MA Design: Learning Agreement
The Question/Topic:
How can the design of the web influence and create trust for the audience who use it?
Breaking down this question…(research plan)
• Who uses the web in this day and age, and what for?
• Understanding cognitive psychology – how people think. The findings/understandings/experiments done to date that could drive the testing I conduct. Looking at key psychologists particularly in the technology field.
• First of many artefacts – to produce a back to basics test to understand how people behave, decisions they make, when presented with options in the digital form. How changes can influence this audience. Simply understand how people think when using the Internet.
The Context:
The critical framework for this investigation is from the industry I work in. I have been surrounded by references and people doing things a certain way but no clear understanding, reasons for why or even evidence for doing something a certain way. A lot of people design without knowing anything about their audience. There are plenty of texts discussing the psychology of the web but no experiments and facts to go alongside the designs and structure of websites to prove their analogies.
Susan M. Weinschenk is a well-known psychologist who focuses her practice on the design of technology. Her books make for an interesting read but she references past experiments from other famous psychologists that have been done many years ago and in different contexts, not in the realm of the Internet.
A Methodology:
I want to take my findings in my research and compile a study with reference to past experiments but applied to the context of the Internet today. Many of the studies of human behavior being referenced still to date were conducted anything from 10 to 50 years ago and not within the digital sector.
I shall take experiments that I have found so far, for example The Framing Effect by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1981) and replicate a similar test to the digital world, this being one of many examples.
By doing this I shall prove that if you present an audience something in a certain way you can influence there decisions and therefore gain their trust. I hope to show that what we believe to be right and how ‘successful’ websites construct their sites to date may not necessarily be the right way.
Justification why using these methods would be most appropriate:
These experiments have already been conducted to understand the human mind and how we think. This shows us we do think in certain ways but how these already founded knowledge would apply to the web and does our behaviour differ in this fairly new environment. Design takes artefacts of science and humanities and therefore here I want to take these (as mentioned) and use them as building blocks to understanding how we use the web and how the design can influence the actions and choices we make…I hope to break all these preconceive rules that I as a designer I have been led to believe that’s the only way to design ‘just because that’s what others do!’
Resources
The resources and equipment that at this stage I believe I shall require would be for it to be digitally presented, on screen and interactive – therefore replicating a web environment. Potentially using familiar objectives to present the audience with a theory in the literal sense that framing a scene can influence what the viewer sees and therefore their next actions by cutting out elements using the picture frame of that whole image – to re-enact The Framing Effect. I would also like to use faces with varied expressions to see how these can control the viewers’ behavior. I would also like to look at how the use of communication on the web can convey how the viewer perceives a message and therefore image, I believe language is key on the Internet but with the restriction of the QWERTY keyboard people are continuously finding new ways to express them…emoticons being one!
Outcome
In summary I hope to prove and understand, how people use the Internet and how this can differ greatly to the ‘real’ world!
I want to take existing experiments to understanding peoples thinking and test them against the web environment in a modern way. I hope to gain new developed experiments from this, forming a complete study for understanding the human behaviour in the way a site is designed and structured. Most importantly showing that in design we can influence people using the internet by the way we design and structure a site if we just take a minute to think and understand the audience that sits before it.
