When we last talked, I was describing the reasoning behind the McGinn design model, having shared that this explanatory text was developed with my colleague, Jen Hocko.
But, you ask, how can such a model be meaningful to the practitioner on the street? I'm a practitioner, which is why I'm keen on keeping anything I write grounded in research, but applicable to our everyday work.
Takeaways for Designers
First, at the lowest levels, what we know about human sensory perception should be codified in our user interface guidelines or standards — not be discovered during our usability tests. We have decades of research on what humans do naturally, which we should be careful not to forget when we’re caught up in the latest cool project, technology or deadline. For example, a recent article highlighted how a marketing department used usability testing to "discover" that bigger targets are easier to find, and that red sends a stronger signal than blue, when users are searching for something specific on a web page. No one needed to run a usability test to find these things out — they just needed to know how the eye perceives light, and have read up on Fitts’ law, first published in the early 1950's.
Next, one’s perception of what is intuitive and innovative is affected by:
- Variations in individual experience
- Variations introduced as a result of context
- Variations in expectations based on culture
Imagine for a moment that you were born on a remote island. What would your expectations be for the behavior of a switch, a dial, or a push button? You’d have no expectations, because you would never have seen them before. Once you were shown that a light switch could result in a room becoming illuminated, you might be impressed with how innovative it was, but the interaction might not have been intuitive at all.
So as result, creating truly intuitive and innovative user interfaces requires attention to several layers of the McGinn model, not just one or two. Many of us start designing for the user group, either blissfully unaware that we need to pay attention to anything below that layer, or by making broad assumptions that all the lower layers are the same for everyone in that user group.
By asking ourselves with each new design who we are designing for and where in the model we might find variations, we will uncover opportunities for making our products and services more intuitive and more innovative. By evaluating our interfaces against each layer of the McGinn model, we can uncover opportunities for improvement and alignment with the people who will eventually, hopefully, be using it.