UX Design for the brain

The brain is an illogical, lazy, guessing machine that designers must understand to create more successful work.

The brain is an enigma. It’s a mysterious and little-understood confluence of neurological circuits firing billions of simultaneous electrical signals while wading in neurotransmitter chemical baths rolling up to billions of years-in-the-making cortical and subcortical structures. Of all its roles and responsibilities, how the brain thinks and reasons is of particular interest to user experience designers because it impacts how users decide, learn, and remember.

Working memory is a central cognitive process that without, we’d be unable to do most of the things that make us human. We’d live in a perpetual present. And as wonderful as that might sound from a mindfulness perspective, the functional reality of a damaged memory system is horrific. As Clide, a patient in a memory study whose brain was damaged by a severe herpes simplex infection put it, “It’s hell on earth. It’s like benign dead — all the bloody time” (Baddeley et al., 2009). Clide wasn’t able to read a book, hold a conversation, or follow a TV program because he would immediately forget what came before.

Working memory is an extremely limited resource (Ma et al., 2014) where we store and manipulate sensory information that expires in a couple of seconds (Baddeley, 2003). Since working memory is such a precious cognitive resource, and taking into account the litany of stimuli around us, designers need to understand how the brain monitors the environment and the factors that affect working memory.

We can’t remember what we don’t know about. And to know or learn something, we must first register (sense) and process stimuli (perceive). Our senses are under constant assault from the world around us. It’s estimated that the optic nerve receives between 10^7 and 10^10 bits of information per second (Itti & Koch, 2001). Just because light hits our retinas, it doesn’t necessarily mean we will notice the object — especially if our attention is allocated elsewhere (Wood & Simons, 2019). We sense considerably more information than the brain can process. This is why the brain has to actively filter the environment, helping us attend to what’s important and ignore the rest.

Since humans are visually dominant, how we perceive and attend visual stimuli should be of particular interest to user experience designers.

One of the most critical roles of selective visual attention is to quickly direct our gaze at objects of interest. The ability to do this quickly and meaningfully in a cluttered visual scene could be the difference between being flattened by a bus or the safety of a sidewalk. Or, less dramatically, between noticing a button or not. The most prominent theory about how the brain thinks and reasons is known as the Dual Process Theory. The theory suggests that there are two systems or minds in one brain. The model is credited to William James, the father of American psychology, in the nineteenth century, and it was extended as “system 1” (S1) and “system 2” (S2) by Stanovich and West in 2000 (Dual Process Theory, n.d.), and popularized by Daniel Kahneman in 2003 as “intuition” (system 1) and “reasoning” (system 2) (Kahneman, 2013).

System One

The brain is constantly and unintentionally scanning the environment for change. In system one, it is believed that the brain thinks and processes information astoundingly fast. This “bottom-up” processing is natural, effortless, implicit, automatic, and unconscious. It is thought that processing in system one happens without self-awareness or control. S1 is responsible for guiding us through most of the thinking we do to make many of our daily decisions.

System one supports fast processing, thinking, and decision making that allows us to quickly determine that, for example, a lion is at a greater distance than shelter. Indeed, system one plays a gigantic role in our ability to stay alive. It also effortlessly allows us to identify the source of a specific sound, display disgust while seeing a gruesome image, solve 1+1, drive a car without fully attending on an empty road, etc.

The automatic system eases the load on our effortful system by assuming the most familiar tasks and converting them into autopilot routines or habits. This is important because our brain operates with a limited capacity and system one gives it the relief it needs to handle the boundless levels of information continuously assaulting the brain. And system one does all this by quickly sorting through information and ideas. It prioritizes what’s relevant and filters out the rest by taking shortcuts.

While these shortcuts keep us alive and well, they also present problematic reasoning and behavioral consequences. Kahneman found that the decisions we make from shortcuts are driven by heuristics and biases. Heuristics are the lessons we learned from previous experiences with similar problems. Like the trial and error heuristic, the availability heuristic gives preference to information that first comes to mind.

When decisions need to be made, for example, we automatically think about related events or situations. We instinctively believe that what is recalled must be important — or more important than alternatives that are harder to remember. Because of this, we tend to overvalue our decisions with the most recent information.

These mental shortcuts are great for speedy processing most of the time, but in order to capitalize on the time and cognitive load savings, the brain seldom focuses on all facets of the decision, leaving us exposed to make less than optimal or rational decisions.

Bottom-up processing is likely processed by the neurons that respond to image difference between a small central region and a broader concentric antagonistic surround region (Itti & Koch, 2001), and the cortico-limbic circuit (Comte et al., 2016). Bottom-up processing happens automatically and nearly instantaneously at an astonishingly fast speed of 25 to 50 milliseconds per item (Itti & Koch, 2001).

Cognitive psychology researchers at Carleton University reported in the Behaviour and Information Technology journal that people make a “like” or “no-like” decision about a web page design in as fast as 50 milliseconds (Lindgaard et al., 2006).

That’s incredibly fast, but the finding that’s more arresting is that people will subsequently work hard to “confirm” their initial assessment — ignoring evidence to the contrary. The researchers call this confirmation-bias phenomenon the “halo effect” (Lindgaard et al., 2006).

Designers need to strike the right halo with their designs and do so quickly on the first shot. To do this, designers need to carefully calibrate their compositions to quickly and automatically process information by tapping into every bottom-up innate tendency possible. For example, by grouping similar information using white space, color, and proximity, designers are able to tap into basic and automatic gestalt principles that help the brain unintentionally process and garner meaning.

System two

The two-component framework, the dual processing theory, explains how the brain manages and deploys attention. This framework suggests that we direct attention to our environment using both bottom-up, image-based saliency cues, and top-down, task-dependent cues (Itti & Koch, 2001).

Top-down attention, or system 2, is explicit, controlled, conscious, logical, calculating, and effortful. System two is a slow, explicit, controlled, voluntary, and high effort attentional activity. It’s the kind of attentional processing needed to park the car in a tight spot, to count the B’s in a passage, and then determine how to act in a social setting.

To understand effortful processing we must first understand the work of Hermann Ebbinghaus, the German psychologist who pioneered our current understanding of how memory works. His research on memory has been hailed as the most ambitious undertaking in the field of memory research and understanding since Aristotle. Between 1879 and 1885, Ebbinghaus ran a series of experiments on himself that led him to the discovery of the “forgetting curve,” the “serial positioning effect,” the “spacing effect,” the “learning curve,” the “primacy effect,” and the “recency effect” which were published in his 1885 book, Memory. A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (Hermann Ebbinghaus, n.d.).

System 2 refers to the internal guidance of attention based on prior knowledge, willful plans, and current goals (Katsuki & Constantinidis, 2014). It is slow, deliberate, effortful and its operations require attention. System 2 takes over when things get hard. Most of the decisions we make are made by system 1 without us even knowing it’s happening and system 2 is only tapped when system 1 stalls. Kahneman (2013) explains System 2, in the context of a movie or a play, to have a supporting character role but believes herself to be the lead actress.

Evidence suggests that even though both the prefrontal cortex and the posterior parietal cortex are involved in top-down target selection, the prefrontal cortex may have a more direct influence on behavioral response than the posterior parietal cortex in top-down tasks (Katsuki & Constantinidis, 2014).

Discussion

S1 and S2 are often described as separate systems and are thought to employ different neural mechanisms and anatomic substrates. From a practical vantage point, however, bottom-up and top-down attributes influence each other to direct attention. Even if the two processes are different, the neural activity of bottom-up and top-down attention correlations support the idea that top-down and bottom-up attention is coactivated on the same network of parietal and prefrontal cortical areas. Instead of thinking of the two attentional systems as being separate processes, it might be more useful to think of them as integrated. In the absolute form of this view, the distinction between bottom-up and top-down attention is arbitrary (Katsuki & Constantinidis, 2014).

Because of the way we are wired, making good decisions is nearly impossible. And what’s the web if not a litany of choice after choice users need to make. What to click, what to type, what to scan, what to read, what to ignore? Decision making is everywhere on the web. Even in places, we wouldn’t expect, such as in linear, mono-directional, sequential user paths such as in demos, online training, and checkout processes. Users can decide to fire up another browser; to close the browser; to type in another URL; to click on a “soft” exit (utility, logo, or footer links); to turn off the computer; or to just get up and walk away. Even when we think the user doesn’t have a choice but to follow the path we’ve laid out for them, they still have all the choice and control to stay on track or bail.

And we can’t make meaningful decisions about our environment until we first perceive it. This is why understanding how bottom-up and top-down attention work independently and together to set the stage from which we can decide is important.

Even so, physiologically or psychologically, we don’t stand a chance to make rational decisions because our limbic system (emotional decision making) makes most of its decisions before the frontal cortex (rational decision making) has its say (Limbic System, n.d.).

Through this lens, the drive to understand our audiences couldn’t be more blindingly obvious. Personas, journeys, interviews, surveys, tree-tests, usability studies — name a tool that gets us closer to our audiences — they are indispensable now that we know getting to the core of how they feel is more important than how they think.

We have to accept that almost always, we are irrational creatures at the mercy of the limbic system and S1. When we design, we often forget that people make emotional decisions that might not be the most rational. We also forget the gravity that emotional decisions have over rational decisions. We so often try to convince or guide people with rational arguments, facts, and processes. But in the end, we are largely subject to the whims of S1 and the limbic system. And because of this, our designs need to be smarter than we are (Limbic System, n.d.).

Our compositions need to manage cognitive load, drive action, and appeal to emotion. Our perceptions are the product of educated guesses based on the lightning-fast processing from sensory information. These hypotheses are formed by a number of factors, including our personalities, experiences, and expectations. And so, what happens when designers have the wrong experiential and expectational framework for their users?

Our brain processes both top-down and bottom-up information so fast, that with so many of our biases in play, if we are not careful to engineer the right and most productive set of visual cues at the right time for the right context, we might end up creating more issues than we can ever imagine.

Citations

Baddeley, A. (2003). Working memory: Looking back and looking forward. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4(10), 829–839. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1201

Baddeley, A., Eysenck, M. W., & Anderson, M. C. (2009). Memory. Psychology Press.

Comte, M., Schön, D., Coull, J. T., Reynaud, E., Khalfa, S., Belzeaux, R., Ibrahim, E. C., Guedj, E., Blin, O., Weinberger, D. R., & Fakra, E. (2016). Dissociating Bottom-Up and Top-Down Mechanisms in the Cortico-Limbic System during Emotion Processing. Cerebral Cortex, 26(1), 144–155. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhu185

Dual process theory. (n.d.). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory

Itti, L., & Koch, C. (2001). Computational modelling of visual attention. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2(3), 194–203. https://doi.org/10.1038/35058500

Kahneman, D. (2013). Thinking, Fast and Slow (First Edition). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Limbic system. (n.d.). Wikipedia. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbic_system)

Lindgaard, G., Fernandes, G., Dudek, C., & Brown, J. (2006). Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression! Behaviour & Information Technology, 25(2), 115–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/01449290500330448

Ma, W. J., Husain, M., & Bays, P. M. (2014). Changing concepts of working memory. Nature Neuroscience, 17(3), 347–356. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3655

Wood, K., & Simons, D. J. (2019). Processing without noticing in inattentional blindness: A replication of Moore and Egeth (1997) and Mack and Rock (1998). Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 81(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-018-1629-1