Sources of design principles: learned or hardwired
The significance of design cannot be underemphasized. The width of partograms (graphical representation of cervical dilatation against time for women during childbirth) changed the quality of obstetricians’ decisions. This could have an effect on the incidence of Caesarean sections performed. Just imagine, the design of a graph playing a role of weather a woman has a major surgery as Caesarean section! (Tay and Yong 1996)
After reading and blogging on humans’ dual information processing capacity and the significance of training and seeing consistent designs with consistent meaning, I started asking myself: why do we react to designs the way we do? Is this because we have been trained to react in this way or are our reactions something hardwired into our brains?
For example, looking at the above two partogram designs (from Cartmill and Thornton 1992) resulted in different decisions by obstetricians. Obstetricians perceived a longer elapse of time when present with the wider partogram than when presented with the taller partogram, although, both partograms presented the same information. Could this reaction be because since childhood we were trained that longer lines signify longer time elapse? Or are we hardwired to make this association?
Shiffrin and Schneider (1977, Experiment 1) showed that it is difficult to unlearn something that we developed an automatic and spontaneous reaction to. (Quoted in Schneider and Chein 2003) In their experiment, it took three times as long to relearn a previously learned target search. Therefore, it may seem that our reactions to designs are hardwired, but these reactions may be things that we learnt from our environments since infancy. It is interesting to know that in the Far East, the use the color red to signify a stock going up in price, while in rest of the word the color green gives this meaning. In the Far East, the color red is linked to prosperity. So, at least, humans’ reaction to the color red is not hardwired. Yet, there are design principles that seem to be based on our brains hardwiring. One example is avoiding split attention. (I am making another promise to write a post on cognitive load and split attention in the near future.)
Therefore if we agree that our reaction to designs is partly learnt, and once learnt hard to change: we must always consider what people are already used to and developed automatic reaction to. For example, we should not try to give wider graphs the meaning of short time elapse. The second learning point is for novel designs; we must give deep thoughts to designing them, then, stick with these novel designs. An example of a novel design is the blue underlined WebPages links. People got so used to this links design that it is unwise to ignore.
Cartmill, R.S. & Thornton, J.G., 1992. Effect of presentation of partogram information on obstetric decision-making. Lancet, 339(8808), 1520-2.
Tay, S.K. & Yong, T.T., 1996. Visual effect of partogram designs on the management and outcome of labour. The Australian & New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 36(4), 395-400.
Schneider, W. & Chein, J., 2003. Controlled & automatic processing: behavior, theory, and biological mechanisms. Cognitive Science, 27(3), 559, 525
