Think like a child

Have you ever wondered, why your dad is still apprehensive about touching your smart phone while your 4 year old has already started to teach you some tricks of using your smart phone smartly.

The truth is that the pace at which technology is racing ahead, it’s hard to keep up with it. Humans learn at a much lower pace, but when we do learn, we learn it for life and then it takes humongous effort to be able to change that habit.

One of the finest revelations that my past experience subtly brought forward to me was to give me insights into these small nuances in behaviour of people from different generations.

Currently, we are living in the golden era of technology where innovations are no longer a “Eureka” moment but a survival mechanism. But in this whole race of packing these moments in our products we often forget these behavioral traits of generation gap and build systems, which are insensitive to the audience.

How do we address this gap?

Lets understand some basic human traits to be able to effectively address this. We human beings, as we grow up, turn out to be more and more pessimistic in our approach towards accepting changes. Slowly as habits build up we tend to start guarding them and protecting them with arguments of our own.

Let me explain this phenomenon with an example. We adults are still stuck in the era of comparing platforms (Android, iOS, Windows, Symbain, blackberry) and patronizing them as religions. I have witnessed some bizarre arguments on why iOS is the God of platforms and why windows should be thrown out of the window etc.

While the truth actually is that the younger generation has already crossed this barrier of platforms and for them it is just an invisible layer which is non existent. They seem to completely ignore the fact that which phone or which laptop or platform they are performing their tasks on.

Although this might sound a bit bizarre, but this trait of being blind to the platform layer comes from the tremendous amount of optimism that the younger generation carries about every piece of technology that they pick up. Unlike us, where we are still skeptical about whether a button on the screen will perform as per our expectation or not, they seem to be pretty sure of its function and tap that same button with much more confidence.

For them this acceptance of technology has come very naturally as they seem to have grown along with this and hence you will see that little ones around you can pick any damn mobile phone and start to comfortably navigate or play a video or play a game without complaining or caring much about skeumorphism or flat design or material design.

I do not how many of you would have shouted at your little ones when you see them picking up one of your precious devices and frantically trying to tap on those fragile looking screens. This shows the level of optimism, which the newer generation has reached when it comes to technology. For them a non-responsive (non touch) device is non-existent. Try giving a 2 year old an older blackberry device and you will see that their first reaction is to tap on the screen leaving aside all those fancy little buttons.

The time has come now to start thinking of how do we start graduating generations to be able to match up with the pace of technology. The answer lies in the title “Think like a child”. A child’s mind is unadulterated and unbiased. They take things at face value, which helps them break down complex interfaces into simple call to actions. The platform as mentioned earlier should become invisible behind the goal.

Innovation should lye in the systems that you are building and are often hidden behind layers of interfaces.

To be able to successfully surface your brilliant and innovative ideas, build handles that allow you to map your systems on top of existing mental models of people. In the context of digital applications we term these handles in the as responsive and intuitive interfaces.

Success of any system lies not on the level of innovation packed but in the level of acceptance that it has gathered with your audience. Hence you will see simplest of applications and systems gain popularity in a very short span of time.

When it comes to experience design, the need of the hour today is not only innovation today but also intuition.

Signing off.

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Originally published at tanaykr.wordpress.com on March 3, 2015.