RWDevCon Inspiration Talk – Cognition by Cesare Rocchi

Shape

Let’s move to shape, which you can couple with color. Look at this wonderful recycle bin.

I have no idea where I should put paper for example. Sure, it’s a great industrial design. I could put labels for paper, glass, and so on and so forth.

But this is way better:

Attribution: wikimedia.org

They’re better because here you see affordance. Say I’m walking on a sidewalk with a newspaper that I’ve read. It’s immediately clear to me that it goes in the blue bin because the shape of the hole affords a piece of paper, much like a handle affords twisting or a cup handle affords grabbing.

This is a great example of coupling color and shape.

First Impression

Last example is first impression. A few years ago Blink was a massive success.

Attribution: whohastimeforthis.blogspot.it

It’s a book that claims that when we meet a person or buy a new object or live a new experience, our mind starts thing slicing very fast, because the mind needs a way to classify something new quickly, and not using the whole thing but just slices of that.

Unfortunately, that happens also with applications or digital products in general. How many times have we been dumped on the first screen of an application with no idea of the actions that we can make?

What can I tap? What happens if I tap this or that? I wander around and see how it goes.

Even if you’re building the simplest application that allows to perform very well know tasks like checking email or to-do list apps, it’s always a good idea to provide a good onboarding.

Tell the user which are the key actions that can be performed on every screen.

Cognitive Science and You

Going back to the initial quote, let’s restate it:

Another quote by a famous guy (Me, right now!):

To keep users engaged the fewer surprises such as breaking expectations, and the lower interaction overload going on, the higher the chance that users are going to go back to our app and open it again.

Going back to the blank canvas, it’s not blank anymore.

It’s not scary anymore, because now we have tips and tricks like:

• chunking
• white space
• color
• shape
• the superpower of a first impression

These are all of the things that Giotto exploited, and now you can too.