Cognitive psychology helps to explain human behavior through making models of the process of understanding and processing information. Similar mental models are at play on our web sites when we create systems for our web applications—we are trying to predict and encourage a way of thinking and behaving. By understanding the thought processes of our users we can make better web sites for them. This talk will explore aspects of cognitive psychology and relate them to the web development process. Schema theory will show how our users create these mental models and how they can change over time, plus what happens when they change too quickly. A look at flow will explore how this relatively new area can encourage your users to interact with your site on a deeper level. We’ll explore why people find challenge satisfying and how to apply this to your site. How people react to repeated tasks is an important aspect of human behavior, reinforcement is the psychological model at work. We’ll explore why RSS and email reminders work in different ways, plus show where else reinforcement surfaces.
Finally we’ll look at the overall web development process and armed with our new knowledge, discover how we can make better decisions about what to build and how to approach new features.

Gavin Bell
Nature
Gavin designs social software for the Nature Publishing Group. He has worked in web product development since the mid-90s. Large scale web applications covering identity management, on-demand media and social software have been the main focus of his work. Gavin lives in London with his wife and son. He writes on nascent for Nature and on take one onion. His personal website is gavinbell.com.

Conference Notes

Website Psychology – A journey into the cognitive underpinnings of the web.

Schema – cone into our lives as mental models. It helps us manage expectations.

Congruence – the ability to meet expectations or the schema.

Adaptation – gradual changes in the schema and web/technology/people change to adapt

Measured – Track it

Affordances – Action possibilities and independent of an individuals being able to recognize them.
Cognitive Dissonance – describe uncomfortable conditions when you are having conflicting thoughts.

Consistency vs coherent – consistency is rule following and coherent is understanding the context of what one is trying to do.

Flow state – full involvement and enjoyment of the activities, sticky and desirables activities that are very addictive. Positive activity is looking a how normal people work and trying to improve that.

Challenge – need to encourage people to enter into a competitive state. Above your level of skill but makes you better. You want to get people to be challenged and get them to be engaged and stay with them longer and the best way to do this is to encourage learning.

Curiosity – engage it

Pivots – taggable information, discussion boards, provide different ways to collaborate with others. Pivot through the data on the site.

Reinforcement – good

Operant Conditioning – checking twitter , email , status, news, etc. slower updates are much better and you have to be careful not to waste peoples time

Social Software – updates – some are meaningful and some are not. Manage to provide filters in case people are busy and processing lots of data these days. Deniability is healthy and people need to be able to pass over things and deny them.

Attention – there are completing demands and people need to filter the features to the most important information online . Allow customization and the ability to turn off things online that a user does not want.

Memory – all this ties back to memories and it is always connected to other people and things. Average human beings can remember 3-7 things.

Consciousness – sentience (access retrieval process) self knowledge, build web sites to allow for individual representation

Collective Intelligence – Collect information and know how to retrieve it. Information is stored

Collective Intelligence – BOOK

Waterfalls and Washing Machines – Do away with the traditional waterfall methods but psychology also tells us that Lots of small iteractions , working tightly together is going to work a lot better.

Vision – Need to have a vision that carry you through launch (only spend 40 to get to launch and 60 % after launch.) Details are really hard to replicate…

W words – who why where what when. Don’t focus on features – Focus on experience. Don’t listen to super expert users , Focus on the bulk of the users or general users. Interactions start between one another so don’t focus on the interaction starting with your web site.

Recipes – Respect for the context of action. Users are skimmers….

Verbs – Get a high level capture of what people want to do and what they do do.

Experience – Focus on successful products. Look closely at the best web sites for eCommerce ; Amazon, Dell, ebay, ipod, all of these have the right recipe for success in experience.

Experience arcs – The process of looking at the interactions of people before they come to the site.

Project Management in Multiple stages – Preawareness, Awareness, Search, Analysis, Acquisition, Membership,
Gardening – choose tools

Web site or application – we are now building Web Applications… not just Web sites. Individual experience between people and your products. If you choose the wrong platform then you get too much interactivity that does not give a clear picture of what to do.

Complexity – building applications with a small narrow feature set. Need something like yahoo patterns library for the Web – standard way of sharing data and downloading information.

Tailored – Single applications that are focued on doing one thing very good.

Blurring – Web and Desktop applications are blurring – Ruby Coco ( use same apps for web and desktop)

Open ID – having your own identity is becoming less important. Use Open ID to find out that the user is also having all these other interactions on the web

RSS/Widgets/Google feed reader – technology needs to be hidden , SSO and handoffs securely
Identity Profiles – manage your social graph, very important to be able to manage your identity online securely.

Social objects – look at Doppler look at the social relationships you are having – sharing information with you

Privacy – Very important when building API and mash ups and these types of information sharing

Social Web Applications – writing book Social Web Applications

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