Muddle Through Towards Better Web Design
Since the arrival of Pope Benedict XIV at the Twitter scene, I’ve been wondering how many people who don’t know how to use the Internet are still out there in the Western world. But an even more intriguing question is this: how come so many people are proficient at using it? Have they been taught web browsing at school? Did they have to read “Internet For Beginners”? Have they taken any special courses?
The answer of course is that they learnt things on the fly. Our cognitive abilities allow us to instinctively absorb new information, recognize new patterns and adapt to new environments and routines. We don’t need special instructions or conscious decision-making regarding the best approach to knowledge accumulation. We want to do something and we try to do it. We “muddle through”.
I borrow here the language of the web usability guru Steve Krug, and in particular his “Don’t Make me Think” book, considered by many the “bible” of user experience. Muddling through is Krug’s third “fact of life” of real-world Web use, just after scanning and “satisficing”. Below I’m going to prove that muddling through is not just an effective and time-saving approach to information discovery that humans simply opt for but rather it’s the way we live in general. Our minds are conditioned to muddle through. Better web designs are impossible without proper recognition of this fundamental human nature.
How Do We Really Use Websites?
So how many of you read the user guide booklet that came with your new iPhone? What about the “Convention Used in This Book” page in your latest educational book? Mu guess is: not many. The same is true for the way we use websites. Everyone’s busy, everyone’s just trying to figure out how to get to a particular place and doing anything else seems like a waste of time. Now the funny thing is that everyone’s got their own way of doing things. Even when it comes to a standard process such as navigating a website, some people will follow the links in the main navigation, while others will use the search button or start scanning paragraphs for clues.
One important implication of this tendency to muddle through is that people will often use websites in unexpected ways. Designers sometime envisage a perfect way of completing a particular process, e.g. you click on this link, you fill the form, you browse the available options and choose one as indicated in the instructions displayed to you left, you click the big “submit” button, etc. But in practice there are many ways to browse a website, use a web application, or even fill a contact form (“should I put my phone in the specially designated field or attach it in the body of the message like I always do?”). As a result, when offered a detailed record of how websites are actually used, some designers might think “who on Earth would let those monkeys anywhere near a computer?” Such attitude ignores of course that web users are not trying to figure out what the brilliant designer had in mind when creating the interface. They just want to get what they came for. If they have muddled through something and it worked, why shouldn’t they try the same approach next time?
A well quoted example of such interface misconception is Steve Krug’s anecdote about some users typing full URLs (including www.) into the Yahoo search box every time they want to go to a particular website. Krug explains:
If you ask them about it, it becomes clear that some of them think that Yahoo is the Internet, and that this is the way you use it.
Muddling through, being a rather crude approach to cognition, is clearly prone to errors. But many errors, like the one above, don’t have a great impact on the end result. If a website is used on a regular basis, an incomplete understating might slow things down a notch or make the user miss out on alternative options. But if you compare this to a structured approach to web browsing that involves careful review of published instructions and analysis of all potential routes and uses of the interface, then muddling through certainly sounds attractive. As Jeffrey Veen puts it:
[..] we’re much more like motorists behind the wheel of a car in an unfamiliar city. We have a clear destination in mind, and are making split-second decisions while negotiating a confusing new place. And we are doing a task that demands our attention at the same time. No wonder we don’t read. We’re just trying to เว็บตรง get done with this nonsense as quickly as possible.
I believe this to be a well accepted proposition in the realm of user experience. However, besides this need for time-optimization there is also an alternative perspective for understanding the muddling through process where the explanation is found in the depths of the human psyche. In such view, we don’t simply choose to muddle through. Muddling through is what makes us who we are.
Psychology of Muddling Through – the Doing Mode
In the field of Psychology, the process of muddling through is recognized as part of the “Doing mode”. Doing mode is the function of the mind that allows rational critical thinking. Doing mode is what allows us to build bridges, send men to space, or write our thesis. It also governs the process of learning from repetition, a crucial ingredient to the success of the muddling through approach.
According to Prof. Mark Williams from Oxford University, Doing mode usually begins with recognition of a gap between our perceived current state and some alternative state that we would prefer to be in. In the context of the Web, this could be as simple as “I sit here bored to death; I would rather be watching a video of a skateboarder hurting himself”. This perceived gap triggers an automatic pattern of mind activity, which sole aim to bring us closer the desired state.