Comfort your users

On the omelette to see a more interesting article, by the way also look at the following reply, suddenly think of a lot of interesting things, about emotional design. I began to think, is not in many cases, when considering the simplification of the interface, we also need to provide a little meaningless things to give users the effect of comfort?

This article is called: Everything is illusion: the soothing effect of the button, intercept one of these:

Placebo button placebo-buttons: A button that is placed in a public place to pretend to be effective but has actually stopped working.

Do you have any experience in pressing the elevator door key? A New Yorker article had mentioned that in the early 90, the local elevator has not yet closed the door key, this is added later, but in fact it is not much use, but for people to cause ' bash this, close the elevator ' an illusion, but also can ease people waiting for the elevator downstairs when the boredom.

If you look at your life carefully, you must have the following common habits:

is too hot to go home get the air-conditioner to 16°c. -but in fact the temperature can not immediately fall to the 16°C computer card in the right mouse click on the "Refresh" command. In fact, "refresh" does not solve the card problem. BT download time to let the task immediately after the pause to continue, hoping to speed up. -Well, from my point of view, I find this seems to be a bit of an effect.


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from a streamlined perspective, many of the designs are excessive

Why do I need the "receive" button in the mailbox interface? This is a problem that has been hotly discussed inside the department, because the mailbox has already realized the synchronous charge, the mail one, the other side does not need to click the Receipt button, may receive the mail and sees the prompt.

From a streamlined point of view, the "Receive" button is the product of the software side, because local mail and network-side mail can not be synchronized in real time, only need a "receive" button. So for the web side, this button seems redundant, because the Web page can be synchronized in real time. (So Gmail and Hotmail remove the button to receive the letter)

The ancient Win98 system has a "My Briefcase" function, he is mainly used to sync update files, each time you update, you have to click "Update" to make the file update. However, Dropbox this function also saved.

The streamlined design principle emphasizes, as far as possible reduces the user the operation cost, helps the user to take one step more. Therefore, the "receive" button is actually not necessary,

Then there is reason for it, and I can only understand it from an emotional point of view.

from the user's needs, these designs can let the user vent the anxious waiting mood

Remember when you wake up to sleep and black screen computer, crazy over shaking the hands of the mouse?

Remember you are in a hurry, can not wait for computer prompts to unplug the U disk flash?

People can not have accurate subjective perception of time, people are often underestimated for longer time intervals, while for shorter time intervals, the estimate is higher.

Psychologists have found that the time measured with a timer is not exactly the same as the estimated time. People's time perception is related to activity content, emotion, motivation and attitude. A rich and interesting situation, people feel that time is fast, and the content is poor and boring things, make people feel time is very slow, positive emotions make people feel that time is short, negative emotions make people feel long time, the attitude of anticipation will make people feel time is slow. In general, the more you pay attention to the duration, the longer you feel; The estimate for anticipation is longer than the retrospective estimate time. Source

For a network of high-speed information transmission, the user is difficult to accept for one second of waiting speed. However, when the user is in a state of anxiety, it will automatically find a most direct way to ease the mood.

For designers, it is necessary to provide the most direct mitigation like "mouse". To comfort your users.

How to console users

The key to comforting users is to provide a rich and interesting context to the user. Personally, I think we should start with the following three aspects.

1, reduce frustration, especially the frustration of multiple attempts

Design, let the machine error feedback humorous and have the humanization, show the care of the user, naturally easy to be accepted by the user.

The methods used are: personification (such as watercress desertion), humor (such as fried eggs overloaded chicken, version II), games and so on.

However, it should be noted that the user's many attempts to fail, should be given more caring feedback, for users, this feedback can make its "inside cow face". such as QQ mailbox, many times click on the warm tip of the letter button.

2, let the wait become slow and can pass

I like the ghost version of the system, he not only made the installation system faster, more importantly, when installed, he can provide a gap solitaire, minesweeper such a game to pass my time.

At the same time, the progress feedback provided is different based on the length of the wait time. The short time uses the simple loading icon, the mouse busy state, in the long time uses is the progress bar, but at the same time, should avoid using the non-deterministic progress bar as far as possible. Reference to the Windows Interactive Experience specification

Finally, it should also be noted that if the longer the time required, the progress bar should be longer, so that users can easily perceive the progress of the change without misunderstanding progress stopped.

3, give a surprise

Is the inherent habit of the people, even if the beautiful interface, and then humorous sentences, but also tired of the time, especially for the network, today's popular sentence, tomorrow will be concave and convex. The most prominent manifestation of this behavior is on the skin of the Web product. The user always seems to have no 100% satisfied skin.

Therefore, in the design, there should be some random, easy to be found by the user changes. Through this change, the user can get a sense of pleasure, but also to find the sense of achievement of this change, which is the two positive emotional factors.

A more vivid example is Google Doodle, there are a variety of software in the small eggs, as well as the game hidden barriers and cheat code.

Source: http://www.userkon.com/tolyer/comfort_user.html