What Does this Gorilla Have to Do with Usability?

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on June 21, 2010

In their well-known test of selective attention, psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons asked test subjects to watch a short video in which two teams, one in black shirts, one in white shirts, move around and pass a basketball to one other. The subjects were asked to keep silent count of the number of passes made by the team wearing white.

About 25 seconds into the video, someone wearing a gorilla suit strolls into the middle of the passing game, beats their chest, and then strolls out again. The gorilla is on screen for nine seconds. The correct answer to the question about the number of passes is 15. But the real question was “did you see the gorilla?” About half of the test subjects did not.

Watch the video: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html

In their new book, The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, Chabris and Simon discuss the “illusion of attention” and our lack of awareness about the limitations of our perceptions, memories, abilities, and knowledge. (For example, more than 63% of Americans think they are more intelligent than the average American.) Their gorilla experiment demonstrates that when we focus our attention on one object or action, we can easily miss anything else going on around it. Other experiments found that people who missed seeing the gorilla had their eyes on it, but they didn’t see it because it was not what they were looking for.

Our tendency toward selective attention has implications for web interfaces. If you have ever participated as an observer of a usability test, you may have had the experience of watching a test participant fail to see what you perceive to be an obvious link, or button, or some other interface element. Seconds, or minutes, go by while the participant struggles, and you’re thinking, “Why in the name of all that’s good and decent can they not see that link? It’s RIGHT THERE! CLICK IT!!”

Users may miss a link or some other element for all kinds of reasons – lack of white space, crowding, small font, sub-optimal contrast – but one common reason is that the link (or button, or whatever) was like the gorilla in the experiment: users didn’t see it because it was not what they were looking for. In many instances, they were looking for other words – the words actually used didn’t match their expectations. They were looking closely for X and therefore didn’t see Y. So much of usability has to do with language, with using the keywords that match what your users have in mind. And even subtle differences can adversely affect a user’s ability to find what they are looking for.

Another common reason why users miss seeing what might seem blindingly obvious to a development team is that usage convention has led the user to expect one interface element when another has been used instead, such as a link instead of a command button.

Convention also leads us to expect certain elements in particular places – primary navigation at the top or on the left, a search box in the upper right, contact information in the footer, ads or other "fluff" on the right, and so on. If a user misses an interface element, it may be because it was not in the position they expected it to be, and therefore they simply didn’t see it.

One of the great benefits of usability testing is that it helps us to understand what users were actually looking for and what they expected – where was their selective attention focused? This in turn can help us design more effectively.

What do you think? Are there other implications for selective attention?

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Excellent resource for gaining “cultural intelligence”

from Joyce Lasecke, President

on June 06, 2010

Many of our clients are Learning & Development departments in multinational companies. Anecdotally, it seems that most recognize the need to adapt learning and development methods to audiences in different cultures, yet lack the capacity and sometimes the strategy to make such adaptations. A good place to start for learning leaders, instructional designers, and trainers might be self-education. We're compiling a reading list of books and articles about global training and cultural awareness; we'll share it on our website once we've read enough of the items to make a decent list. I'd like to recommend two books. I've read one and I've read the table of contents of the other (the 7-page TOC was enough to ascertain that the book was relevant!)

Cultural Intelligence: Living and Working Globally, 2nd Ed., by David C. Thomas and Kerr Inkson. This book neatly presents a research-based framework and provides loads of examples of workplace situations where people operating from their cultural contexts misunderstood each other and missed or misinterpreted cues. The book is organized in a way that makes it useful as a field guide--there are chapters on cross-cultural decision-making, leading, negotiating, and teamwork. Even if you just page through to read the real-life situations, you will be enlightened.

Cultures and Organizations, 3rd Ed. (just released!), by Geert Hofstede, Gert Jan Hofstede, and Michael Minkov. Geert Hoftstede is one of the well-regarded researchers and authors on the subject of society-based culture. As with Cultural Intelligence, there are numerous ways to use this book besides reading it cover-to-cover. For example, there are tables that any tech writer would admire that contrast key differences in behavior between societies that are weak or strong in a particular cultural dimension, such as individualism (e.g., the US) versus collectivism (e.g., Japan). Here are just a few ways that I think these books are useful to the L&D profession:

• Designing and developing soft skills training
• Creating scenarios in eLearning courses that are realistic and credible
• Working with colleagues in other countries

I'd love to add your recommendations to our list. You can find me on LinkedIn.

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