USERS INTELLIGENCE DON’T MERGE BUT INTERSECT
THIS IS WHAT YOU CAN USE
OBEY THE USERS SYSTEM SO HE OBEYS YOU If something is designed, it is mostly designed for a special purpose. In most cases there is a user involved, who has to use the design. Preferably he uses it as you designed it. But if you don’t understand how the user works, he will use it differently or not at all. In many cases, it can be interesting, if the user uses the design in a different way, because then you learn something about the behaviour of the user, what you obviously did not know before. But if he uses it not at all, the design is failed. This, we do not want to happen. So there is a need to get used to the essentials of the user, to get know how he works. If we know this, we have to follow this knowledge to obey to the users need and behaviour. Then, he will ideally use the design as we intended it. If he does, we did a good job in understanding him. In short, he obeys us, if we obey his system. Though it is not to obey the user himself. The user does not know what he wants. A nice example here is an American research about tomato sauce. Before that research there was no company who offered extra chunky tomato sauce. In questionnaires the people also never mentioned, that they would like to have extra chunky tomato sauce, because they did not know about it. But when the researchers did not ask them what they want, but gave them the direct choice between several sauces, then surprisingly one majority of people prefered that extra chunky one. The tomato sauce became a huge success in America, because the researchers did not listen to the users, but to their needs. So, let us explore a major part of understanding how users function.
SIMPLICITY Users are very diverse. They can be educated, stupid, clever, patient or on the edge. The important thing is, that if you want to reach them, you cannot rely on an ability one user has, that the other one doesn’t have. It is the effect that a big human crowd always has, it is stupid & pure.
THE SOLUTION The bigger the amount of people is you want to reach, the more intense the humancrow-effect gets, and thusly the simpler you have to be. Use mechanisms that everyone posseses independently from age, sex or education. Do not forget that even though most users of graphic design products do not see or interact with each other directly, the human-crowd-effect still is in charge and has to be considered. And no matter how many people there are, there is always one property that they will share: they do not want to think about how the design works. It just has to work.
Applying this to the website and making a game, I would make the whole website a game. Here, I want to combine mine and the users goal. What I want to achieve is that I want the user to look at all pages. The user wants to get something for free. So, I will communicate to the user, that he gets something for free if he looked at all pages. It will be shown which pages he already looked at, and a lot of cheering happens for motivational reasons. Finding all pages won’t be difficult until he reaches the last three pages. This is the point where the user would get bored, if nothing would change, so there will be a small puzzle to show the page. This way I want to counteract the human-crowd-effect, and make people more smart.
to make the page visible, order the objects in a logical order: The next page will be another puzzle like:
why does a mirror invert left and right, but not up and down? clicking the right answer shows explanaition and of - because our eyes are arranged left and right of our heads. course the next page. - the mirror does not invert left and right either. - because the people in the mirror world have made us think that it is like that. The final puzzle will be to click a quickly moving dot. To make it less frustrating, the clickable area expands after every miss invisibly. Then a nice entertaining animation will be shown that compliments the user.