Bottlenecks aligning UX design with user psychology

Our fundamental assertion is this: digital innovations must survive the psychological bottlenecks of attention, perception, memory, disposition, motivation, and social-influence if they

David C Evans

Bottlenecks

Aligning UX Design with User Psychology

David C Evans

Kenmore, Washington, USA

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Prologue: Memetic Fitness

In this series of essays, we seek a better understanding of why some digital innovations and

experiences engage us deeply and spread widely, and why others do not, drawing upon the lessons of

100 years of psychological science

Our fundamental assertion is this: digital innovations must survive the psychological bottlenecks

of attention, perception, memory, disposition, motivation, and social-influence if they are to

proliferate Our receptivity to your inventions in this way determines whether we engage with them

and recommend them to others—or not

Who are we? We are your customers, your users, and your audience You are entrepreneurs,

designers, developers, publishers, and advertisers This series is only worth reading if we can talkwith you directly in a first-person plural voice But this is the usability feedback you always dreamed

of, because we are also dedicated students of psychology Perhaps you were too busy coding in yourdorm room or even dropping out to raise venture funding to fully digest this body of theory But if youread on, it’s because you now realize that our psychological receptivity to your offerings is the

difference between success and failure For just as chemistry is the science behind good cooking,psychology is the science behind good design

The key lesson of this piece is that our nervous systems are radically bottlenecked, and the retinae

of our eyes are only the first of several constrictions Our capacity for memes is wide and deep, but it

is filled through a tiny pipette, one at a time We are built this way for our protection We can’t afford

to have our brains colonized by memes that take more than they give Offsetting the sheer number ofmemes in the information age is our supremely adapted ability to ignore things that, in our words,suck Our psychological bottlenecks are simultaneously the challenge you must overcome to succeedand our protection from exploitation

Key Point

Who are we? We are your customers, your users, and your audience You are entrepreneurs,

designers, developers, publishers, and advertisers This series is only worth reading if we can talkwith you directly in a first-person plural voice

So let’s begin A meme , if we may define it properly for you, is an idea, an invention, a particle of

culture ranging from the simplest to the most complex, whose diffusion through a population can be

observed You are probably familiar with this word, but its original meaning went far beyond LOLcats and political gaffes to encompass almost everything you are involved in creating The term wasborn in this 1976 passage by sociobiologist Richard Dawkins, which is worth reading in detail:

[A]ll life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities The gene, the DNA

molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our own planet There may beothers If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend tobecome the basis for an evolutionary process…

I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged… The new soup is the soup of humanculture We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural

transmission, or a unit of imitation “Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a

monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I

abbreviate mimeme to meme … Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes

fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches Just as genes propagate themselves in thegene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves inthe meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process that, in the broad sense, can be

called imitation i

Endowing the term meme with the weight that Dawkins intended (he went on to discuss the memes

of entire religions), ii we will use it to refer to any invention or work product in whose proliferationyou are invested This may be your app, your web site, your bot, your game, your blog, your design,your interface, your tweet, your newsletter, your movie, your book, your song All the ads, logos,charts, infographics, tools, reports, spreadsheets, and “solutions” you’ve ever made for your company

or your clients Include too your digital identity, your posts, your pictures, your dating profile, andyour résumé

In the past, few of you could afford to spread your memes through the scarce and expensive

communications channels like TV, radio, recording studios, and publishing houses The bottleneckswere in media then, but not anymore Because the internet iii reaches us all and launching memes

through it is easy and inexpensive, it has not only devalued the old broadcast channels, but it has

caused an explosion of content Look at just one platform, smartphone apps, where by 2015 therewere 1.6 million apps on Google Play, 1.4 million in the Apple App Store, and by some estimates,over 9 million apps and web sites on the Facebook Developer Platform iv This has pushed the

bottlenecks out to us, the end users, whose nervous systems must play a much larger role in separatingthe meaning from the noise

But history, even ancient history, has repeatedly witnessed such explosions of innovation, andscholars are quite familiar with what happens as they run their course Studying early multicellular

life in ancient shale fossils, archaeologist Stephen Jay Gould described what he called the Cambrian explosion This was a brief period 570 million years ago when evolution burst forth with the most

numerous, interesting, fancy, and bizarre animal phyla our planet has ever seen (Figure I ) “This was

a time of unparalleled opportunity.” Gould wrote, “Nearly anything could find a place Life was

radiating into empty space and could proliferate at logarithmic rates…in a world virtually free ofcompetition.” v

Figure 1 An example of an early phyla in the Cambrian explosion that later went extinct.

But what happened shortly afterward? Most phyla promptly went extinct, except the few

vertebrates and arthropods we know today Gould argued that those that survived made it through keyecological bottlenecks, whereas most did not

Fast forward to the Facebook epoch, and Cameron Marlow, who pioneered Facebook’s data

science team, referred to the same Cambrian explosion to describe the history of apps on the

Facebook platform (Figure 2 ) vi Mere months after this niche opened in 2007, developers launchedhundreds of thousands of apps and games on it But almost as quickly as they were created, most

“died” for lack of attention and use, and only a few proliferated and dominated

Figure 2 The explosion of apps on the Facebook platform.

Gould may have been looking at prehistoric sea bugs, but he saw a larger pattern when he notedthat “rapid establishment and later decimation dominates all scales, and seems to have the generality

of a fractal pattern.” vii Indeed, history has shown this metapattern to be true of the early World WideWeb (ultimately dominated by AOL, Yahoo!, and Lycos), social networking (Facebook), productivitysuites (Microsoft Office), blog platforms (Wordpress), music streaming (iTunes), video streaming(YouTube), messaging apps (Skype, WeChat), and smartphone operating systems (Android, Apple)

viii As such, there is every reason to expect that “rapid establishment and later decimation” will berepeated among the platforms that are just emerging: bots and chatbots on messaging and voice

platforms, in-car infotainment systems, the internet of things, and augmented-reality content

This is why you must understand your users, and the psychological bottlenecks we employ toensure that we expend our time and energy only on useful memes The memes that are optimized forreceptivity will go on to dominate, while those that are misaligned with human nature will be selected

against and ultimately go extinct, suffering the silent, ignored death of most digital inventions.

Dawkins’ analogy, that memes are to culture as genes are to heredity, also helps to understandwhy you put so much effort into your inventions, and what your essential challenge is You likelyalready know what it means to strive for genetic fitness: spreading your genes through the population

by amassing resources, attracting a mate, raising offspring, and caring for relatives Dawkins’ analogysuggests that you work just as hard to maximize your memetic fitness: spreading your inventions

through the culture by attracting attention, retaining it, and encouraging your audience to pass the

word You cultivate your fitness in two separate ecologies like a gambler playing at two tables In adigital age, fitness may be defined as much by fame as by family, and you make that choice with howyou allocate every hour of your day

But there is yet another, often overlooked, way by which Dawkins’ idea of memes helps to

understand the diffusion of innovation His notion packetizes your inventions into parcels of energy

and meaning, just the way genes packetized our understanding of heritable traits This helps

enormously in tracing the transmission of your work, just as it helped to trace the transmission ofgenes from parent to offspring

As such, in this piece we will conceptually follow your meme as it leaves a screen and hits theeye, penetrates a brain, is imbued with meaning, and is retained and used—or alternatively—

overlooked, discarded, and abandoned We will explore the forces that determine whether your memematches our dispositions and meets our needs and is ultimately recommended to others—or is

irrelevant, a disappointment, and detracted from mercilessly in our online comments Ultimately, thesurvival of your meme through these bottlenecks is what determines your memetic fitness and whetheryour work will leap “from brain to brain” and across the globe

Key Point

Digital innovations must survive the psychological bottlenecks of attention, perception, memory,disposition, motivation, and social-influence if they are to proliferate Just as chemistry is the

science behind good cooking, psychology is the science behind good design

If the bottlenecked user is our fundamental assertion, then our fundamental assumption is that thereexist many good memes worth spreading that fail due to avoidable misalignments with our nervoussystems We are not talking about all the buggy apps and ranting blogs that we kill off quickly with

“user-selection” before they can make further demands on our attention We’re talking about the

myriad of fundamentally viable memes that, through some shortcoming or flaw in their design, fail topass through the bottlenecks that we use to block out the noise If you are the author of a truly usefulmeme, by the end of this series you will learn many concrete ways to improve your work so that weare more receptive to it

But we offer you our thoughts without altruism The memes that you build make up the digital

tools and environments we use to do our own life’s work, provide for ourselves and our loved ones,connect with our peers, and enjoy the creativity of others or express our own creativity Your memesundergird our mortal existence from birth to death Only when your business goals satisfy our lifegoals will success be assured and mutual

If nothing else, we hope to evoke both innovative new directions in design and fruitful hypothesesfor research Where we have permission, we will refer to actual research studies that we’ve

participated in, sometimes commissioned by tech giants, other times by start-ups, but always on

issues where the stakes were high And to other users like us, we point out that a meme carrier can instantly become a meme creator , so any of us who has ever tried to raise awareness for anything,

from a college app to a killer app, stands to learn from this exercise as well

With That, We Organized this Book as Follows

If your meme successfully passes through…

Part I

…the bottlenecks of attention…

foveal acuity (Chapter 1 ) - the tiny area on our retinae required to detect symbols, color and

depth

task orientation (Chapter 2 ) - matching whether we have a goal or no goal

attentional focus (Chapter 3 ) - the exclusive direction of our attention

Part II

…the bottlenecks of perception…

Gestalt perception (Chapter 4 ) - instant, pre-cognitive inferences of meaning and function depth perception (Chapter 5 ) - the realistic appearance of dimensionality

motion perception (Chapter 6 ) - the realistic appearance of movement

Part III

…the bottlenecks of memory…

working memory capacity (Chapter 7 ) - the rapid decay and displacement of information signal detection (Chapter 8 ) - ignoring the noise to attend to the signals

long-term memory and habituation (Chapter 9 ) - ignoring things we’ve already processed elaborative encoding (Chapter 10 ) - failing to recall information that could not be re-activated

Part IV

…the bottlenecks of disposition…

personality (Chapter 11 ) - matching our stable preferences and tendencies

development (Chapter 12 ) - addressing the existential questions of our life stage

needs (Chapter 13 ) - delivering safety, belongingness, status or creativity

fun (Chapter 14 ) - delivering satisfaction and mirth

Part V

…the bottlenecks of motivation…

schedules of reinforcement (Chapter 15 ) - timing rewards to maximize engagement

escalating commitment (Chapter 16 ) - slowly increasing the give and take

approach-avoidance conflict (Chapter 17 ) - matching whether we are rushing in or backing off routes to persuasion (Chapter 18 ) - matching whether we are thinking or feeling

Part VI

…and the bottlenecks of social influence…

social capital (Chapter 19 ) - risking our reputation to make a recommendation

group polarization (Chapter 20 ) – extreme opinions in online discussion

social influence (Chapter 21 ) – actually being influenced by a recommendation

Part VII

…then we will be maximally receptive to it and reward you with a viral cascade that has the

potential to reach every last human on the web.

receptivity (Chapter 22 ) - how our willingness to forward matters more than our connectedness six degrees of recommendation (Chapter 23 ) - the possibility of 100% network penetration

Notes

i Dawkins, R (1976) The Selfish Gene Oxford University Press Pp 191–192 Author’s

emphasis

ii Dawkins, R (1976) cont “Consider the idea of God We do not know how it arose in the

meme pool Probably it originated many times by independent ’mutation’ In any case, it is veryold indeed How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great musicand great art Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that ’survival value’ heredoes not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool The

question really means: What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and

penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme poolresults from its great psychological appeal.”

iii We will not capitalize the word internet in this work for the same reason we don’t capitalize

the word water; some may lay claim to certain parts of the global flow and insist on a propernoun, but those partitions are as meaningless to memes as the names of rivers are to water

molecules The Associated Press stopped capitalizing internet in April, 2016 See

http://www.poynter.org/2016/ap-style-change-alert-dont-capitalize-internet-and-web-any-more/404664/

iv Statista (2016) Number of apps available in leading app stores as of July 2015 Retrieved

from available-in-leading-app-stores/

http://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-v Gould, S.J (1989) Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History Norton P.

228

vi Marlow, C (2009, May 19) System design and community culture: The role of rules and

algorithms in shaping human behavior Panel presentation at the International Conference forWeb and Social Media, San Jose, California

vii Gould, S.J (1989) Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History Norton P.

208

viii Bump, P (2014) From Lycos to Ask Jeeves to Facebook: Tracking the 20 most popular web

sites every year since 1996 Washington Post Retrieved October, 2016 from

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-tracking-the-20-most-popular-web-sites-every-year-since-1996/?tid=trending_strip_5

Part I: The Bottlenecks of Attention

Chapter 1:​ Foveal Acuity

Chapter 2:​ Task Orientation

Chapter 3:​ Attentional Focus

Part II: The Bottlenecks of Perception

Chapter 4:​ Gestalt Perception

Chapter 5:​ Depth Perception

Chapter 6:​ Motion Perception

Part III: The Bottlenecks of Memory

Chapter 7:​ Working Memory

Chapter 8:​ Signal Detection

Chapter 9:​ Long-Term Memory

Chapter 10:​ Encoding and Retrieval

Part IV: The Bottlenecks of Disposition

Chapter 11:​ Personality

Chapter 12:​ Developmental Stages

Chapter 13:​ Needs

Chapter 14:​ Fun

Part V: The Bottlenecks of Motivation

Chapter 15:​ Schedules of Reinforcement Chapter 16:​ Escalating Commitment Chapter 17:​ Approach Avoidance

Chapter 18:​ Routes to Persuasion

Chapter 18:​ Routes to Persuasion

Part VI: The Bottlenecks of Social Influence

Chapter 19:​ Social Capital

Chapter 20:​ Group Polarization

Chapter 21:​ Social Influence

Part VII: Receptivity

Chapter 22:​ Receptivity Thresholds

Chapter 23:​ Six Degrees of Recommendation

Epilogue

Index

About the Author and About the Technical Reviewer About the Author

David C Evans

is senior manager of customer research at Microsoft, where he influences

the design and positioning of Office 365, Cortana, Windows 10, Skype,

Outlook, Yammer, and the Office Graph He managed GfK’s retail

research for Microsoft in 44 countries, established a psychographic

segmentation at Allrecipes.com , and ran the usability firm Psychster

Inc in Seattle, where he consulted for Amazon and the States of

Washington and Oregon His whitepapers, co-written with enterprise

clients, have appeared on TechCrunch, Mashable, and MediaPost , and he

is a frequent guest on American Public Media’s Marketplace Dr Evans

teaches graduate courses in usability testing and the psychology of digital

media at the University of Washington He holds his B.A from Grinnell

College and his Ph.D in Social Psychology from the University of Iowa

About the Technical Reviewer

Peter Meyers

is a cognitive psychologist and the resident marketing scientist at Moz, a

Seattle-based search marketing software company He spent the past four

years building research tools to monitor Google and trying to understand

how the internet impacts the way we consume information, share content,

and ultimately make decisions

Part I

The Bottlenecks of Attention

Kenmore, Washington, USA

You worked hard to digitize your ideas and send them our way in the form of light and sound But theymust be encoded into neural impulses for your app to work and your business model to succeed From

a business perspective, a meme that never enters a brain is the tree that falls in the proverbial emptyforest—it doesn’t exist

To cross the organic boundary into our nervous systems, the first requirement is that it must fall inour line of sight That statement may be painfully obvious to you, but it is an even bigger pain point

for us Your meme will fail if the light from it only reaches our peripheral vision where we can

neither read nor see color

Several billion-dollar examples instantly leap to mind: navigating while driving, video calling ,and seeing display ads on web sites To illustrate, most if not all of the point-of-interest icons

designed for this dashboard navigational display are difficult or impossible to be seen or appreciatedwhile driving (Figure 1-1) It was someone’s job (maybe yours) to make these memes, like the

hamburger icon, or Korean, Italian, and American flags for different ethnic restaurants, but they maynever actually enter a driver’s brain in the moment when they might be of use

Figure 1-1 Dashboard display.

Consider closely the back wall of our eyeballs and you’ll understand what you’re up against Our

retinae have a lot of neurons to catch the light, but the cone-shaped neurons that let us see color and the detailed edges of characters are concentrated in one tiny area, called the fovea , which is

opposite our pupils (Figure 1-2) i Our fovea are amazingly sensitive when we point them your way:

we can detect whether or not you’re holding a quarter from 90 yards off But if we’re looking just to

the right or left of you, our acuity plummets to only 30% of what it is when we look straight at you A

little further off, our acuity drops to 10% ii

Figure 1-2 Diagram of the fovea iii

What that means for your meme is that we cannot read it if we’re looking a mere six degrees to theleft or right At the typical distance to a screen, we’re blind to symbolic information a mere five

characters away from where we are focused Stare at the period at the end of this sentence and countthe number of words you can make out past it Not too many Perhaps we could read your meme in ourperipheral vision if you increased your font size But you’d have to increase it 400% if we’re lookingsix degrees off, 3000% if we’re looking 20 degrees off, and 9000% if we’re looking 30 degrees off.Good luck doing that on a smartphone screen or a dashboard display

Figure 1-3 Technology adoption rates. iv

Why would this be? Many factors could be to blame, but the 20 degree offset or more betweenwebcams and the eyes of the person we are talking with might be one Because no one yet has

invented a webcam, native or peripheral, that sits right behind the monitor, only on top or to the side

of it, we never get to look directly into the gaze of our friends and family members while we talk

(Figure 1-4) Nor do they look into ours, because to do so, we’d both have to look directly into thecameras, at which point we could no longer make out each other’s faces The problem persists even

on smaller devices because our foveal acuity is so narrow (Figure 1-5)

Figure 1-4 Sensitivity to gaze direction from Chen (2002) Original caption: “The contour curves mark how far away in degrees of

visual angle the looker could look above, below, to the left, and to the right of the camera without losing eye contact The three curves indicate where eye contact was maintained more than 10%, 50%, and 90% of the time The percentiles are the average of sixteen observers The camera is at the graph origin.” v

Figure 1-5 (a) The typical experience with video calls in which, when we look at others’ faces, we see them looking away (b)

Looking into the camera directs our gaze appropriately, but now we can no longer make out each other’s faces This artificial view is shown in most advertising for video-calling services.

Thus we’ve had face-to-face calling for over 85 years, but never quite eye-to-eye calling The best that the top video-calling applications have ever given us is a view of our friends’ eyes looking

away from us as we look at them (although interestingly, their ads never show it this way) This

mismatch with human nature has proved to have a very slow rate of adoption, far slower than to-voice calling did before it

voice-Or consider ads on web sites By 2016, U.S companies alone were spending over $30 billion oninternet display ads, vi over half of which didn’t display on a screen long enough to be viewable (half

of their pixels were rendered for less than a second) vii And of those that did, a vast majority werehitting our peripheral retina , where we can’t make them out as we read the content elsewhere on the

page We need only point our fovea five characters to the left or right, doing whatever it is we came

to do, and your ads were lost on us Let the sheer waste of that and the lack of ROI sink in as a result

of this incredibly powerful psychological bottleneck Not to mention the inaccuracy of reach

statistics, which only measure whether the ad was queried from a server, ignoring whether it landed

on a fovea, or even a peripheral retina This is not the path to memetic fitness, let alone marketingsuccess and profitability

And then there are our cars, the next big battleground for tech dominance Whoever prevails inthis context must find design solutions to accommodate the fact that we must point our fovea forwardout of the windshield while we drive This is because our fovea are also required for depth

perception, something our peripheral vision is incapable of, and thus many states mandate we keepthem on the stop-and-go traffic ahead The problem is that you need to rethink the traditional monitor.Positioned currently where the radio traditionally sits, or on a smartphone held in a driver’s hand, it

is so far away from our foveal vision that we expose ourselves to real danger in trying to view any ofyour memes shown there (Figure 1-6) In a 2014 report, the U.S National Transportation Safety

Board listed “visual” and “manual” distractions on their “most wanted list” of critical changes toreduce accidents and save lives (in addition to “cognitive” distractions, which we’ll return to later).They specifically referenced “the growing development of integrated technologies in vehicles” andits potential to contribute to “a disturbing growth in the number of accidents due to distracted

operators” viii

Figure 1-6 Dashboard display challenge Most design elements on dashboard displays will be unreadable by drivers focusing on the

traffic ahead unless they are projected onto the windshield ix

Certainly, if self-driving cars proliferate, then the entire interior of cars can be redesigned and

turned into a media room or a productivity center (which will spark its own platform for competing

memes) The speed by which this technology proliferates will depend on the incidence of fatal

crashes, like the 2016 accident by a self-driving Tesla, and on whether drivers will legally be

allowed to let their attention wander x

But for those of us who continue to drive, whether out of economics or the pace of change, our

retinal anatomy would predict that our windshields will become our monitors, where your digital

memes will be displayed Clearly, they must not compete with the things we need to see outside the

car, but instead augment them The first memes to warrant display on windshields will make road

hazards like falling rocks and crossing deer more visible, forewarn us of tight curves, and signal

slowdowns in traffic After the first wave of safety memes is established, next will come

convenience memes : those that enhance street signs and outline upcoming freeway exits Finally,

with a considerable testing, providing jobs for memetic engineers, the third wave of commercial

memes will arise on our windshields: digital billboards pointing the way to gas stations and

restaurants, specially adapted for the windshield Commercial logos have been displayed on GPS

units and “heads-up” displays already for some time; maybe on windshields they will finally hit our

fovea and enter our brains

Is there a limit to the content that can be projected on a windshield? Of course there is But

scarcity is the foundation of value, so this only drives up the price for a placement How can

legislators help? Not by banning windshield displays altogether, but by establishing a data-driven

regulatory agency, in the United States perhaps under the National Transportation Safety Board

(NTSB) or the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which approves memes

like the FDA approves drugs Broadly, windshield memes must be shown empirically to…

Increase drivers’ safety, not imperil it

Improve our driving, not impair it

Augment reality, not distract from it

As you see, our psychological constrictions matter, starting with the nerves in our eyeballs But

this is only the beginning, since our attentional capacity is just as laser-thin

Notes

i Jonas, J B., Schneider, U., Naumann, G.O.H (1992) Count and density of human retinal photoreceptors

Archive for Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology, 230 (6), 505–510.

ii Anstis, S M (1974) A chart demonstrating variations in acuity with retinal position Vision Research, 14

Retrieved from http://anstislab.ucsd.edu/2012/11/20/peripheral-acuity/

iii Used with permission from Cellfield Canada Inc

iv Adapted from Felton, N (2008, February 10) Consumption spreads faster today (graphic) The New York Times.

Retrieved from

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/02/10/opinion/10op.graphic.ready.htmlSee also Rainie, L & Zickuhr, K (2010) Video calling and video chat Pew Research Center’s Internet &

American Life Project Retrieved from

id=503386&CFID=864400319&CFTOKEN=50601798 Copyright ACM Inc Used with permission

vi eMarketer (2016, January 11) US digital display ad spending to surpass search ad spending in 2016 Retrievedfrom http://www.emarketer.com/Article/US-Digital-Display-Ad-Spending-Surpass-Search-Ad-Spending-2016/1013442

vii Loechner, T (2013, Oct 30) 54% of digital ads aren’t viewable, and even ‘viewability’ is in a black box

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/212460/54-of-digital-ads-arent-viewable-and-even-view.html

viii National Transportation Safety Board (2014) NTSB most wanted list: Critical changes needed to reduce

transportation accidents and save lives Retrieved from

http://www.ntsb.gov/safety/mwl/Documents/2014/03_MWL_EliminateDistraction.pdf

ix Evans, G A (Photographer) (2016, November)

x Stoll, J D (2016, July 22) Tesla autopilot crash shouldn’t slow self-driving development, regulator says

http://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-autopilot-crash-shouldnt-slow-self-driving-development-regulator-says-1469200956

Kenmore, Washington, USA

To place your meme precisely where we will be directing our fovea , and thus our attention, the firstidea that likely occurs to you is to “learn our goals” and you would not be wrong “Goals serve adirective function,” psychologists Locke and Latham wrote in 2002, summarizing 35 years of research

on the topic “[T]hey direct attention and effort toward relevant activities and away from irrelevant activities.” i But we want you to take a step back even from that The first thing you must do

goal-is learn whether or not we even have a goal If we do, then any meme that interrupts us will be

ignored as a frustrating distraction If we do not, we will be receptive to unsolicited and unexpectedmemes, although we will resist any effortful concentration required to engage with you

Key Point

To meet our goals as users of your meme, the first thing you must do is learn whether or not we

even have a goal

In 1991, psychologists were given a research instrument as important to them as the telescope was to

Galileo: functional magnetic resonance imagery fMRI allowed them to see small changes in

cerebral blood flow as we think or feel different things For the first time, neuroscientists could

examine the brain while we were awake and alive rather than anaesthetized or dead So they beganasking us to perform specific tasks to learn which areas of the brain were responsible for executingthem

By 2014, Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist on the front lines of the imaging revolution, summarized

“one of the biggest neuroscientific discoveries of the last twenty years.” ii This was the existence of

two fundamental patterns of activity in the cortex : the task-positive network and the task-negative network (Figure 2-1) According to Levitin…

the task-positive network is

“the state you’re in when you’re intensely focused on a task such as doing your taxes, writing areport, or navigating through an unfamiliar city This stay-on-task mode is… [one] dominantmode of attention, and it is responsible for so many high-level things we do that researchershave named it ‘the central executive.’”

the task-negative network is

“the mind-wandering mode…a special brain network that supports a more fluid and nonlinear

mode of thinking…[in which] thoughts seem to move seamlessly from one to another, there’s amerging of ideas, visual images, and sounds of past, present, and future.”

Figure 2-1 Brain regions in the (a) task-positive and (b) task-negative networks. iii

Essentially, fMRI studies showed first that no matter what problem they asked us to solve or task

they asked us to perform, a similar network of pathways was activated This was the task-positive

network , including the pre-frontal, medial, and occipital lobes and other loci involved in processing

language, symbols, and mental models

The task-negative network was discovered more or less by accident, according to neuroscientist

Matthew Lieberman iv During most neuroimaging sessions, the researchers didn’t slide us in and out

of the fMRI between tasks, but instead, they left us in there with the machine running During thedowntime, when we were listening to the hum of the electromagnets and solving no specific problem,the task-negative network appeared in our brains, and it too was remarkably consistent in its pattern.Our brains were defaulting to a state in which the medial areas deep in our cortex were at work aswell as the hippocampus When asked what we were thinking about, we typically replied we weredaydreaming, remembering, and pondering over social situations

Just like the functioning of our hearts and our kidneys, neuroscientists realized that there is noresting state for the brain We are either solving an advanced symbolic problem like only our speciescan, or daydreaming to consolidate memories, see new connections, and try to understand the peoplearound us

As an inventor and promoter of digital media and experiences, your first objective is to

understand whether we come to you in a task-positive or a task-negative mindset

This is precisely what Allrecipes.com did, the largest community cooking web site in theworld (Figure 2-2) They fielded a survey via a popup window with one question:

If you had to choose just one, which statement below best describes your visit today?

I had a specific goal I knew what I was looking for or hoping to accomplish.

I did not have a specific goal I was exploring and just looking for interesting

information rather than something specific.

Figure 2-2 Task orientation in visits to Allrecipes.com .v

Allrecipes.com found that about 73% of us were task-positive and 27% were task-negative(Figure 2-2) As task-positive users , we were trying to make progress toward a known outcome, and

so we wanted to be efficient and productive We might be trying to figure out, for example, how tomake a pomegranate reduction sauce for a lamb roast As task-negative users , we were passing time,open to ideas, and just being a part of the community We might be, say, getting new ideas in advance

of a holiday, triggering memories of dishes we once loved but forgot, or looking to see what otherswere talking about

But the more important lesson that Allrecipes learned was that task-positive and task-negativevisitors used totally different navigation features of their site (Figure 2-3) Task-positive users among

us tended to use a search field This was attentionally the most economical way for us to get our

reward By contrast, task-negative users tended to browse the body of the site, clicking the pictures,links, and graphics in the hope that we would discover what we didn’t know enough to search for

Figure 2-3 Navigational preferences for Allrecipes.com visitors with a goal or no goal.

The realization that most of its users were task-positive helped Allrecipes.com make muchsmarter decisions about which features to invest in They knew they had to have a very smart searchalgorithm and excellent search returns, since the majority of their users were task-positive However,they could not ignore the minority who were task-negative and clicking links and going down rabbitholes, because these viewers were spending more time on the site and loading a lot more pages andhence more ads

Allrecipes understood also that the mix of task-positive and task-negative users on their site was

a function of their acquisition strategy At the time this survey was conducted, Allrecipes engagedprimarily in search marketing, and so the majority of us were coming in from Google This

predisposed us to being task-positive We knew what we were looking for and we had begun lookingfor it well before arriving on Allrecipes’ domain But later, Allrecipes put out a print magazine at thecheckout aisle in grocery stores This helped bring in more task-negative users who weren’t lookingfor anything in particular, but just wanted to browse cooking content Balancing out the mix of task-orientation of their users with their acquisition marketing was an important way for Allrecipes to bothmeet our needs and overtake Foodnetwork.com as the largest global cooking community

Key Point

When we are positive, we resist intrusions and find them distracting When we are

task-negative, will resist effortful tasks and welcome intrusions

In essence, when we are in a task-positive mode, we point our fovea where we consciously choose

to, in the service of trying to reach our goals, and we actively avoid everything else, which we treat

as an unwanted distraction If a majority of your users are oriented this way, as with many

productivity platforms (Microsoft Office, Slack), you should avoid ad-support as a business modeland instead steer toward a subscription model If you display any ads at all, only do so in search

results, because interstitial ads will perform poorly and be an annoyance Your essential design

strategy is to help us find what we’re looking for Discard the thinking that, “if you build it, we willcome” in favor of, “learn where we’re looking and be waiting.”

But the strategy reverses when we are in a task-negative mode Now we welcome the attentionalintrusions, including advertisements , and we resist expending the effort and concentration needed tosolve things If you’re building a mind-wandering app or web site like Flipboard, Reddit,

Funnyordie, and most news aggregators, fill the real estate with thumbnails, headlines, and links, andload this content endlessly as we scroll down so there is effectively no end to the page (This is theplace for “if you build it, we will come” thinking.) Use machine learning to suggest content that issimilar in category as what we’ve previously clicked (e.g., sports, election coverage) Adopt a

social-marketing strategy where you post this same content elsewhere on the web If you do use

search marketing, optimize to search terms that are more general (e.g., “holiday recipes”) and lessspecific (e.g., “balsamic reduction sauce.”) In your own interface or on your own domain, do not inany way puzzle us with difficult navigation, advanced search forms, lengthy registrations, or anythingthat would require task-positive mental effort On these sites you should follow the advice of

usability guru Steve Krug and “don’t make us think.” vi

The neuroscientist Daniel Levitin writes of the task-positive and task-negative modes, “These twobrain states form a kind of yin-yang: When one is active, the other is not.” Thus to survive this

bottleneck , learn when and how often we are in each mode and adapt your design accordingly vii

Notes

i Locke, E A & Latham, G.P (2002) Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task

motivation American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.

ii Levitin, D J (2014) The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight In The Age of Information

Overload New York: Plume pp 38–39.

iii Gordon, B A., Tse, C.Y., Gratton, G & Fabiani, M (2014) Spread of activation and

deactivation in the brain: Does age matter? Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 6, 288 Retrieved

from

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnagi.2014.00288/

iv Lieberman, M D (2013) Social: Why our brains are wired to connect Crown, New York.

v Evans, D C (2009, August 3) Needs & navigation survey Proprietary study commissioned byAllrecipes.com Images and data used with permission

vi Krug, S (2006) Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability 2nd Ed.

New Riders

vii Levitin, D J (2014) The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight In The Age of Information

Overload New York: Plume pp 38–39.

Kenmore, Washington, USA

Given that our foveal acuity is as narrow as a laser, the first monetizable event in the attention

economy is when we point it toward your meme to the exclusion of all others You must understandthis as an economic transaction: in the face of endless informational demands, we allocate the scarceresource of foveal acuity and attention in the way we hope will be the most rewarding The instant weflex our orbital muscles and look, we become customers to digital advertisers, publishers, and

developers like you And as we begin to consume your memes, you can begin to monetize our

attention

Psychologists have known since the 1960s that goals determine the direction of our gaze In oneexperiment in 1967, Yarbus showed us the painting titled “Unexpected Visitors” by Ilya Repin andasked us to guess the ages of the characters i This is where we looked (Figure 3-1)

Figure 3-1 Eye gaze when guessing age Adapted from Yarbus (1967).

But when he asked us to determine how rich everyone is, this is where we looked (Figure 3-2)

Figure 3-2 Eye gaze when guessing material circumstances Adapted from Yarbus (1967).

And when Yarbus asked us to guess how long the unexpected visitor had been away, this is where

we looked (Figure 3-3)

Figure 3-3 Eye gaze when guessing how long the visitor had been away Adapted from Yarbus (1967).

No question, we voluntarily direct our gaze to different elements of a meme depending on ourinformational goals

The same is true when looking at most content, social media, and storefront web sites As

always, our objective is to grasp the meaning of the page with the least allocation of attentional

resources As such, we tend to scan such pages in a F-shaped pattern , as discovered by usability

expert Jakob Nielsen in 2006 We concentrate our gaze at the top-left corner and penetrate into thebody to read (Figure 3-4) The headline at the top usually meets our miserly goals the best, so that’swhere we look the most, but if we aren’t satisfied, we read lines lower down, hence the F-shape TheF-shape is reversed for languages like Hebrew and Arabic, written right to left, which proves thispattern is a function of our goals

Figure 3-4 Gaze dwell times shown as “heatmaps” reveal an F-shaped pattern From Nielsen (2006). ii

So, the attentional bottleneck isn’t a round pinhole; when you account for common eye

movements, it’s shaped like a capital F What this means for your design, if by chance we’re the first

to tell you, is that on most web sites with left-to-right languages, the lower-right corner is an

attentional desert We just don’t focus our attention there very often We recommend you never putany critical navigational links there, and unfortunately any ads you place there won’t perform verywell either They won’t pass through the bottleneck of gaze Interestingly, if you try to offset our

tendency to ignore that area with brighter colors, it will actually backfire: we’ll simply think it’sanother ad on which we should waste no attention In general, it’s a good idea to design to the F-shaped pattern ; you have to have a really good reason to fight against our expectations Put importantlinks across the top and down the left spine; use a headline What should you put in no-man’s land?Maybe just whitespace

Key Point

On most web sites with left-to-right languages, the lower-right corner is an attentional desert

What happens when our information goals are flat out unmet on a web page and we simply cannot findwhat we’re looking for? The F-shaped gaze pattern gives way to one big blob of hunting around Butthere is something you should learn from our desperate search: it proceeds in three distinct phases

A usability study of the Washington State unemployment statistics site illustrated this nicely Weparticipated in the study during the Great Recession of 2009 when everyone wanted to find job

openings Our task was simply to locate the link that would lead us to them on the site shown in

Figure 3-5, which is how it appeared prior to the re-design

Figure 3-5 Washington State employment statistics site before the re-design , circa 2009.

We began our search in the efficient F-shape , hunting by location more so than by graphics or text(phase one) Unrewarded, we changed our gaze pattern to instead scrutinize all of the icons and othergraphics on the page (phase two) Still not finding it, we changed our strategy again, now readingevery word of every link on the page (phase three) This hierarchical process is very similar to howpsychologists believe we read most text: we scan entire blocks of words first, and if we don’t

comprehend the meaning, we look at words themselves, and if we still don’t comprehend, we look atcharacters iii

On the Washington State unemployment site before the re-design , the best two links to find jobswere those labeled “Job Seekers” and “Occupation Explorer.” But they were both located on the rightside rather than the left, and low enough to be dangerously close to the attentional desert Good

graphics and better word choice would have helped, to be sure, but so would placement on the page.Interviews with participants in the study confirmed that we were unable to find our informationusing the efficient F-shaped scan Instead, the layout forced us all the way to phase-three link-reading,and therefore extracted the maximal attentional cost from us Our gaze dwelled for many seconds onalmost all areas of the page (Figure 3-6) Had the reward been anything less important than jobs inour area (and most memes are), we most likely would not have paid this price We would have

simply left the site It’s always embarrassing to web page designers when, from behind a one-waymirror in a usability test, they see us abandon their work and go to Google to find something that

could have been found from the page we were just looking at You’d be surprised how often that

happens

Figure 3-6 Gaze dwell times for areas of interest (AOI) on the Washington State employment statistics site. iv

You should learn what the gaze pattern is for your meme After the State of Washington did thatfor its unemployment site , this is how they changed it (Figure 3-7) The link to “Employment

Resources” was now in the top left at the epicenter of the F-shaped gaze pattern And in the middlebar of the F, they put an easy pull-down menu where we could specify “I am a job seeker…lookingfor job openings.” It was much easier for us to meet our goals We found our way to the job openings

in a fraction of the time

Figure 3-7 Washington State employment statistics site , circa 2010.

Positioning key content within the F-shaped gaze pattern is a great way to help us meet our goals.But as meme-makers, you have business goals too, and on ad-supported sites, this often means

attracting our attention away from our goals and toward ads or other monetizable content Or thinking

of smartphones , you may find that push notifications are needed to remind us to use your app Datapublished by Quettra in 2016 calculated that 80% of us never use an app again five or more days after

we install it v An animated reminder to which we again orient our attention is often needed to triggeranother usage session

But the psychology of triggering an involuntary orienting response is one you should understandwell and use sparingly, because it further constricts the already narrow bottleneck of our attention

Meme -makers since the inventors of the “pop-up ad ” in the late 1990s have known that memesthat jiggle, flash, or are bright red exploit a loophole in our attentional systems and get us to look at

them regardless of our goals for the moment Recall that the cone-shaped cells in our fovea have the acuity, color sensitivity, and depth perception required to process your meme So what are the rod- shaped cells that dominate the periphery of our retina optimized for? They are best at detecting small

changes in light and motion vi The light from the entire binocular visual field, ranging 100 degrees outfrom the nose temporally to both sides, stimulates the peripheral retina and is processed in the

occipital cortex, where it is stitched into a running conception of our environment This is integratedwith the sounds heard by our ears that are formed into their own neural model in our parietal lobes vii

So, for example, while reading song lyrics on Pandora, we form an image of the entire page, notresolute enough to read it all, but just enough to get a sense for the broader space we’re in We

continually compare new impulses from the eyes and ears to the current neural model, and we aresupremely adapted to ignore things that stay the same, but to orient to things that move (This neuralwiring is common in predatory species like ourselves We are so tuned to movement that we often fail

to notice things that instantly appear or disappear in a phenomenon called change blindness )

Thus, when something in the periphery animates, whether vertically, horizontally, or in apparentproximity to us, that motion violates our neural model and we orient to it The parietal lobe

disengages our attention from whatever it’s currently on, our superior colliculus moves our foveayour direction, and our thalamus re-engages it viii Our heart rates drop briefly and we turn our eyesand heads to allow our nervous systems to encode your meme This is the orienting response

Done well, it’s very effective The cacophony of early popup ads later settled into the horizontal carousel , as seen in Figure 3-8, in which informational slides scroll to the next one automatically,

sometimes with integrated advertisements We orient to this motion even though our task-positivegoals might take us elsewhere on the page, and any of us in a mind-wandering task-negative modewelcomes the unsolicited content

Figure 3-8 A horizontal carousel on SocialPsychology.org.

However, other animations trigger our orienting response in a way that feels out of proportion to

our perceptible benefits With the proliferation of streaming video, many video ads began playingautomatically on the pages we navigated to Or in another example from 2015, one of us remarked thatdesktop notifications for updates of Adobe Reader had been interrupting our attention for ten yearswithout a noticeable change in the software experience (Figure 3-9) Despite these updates beingimportant for security and requiring our approval, many of us made fun of Adobe over this for weeks.Windows 10 later corralled all of these “desktop toast” alerts into an “action center,” removing theanimations and replacing them with a black and white system icon This helped, but in 2016 we werestill awaiting more control over the timing of system updates, one of which had become Windowsitself.

Figure 3-9 Update notification.

Even as we were less often needlessly orienting to desktop notifications, we were seeing evermore alerts on our smartphones The dominant design for these was the bright red dot with a number

in it, sometimes called “the meatball ,” indicating how many new pieces of content the meme-makerswanted us to attend to (Figure 3-10) This was enormously effective at cuing a response to Facebook,LinkedIn, and others, but by 2016, duplicate notifications were appearing on both phones and PCs,and cancelling one did nothing to cancel the others

Figure 3-10 “Meatball” notifications of new content on smartphone (left) and web site (right).

If animation and red colors attract attention, then what’s the problem with more of it, you ask? The

answer is that when we come to perceive them to be a constant in our environment, rather than an

anomaly, they are incorporated into our neural model of the status quo, and we stop orienting to them.

This is a form of habituation and it is the opposite of orienting It is the gradual decrease in our

likelihood to look if we are not rewarded From the time we were monkeys, a rustle in the brancheswould cue us to look, but swaying branches in a swift breeze would be ignored

Key Point

The more you trigger an orienting response with sound and animation, the more the attentional

bottleneck will constrict and we will ignore it

Habituation should concern you very much as a designer and a meme-maker: it means that the

attentional bottleneck constricts even more the more you abuse it And every time you exploit theorienting response, consider how others are too Each time a red dot or bell tone takes our attentionaway from a task-positive activity, like for example using a smartphone navigation app while driving,there are potentially dangerous consequences And this is only compounded when you consider ourcars themselves might be flashing and beeping at us at the same time

That is why good designers know to notify only when we will be reinforced for it The makers ofSlack , a team productivity tool, helped make the @mention feature go mainstream, in which wereceived a special alert when someone mentioned us by @name in a post This helped us orient togroup messages that called us out specifically or gave us an assignment that we did not want to miss.However, some of us began abusing the @channel feature, which sent one of these notices to

everyone following a channel topic Habituation was sure to ensue, so Slack put the brakes on it with

a dialog box that asked if we were sure we wanted everyone to orient to our message (Figure 3-11)

Figure 3-11 Discouragement to send habituating notifications.

Even the most serious and justified use of push notifications must take care not to train us intohabituation Starting January 2013, millions of mobile phone users in the United States began

receiving a text message with sound and vibration alerting them about a child abduction in progress(Figure 3-12) These were the result of a partnership between the Department of Justice, the FCC, andFEMA, and named “AMBER Alerts ” after an abducted Texas child whom law enforcement wasunable to save in time in 1996 But on the DOJ web site , they acknowledged that these alerts shouldnot be abused, and only issued when it was verified that a child was in danger and there was enoughinformation for the public to actually help “AMBER Alerts should be reserved for those cases thatmeet the AMBER criteria Overuse of AMBER Alert could result in the public becoming desensitized

to alerts when they are issued.“ ix

Figure 3-12 AMBER Alert on a smartphone.

If we are at risk of habituating to memes that are this important, we’re likely at risk of habituating

to yours as well If you cannot ascertain where our attention will be directed next and be waitingthere for us, then treat every leveraging of our orienting response with the care of an AMBER Alert

Notes

i Yarbus A L (1967) Eye Movements and Vision New York: Plenum Press Repin, I (1888).

Unexpected Visitors Oil on canvas

ii Nielsen, J (2006) F-shaped pattern for reading web content Image used with permission fromhttps://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/

iii Marsh, G., Friedman, M., Welch, V., & Desberg, P (1981) A cognitive-developmental theory

of reading acquisition Reading research: Advances in theory and practice, 3, 199–221 See also Spiro, R J., Bruce, B.C., and Brewer, W.F eds (1980) Theoretical issues in reading

comprehension: Perspectives from cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and education Routledge.

iv Evans, D C, Johnson, J., Levine, J., & Duffy, R (2011, October 24) Combined findings:

Baseline and redesign usability testing Proprietary study commissioned by the WashingtonState Employment Security Department Used with permission Eyetracking provided by

Cascade Strategies.

v Chen, A & Jain, A (2015) New data shows losing 80% of mobile users is normal, and whythe best apps do better Blog post retrieved from http://andrewchen.co/new-data-shows-why-losing-80-of-your-mobile-users-is-normal-and-that-the-best-apps-do-much-better/

vi Rodieck, R W (1998) The First Steps in Seeing (Vol 1) Sunderland, MA: Sinauer

Associates

vii Cook, E., & Turpin, G (1997) Differentiating orienting, startle, and defense responses: Therole of affect and its implications for psychopathology In Lang, P.J (Ed); Simons, R F (Ed);

Balaban, M T (Ed) Attention and Orienting: Sensory and Motivational Processes, (pp.

137–164) Mahwah, NJ, US: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers

viii Diao, F., & Sundar, S S (2004) Orienting response and memory for web advertisements:

Exploring effects of pop-up window and animation Communication Research, 31(5), 537–

567

ix Department of Justice Amber Alert Frequently Asked Questions Retrieved October 29, 2016from http://www.amberalert.gov/faqs.htm