I was reflecting recently on what I thought made up a healthy decision making process. I’m not a psychologist or anything, I just sometimes like to sit and think about weird stuff. Here are 3 components that I think should be equally employed when making a decision–none of this is new, it’s all been done, and done much better:
- Reason*
Rationality, morality, and logic. - Intellect
Collecting and analyzing evidence, weighing feasibility, assessing situations, clarifying assumptions, etc. - Emotion
Feelings, intuition, and instinct.
* Depending on how you interpret the word, Reason can be somewhat closely associated with both Intellect and Emotion. Still, I felt like separating them out.
Ground breaking, eh? You know, my sister just got her Masters degree in Psychology from Northwestern University - maybe some of it rubbed off on me? Yeah. But anyway, as I think about the 3 components I mentioned, something is missing. I think there’s a critical fourth component that we (at least in the western world) too often ignore: Community.
I think many people would recognize that in the western world we’ve grown much more individualistic than people have been historically. Families are “different”–more scattered, for example–and we no longer have structures like tribes or villages, all of which incorporate close nit communities of people living together day-by-day. I’m not saying there aren’t valid reasons for our move away from small tight communities, or that it’s inherently bad, but I do think we’ve lost something in the process.
When we factor only Reason, Intellect, and Emotion into a decision, absent from Community, we miss all the other perspectives of Reason, Intellect, and Emotion that other people bring to the same situation–often more experienced perspectives. Of course, we still need to be the ones that make the decision, and definitely I’m not advocating Groupthink.
Bringing It Back Home to UI Design
So then I started thinking, how does this relate to User Interface design in particular, and application design in general? When we make decisions surrounding user interfaces, which of the four components are we actively engaging?
Example: a “Tools->Options” dialog. (C’mon, you know you’ve got one in your app, everybody’s doin’ it!)
Decision: What options should we expose?
(Sub-decision: How should we expose those options?)
Intellect, and to a certain extent Reason, tend to be the big drivers when deciding which configuration options to include. Which options should we include? All of them, naturally! And how should we expose them? Numbers should be specified via a slider, textbox, or spin control, and a boolean flag should be a checkbox, etc. Makes sense, and offers the user maximum control. How should we organize it? Just slap them on some property sheets and be done with it. Just as long as they’re getting exposed.
But what about Emotion? I could expose all those options, but users are going to feel dirty every time they are forced to open the Options dialog. Or Reason/Morality: is it irrational or even immoral to offer esoteric configuration options? Is it tantamount to actually inflicting pain on someone if we make them try to grok what the difference is between using “the default value”, “an override”, or “an override-then-the-default-depending on option C”, and to do so in such a way that seemingly doesn’t make sense on purpose?
What we really need, is to incorporate all 3 components along with Community in the decision making process. In too many smaller software companies it’s developers using their Intellect, and nothing more. Community provides the necessary ballast. What is the intent of the application? What do we even want users to be able to configure in the first place? How will users most likely use the app? Will it line up with our intention, or will it diverge? The questions can be endless, but of great value. And they should be asked!
How can we gain this communal component to decisions? Roy Osherove has some pretty good ideas, for a start. But the real key, however you do it, is to actually ask people what they think, feel, and believe.
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