Bending Reality
How to Create Magic in Your Design
Umy is a designer at argodesign — at least, that’s his day job.
His night job is that of a professional magician.
Like so many of the passionate creators and makers at argo, Umy finds that his side project and his work for clients feed each other in meaningful ways. Although a magician never reveals his secrets, Umy shares how he unlocks limitations in innovation design with a touch of magic.
Magicians and designers have something in common. Both of us conceal very complex solutions to craft the desired experience.
For centuries, magicians have exploited humans’ cognitive limitations, such as expectation, attention, and memory, for entertainment. In turn, UX Design can employ those cognitive limitations to better empower users.
Perception and Reality
I bet you’ve heard the phrase “perception is reality.” Makes sense, right?
Perception is not reality. Reality is reality.
The human brain can’t process everything all at once, so the brain prioritizes the most important things in each moment in the form of perceptions, stored as memories. Magic in design manipulates our limited capacity for perceptions, attentions, and memories.
Perception allows more room to negotiate. This is where magic lives.
Let’s take a simple cloud-based photo app for example. The upload is the most painful step of the experience where the user can only wait for the moment to end. Any photo app that can shorten the waiting time drastically improves its UX.
In 2010, Instagram used magic to “skip” the uploading step all together. Not literally, but you can edit out the upload from the user’s perceptive reality. Here’s how they did it.
The moment the user takes a picture, the app immediately begins the upload process. By the time the user picks a filter and adds a caption, the picture is already up in the cloud. For the user, uploading never happens. It just works like magic.
“No-upload” UX encouraged more use, which led to more content, which led to lively social interactions, which helped Instagram become the second largest social media platform in the world.
Magic in design is editing out the moments you don’t want in the audience’s perceptive reality.
Building a World with Moments in the Human Brain
Like any fictional narrative, the artist builds a world of moments within the audience’s mind. In that temporal world, the artist is able to define physics and create miracles just for the brain.
The human mind is brilliant, but it’s not perfect. To truly design a human experience, we must design with the human mind at its core, with consideration of its strength and limitations. To create a successful moment, one must: 1) set the audience’s expectation that the moment is about to happen; 2) guide the user’s attention to the key takeaway; and 3) help them remember the right details.
1. The Red Herring: Finding the right context
One morning in 2007, Joshua Bell, one of the world’s greatest violin soloists, did a 43-minute performance of some of the most complex pieces of music at a Washington DC subway station, with The Washington Post as an observer. You would think that a musician of that caliber performing for free would draw a massive crowd. It turned out that nobody cared. Among over 1,097 people who passed Joshua Bell’s performance, only 27 stopped to listen and pay money. He only made $52.17 that day.
Has humanity lost its appreciation for arts? Of course not. The problem isn’t the audience, but the audience’s state of mind. During their morning commute, a performance from a virtuoso artist was the last thing they expected. They couldn’t see Bell, because he simply wasn’t supposed to be there.
Magic in design can only happen when the design is expected to change the condition of the moment. Contextual awareness in design can set expectations and help the audience “feel” the moment we crafted for them.
We can achieve that by anticipating the user’s track of mind, their course of action, their end goal, how far along are they in the process of achieving those goals, and most importantly, what they need in each moment.
You may have implemented a great design feature, but for some reason, users don’t notice them. Then you try to roll in callouts, tooltips, and hints to teach people, but the user dismisses them anyway. Try to empathize with the users. Think about what they are expecting and how design can best serve those states of minds.
2. Attention Manipulation: Designing for how the brain processes information.
Looking is NOT seeing. When people pay attention to something, they will miss everything else, even when they are staring right at it. It’s called Inattentional Blindness.
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons coined this term in 2010 with the Invisible Gorilla Test. The test demonstrates the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, by asking participants to watch a basketball game and count the number of passes.
Most people did well, but the real finding is that only 50% of the participants notice a woman in a gorilla suit walking across the screen. When asked, the participants who missed the gorilla were certain that the gorilla didn’t appear in the first watch of the video.
The human brain can’t see the whole picture, we can only process visual information in parts. That’s why MC Escher’s Ascending and Descending visual illusion works.
Just because we pay attention to something, doesn’t mean we remember it correctly.
3. Memory Manipulation Not everything seen can be remembered.
The human mind simplifies information stored in our memories for efficiency. We don’t capture memories like a video camera. A memory is more like a conceptual landmark used to encrypt the information of the moment. Every time it is recalled, it also evolves with bias.
Magicians take advantage of memory limitation and manipulate how the audience remembers the performance by recapping the chain of events right before the climax. During that recap, magicians emphasize and exaggerate the moment. By repeatedly recalling the moment or the magic they want the audience to remember, the dirty secrets get washed out to non-existence in their memory.
Knowing this limitation, we can tailor the design to reinforce essential moments and to erase the moments not needed.
Bad design is everywhere. Good design is invisible. So is magic.
The truth is you don’t get to “show” magic in design. Creating magic in the product and experience starts behind closed doors. Research, discovery, process, and iterations cannot be seen. Users can only experience the “effect” of your work. A magical UX devises the moment we most need magic, directs your attention to what matters, and helps you walk away with the right memories of the moment.
abracadabra.
Umy is an innovation designer with rich knowledge in both traditional media and all things digital. He possesses an in-depth understanding of research and strategically designed products for the IoT ecosystem. With a passion for storytelling and innovation, Umy has delivered multi-disciplinary solutions for Fortune 500 companies across platforms and industries in the last two decades.
