To Be Truly Human Centered
Temple Grandin revolutionized the livestock industry. As much as anyone can, she greatly believed in the humane treatment of animals who were on their way to slaughter. She created a number of advancements to improve the quality of life and care of animals both before and during processing. The cattle holding shoot she designed is still in use by most major food facilities today. She even won an award from PETA in 2004 for her work to reduce the amount of fear and pain that cows experience in the slaughter process.
She did this by taking a rather unconventional approach at the time. She empathized with the animals that were going through this process and identified things that could possibly induce stress or undue pain. She would enter the equipment herself and notice things like reflections or shadows or the position of people that would increase the stress level of the animals. This stress might cause the animal to thrash and injury itself or it might stop moving altogether causing delays and making the whole process worse for all parties involved. She focused on the small details to which animals are sensitive in order to design thoughtful and humane animal-handling equipment.
For example, she designed a curved loading chute that takes advantage of how cows naturally behave. Somehow she figured out that cows have a natural tendency to go back to where they came from. By allowing them to do what comes natural through the curved chute, the whole processes flows more smoothly. The animals experience less stress and the operators of the facility are able to more easily accomplish their tasks as well.
(I suppose I should mention that Grandin is autistic and she claims that it is her autism that helps her view the world as the animals do. I don’t know enough about autism to have a point of view on this claim, and will only note than her accomplishments are remarkable).
A lot of design focuses on the user’s goals, needs, and motivations. But these weren’t really relevant to what Grandin designed. The end result of the process is actually the antithesis of what an animal’s goals, needs, and motivations are. And yet the designs have been successful anyways. She focused on understanding the biology and behavior (and maybe even a bit of psychology) of the animals to create her solutions.
Perhaps taking a cue from her, we have another, human-based equivalent we can also look at to see what lessons we can learn.
A trip to the Grocery Store
When was the last time you considered the details around your grocery shopping? What is the store layout? Are the fruits and vegetables up front? Where is the dairy section? Does the store have music playing? You probably haven’t thought about it too much, but the people who designed the grocery store have certainly thought about it a lot.
Much research has gone into arranging the store just right to maximize the profits of the grocery store. The internet has a treasure trove of information about this. Many grocery stores, for example, want to set the mood when you first enter. They place the coffee shop or the bakery up front to activate your sense of smell. They also place the fruits and vegetables up front, since they are fresh and bring out lots of color. The store then puts other essentials like meat and dairy on the periphery of the store to make sure you transverse the whole store to get your essentials. This then gives you ample opportunity to identify new things that you hadn’t considered needing before you entered.
And of course we are all familiar with the splurge items available at the checkout counter. These high revenue items are placed right where you are going to wait a few minutes for your turn to check out. The temptation to grab something is strong and the grocery store knows this.
Not all grocery stores operate the same way. Aldi’s, where I do a lot of my shopping, does not have produce up front in all of its stores and does not have any fresh baked goods. Trader Joe’s, owned by the same company, fits the more traditional model so I assume the choice is intentional to fit a well-researched market segment.
Thinking about all the design that goes into the grocery store, it starts feeling a lot like the slaughterhouses that Temple Grandin designed. In both cases, the “user” needs of the system are not the primary needs designed into the system. While I need groceries, I don’t really need the splurge items at the end. I don’t often want to cross 20 aisles of grocery store just to get milk or fresh meat. These are there to increase the profits of the store. Similarly, the animal does not have a goal of being killed and processed for meat at the end of their walk through the facility. These both could be considered dark patterns, given that they are ultimately serving the needs of the product owner over the needs of the user.
In both cases, though, the design team has taken into consideration user behavior in order to design a more pleasant experience. And I believe that this aspect is often missing when we talk about Human Centered Design (HCD).
Human Centered Design
Conversations of HCD usually revolve around doing user research and understanding user goals to solve the users’ challenges. These are, of course, vitally important. But we cannot be doing HCD without fundamentally understand how people work. This is why at least some base level knowledge of Psychology (Cognitive and Perceptual) is so important*. For some reason, the part where we understand humans is often just completely left out.
*Full disclosure, I got a degree in Psychology that heavily influences my viewpoint.
As many problems as the field of Psychology has had with validity and repeating results, its clear that the field still has a lot to offer. Unfortunately, too often what is shared is misleading or completely wrong. I have seen enough instances of people using Miller’s Number (7 +/- 2) incorrectly that a post will be coming on it in the near future. If designers really cared about how people work, pie charts would no longer be a thing and flat design would never have been so pervasive. There are thousands of examples of similar issues, but most articles that talk about Psychology and UX often only mention Gestalt for some reason. Again, it’s valuable to know, but there is so much more than that.
This isn’t to say that everybody on the UX team needs to have a degree in Psychology. That’s not how teams should work. But it is a vital skill that should be on the team somewhere. We need to be concerned with both our users’ needs and our users’ capabilities.
Psychology will inform how we lay out information for better user comprehension. Data visualization are much better than data tables in this regard, but woefully underutilized or misused. Perceptual psychology will influence what colors we should use. People are most sensitive to a wavelength in the green family, which means we are often most drawn to things that are working well in standard designs (using the green=good, yellow=warning, red=bad paradigm). We know that people have a lot of built in capabilities that we can take advantage of in design but usually ignore, like the cocktail party effect. Even the notion that people should be designed out of the system to increase performance and safety flies in the face of decades of research on system performance.
HCD is designed to marry both parts of the equation. If you focus only on the psychology aspect of how humans work, it is highly unlikely that you will deliver a product that offers value to the customer. If you do it nefariously, you will have created a dark pattern. Similarly, if you only focus on user needs, you run the risk of something that works greats, but ultimately conflicts with human tendencies. These products will fail as well. Only by bringing it all together can you claim to be doing design that is truly human centered.
Thanks for reading. For more of my UX ramblings, you can follow me on Twitter: @bkenna1 or here on Medium.
