a decision. Consider:
- “Would you rather have the pappardelle special with fresh-caught sea urchin and cauliflower reduction or the island duck special with mulberry mustard and broccolini?”
- “I’ve got two specials today. The first is pappardelle with fresh-caught sea urchin and cauliflower reduction. The second is the island duck with mulberry mustard and broccolini. Which sounds better, the pappardelle or the duck?”
Four words into the first example, the user is already experiencing the anxiety of having to make a decision before even knowing what the choices are. In the second example, we “front-load” the categories first (“I’ve got two specials”) and then we describe them, giving the user some time to (figuratively) digest the two dishes. When the question is finally presented, the user has been able to gestate the decision before getting, “Which sounds better, the pappardelle or the duck?”
As you design, wearing the newbie hat inoculates you from ‘The Blindness of Locals’ and ensures you don’t forget to tell your mom about I-5. This principle is not anecdotal, but forms the basis of a robust design before it goes into usability testing or production.
