After attending my first UX book club Meetup, in which we discussed Just Enough Research by Erika Hall, I was inspired to think more about the contrast between lean, design research and more rigorous, conventional academic research. With my background in Neuroscience, I am naturally more familiar with academic research. Erika Hall does a good job of clearly explaining some of the similarities between UX research and scientific academic research. For instance, one of the reasons that the scientific method works so well is that a scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable. That is to say, the predictions derived from the hypothesis can be found to be false. UX research has a similar requirement, that your desire to find out an answer must be stronger than your desire to predict the answer. With both UX and scientific research, you need to be able to keep feelings out of your research. I know from my own personal experience, that this is not always easy. The results of my MSc empirical project were never published because they were inconclusive. But there aren’t room for hurt feelings in research, only results and conclusions. Finally, a UX researcher, like a scientist, needs to be a good analytical thinker in order to pose a clear question and write an intelligible report.
Now, let’s examine the differences between scientific research and UX. Academic research is grounded on data and statistically significant data sets. Academic research is a type of “pure research” (also called basic or fundamental research) while UX research is a type of “applied research.” The field of Neuroscience is a good example of pure research, setting out to answer a specific question to advance this particular field. Pure research is thought to arise out of curiosity, without a practical end goal in mind. Using my MSc project as an example, our question was, “How does sleep affect language learning in adults?” Pure research uses very meticulous standards and methodologies to discover new facts. In contrast, applied research exists to solve a particular real-world problem. Some examples of applied research questions are: “Is genetically modifying food hurting health?” or “What type of anti-smoking campaigns can reduce smoking among youth or adults?” Design research, as a type of applied research, may be asking: “who will use this design?” and “how effective is this design?” Research protocols in design research are more relaxed, because they exist in messy real-world conditions. For instance, it may not be possible to take a random sample, because you’re tight on time.
I was very excited to find this article which is the first that I’ve come across which uses the term “neurodesign.” They defined “neurodesign” as: “an approach that lets you look at the brain triggers behind good customer experience and use them to help you make better informed design decisions based on customer behavior, human trends, and overall customer or company interactions.” In other words, neurodesign combines the best part of both Neuroscience and UX methodologies. Since my past blog entries have discussed the intersections of Neuroscience and UX, I would like to finish by summarizing two of the most important ways that neuroscience can help designers understand UX. The first is how users focus their attention and the second is how we can use positive reinforcement to create a better customer experience. I discussed the neurobiology of attention and positive reinforcement in my first and second blog entries, respectively. The takeaway message for attention is that instead of processing the entire visual field in full, we focus on regions of the visual field and this is dependent on what grabs the user’s attention. I’ve written quite a bit about positive reinforcement already but the article I linked to above has a great example, with the Starbucks app. Users can store their favorite drinks on their phone and set up a pre-paid account and then scan their phones for payment. This makes users feel good because it gives them the pleasant sensation of having many choices in how they order and pay for their coffee. Humans like to be in control of their environment. Users can also order wirelessly ahead of time, once they’ve set up their list of favorite drinks, and skip to the head of the line at Starbucks to pick up their drink. Again, this is positive reinforcement because it saves people time and rewards them with social status. The takeaway message for positive reinforcement is to identify where an action (like the clicking a button or a link) makes the user feel good and utilize this to your advantage.
In this blog post I have discussed the difference in UX and Neuroscience methodologies and also reviewed two of the main contributions Neuroscience has made to understanding UX. The term “neurodesign” identifies the important intersection of these two fields and I am not alone in finding this topic worth exploring further. UX magazine ran an article that identified science, such as psychology and neurobiology as one of vital components in the future of UX. Stay tuned for my next blog entry, where I discuss some of the important tools that are used to examine web accessibility.