Design For Thinking! — Quotidian — 497
(Transcript of video originally posted on 09 Sep 2023)
This Six-Headed God? Very interesting origin story! In fact, the myths, the documents, they do not agree with each other. Each seems to have a different yarn to spin. From the pictorial version I read as a kid, they are born as six separate children.. Six children. And, six celestial nymphs happen to pass by. They each take a child and they take them all to Parvathi. Parvathi, in her motherly love and affection, embraces the children all at once, and lo and behold! It becomes a single child with six heads! Six-headed! It is these six heads.. that we are going to talk about! Welcome!
Namaste!
A book like this.. We have seen this earlier too. And, this is the book we are using at the Zoho School of Design. The idea is not just to teach Graphic Design but.. to deliberate about who this is for. Is it for our customers? If it is to be to their liking.. If it is to be easy for them to use.. If it is to be USEFUL for them.. we need to first understand how they think. And, this book teaches us how they think. How we ALL think.
There is a certain inherent complexity though, hidden inside. We first need to understand that whenever we keep the brain out there, (remember the Brain-Mind difference? We encountered it recently).. When we keep the brain out there, and we start analysing it.. take a moment.. pause.. and wonder! “Hey, what is being analysed?” The brain. The mind. “Hey, who is analysing it?” The mind in the brain! Do you get it? We perform experiments on countless things. The experimenter and the experiment are clearly separated.. But in the matters of the brain and the mind, we are exploring ourselves.
Take this tattoo. You can place it on your arm. My friend, her close friend’s name is Raj, supposedly. She has tattooed that name on to herself. She is able to see it. She is able to show it. Just like that. Pretty apparent.
She now tries placing it elsewhere on her body. When she applies it here, .. she isn’t able to see it except with the help of a mirror. Wait..! You can look at this tattoo at least using a mirror.
What about this? She is not able to see it. Nor does a mirror help her to see it. One has to indulge in gymnastics with multiple mirrors, and even then, it will be pretty much distorted at the end. It is the same analogy that we can apply to understanding how we think. Some times, when we do some things, it is immediately apparent that this is the reason we did that thing. In some cases, it is not immediately apparent, but when you sit back and wonder.. “Hey, we did that.. but, why did we really do that?”.. When System 2 thinking kicks in, we are able to arrive, deduce, “Oh, this could be the reason we did that!” But then, there are these third-level situations where too many factors seem to be playing an interweaving role.. we don’t even know.. we can’t ever know.. what the processes were that led us to the final decision. Please keep this important tenet in mind. Before we get in any further, this disclaimer is so important. We do things without thinking. We do things that we can later explain with a thought process. We do things that we can never explain, ever after we look back at it, and spend a lot of time ruminating over it.
Anyway, .. the Layered Mind should lead us to the Layered Camera in the iPhone, for example. If you take a look at that exploded view, you will realise that there is an infrared filter, a colour filter, a zooming mechanism, a dust-protecting layer, a wide-angle camera, and so on and on. All of these brought together into an integral hole, that is the iPhone camera. Similarly, when you exclaim, “I am thinking. Wait..!”, what are you really going through?
There are SIX MINDS. It is an over-generalisation. But, one typically thinks in these six departments. If you end up giving too much to one of these and ignore something else, you are not understanding the customer holistically. You are ignoring an important, vital marketing or persuading opportunity — says the author! Shall we look at them one by one?
The first is Vision / Attention. Vision seems to remind us of what we see with our eyes, but more than that, the overall perception.
Mona Lisa. The moment you see this image, that heat map tells you the hotter parts where the eye lingers longer, the cooler light-blue dark-blue parts, where the eye doesn’t even go. Then, we have Visual Sequencing. When the picture is seen for the first time, where do the eyes go FIRST? Oh, to the eyes! Then the lips.. Then the forehead. And then those hands. This is that sequence. Visual Sequencing. And, overall, during the first few seconds, how much attention does the head grab? How much attention do those hands grab? We showed this picture to a thousand people. And, 850 among them, spent time looking at the head first. These are all studies you can perform with very simple hardware these days. Simple software and hardware. You need to understand where people see. It could be a website design, it could be a printed brochure, it could be a three-dimensional object. But, where do people see? To understand that, is key! Only after you start understanding it in depth, you come to learn that people have learned blindness. Temporary blindness. If you show something to them too often, they will stop seeing it. And, there is the saccade. Saccade is, .. from Mona Lisa’s head, to Mona Lisa’s arms, those fingers.. they JUMP. During that jump, the eye wasn’t seeing anything. The camera was recording, but the eye didn’t see anything. This is called the saccade. The brain fills up, for the intervening space and time. The brain supplies some false information to you.
How do you design something that stands out? Typically, there are six ways to make it. You can make it look unusual by changing the shape.. By changing the size.. Or, the orientation. Probably it will grab the eye then. Weightage. The thickness of the line! Position. Slightly off the predicted expected location.. I will be able to differentiate. And finally, color. One of these.. or a combination of these, when used appropriately, can grab that Visual Attention from the customer.
Alright! The second brain part? Meanwhile, please note. This doesn’t mean, the brain has something anatomically special, related to that domain, in that particular location! This is just a rough division into six parts. The second part is Wayfinding. Finding the way. Very very important. A map. A pathway. A route. An understanding of the lie of the land, as they say. Any product, even a house, when you are designing a house, or a city, when the roads are being paved, requires Wayfinding from the customer. If they struggle with Wayfinding, they are not going to be coming your way the next time..!
In Tunis, .. it is mostly desert everywhere. This desert ant, that lives in that Tunisian desert.. Understand its plight. It can’t follow the footstep marks made by the one going ahead, nor can it retrace the steps that it makes in the shifting sands. The sand is going to be overlaid by more sand, in seconds. It can’t say, “Hmm.. there is a landmark. This tall dune here. Let me remember it..” For the dunes themselves are changing all the time. Nor can it leave a scentmark, for the wind is blowing strongly round the clock, and is going to obliterate all scent signals in moments! How does it navigate? Scientists have conducted experiments found out something interesting! It seems these Tunisian desert ants, they navigate using the sun as a compass and they can also count their footsteps.. “How many steps have I made?” It can keep count. So, when it goes from Nest to Food, Food to back, it is sun plus number of steps! Smart!
It is starting from the Nest. And, it forages randomly, in search of food. And then it finally chances upon some food in the Feeder. The scientists have placed some food there. The moment this happens, it is able to not just retrace the steps, but even better, it does a “straight-line” move back to the Nest, thanks to the homing assistance from the sun. The scientist, mischievously evil he is, he displaces the ant as shown, the moment the ant has located the food. After this displacement happens, the ant starts off at the same angle, and searches for the Nest. Expecting the Nest to be there. But, not finding it there, it demonstrates that it is smarter than the scientist gave it credit for! It reaches the point where the Nest should have been (had the displacement not happened), and it goes in ever-widening circles.. until it hits upon its original Nest. Wayfinding!
This Wayfinding is so important that I would even relate it to the fundamental questions of life itself! So, what are the fundamental questions of life? Remember the scenes in the movies? When somebody has had a hit to the head, they are in bed, they wake up, they are still groggy, .. they wake up, and then they ask these three questions.. What are those questions? Where am I? Where did I come from? And of course, where all can I go? These three questions are important in life itself. Who am I? Where am I? Where did I come from? What is my origin? That will also help you understand “Who you are!” And, having understood who I am, and having understood where I am, and where I came from, I need openings.. What are all the options available for me. It is exactly this that customers will expect in your navigational interfaces too. Whenever you are reviewing an interface, ask these three questions. Can the user easily tell where they are.. Where they came from.. What are all the avenues open for them, from here.. Simple, but too often, many of us ignore these simple rules of thumb.
We have done two parts of the Mind. One was Vision and Attention. And the other was Wayfinding. We have four more to go.. Shall we jump to the next episode, to greet them too? Do you MIND?
