caitlin gannon

37signals says:

We’re a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based software products possible with the least number of features necessary. Our products do less than the competition — intentionally.

We believe software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much to learn. We build web-based products that do less, work smarter, feel better, and are easier to use.

The simplicity trend is everywhere. Less is more. But is it really that … well … simple?

Flickr is a great place for a diversion, and a reminder that stick figures all over the world put up with a multitude of bizarre threats and dangers. Where would we be without their brave warnings?

When it comes to self-deception, we humans are experts. We are quite able of convincing ourselves, for example, that we know something when in fact we really don’t. One of my favorite cogsci blogs, Mixing Memory, describes this phenomenon — called the illusion of explanatory depth — in some detail:

The idea behind the illusion of explanatory depth is simply that there are many cases in which we think we know what’s going on, but we don’t.

There are many great examples in cognitive psychology (e.g., psychological essentialism, in which we believe that our concepts have definitions, but when pressed, learn that either they do not have definitions, or we don’t have conscious access to those definitions), but you don’t have to look to scientific research to find them. If you ask 100 people on the street if they know how a toilet’s flushing mechanism works, many, if not most will tell you “Of course I do!” But if you then ask them to explain it, you will quickly find that they really have no idea how a toilet’s flushing mechanism works. This is the illusion of explanatory depth. They know that when they push down on the flusher, the water leaves the bowl, and then fills back up, but they don’t know how this happens, they only think they do.

The researchers cited in this post found that a person’s overconfidence is highest when explaining how things work (such as toilet flushers) as opposed to citing knowledge of facts or stories. The subjects’ overconfidence was also higher for devices with more visible parts than for those with hidden parts.

The author’s ultimate point is that the illusion of explanatory depth can lead us to deal with information overload by relying on the expertise of others; we think we have knowledge but really we just know about the knowledge.

So how might this phenomenon apply to user experience?

• Do users assume they have more knowledge than they do? (Sure, I know how to use Amazon. Hmm…wait a minute…how do I change my default shipping address?)

• How does the user interface impact the force of the illusion? Which kind of interface is likely to seem easier, one with more buttons (more visible parts) — or a bare-boned interface like Google (less visible parts)?

I don’t have any conclusions to offer (I won’t succumb to the illusion, I won’t). I’ll just keep an eye open for other experts out there on the web who can explain it to me, so I can then convince myself that I knew the answer all along.

Scientists are in a mad rush to locate specific emotional and mental states in the brain: schadenfreude, empathy, even anomie (well, almost). Articles are published every day about scientists “mapping new regions of the brain” and are often accompanied with now familiar images of brains lit up by MRI technology (and PhotoShop).

A recent article in the NYT takes issue with this popular image of the “lit up” brain:

[This] may leave out the bigger issues of interconnections, the impossibly complex network of impulses and interactions that underlie our thoughts and actions.

So there’s more to the story than a bunch of blinking neurons.

The same day I read this article, I received a note from The Edge about Marco Iacoboni (famed researcher of mirror neurons) and his instant science experiment involving the Superbowl ads and MRI. This, apparently, is your brain on advertisements:

(from the Edge article)

Iacoboni is interested in the difference between what people say and what their brains reveal. Apparently there is a difference between the ads that people say they liked vs. the ads that elicited the strongest emotional response in the brain.

What is quite surprising, is the strong disconnect that can be seen between what people say and what their brain activity seem to suggest. In some cases, people singled out ads that elicited very little brain responses in emotional, reward-related, and empathy-related areas.

It’s interesting that he seems to conflate emotional response with liking something. I can watch a Kodak commercial and register an emotional response to the heartstrings-pulling, but that doesn’t mean that I like it or that I’m going to go out and buy a Kodak camera.

Back to the NYT article: when we look at pretty pictures of the brain produced by the latest in imaging technologies (superbowl ads = ventral mirror neurons), we should also remember that the brain is infinitely more complex than we can even imagine. The images are just one view, not the whole picture.

The subtle biology that integrates and coordinates disparate areas of the brain, like the visual, the verbal and the emotional — the interlocking symphonies of activity that make us individuals, that help determine what we do when jealous or inspired by a work of art — are absent, despite all the color-coding and exotic names for areas of the brain.

In other words, there’s still an individual self in there - even if my mirror neurons predictably light up when I see the Clydesdale horses.