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July 1, 2009
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Have you noticed anything different about your pill bottles lately? The story behind the re-designed pill bottles used by Target pharmacies is inspiring and shows how a little contextual observation, user input, and collaborative design can be combined to benefit millions...
It all started with a School of Visual Arts graduate student and her grandparents. Deborah Alder's grandmother accidentally took pills from her husband's pill bottle. It was an easy mistake to make - both took the same medication, but at different dosages. To add to the confusion, their names, Harriet & Henry, are very similar. Adler saw this accident for what it was: a serious usability problem in pill bottle design lying in wait for more victims. Adler spent a great deal of time and effort redesigning the standard pill bottle to be more error proof as her thesis project. It wasn't long after that Target bought the patent and worked with Adler over the next year to fine-tune the design for mass production. Target and Adler may not have realized it, but along the development road from design sketches to production, they employed many important user experience techniques. This is part of why the design has met with such great success. 1. Contextual Observation - The design began when Alder saw a problem in her real life. Design ideas that come from a natural context are more authentic and have a greater chance of maturing into a truly needed and wanted product or service. |
2. User Experience Review - As part of her pre-design research, Adler studied current pill bottle designs and made a list of areas that needed to be improved. 3. User Input - Pharmacists were consulted and contributed to design details such as what information card size would easily print out from their printers. Hopefully, the new design was also put in front of several patients to ensure the label usability was also improving. 4. Design Collaboration - Beyond getting input from all user types, many others had impact on the final design including an industrial designer, Klaus Rosberg, Target marketing teams, and bottle and label manufacturing teams.
References: The Perfect Prescription: New York Magazine |
Getting a Head Start with Cognitive Modeling Research
What if we told you that you can get inside your users’ heads? That you can learn how your users think, how they search and even what they will find easy or hard to do? You could then use this information to build a better user experience in your product or service! How? By conducting cognitive research and uncovering your users’ collective mental model.
It’s easier and cheaper than it sounds…
Mental models describe how people organize or think about information or processes. In order to make sense of the world and react quickly to our surroundings, we mentally categorize, chunk and simplify incoming and stored information into manageable patterns or processes. When we find ourselves in a new situation such as using a new product or entering a new store, we call upon these stored patterns and processes to help us more quickly cope with the new situation.
Consider how this woman (we’ll call her Jane) thinks about her new iPhone. Jane thinks about her iPhone as a cell phone, miniDVD player, digital camera, GPS and gaming device all rolled into one. This is her mental model of the iPhone. When learning to use each iPhone component, she'll call upon what she knows about using these other devices. If the iPhone's interaction matches her past experiences with other devices, Jane will find it easy to learn and use. If it behaves quite differently, she'll have a difficult time becoming proficient with the iPhone.
Now consider how Jane thinks about a large set of items such as types of fruit. She has mentally grouped the fruit into a smaller number of categories including melons and citrus to ease the mental load required to remember the various types of fruit. This is her mental model of fruit.
So, why should you care about mental models? Documenting your users’ mental models can provide a framework for product design. A design that conforms to users’ existing mental models will work the way that users think. It will be more intuitive and easy to use and learn. It will also allow users to more quickly locate desired information.
This point can be easily demonstrated. Look at the organization of fruit in these two stores. Which store will Jane find more intuitive?
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Jane will find items in Store B faster because its organization more closely matches her mental organization of fruit. She is likely to take longer to find watermelon and cantaloupe in Store A, for instance, because there is no melon section.
Mental models can be captured in different ways depending on the question of interest. One of the most common, quick, and cost effective ways is the card sort methodology. This technique allows you to understand how users mentally categorize information, such as types of fruit or word processing commands. The resulting model can then be used to inform design efforts for a product’s information architecture and navigation systems.
In a card sort study, we work closely with a product team to identify the items that participants will sort and categorize. Once the full set of items is agreed upon, each item is recorded on an index card or entered into an online tool such as OptimalSort, WebSort or UserZoom. Study participants are asked to perform an ‘open sort’ with the cards by sorting the items into groups, which they then label.
An alternative approach is a ‘closed sort’ in which a pre-defined set of groups is provided. A closed sort technique is helpful when part of the product’s organization is already in place and new elements must fit into its structure.
Participants are allowed to group and re-group as they work through the cards and are asked to “think out loud” and comment about labels that they find unusual or confusing.
Card sort data is analyzed to find grouping trends across participants. The results can then help positively affect designs:
- Cluster trends guide information architecture and navigation design
- Terminology is verified as understandable and concise, or problematic terminology emerges
- Items that have low agreement on category placement are identified and can be renamed or duplicated across categories
A card sorting technique is just one of the cognitive modeling techniques that can be used to identify your users’ mental models. Mental model data offers product teams a chance for a “head start” (pardon the pun) on their designs by increasing the odds of getting the design “right “ on the first try, thereby eliminating costly re-architecting later on down the design and development road.
At Sage Research & Design, we have strong backgrounds in cognitive modeling research. Contact us to discuss ways in which this type of unique user research can improve your interaction design.
Best of the Web: UPA's Usability Body of Knowledge
Our pick for the coolest UX website
In each e-bulletin, we'll feature a User eXperience website that is either a great UX resource or is just plain cool.
Usability Body of Knowledge
The Usability Professionals Association has initiated a massive undertaking to create a living reference library that represents the collective knowledge of the User Experience profession. While the work is still incomplete and only a preview is available, it is already a helpful resource that only promises to get better and better. The Body of Knowledge (BoK) will house a plethora of entries on topics such as User Centered Design methods, best practices for Design, Organizational Topics, Research Issues and Reading Lists. The target audience for the BoK is practitioners, colleagues in related fields, students, educators, researchers managers and even policymakers.
The BoK team is still looking for more contributors so if you have an itch to share what you know, sign up to be a guest contributor.
Saving with Sage
For a limited time receive:
10% off the cost of a cognitive modeling/card sorting research project
Let us help you uncover your users' collective mental model and apply this insight to your product or service design. Offer expires 8/31/09.
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