By Qiyun Feng,
Qiyun Feng is a data scientist currently working at Innovations, Science and Economics Canada. He writes out of pure interest in psychology and technology. You can reach him by his email or his LinkedIn.
A journey of user experiences
There’s an infamous website, the Yale School of Arts front page, which features the most absurd combinations of visual assets and page placements. It conforms to none of the modern design languages, and it almost evokes a sense of the 90s and 2000s with the design language. Despite these characteristics. There are two feelings that this website evokes. Being born in the 90s, I have very deep sense of nostalgia for the olden days where websites were laid out into sitemaps, and we had to navigate through endless hyperlinks to find what we were looking for. The other side of me groans and wants to turn this website off immediately.
A journey of user experiences
Figure 1: Front page of the Yale School of Art
There’s a term in the industry that dubs the culmination of design and customer experience as user experience. It is known by many names throughout time, user centred design, usability, user experience but they are all about the same thing.
Don Norman, the creator of the term usability, defines it as a cohesive integrated set of experience from initiation to the disposal. It is designed to fit that entire experience together seamlessly. The International Organization for Standardization defines use experience as “A person’s perception and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system, or service.” Steve Krug, the writer of the book, Don’t Make Me Think, considers user experience to be an amalgamation of a dozen different disciplines from interactive design to visual design, to content management, coming together to make a product.
There’s very little disagreement on what it means to create a good design. You need a good product with good functionality, and you need different talents coming together considering various parts of the product so that it fits like a glove to the use case.
However, I want to look at it through a different lens. What about the actual emotional and physical experiences. How about looking at it from the lenses of the user and the customer. While there is an importance to the immediate response of the user, and the reaction of the user, the focus of user design generally seems to end at that point. We want to look at it from the perspective of emotional designs.
Emotional design and UX
Emotional design can be divided up largely in to visceral, behavioural, and reflective, according to Don Norman. Visceral is the physical appearance of a product. Obviously, everyone wants the product that looks “nice” but nice can be defined in a variety of ways. The second is the behavioural design. How usable is a product or how effective is a product is generally the question we ask to figure out how well a product is designed in this category. Finally, there’s the reflective designs, the things that makes the user think back about their experiences.
Using an adequate mix of these different designs is the key to creating a user experience that makes the user appreciate the product. Let’s go back to the front page of Yale School of Art for a demonstration of this.
If we were to analyze this page, solely based on what we would see, the visceral design of this is terrible. There’s no cohesive design language. The fonts are all different. It’s not reactive so everything is left aligned, there’s a different background on every page making it extremely difficult to understand. By this alone, it would seem like this is a terrible design.
Let’s look at the behavioural design of the website. From the behavioural aspects, it would seem all the functionalities are there. There’s a navigation bar, the animations can be paused, most of the assets are in the form of cards with a details button. They even have something that tends to be missing from some websites, a sitemap! From this perspective, this is a functional website though we would have to deduct points for their accessibility.
Finally let’s look at the reflective design of this webpage. On the side of the webpage, there’s a quick blob of text explaining the origin story of the website.
“This website exists as an ongoing collaborative experiment in digital publishing and information sharing. Because this website functions as a wiki, all members of the School of Art community—graduate students, faculty, staff, and alums—have the ability to add new content and pages, and to edit most of the site’s existing content.Content is the property of its various authors. When you contribute to this site, you agree to abide by Yale University academic and network use policy, and to act as a responsible member of our community.”
This finally makes sense. This is an arts project that is based on the collaboration of the Yale School of Art community. The intent is not to create a website for the public in the traditional sense but to create a piece of modern art that is available to be browsed by the public. Finally, this makes sense.
One of the importance of modern art is experimentation and we are obviously witnessing a large-scale experimentation that an entire community is undertaking individually and witnessing the result. If this was a commercial product it would never work but as a piece of modern art, it will live on.
How does mental health play into this?
There’s a copious amounts of mental health application out there now. The majority of which falls under these following categories.
1. Online therapy sessions: Basically, a glorified chat client that enables text-based or even video-based conversations with a therapist.
2. Meditation: Basically, a glorified audible that contains large amounts of meditations that is aimed to make the user use meditation
3. Journaling: Basically, a prompted notebook that captures your moods and provides feedback.
If we applied emotional design to all these applications, all these applications have an immaculate design. They certainly have good visual artists. They are also very functional in terms of the usability aspects. The chat client does what it is supposed to, the meditation is certainly calming.
The challenge is the reflective aspects.
There’s a variety of different mental health issues. To give a brief overview, here are a three. ADHD, or Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, is a mental health challenge where the person suffers from persistent or hyperactivity-impulses that interferes with functioning. Depression is a mood disorder that causes persistent feeling of sadness and a loss of interest. Anxiety disorders is a group of mental health disorders characterized by significant feelings of anxiety and fear.
People with ADHD and Depression faces a completely different challenge from those with Anxiety. People with ADHD and depression are more likely to never use the application or product in the first place whereas people with anxiety are at risk of using the application either too much or getting anxious of the very thought of the application itself.
What is apparent is that the designer of any given application, for mental health needs to provide accommodations for people that are neural-divergent. For example, for those that are ADHD, they will need a reminder to do the activities in this application when they are less busy in their schedule. ADHD is blindness to the time and thus the application will only be successful if they help guide ADHD time manage their therapeutic process. For those are that depressed, on the other hand, this is a case where they need impulsive breaks and a strong external force to break them out of arguing against themselves. This is where the application will require strong reminders and enforced actions to make the individual partake in the therapy process.
The only way that the mental health therapy works is the have the reflection design built into the process and create an environment where those that are struggling from mental health can leverage the functions of the product to cater to whatever their usage is.
How to leverage this in my designs?
There are a couple of philosophies of design that should be implemented but it is worth mentioning the one that is fundamentally the most important, which is testing whether your application made a positive impact with the user. The marker of a positive impact should be positive mood changes for a prolonged time and the sustained usage of your application. You can only verify this through user testing and user survey.
There is however a couple principle that is necessary to build an application that caters to people that are neural-divergent. The first of the principle is to follow nelson’s heuristics number 7, provide flexibility and efficiency of use. Provide people the ability to set up their schedules for integrating the application for their use. If the application is distracting, people with ADHD should be able to set the time frame they use the application. If it’s people with depression, then depending on whether your application is for therapy, or for other tasks, you will want the application to show customized notifications to enforce the usage of the applications.
The second important principle is preventing errors, creating a consistency and rules for the customization that people can make in an accessible way to those that are neural-divergent is extremely conducive to the reception of the application. If the customizations are standardized, the range of states the system can be in is standardized and will drastically reduce the likelihood for errors. This is necessary so that people can expect the same customization to function the same way facilitating a community to develop.
The third important aspect is helping users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors. It is critical to let the users know whether what they did was a slip or if it was a mistake with the system. If it is a slip up or a mistake from the user’s part, then they need to be able to fix it easily. If it is a system mistake, then the user will also need to know that it wasn’t the user’s fault. For those that are neural-divergent, it is simple to be critical of themselves when mistakes or errors occur, and we want to maintain a positive reinforcement for the users in the application.
Finally, allowing the community to be personalized is another important step to allowing the user get help. Yes, having help and documentation is a necessity, but for this day and age, having some sort of chat, or bulletin board where questions can be asked, achievements can be shared, is critical to the success of any platform. Having that ability will simplify help and improve the feedback process.
If we bring back the Yale School of Art, these criteria are met perfectly. They provide the maximum flexibility, which is allowing any student, faculty members and professors to contribute to their page. The website is basically a blog with custom stylings. They have both instructional tools and error prevention by design with sitemaps for those finding it challenging to navigate the site. Finally, the entire website is essentially a community bulletin board. For those purposes, this ends up being a great reflective design that not only has the community members examine art in a nuanced way, even if it is not built specifically to cater to the neural-divergent individuals.
Conclusions
Mental health is a topic that has gained a lot of traction over the period of covid, and more people are becoming aware of the individual differences that exists. While this has been fantastic to the understanding and acceptance of those that faces mental health challenges, this has also highlighted various challenges in design faced both in general applications and mental health applications.
This calls for the need of a more intricate investigation into what is done until now.
In the end, I leave you with a simple thought experiment. Using this game here , please leave me a comment on from a scale of 1 to 10, how furious did this game make you. Now I want you to imagine this is what it feels like when you are neural-divergent. People that are neural-divergent face this kind of design as a normality.
I hope you don’t break your computer out of pure computer rage, and I wish you the best on your journey to good design!
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