The reality of the world we live in is that we distrust technology implicitly. I don’t know anyone who’d step on a plane without a pilot and a co-pilot and yet that same plane is fly by wire, almost every step in flight is executed with near perfection by Autopilot and it has been for years. In theory we don’t need pilots to be behind the wheel, AI has largely replaced their jobs and yet there they remain. While the AI performs almost perfectly, the time when it fails is when we want human redundancies. We want pilots on planes so that when the AI fails, a human can do their best to solve for the emergency, and if one pilot fails, their copilot is there to take over for them.

The truth is, we’re all very uncomfortable letting Ai and technology take full control of our lives and livelihoods. Most people fear Tesla auto-pilot and for good reason, its dangerous, unpredictable and imperfect, and the NHTSA and your mom wouldn’t want the car driving itself without a human behind the wheel. Technologists like to espouse that we’ll all be firing our accountants and designers and using chatbots to do our taxes and create UI designs. The truth is, with so much at stake, be it the IRS auditing your mistaken taxes. Or no planning or real understanding made on behalf of the AI doing UI design. We don’t want to, and wouldn’t be so unwise to risk our lives and livelihoods on an AI. We will always want human oversight. I want a person to double check and make sure that whatever the AI does, it works and makes sense and doesn’t land me in jail for tax fraud! While it is true that AI will probably learn to do most of these jobs with a high degree of accuracy, perhaps as good as the 99th percentile of all humans, I will always want a person at the end of the line making the decision of what is right and wrong.

So what is the AI good for? Co-pilot is clearly the future, rather than replacing humans entirely, our jobs will be greatly sped up and optimized by AI co-pilot assistants. Accountants will have a vastly easier time organizing filing and overseeing clients taxes, and UI designers will get instant inspiration, icons, ipsum you name it. Many jobs will find niche uses for AI copilots, speeding up and augmenting human work for the better. AI doctors, tutors, educators, with an accuracy of even the 20th percentile of humans will lead to an incredible democratization of access to expertise around the world. This will greatly increase the productivity, health and education of millions of people without easy access to it.

It will however for the foreseeable future remain something with oversight, a helpful coworker to all employees, a educator and doctor for those without access. Democratization and optimization are the real use of AI. Just like we’ve seen already, we aren’t ready to put our lives in the hands of machines, even if on paper they’re less fallible than humans, we still place our trust in ourselves and trusted professionals. I for one do not want to see a future where every call center employee is turned into a stripped down ChatGPT bot that has no agency and power and can’t help me solve my problems. Humans want human support and always will until we can create something so human its indistinguishable, and if we do, we’re in much more trouble than who’s job is at risk. Everything will be at risk.

But for now. Relax, rejoice, we have great new tools to help us thrive as professionals. Don’t buy the hype. After all, we we’re supposed to get the hyperloop, flying cars, and crypto utopia. We all need to be more critical and skeptical of Silicon Valley hype. Most of it is vaporware.

When you imagine augmented reality (AR) you probably imagine something reminiscent of Blade Runner 2049: billboards of intrusive, digital advertisements occupying your vision as you walk through the city, an inescapable cacophony of visual and auditory noise creating a claustrophobic experience of reality.

Our imagination of AR has been limited to this dystopian landscape. As a society, we’ve never imagined what good AR could do, we’ve only used the collective imagination to create different versions of dystopia. This isn’t unique to AR, it’s true of any new technology. It’s our impulse to imagine our worst fears before our grandest of ambitions or as Molly Ferguson writes:

“Utopias and dystopias ultimately stand the test of time and keep society’s fascination because they reflect the polarity of human nature — extreme violence and destruction; extreme healing and unity. Utopias and dystopias then are an exploration of those poles;”

In addition, it’s common bias to imagine the worst of our nature, and to ignore the best feature of humankind. The social psychology researchers, Paul Rozin and Edward Poyzman, coined negativity bias, and perhaps this feature which they’ve outlined reflects how we see reality best:

“Negative differentiation states that since negative events are by nature more complicated than their positive counterparts, we require a more significant mobilization of cognitive resources to minimize the consequences of the event and deal with the experience, making it a more memorable and intense experience.”

And this is also true of how we experience pop culture, with darker more dystopian movies being more beloved than romantic comedies. It may be counterintuitive to realize that negative imaginations consume more of our cognitive load, but it makes sense. Comprehending the implications of a cancer diagnosis are far more complex than to imagine oneself as healthy forever. This is perhaps why we never see positive imaginations of XR, it just wouldn’t make for an interesting premise because it’s quite simple.

Meta announced in October of 2021 their grand ambitions to bring Ready Player One, home office addition, into reality, with a yearly budget of $10 billion, they seem poised to make Zuckerberg’s ambition a reality. However the public hasn’t reacted positively to Zuckerberg’s vision. Wired wrote:

“Meta shows fictionalized videos of their visions of the future, they frequently tend to gloss over just how people will interact with the metaverse. VR headsets are still very clunky, and most people experience motion sickness or physical pain if they wear them for too long. Augmented reality glasses face a similar problem, on top of the not-insignificant issue of figuring out how people can wear them around in public without looking like huge dorks.”

The glossy version of the future Meta has portrayed isn’t real and isn’t the lived experience of the product, but there’s a more metaphorical problem as well.

Meta is anti human, they assume that we want to be more immersed in our online experiences, leaving reality behind entirely. Meta’s philosophical argument is that the public isn’t interested in reality, real human interaction, real experiences, or the world at large. This is clearly an observation made by the isolated technocratic lizard people that occupy Silicon Valley. What they have missed is that in fact people want to spend less time online; less time in-front of computers and more time with friends, family and outdoors experiencing the real world. While this is a philosophical argument, it is also a practical one. We on average spend every waking hour now behind a screen, and what Meta is proposing is to not only spend it behind a screen but to walk out of reality and into a completely digital world; to never take off the headset. This is why the public is reacting to Meta with such hostility. It only proves that their greed to maximize on platform time overrides any understanding of what the public wants. Seeing colleagues over Zoom or in the Metaverse will never have the same human level tactility.

From the fundamental technological hurdles and philosophical shortcomings to how much people already interact with technology and their fundamental push back against using it more than they already are, it is clear that Meta isn’t the future people want.

This leaves us as designers with an opportunity: first to imagine the future of XR that is utopian and genuinely improves people’s lives, and second to fundamentally understand the wants and needs of real people and create something that improves their lives and helps them connect with their devices and their loved ones and their communities better than before.

Google’s project Starline is far more reflective of what people want. They want to feel present with others, connected to their community and loved ones without barriers. This is what we want, and what we should enable in that future as designers, by getting technology out of the way and letting people interact with the real world. That is the future of AR.

Concert is AR/XR for humans. It’s a fundamental understanding of the wants and needs of people and it provides a real solution to real world problems, while also enhancing existing interactions with devices. Concert seeks to avoid any dystopian imaginations of augmented reality by offering a limited professional and entertainment experience. Concert is tied to a user’s device and designed to work with their specific platform. It doesn’t have its own operating system in any real capacity. Inputting information is done with a user’s existing device which is vastly superior to any kind of holographic Xbox Kinect inspired interaction. In order for XR to fill a space within our lives we need to be able to interact with it with a high degree of throughput. If XR can’t offer a faster input method, then it shouldn’t be a feature of the platform. Concert is a hybrid platform which leverages a user’s existing smartphone and personal computer via bluetooth to allow for unique interactions. Most importantly, it offers a familiar and efficient input method.

The main function of Concert is to act like a second screen tied to a device and its ecosystem. When it comes to productive functions, this gives users the option to have multiple screens in space and position them freely. However they can use the mouse and functionality of their laptop synergistically with their headset. This gives them the freedom to work where they please but the bonus of having a full field of displays. In addition, Concert works with the phone. It enables unique entertainment experiences, allowing users to use their hands as inputs for games and position virtual entertainment screens in physical space. It also allows the user to type and launch apps through their phone, creating a virtual remote-like relationship. The Concert device itself, the Aurora, has sensors to detect hand movement and placement in space. This allows the user to leverage both the best features of the touch screen, and augmented reality with virtual screens and hand interactions where they fit best.

Additionally, Concert is a platform for application creation. Like the original iPhone, it opens up a new medium of input and interaction. This creates new opportunities for experiences which users find productive and entertaining. Concert reflects what people want today, which is a more productive work environment, and a limited scope of experiences that enhance their existing technology. Concert is an overlay over reality that enriches the experience. Concert is built to be humanist and unobstructive unlike any other imagination today.

PSA: This is a pretty technical article folks, so if your looking for a quick and fun read this probably isn’t for you! However, it is a great reference for this tool for current and future use.

Recently I’ve been exploring mental models in human machine interactions. Exploring different methods of exposing internal mental models of users. The first extractive method was the Think Aloud 2.0 Method which was originally proposed by Neilson Norman. This extractive method makes interviewees read aloud all of the actions they’re taking while they’re interacting with the interface. This allows us design researchers to get a glimpse into their mental models. However there is another popular method which we can leverage to gain access to mental models, its card sorting. But this paper will seek to expand upon the card sorting exercise to reduce biases and increase output especially for insights which are innate to the users.

In order to achieve truly unbiased and subconscious behaviours we have to remove a couple systematic biases from the exercise. First of all, Card sorting is usually guided and done in a group model, that introduces several strong biases to the data. First of all there is inherent authority bias when an instructor is guiding a class. Design researchers are prone to nudging users and giving them subtle often subconscious facial cues to what they prefer. This is usually done both subconsciously on the part of the instructor and the interviewees, its true that we lead one another largely with our faces, even if we are unaware of our subtle facial expressions that expose inner motivations, this is usually referred to as “theory of mind” Humans have a innate ability to infer emotional states and behaviours from other humans and animals. Our ability to inference is a powerful bias able to sway the opinions of the interviewees, this is a lot of bias for the expected data, so we need to account for both authority bias, and nudging, and our facial expressions.

When we ask participants to sort cards for the interface laying out the interface logically and clearly, were not accessing their scripts or mental models of what an interface is to them, we have more difficult job as researchers accessing their mental prototypical model of the interface when users are using concentrated effort. Therefore we want to remove conscious effort from the experimental framework as much as feasible. By doing so we encourage users to go with their gut instincts, and by doing so we can better explore their innate software biases within the context of the experiment.

We also want to account for social pressure. While it is true that group settings result in better outcomes and insights for most circumstances. Group think is not necessarily reflective of the users own experience or biases. In constructive group dynamics we can often raise the bar of our individual intellects while on an individual basis we are less intelligent and certainly less plugged into the moment. Groupthink is extremely important in the field of UX for solving complex problems, but in the specific case of extracting behavioural models, it works against the research.

The Experimental Framework.

Ultimately we’re seeking to evoke users instinctive intuitive mental models. So we have to account for conscious effort removing it from the experiment as much as feasible. To do so we’ll run the sorting exercise at a fast pace, asking users to assign the items where they “feel” they fit, not where they “think” they fit. By cueing users emotionally we can tap into their mental models. We also want to run this exercise with one user on a computer in a controlled environment. They have to be familiarized with how to conduct the experiment and then its gamified we get them to sort cards in super tight frameworks making the experiment into a type of fun and engaging game, which serves us as researchers and keeps the user engaged throughout the process. Ideally we want to conduct three+ exercises, each with the time getting shorter, the time will decrease to force users not to deliberate longer, and make more intuitive decisions.

We also want to run a control trail. We can attempt this by having a group of participants conduct the same test but without the time trail and asking them to think through each decision and make logical informed choices about where each component should go. A logical informed choice is one *which is written about* So we ask our control group to write about each decision. This will give us insight into how the logical answers differ from the intuitive answers. We can then test each set of insights by trading the interface layouts with each group, users will be asked to find a particular item in the software as fast as possible, the longer it takes to find the item or complete the task reduces the score of the arrangement. Before we do this though we need to combine our insights from each set of users into one model.

Combining each software layout is simple. For each placement of an item within the OS, we observe how many times it ends up in that location, we then take the most popular location for that item and incorporate it into our trial model. This way the patterns that emerge within the research are preserved for testing.

The trail period with the control group will serve to prove if the intuitive thinkers had a more broadly appealing layout on mass when compared to the hard thinkers, our control group who made decisions logically and with conscious effort. Helping to validate IDT * intuitive design theory; More intuitive designs can be found by understanding the subconscious mind. The intuitive mind.

I know this weeks post was pretty UX technical, but I wanted to layout a really robust new user test to help create some really interesting findings, I hope you can use this tool to put intuitive design theory to the test, as its just a theoretical framework, tons of research is still needed. But as Intuitive dynamic moves forward I’m looking forward to publishing our insights to you. Its time for the hard data! *my main motivation to do this work is because time and time again the insights I gained from users were confabulated, and subconscious, people would make decisions without consciously knowing why, and they’d fill in the gaps with biased and none sensical explanations, so why not avoid that altogether and just look at the subconscious mental models?

Intuitive Dynamic — Written by Leonardo Julian Felix — August 1st 2021. BED Human Machine Interface Design Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Mental models are the most important component in Human Computer Interaction. (HCI). Each person has a unique mental model of how to interact with a machine.

What is a mental model?

A mental model is a subconscious algorithm, a script. We use subconscious algorithms all the time throughout our daily lives. For example, once you’ve learned something new, like how to drive a vehicle, you no longer have to put conscious thought or energy into your driving, its like your brain does it automatically for you. This extends to all aspects of our lives, a surprising amount of the time were running Algorithms or Scripts that dictate how to act and what to do next without conscious effort.

We have scripts for how we interact with interfaces as well. You might find yourself on impulse visiting a website without consciously deciding to, or doom scrolling through instagram for hours, completely checked out from what your watching. Indeed our habitual software interactions dictate most of our online experience. Each of us use our mental models to make predictions about what to do next, to automate certain tasks, and to expect certain stimuli. The expectation of stimuli is also the route of our addictive tendencies; but that’s a future topic.

Scripts also create cognitive prototypes; A cognitive prototype is a prototypical imagination of what a certain object or concept may be. For example imagine what a website looks like with your minds eye, that's your cognitive prototype. The effect of which is that when we encounter non prototypical software, it forces adaptation and given a vast variety of factors this can either lead to positive exploration, or deep frustration. Factors like expedience, if we’re stressed, hungry, or even if it’s sunny outside can contribute to a users experience, and when users are asked to perform an adaptation under stress it creates frustration. Only under the best of circumstances will people gladly adapt their prototypes and scripts.

Mental Models are habitual functions. They’re stored in the default mode network within the brain, a global area within the brain that manages all manner of automated habitual tasks. The (DMN) in conjunction with the visual and motor cortex’s with the basal ganglia serves as the heavy lifter in the brain. One way to think about how we create new scripts is that we load scripts by using conscious effort to learn a new task. Once we’ve learned the new task through repetition, it is removed from the conscious load and stored in the DMN. This is of course an over simplification, the DMN and conscious mind work together to create new habits and scripts. However their is divide within the brain where certain tasks no longer become accessible to the conscious brain as its stored in the subconscious and we follow our scripted actions without noticing at all. However when were consciously aware of our surroundings be it in conversation or work, the DMN is less active and the prefrontal cortex is activated. But we do need to remember that the DMN and the PFC work with all segments of the brain all the time. With variances in activity .

Because we’re unaware of our scripts, designers impart our own mental models into our software design and as we build our software we have an innate understanding of how it functions. Its widely known in UX that our main goal is to conduct research in a way that ensures our software is user friendly, AKA. interpretable by other individuals mental models. What were doing as designers is establishing a model of interaction and then testing if it can be widely adopted by countless personal algorithms. Thankfully human scripts are largely similar to each other, given their are limited ways to interact with physical frameworks. Deviation from the mean is rare.

“Mental models are in flux exactly because they’re embedded in a brain rather than fixed in an external medium. Additional experience with the system can obviously change the model, but users might also update their mental models based on stimuli from elsewhere, such as talking to other users or even applying lessons from other systems.”- Nielsen Norman Group.

Then there’s The Jakob’s Law of Internet User Experience which dictates that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. Design for patterns for which users are accustomed.” Now that we understand Jakobs Law, how can we uncover users mental models? How do we mine the subconscious?

Thinking Aloud 2.0

A technique created by NNG, thinking aloud basically consists of asking users to consistently talk through their actions while using your software. This illicists their subconscious through speech and allows us to glimpse inside their mental models. It does this by having the users do something their mental models are already trained to do. Quickly you’ll notice where users find certain points of confusion and gaps in their models. I.E faults in your software that cause their mental model to fail.

A users confusion is a failure to predict and build for their mental model. Bad software design causes mental models to fail.

Bias in the Thinking Aloud method of research:

There are a couple study jeopardizing biases that we can account for in Thinking aloud 2.0

Filtered statements: When were being watched we tend to filter our speech for a variety of reasons, we could want to be more polite, so we filter our profanities, we could want to be liked more, so we’re friendlier and nicer, we could be expecting a reward so we praise the research and researcher, and we filter our words to appear more intelligent. We need to account for all of these to get proper subconscious unfiltered data.

Biasing User behaviour: Researchers being present for the study will bias the data, we will change our behaviour in the presence of others so we want to adapt to this challenge by taking the human element out of it, letting the users express exactly their inner monolog.

In order to do this we need to have carefully constructed consent forms that do not advertise that we are directly recording users actions. We want to use ambiguous language like, “may or may not be recording this session. Please consent to both.” “May or may not be alerted to recording.” “All data collected in this study will be completely confidential and stored on cold servers.” etc. And we take the human element completely out of this, using software to guide the users through the study.

How to structure Think Aloud 2.0

Before the study: We want to invite participants with the pretense that were studying “the effects of talking through software.” Looking to see how it affects the use of software. Please think aloud. This is of course arouse! We just don’t want to subject them to any biases before the study is conducted. We also ensure they they’ve consented to the studies ambiguous recording strategy, as we’ll be recording these unobtrusively.

Without a researcher in the room, we need a way to ensure that the participants continue talking through the research. We use a digital prompt and we record the screen and the audio from the participant. While they talk through the software we can interpret where they’re navigating too, where their difficulties lie, whats easy and what's more difficult, what adaptations are made and where they fail outright.

To do this we ask the participant to perform a navigation test, or a sign in test, perhaps a point of sale, giving them a directive within the software as usual.

Ensure that you record the amount of time it takes for the users to complete the task, the number of clicks it takes, the number of back pages, the number of mistakes that are made for quantitative analysis. (Add on whatever more quantitative analysis you like.)

Interpreting The Data

Congratulations, you’ve just completed a study with as little bias in the research as possible, this is the more pure way to see how your software stands up against foreign mental models. The less confusion within the user tests obviously denotes success. However we can glean more meaningful insights.

Where do users navigate first?

Where do users spend time idle?

Where do users have trouble finding an item?

Where do users report frustration / Confusion?

Final step: Implementing changes to account for mistakes.

You’ve found where users spend idle time or report frustrations, so you want to account for these, one way to approach these problems is to adapt the software to being more prototypical, this means searching for examples of the task your trying to have a user complete and making your design more like the prototypical design. Moreover, if you firmly do not wish to follow the prototypical design, testing if an innovation on a design does not result in frustration is an amazing way to approve new features and designs within software, your pushing the boundary forward but within our collective mental models. After you’ve made you changes, run the test again with the same or different participants observe the quantitative differences in their experience and observe the qualitative differences as well. Qualitative difference can include mood observations, optimistic or negative language, chart how emotions alter during the task as a job well done is always denoted by a more assertive and jovial participant.

Conclusion

Think aloud 2.0 is just one way amongst so many that help design researchers to gain an understanding of how effective their software designs are in the hands of users unique mental models. (TA2) tries hard to account for all kinds of biases within the research, this is done deceptively but effectively. Their will always be poor tests and innate biases, the most we can do is try our best not to bias users with authority, reward, or even our presence. TA2 is as impartial as yet imagined. I hope it can give you and your team some incredible insights into the minds of your participants and the effectiveness of your software designs. The prototypical mental model has lots of room for innovation, I challenge all of you to find some.

Intuitive Dynamic.

Designthinking relies upon gathering meaningful insights about users interactions with software. As designers we rely upon truthful and detailed accounts of the actions users took and the reasons behind those actions. But what if I told you they didn’t know why they made those actions, and they made it up the reasons why…Welcome to the confabulation paradox.

It occured to me in a design thinking workshop at my University, as a class we were testing our UX designs out on one another and recording why each of us made certain choices when using the software. This was an exercise designed to take meaningful insights from users, to find stumbling blocks, biases, and empathize with one another. However I noticed a fatal flaw. When my classmates would ask me why I made certain decisions within their software I wouldn’t know why. I was completely unaware of my navigation process, It was clear to me that I was running a script. A preprogrammed subconscious script that allowed to me navigate the software without paying any attention. When my classmate would ask me why I chose a certain decision, I would make up a reason, why? Not because I was lying, but because I was trying to justify why I made certain choices. I was confabulating.

And if i was confabulating, so were they.

It occured to me that we weren’t so much recording why we made certain choices, we were recording each others subconscious scripts and trying to justify the choices these scripts made. This doesn’t bode well for Designthinking. If the reasons we’re modifying software are based upon the users justification for making a decision and not the true cause of why they made that decisions; their subconcious scripts. Then were any of the insights we had recorded valid at all?

The traditional view of memory is that it’s like a hard drive, and if you can’t remember something it’s because it’s been lost, corrupted or is suppressed. But this is plain wrong.

People confabulate memories the same way they build a complete picture of vision, the brain fills in the gaps with the relevant information, this creates a complete picture of a situation which can be distorted. Memory like vision is therefore inherently flawed, especially in the case of distant recollection.

Our memories are incredibly fragile and susceptible, scientists have proven that you can successfully and rather easily implant memories. Moreover several studies have shown that our brains will create new memories when there isn’t any recollection of an event, our brains will dream up a new memory, a justification for an action.

When were on “Autopilot” zoned out or running a script our brains will create a memory and a reason for what we did if called upon. Tricking the conscious brain into a lie to deceive it, to not detect the subconscious pulling the strings. The brain is more interested in building meaning than it is in create a detailed and accurate memory of an event. Just like on the Savannah, it was more relevant to understand the danger presented to you and the meaning behind it, than the facial features of a particular tiger, or the shade of grass. What you needed to survive was, the context. Reconstructing that context in many different ways allows the mind to prepare for future unknowns. Which is also the route of a lot of modern anxiety. However, it makes for terrible detailed recall and confabulation abound when we conduct surveys and user tests.

Here’s the breaking point

In order to remember anything we need to be consciously aware of our surroundings, and even if we are present, we can be unconscious and therefore not remember the motivations, actions, or details of what went on. This means that if your user test participants are checked out, or not fully aware and tuned into their surroundings, almost all of the time they won’t remember why they chose certain decisions. When their asked to justify them they’ll create a new memory to make those decisions make sense. It's a battle ground between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind.

Then you make the worst choice ever and as a researcher you say, did you do X because of Y. And they go “Oh Yes! Of course I did.” False memories can be easily implanted in our minds. Given social pressure especially from those who have influence over us like a researcher, authority or family member we will fabricate new memories from imagination and implant them, this was perhaps evolutionarily useful as just being told we did something could create a strong memory within us, most likely as a backup for when we did not recall an event, we could have that memory restored through imagination and therefore grasp the context at hand. However in the user testing process it means that any introduced reasoning for actions from a researcher skews the data so much it becomes unusable.

Where do we go from here?

We know that our participants don’t know why they make the choices they do. So naturally we study the subconscious. Watching users go through software and looking at where they fail and where they succeed is the only way to conduct a user test without bias. Don’t ask participants why they made a certain decision, they know as much about why they made that decision as why they made a right turn on a red light an hour prior driving to your lab, they weren’t present and they don’t know why. All we can do as designers is observe their behaviour and develop behavioural models. We can search for commonalities in Scripts to create software which avoids users having to think about using the software in the first place. The absence of thought is where software really thrives.

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Intuitive dynamic & Subconscious design theory; The idea that users should think as little as possible when using software. Intuitive software comes from the absence of thought. It should be our primary goal as UX designers to make thinking as minimal as possible, not because thinking is bad, its because it takes effort, and effort equates to frustration, and frustration creates a poor user experience.

Intuitive dynamic — Written by Design Mind.

Placebos are one of the most miraculous features of human biology, our innate ability to believe that we are healing and heal ourselves through the power of our own belief. “The placebo effect is triggered by a person’s belief in the benefit from the treatment and their expectation of feeling better.” The unique human ability to manifest ourselves into good health also applies to our perception of the designed world. Our perception of a product or service changes the perceived physical experience of that product or service. If we believe it to be superior to another product or service it will be objectively superior to the individual in a physical manifestational way.

Human perception is incredible vulnerable and malleable. Companies constantly use this to their advantage.

Studies in human cognitive psychology have proven time and time again that a perceived sense of superiority manifests as objective superiority to the participant. For example. The Pepsi Paradox documents how Ads affect our direct perception of reality. Our perception of a brand changes our enjoyment of the product. Our brains literally manifest an experience based on our preconceived perceptions of beauty, superiority, and goodness which rise from the subconscious. This is manifested in the Pepsi paradox in which blind participants enjoy Pepsi more than Coke. But when they’re aware of the brand they dislike the taste of Pepsi and usually prefer Coke. Their preference is changing the objective taste of the beverage.

This effect also manifests itself in Wine Preference Studies. Blind participants denote no preference for more expensive wines over cheaper wines, and note no obvious difference in quality or taste, but when the brands and prices were revealed, participants objectively stated that they enjoyed the more expensive wine more. The price and brand were altering their reality.

Again this manifests itself in price theory, where if a good or a service is marketed below it perceived value the consumer will perceive it as lower quality even if it is objectively the same as a more expensive counterpart. Therefore companies are always trying to find the perceived correct price based on their product or service and not an objective one. The subconscious perception of value is more indicative of what consumers would pay as opposed to the actual value of the goods. Take Beats by Dre for example. Marketed as a high end product with tons of celebrity partnerships, designed to look and feel expensive but made from cheap parts and plastics, the public perception of beats priced at $300–500 was that they were a high end quality product which justified their price, even if there was no difference between beats and a $30 pair of no-name headphones. What’s even crazier is that their didn’t have to be a difference, the perception of quality is enough for them to sound objectively better to those who believe their marketing. What's most interesting is that audiophiles who have a strong distaste for beats have a much stronger bias against the product while people who perceive them at face value love the sound. It comes down to the consumers Perception which alters their subjective reality.

How do we interpret value? The leading theory is that the subconscious brain is always comparing and contrasting different values and products, this creates a complex network of perceived value. If we always had to use our conscious brain to determine if something was priced fairly we’d have to use an insane amount of effort just to lead economic life. So our perception of value is “chunked” and stored in our subconscious systems allowing us to make quick face value judgements about quality, price and fairness.

For example we know that a cheap Chocolate bar might be priced for a dollar, and a luxury chocolate bar for $10. We interpret the value of the chocolate bar based on its brand and quality associations. A luxury chocolate bar is only worth $10 in perceived value because the designed world put that chocolate bar in black minimalist packaging and says its from a far away land and sells it for a premium. Associating it with luxury justifies its price. The associative differences in packaging and style differentiate value for us. Beauty is always associated with luxury and value. Beauty is also associated with increased price. Therefore our associations between different value systems infer monetary value. It’s a designed value in a designed system. We’ve designed it into ourselves. Bringing all these concepts together. Our associate system manifests itself in our perception. Products we perceive personally as superior will always manifest themselves as physically superior and our perception is constantly under flux through advertisement.

Companies are constantly using our own subconscious psychological quirks against us. Here’s one more example.

Companies use Price Anchoring to their advantage, a product listed for more then its perceived value then market down 20% for a limited time sale is always the most compelling offering as we match the price with our perceived value and believe we’re getting a good deal on a product of higher merit. The cards are stacked against us. “What should we price it at?” asked Jobs. “If you listen to the pundits, we’re going to price it at under $1000, which is code for $999.” He put a giant “$999” up on the screen and left it there for ages before finally going on. “I am thrilled to announce to you that the iPad pricing starts not at $999,” said Jobs, “but at just $499.” On-screen, the $999 price was crushed by a falling “$499.”- Intuit. All it takes for us to fall for this perceptual illusion is setting the price high and slashing it closer to where we intuitively believe the price to be. We’re so vulnerable to these illusions and this is one of many.

We designed it into our collective subconscious.

The unspoken truth is Designers are unaware of their roll in this grand value system. We innately know how branding functions both physically in a products characteristics and graphically in how its packaged and marketed. We subconscious understand the structures that build value. We can innately assign a designed value to the perceived value of the good or service. Without knowing it consciously we assign a graphical, industrial value to the product based on how we perceive its value. The target market segment is always imparted from a designers biases. This system slowly evolves and morphs over time as our societies emergent structures of value evolve.

What designers need to know is that they’re directly altering the objective perception of the product, designers need to understand the theory of mind value associations because they hold the keys to altered perception. Whats coming next is a toolkit specifically designed to help designers understand how people perceive value, although we all have a innate sense of how our value systems work, we should know how they’re formed altered and guided. This can help designers and businesses alike build the correct perception of value into their products helping them to gain the largest possible margin on the product and also leverage this capability to alter the collective perception to create subconscious superiority biases and create objectively higher quality experiences for customers. It’s a brave new world of Objective experience design.

This is a work in progress from Intuitive Dynamic. If you’d like to contribute to our mission please reach out.

This is the first of a series on the future, green technology, and optimism.

Good morning.

“Its Saturday, November 22nd, 2071” The speaker calls. “ You have no appointments, the air quality is clear, it will be sunny with a high of 16. Have a wonderful day”

Your automatic blinds whir, your lamps flicker on, outside is a bright cold blue sky, the birds are chasing one another on your garden terrace, you look outside to a city covered in greenery, electric cars whir past silently, wild mills turn effortlessly in the distance.

“Hey Axa,” you exclaim, read me the news. “In the news today, U.N world climate summit publishes annual report, stating that global C02 has stabilized at 450 ppm, Senior advisor to the prime minister on environment Gloria Stadler spoke today, “Our carbon capture systems are working far better than expected. We will begin exporting synthetic petroleum to the U.A.E for bio-plastic production…..”

A dull “boom” interrupts Axa’s reading. Ringing down into your apartment. A supersonic plasma jet passes overhead. You smile and remember your 20’s. When you thought that life was over, when everything felt so lost, you couldn’t have known that everything was going to be alright, how could you?

The time to grieve is over.

We’ve been basking in our despair, haven’t we? the recurring theme Armageddon is exhausting. It’s degrading and down right destructive. Our grandparents were optimists, modernists and dreamers. Even in the swings of the Nuclear age, an age of terror and destruction on a scale never before seen, somehow, they envisioned a beautiful glorious future.

While it might feel like there are more issues then ever before, that humanity is pushed to the brink, I would argue that’s a deception. Our algorithmic media is designed to upset you, to make you believe that the world is falling apart. Digital media connects us to every terrible event and struggle on the planet and makes it our own struggle. We’re inundated with terrible news. Every problem becomes a personal problem, every vengeance our own. Humans aren’t designed to live this way, we’re empathetic and social creatures. This constant barrage of negativity is for a profit, and it’s driving more and more people into a depression. Hopelessness has become not only acceptable, but the dominant mode of being.

Refuse to be hopeless.

Look what we’ve accomplished in 100 years, it’s miraculous, from the horses and wagon’s to space shuttles. We gave power to the world, we’ve fed billions, we’ve raised the species out of poverty, we’ve given a higher quality of life to more people than has ever been seen in the history of our species. We’ve connected the world, cured disease, stopped meaningless wars, and built glorious societies which help one another and provide freedom to all.

We’ve accomplished so much, we have so much to be proud of, our grandparents have left us an incredible legacy, it’s now up to us to carry that legacy to its fulfillment.

What does the future hold?

We’re already on our way. Solar has just reached its most affordable milestone, 55$ / Megawatt, that's 0.03C / Watt. cheaper than all other sources of energy in history. Fossil fuels including coal are now expensive and uneconomical, the energy transition is well underway. Within the next 5 years most automakers will be phasing out combustion engines and moving to electric cars as their entire lineup. Scientists at the Wuhan University have invented an Electric Plasma Jet Engine, laying the groundwork for carbon neutral aviation. Recently the largest central board of global freight shipping announced massive divestments from fossil fuels and a multi billion dollar innovation fund to build Hydrogen powered freight transporters. Even British Petroleum one of the largest fossil fuel producers in the world has announced their divestment from fossil fuels. Tesla Battery day showed how in the next two years they will be able to build terawatt (trillion-Watt) Scale battery production plants, their new battery architecture is extremely ecofriendly compared to previous generations of Li-Ions and are 50% cheaper than existing cells, meaning that for virtual power plants (Grids of homeowners who generate solar electricity and sell it to the grid.) Will be 50% less expensive and much more accessible.

Overnight it seems the world is making the transition to renewables. But what does this future actually look like? Imagine a world where energy is virtually free, we’ve created enough capacity from wind and solar that the price of energy becomes virtually 0$. What could we accomplish? Imagine that we can harvest and mine resources sustainably, by mining with electricity under the ground, leaving the surrounding ecosystem intact. Imagine that we can make batteries without toxic or rare materials. Imagine that the internet of things is connected across the globe optimizing fleets of autonomous machines that harvest our food and transport our resources. Imagine a world where every man woman and child lives comfortably, with access to education, healthcare, and prosperity. Imagine that with that access our population actually peaks and falls, and humanity retracts to a 3 billion member species, finally living in natural equilibrium with the earth, imagine that vast tracks of our earth are re-wilded and nature comes roaring back.

This is our future, whether you believe in it or not. The economic and social engines to create this change began 10 years ago, and now they are beginning to take shape. It’s up to us now to imagine a glorious future, one where we spread the species out amongst the stars, live in balance with the earth and each other and built a society which can last for millenniums.

There is so much to look forward to. Our future is glorious.

Imagine for a moment,

You’re carrying a box into your building, your hands are full, it’s just you. There’s nobody else around to help. You come up to the security door, your key-fob is in your pocket, you’ve got to grab it, but your hands are full. So you put down the box, push the key-fob against the reader, press the wheelchair door opener, wait for the door, and then you’re in.

But what if, when you walked up to the door, it recognizes your key-fob from further away, the door opens automatically and you can walk right in?

The experience of holding that box is a temporary disability, you can’t perform a simple task, “getting into your building” Because of it. By designing for this impermanent disability you would make getting in and out of your building easier for those with mobility needs, parkinsons, seniors, or anyone with their hands full.

By designing for disability, we make life better for everybody.

You’ve got a product. Where’s your box?

What could keep a user from easily completing this task? How could you change it to make it better for them and everyone?

According to Rohan Mishra (2018) Universal design relies on designing for the outlier, not the average. If the outlier (anyone with a disability) can use the website or application easily and enjoyably, then everyone else will also be able to use it! Perhaps even more efficiently and enjoyably.

Empathy is deeply relevant on our quest to build more accessible products, so, what if you applied your empathy to the disability instead of personas and user maps? Instead, you can probe your product, how could it be hard to use? Could it confuse someone easily? If you’ve never seen the product before, could you quickly understand and interact with it? Does it meet the guidelines for those with autism, dyslexia, low vision or hearing loss? Could someone with limited motor control use your product? What could block people from using it?

Temporary Disability and Adaptations:

Dynamic adaptations are when you hold the box, but you’ve got your keys in your back pocket, so you press your butt against the sensor and press you butt against the door open button to get in.

The designers who created the system never saw this coming.

It’s up to us designers to anticipate these adaptations so that we can incorporate better solutions into our designs. I couldn’t imagine the designers of your buildings entry expected the circumstances that plague its users. By designing for disability you can predict these circumstances and ensure that users do not have to make adaptations, because the experience is as user friendly as possible from the get go.

“Designing for inclusivity “” reflects how people really are. All humans are growing, changing, and adapting to the world around them every day. We want our designs to reflect that diversity.” — Microsoft Inclusive Design.

Outlier Audit (Anticipating Temporary Disabilities)

Here’s several probes you can apply to your product to ensure that it is a Universally usable product. These probs will help you craft an audit of your product, it will help you understand the outliers, and build a truly accessible design. Each probe is designed to help you empathize with the outlier.

1. Where has a user created a unique bypass?
2. Where are users failing to use your system?
3. Where does it take more time for users to proceed?
4. Is there a tolerance for error, or do users get stuck and can’t get out?
5. Where did your user adapt to your product?

Ruthlessly explore how and where your product can fail, empathize deeply with your users, even the smallest detail you take for granted can be a stumbling point for someone. Break down your product and scrutinize every choice.

Working to not disrupting subconscious rhythms

We only have a limited amount of attention, when we interact with a product or service our focus is either there or somewhere else completely, a seemingly infinite numbers of factors can distract us from the task at hand. When we don’t habitually know how to interact with a product, it interrupts our subconscious which can often be annoying and agitating. When re-designing for inclusivity, its imperative to be able to bridge a persons existing abilities to the new experience, this makes it easy, and enjoyable.

To better understand users subconscious rhythms you can conduct a covert user test on your product. Watching how people interact with your product in the wild is the only way to understand how they learn and adapt to your product and where they fail as well. Watch for the box.

Personas fail designers.

Designers often create generalized research-based “personas” to remind themselves who they are designing for. It helps keep the design relevant to the user’s needs. The limitation of personas is that real people rarely fit into such neat cookie-cutter archetypes.

There’s a high degree of arrogance when we try to take human nature and condense into a sliding 1–5 bar of how outgoing and likeable a fictitious person can be. It’s frankly nearly impossible to imagine ourselves as someone else with a high degree of accuracy, to believe you can is wildly incorrect.

We’ve been wasting our time as designers trying to do what Adam Smith tried to do, take human nature and make it predictable, modern economists know that human nature is wildly chaotic and irrational the vast majority of the time.

You cannot quantify a wild irrational creature.

What you can do is find the box, where people fail. What are their wild solutions that you never expected to see. Look for the outliers, understand the circumstances for the most able bodied and capable and least capable users.

Where do you go from here?

First, stop designing for the average user. Design for everyone by designing for those with disabilities. This way, you not only include those with disabilities, but also everyday people with temporary disabilities.

Second, recognize that you will never understand another person in all their complexity, or even as a generalized persona. Instead, explore what you can know. Observe what your users do. Look for their strengths, weaknesses and adaptations. Consider these to strengthen your design.

The best designs recognize everyones needs first, everything else comes after.

Sources:

• Inclusion Doesn’t Stop at Accessibility
• Microsoft Design

https://uxplanet.org/universal-design-design-for-everyone-61ded4243658

Are you actually in control of your life? You might start off by answering, “Of course I am” who else would be? Well, Hold onto your hat because I’m about to blow your mind. You are two. You are your consciousness, your in control, and you have free will, your the voice in your head. But your not alone in your mind, your subconscious brain is constantly managing your life, making decisions for you, thinking for you, executing your habits and you might think. Okay. But It’s not often in control. Right? Wrong. The dominant mode of being, is subconscious. So what does this mean for you?

How the subconscious controls our lives.

Years are made up of months, which are made up of days, which are made up of hours which are made up on minutes. What you do in each minute compounds overtime, like a rudder on a sailboat in a vast ocean, your daily habits steer the course. They will determine if you reach your destination or become lost in the high seas, each movement of the rudder compounds so you go further on or off course. We are our habits and our lives are dictated by those habits, good or bad. Habits are, habitual, they are inherently subconscious, you don’t have to pay attention when your brushing your teeth, driving down the road, or simply watching TV. Here’s the catch. Your lack of attention lets habits dominate your life. Your brain will do them without you knowing, over and over compelling you to do what it knows to do. This can get quite out of control, because negative habits, bad habits are often rewarding and easy to access. But they push your rudder further and further off course, until your goals and aspirations are far out of sight. The first step to understanding your subconscious mind is to watch it in action.

Watching your mind; How to detect it in action. The first step is to analyze whats making you happy and what is making you anxious and depressed. Introspection is pivotal if you want to watch your mind at work. Think about all the things your addicted too, wether its alcohol, sugar, bad TV, or even doom-scrolling. Pick one bad habit at a time, now in order to see it, we need to disrupt it.

How to disrupt your mind to design your habits; Follow these steps and you will be able to uncover your subconscious mind.

1. Pick a habit, a negative one, for example lets use doom-scrolling as an example.
2. Build a disruptor, with doom-scrolling as an example, download a website blocker and block the websites you endlessly scroll on or websites you find yourself on without even thinking. The habit to visit these sites without conscious effort is deep within your mind.
3. Watch: You’ll visit them. You won’t be conscious of it until the block appears. You’ll start to notice your typing in the URL, or gravitating toward an icon, you’ll notice you try to go there time and time again. Each time you break the habit and force your awareness on it. When you force your awareness on the habit, you begin to break the habit.
4. Awareness and negative association. When your aware of a negative habit, you can apply a negative association. “I just went to visit facebook again? I don’t even like facebook! Why did I go there?” These daily reminders reinforce a negative association breaking those habits down. Within a week, you’ll find you don’t do them anymore.

On a personal note, this method has helped me in the last three months, lose 25-lbs of weight, quit drinking diet sodas, stop eating sugar, exercise everyday and break my addiction to reddit and bad news. There’s an important lesson here too, when you do repeat a bad old habit, don’t feel like you’ve lost. Failure is part of the process, recognizing that you have failed is part of building that strong negative association and is in-fact a victory.

Self help guru’s are always saying, build good new habits and change your life but they never offer any knowledge on how to truly disrupt negative habits, I hope this guide will help you see that your subconscious is in control, allow you to watch it in action, and then design a disruptor to break the habit.

Good luck.

Designmind

Welcome to a practical guide for stimulating neurogenesis, a process inside of the brain in which it builds new connections, strengthens existing ones and generates entirely new neurons. All of these practical guidelines are based firmly in science and were subject to rigorous study.

1. Exercise. Everyday. No excuses. Each and every day we are given 24 hours, it’s not a crazy ask to spend 1/24th. 4.23% of your day exercising. By just devoting 4% of your day to exercise you trigger the brain to begin the process of neurogenesis, this process will persist hours after exercising, helping you to perform as your best possible self.*
2. 10 minutes of meditation daily. In just 0.006% of your entire day your stimulating and strengthening the connections in the pre-frontal cortex. Mindfulness will help you guide your focus, ignore what is unimportant, and balance your mood, it will also stimulate neurogenesis, studies have shown those who meditate daily have a larger pre-frontal cortex.
3. Cut out sugar. Now here’s the thing, sugar is amazing, it tastes amazing, it’s impossible not to love. There will always be a time for a treat. But we have a toxic relationship with sugar in North America on average consuming 100lbs a year of the stuff. From juice, to granola bars, fruit snacks you name it, we’re getting far more than we need. Studies have shown sugar can delay and disrupt brain development. What little we do know about how it affects the adult mind is still up for study. What we do know however, is that sugar disrupts the body’s energy availability systems, and if you disrupt the energy in the body your cognitive function will also be impaired. Remember there is no dietary need for refined sugar, at all. Zilch. So if you can reduce and fuel up with complex carbs and protein, you will have a much more stable energy level throughout the day, and a much healthier liver and pancreas!
4. Live in moderation. Don’t drink too much, don’t eat too much, sleep as much as possible, socialize often. The wisdom of our great grandparents is important. Don’t be tempted to cope with real life stresses with binging one aspect of life. The more in balance you have in life the more balance you cultivate in the brain. Studies around the world have shown centenarians, those who live to be over 100 and are in great cognitive condition, show that they live in moderation and in tight knit social groups.
5. Cultivate a beautiful space. Now that we’re all living at home it can be easier than ever to live in a pile of laundry. But its pivotally important to have a space which is clean and bright and inspiring. Studies have shown that beauty is a key factor in recovery. Having a beautiful environment relax’s you, it lowers your cortisol, which helps aid in your cognition. Living and working in a low stress environment unleashes the creative mind.

I know, this is the monks guide to creativity “Eye roll here.” I know it’s not easy to implement, especially when were stressed out, I know it takes time, time we’re not often granted in our busy lives. But those who followed these guidelines were also our most inventive and world changing leaders. Leaders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Einstein.

Sources:

1* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2018.00052/full

2*https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1074742714001580

3*https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5532289/

4*https://portlandpress.com/biochemsoctrans/article-abstract/31/2/457/63155

5*https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6458291/