You Already Know How to Use It

This project began as a presentation at the Interaction Design Association in Boulder, CO, in February 2011. It's one of several things I've written about the way we encounter new technology. We always compare new things to what we've learned before, so I was interested in the notion from Jonah Lehrer's book, How We Decide, that our brain recognizes patterns in the world as part of this process. Design patterns are an important aspect of interaction and interface design, so this presentation explores those ideas in some depth.

The presentation is 20 minutes long. You can watch it from Vimeo:

Charles Hannon: The Neuroscience of Usability from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

I later turned this into a more formal essay, which was published by Smashing Mgazine. Here's the first couple of paragraphs:

In the first television advertisement for the iPad, the narrator intoned, “It’s crazy powerful. It’s magical. You already know how to use it.” This was an astonishing claim. Here was a new, market-defining, revolutionary device, unlike anything we had seen before, and we already knew how to use it. And yet, for the most part, the claim was true. How does a company like Apple make such great new things that people already know how to use?

One answer lies in the ability of Apple designers to draw upon patterns that people are familiar with. The interaction medium might be completely new: before the iPhone, few people had used a multitouch screen. But everyone knew how to pinch or stretch something, and this interaction pattern was easily transferrable to the small screen after seeing it done just once. As Alan Cooper writes in About Face, “All idioms must be learned; good idioms need to be learned only once.”

Header image from my essay in Smashing Magazine , credited to Sue Clark.