DEANO DESIGNS
BEN CRAVEN pt.2
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What is Psychology to Designers?
I didn't know this but Ben Craven studied psychology. Now, I can see you sitting there thinking to yourself "Well why does that help designers?", and therefore, "What was the point of the talk?" Well, I think it was extremely useful and I want to use what I have learned in my future designs!
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Effortless and Non-Effortless Tasks
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Have a look at this image and tell me what this woman's mood is:
I am hoping that you think she is happy. Now this is an example of an effortless task as you can identify the mood of this person straight away. So now I want you to count how many teeth she is showing in the photo...
I am guessing that took much longer for you to do. I counted each tooth individually from left to right. This is an example of a non-effortless task. It took much more effort to do that than identifying what mood the woman was in.
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so what is the cut-off point here that makes the task involve some effort? Well, Ben says that it occurs when you have 7 things to count and everything after that the task just becomes progressively harder.
So, what does this mean in terms of design? We often deal with things that have more than 7 items regularly (phone and credit card numbers for example). These are made easier to deal with in a few ways. The first is through grouping them:
Does that not make those really long hard to understand numbers really easy to figure out? We as humans also relate things that are close together. Like these items and their corresponding name:
I can immediately tell the name of each of these things and that is entirely due to the fact that the names for them are positioned closely to them.
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How does this Inform our Product Designs?
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I think this is actually harder to do in a 3D sense. In terms of graphic design this should be really obvious but in terms of products it becomes more difficult. I think that it is more about what the design tells the viewer. What does it convey? How does it work? How easy will it work? These things all boil down to the design language that product conveys. Our lecturer, Hugh Pizey commented on the poor design language of the new Nissan electric range so lets have a look at it:
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This is the Nissan Leaf. The most basic of the Nissan Electric range. Personally I don't think this looks basic at all. The wheels are quite strong and in your face; the sloping bonnet and aggressive front splitter give a false impression of high performance; and I just don't think it looks a simple car.
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This idea of how the design looks to us is all about psychology. If it was just toned down and the phrase "more is less" was implemented then I believe a better product would have been produced