Just Add Social Noor on social media

Jared Spool gave a great talk the other day at SXSW comparing magic and mental models. Spool’s talk was really fun, very valuable, and timely. He centered the talk around several magic tricks, which were very entertaining. In using magic as a metaphor for experience design, Spool pointed out that people enjoy magic but they don’t have to know how it is done - in fact it might be more fun if they didn’t know. This same point can be applied to user experiences - the user shouldn’t have to know what is happening behind the scenes. The model presented in the UI should be that of the user, not the designer. He used the example of files in operating systems - there are no files (just ones and zeros) and nothing is ever deleted. But does the user need to know that? No, it is much simpler (and offers a better experience for the user) to just create this illusion that there are files and that they’ve been removed from the recycle bin (or copied elsewhere on the hard drive). He also talked about perceived performance vs actual performance. They’ve found that task completion is the one factor that impacts users’ perception of performance. When users can complete a task quickly and easily, they perceive a system to be faster than it really is. Finally, he pointed out a number of ways to delight users - being whimsical (e.g. Twitter), attention to details (e.g. displaying the correct iPod color in iTunes), and offering critical functionality (e.g. Farecast’s fare predictions).