UNCONSCIOUS AGENTS
by Yasushi Kusume
‘Unconscious agents come into being by dint of training. Repeating the same sequence over and over reinforces the individual components until they smoothly and automatically interlink’.
Consciousness, Christof Kock, MIT press
Do you remember learning to drive a car? You’d passed your test, but you were still inexperienced and you needed to concentrate on what you were doing. All the time. But as you gained in experience, you sometimes found yourself travelling a familiar route and reaching your destination almost without knowing it. It was as if you'd been driving unconsciously.
This is due to what Christof Kock calls ‘unconscious agents’, and it’s a phenomenon that doesn’t just come into play when driving a car. Unconscious agents play a key part in the usability of any product. Helping them emerge is all part of the design process. And it begins with the start-up phase.
The start-up challenge
As Daniel Kahneman has pointed out – in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow – a start-up phase requires considerable effort and self-control. And unfortunately, in general, people are not good at it. There can be several reasons for this: a few drinks, a sleepless night, too many worries, or trying to make sense of a thick manual full of endless tasks. Kahneman notes that ‘the exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant.’ Therefore, the challenge for a designer lies in offering different options for different users; enabling them to train themselves at their own speed.
For example, users familiar with a topic don’t need to follow every step: they can skip the start-up stages. But for those with less experience, a series of smaller and more gradual steps enables them to move at their own pace. This is key for the designer: making the process fit the users. It needs to be something pleasurable, not a process that drains them of the will to learn.
The unconscious challenge
So, once past the start-up phase, experience takes over and multi-tasking begins. We can do more than one thing at once, can’t we? Well, no, not really. True multi-tasking is actually a myth – as Stephen Macknik and Susan Martinez-Conde explain in their book, Sleights of Mind – because our brains are designed to respond to only one thing at the time. What we can do is carry out the tasks we’ve mastered ‘unconsciously’, while at the same time focusing our attention on the task that needs it.
Yet we can be distracted so easily. All it takes for a product we know to become ‘difficult’ is a change in shape or colour or size. If it’s text, brightness and spacing between words and letters can all disrupt our unconscious agents. Which means that the challenge for the designer of a new product is, and always will be: ‘How can I make it work easily – unconsciously - with all the other things the users want to do?'
One sentence
If I could sum up with one sentence, it would be this: Make your product a pleasure to learn, then make it intuitive to use.
Illustration : Secret agent vector created by freepik - www.freepik.com
https://www.freepik.com/vectors/secret-agent