“Human brains are lazy” — Karan Shukla

Photo by Natasha Connell on Unsplash

A couple years ago, Karan Shukla spoke at the IBM Design Studio’s Craftcon. His talk, Designing for the Human Brain, was inspirational to me, as I build content and user experiences for our busy users. My favorite takeaways follow.

The lazy brain

• Humans want the least amount of work possible.
• Progressive disclosure slowly reveals work.
• Patterns can build repetitive affordances.
• Default values let people do less work: defaults can grow and learn over time based on standard behaviors. (hello Watson!)

Limits in the design

• Manage users’ attention span via progressive disclosure.
• The periphery of a page is where you can grab someone’s attention. Peripheral vision is used evolutionarily to detect threats easily.
• For headers, use short block of texts and short line lengths. Echoic memory: small things are easy to remember in short term memory.
• Visual affordances: Animate changes in the interface. Obscure backgrounds behind pop-ups or modal boxes. Or keep less important info visually in the background.

Problem exists between keyboard and chair

• People will make mistakes, so anticipate those.
• Break error-prone tasks into chunks.
• Use the language of users, not the system.

Dopamine’s relationship to the lazy brain

• People want instant gratification.
• But, use dopamine for good, not evil. Don’t design click bait.
• People also seek the Mazlow hierarchy of needs.