Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

At my last web conference, an audience member was picked to come up to the podium and perform a task from the speaker's last usability test. The audience member was asked to vocalize his thoughts in front of the group as he attempted to perform a random task on a web site he'd never seen before. As the participant visibly struggled to perform the task, I subconsciously began to grow surprisingly anxious. After the session, struck by my strong reaction to the mock usability test, my mind drifted back to my psychology studies in college.

During the session, I felt torn between two types of thinking:

Line of thought 1: "Poor chap, I'd be anxious too if I couldn’t find that information in front of all these people. If only I could hold up a sign for him to click down into the sub navigation, that's where I think the content he's looking for lives! Sheesh, this reminds me of that time (insert embarrassing work example here)!"

Line of thought 2: "Man, that link should TOTALLY be over there in the right rail; it would surface the piece of content he's looking for, making it accessible and relevant to the defined user group. Then this poor shmuck could actually find it! I'd like to talk to that web designer about his page element placement."

If line of thought 1 sounds like you, you tend to relate situations to similar events in your own life, using personalizing cognition.

If line of thought 2 sounds more like you, you tend to relate situations to objective facts, using objectifying cognition.

So what do you think? Can personalizing cognitions and objectifying cognitions both be useful forms of processing information as it pertains to smart web design? Or, for user experience design, is it more fruitful to accomplish the goal of making informed decisions by using only the objectifying cognitions that come out of our research and usability testing?

The technique is called Processing. The artist is Radiohead. The code jockey is Robert Hodgin, and he's just attained guest speaker status at my dream dinner party.

Processing is an open-source computer programming language and environment, born out of the Aesthetics and Computation Group inside the MIT Media Lab. Because it is open-source, Processing is free for download and use, and is an ever-evolving platform upon which artists, programmers, teachers, students, researchers and hobbyists can produce and explore images, animation and interaction.

This video is 100% code. Meaning, once everything was set, he hit play. The music dictated the animation COMPLETELY. If you feel brave, read a little about his process here.

Enjoy.