Week 3: 7 Days of HCI / Fall 2024
I may talk about storytelling to an exaggerated extent for the next several weeks (months) to emphasize why it’s important. It’s more of a learning experience for me as when I explain it I may gather more knowledge and write about the topic and enhance my learning.
Visual senses often and highly contribute to contextual understanding and sense-making.
Humans can make better distinctions between forms as compared to text. We have what they call — Pre attentive Attributes, which we haven’t quite discussed yet in our class. But I was highly curious to see what it was so I learnt about it:
“Pre attentive attributes are visual attributes, including size, color, shape, and position that are processed at a high speed by the visual system.” — Source: Guides at Johns Hopkins University.
The Narrative Arc is widely applicable, especially as a sense-making and sequencing tool for relatability.
It’s so simple, our lives revolve around stories — “Do you know what happened today?” “I can’t wait to go back to my country after an entire year!” “I missed the bus so I had to walk till your place!” “I feel hungry and I am low on energy but I don’t have any groceries in my fridge, therefore I need to visit Aldi as soon as possible so that I can eat.”
As short as our stories might be, we somehow find relatability within these short stories with other human beings. To set connections and familiarity, our stories are relatable because of the emotion we express those stories with.
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Excitement: “Do you know what happened today?”
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Anticipation, Relief, Longing: “I can’t wait to go back to my country after an entire year!”
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Frustration, Inconvenience: “I missed the bus so I had to walk till your place!”
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Discomfort, Fatigue, Necessity: “I feel hungry and I am low on energy but I don’t have any groceries in my fridge, therefore I need to visit Aldi as soon as possible so that I can eat.”
Relatability and connection is formed with characters, settings, actions, choices and dilemmas. Sometimes an unexpected twist evokes an emotional response in human beings. You would also notice that when you read stories, you imagine a scenario on your own — you fill in the missing parts of the story. The senses that aren’t engaged but in order to make sense of it, you make something to make sense of it anyway.
Human brain requires context to perceive — more the information to contextualize what we see, more the sense we can make out of it.
Before computers came along, human beings relied on physical objects to make sense and tell stories to themselves about their lives.
Obviously, evidence of replicated physical objects in digital context is highly visible today. And because there is no physical environment in digital settings, we have to provide visual cues to users to help them build context and meaning of information being communicated. We make patterns with the information we have. It creates impact on how we perceive digital information.
Icons are a great way to understand the meaning of ‘affordance’. As popular as the term is, I couldn’t quite understand the meaning of it until recently.
For example: what associations can you form with the icons present in this navigation bar? (Send feedback!) Our mental models help us create meaning with visuals and textual information we see on the internet. We also tend to chunk information to better understand subject matters. So when you move from 1 page to another, you are moving from 1 experience to another in your mental model. You are essentially moving from 1 room to the other in the home of the mind.
As much information is bombarded to us every minute, we divide our attention according to visual cues which are also engaged with familiarity. People process visual information differently and attention cannot be controlled. Cultural cues help in such situations. Human beings are constantly distracted with information, so when information is missing and we rely on lessons from our cultures to build meaning of situations. The way we understand a system works is a mental model. Even if it is incorrect.
So, what cues in your environment today helped you enhance the mental model of your life?