I also have a huge love for the stadiums and they remain one of the reasons I prefer to follow Cardiff at away games.

Stadium architecture has a clear effect on the physical presence of the club and atmosphere at games. The psychological effects on fans, referees and players are well-documented, but home advantage is also believed to give a genuine physical edge, hypothesised to be caused by testosterone increases in players. This effect is especially strong in defenders and goalkeepers, for whom the battle is particularly territorial.

Stadiums must also have logistics and facilities for up to 80,000 visitors (around the population of Shrewsbury), hundreds of police, stewards and officials, media and players. The range of requirements is pretty astonishing.

Clubs are known by the reputation of their grounds and the atmosphere they inspire. Some teams are known for poor support and quiet games (the “prawn sandwich” brigade). Cardiff, on the other hand, have a reputation as a very intimidating club. There are many reasons for this: passionate fans, unfortunate hooliganism, and the constant battle to be noticed against Wales’ supposed national sport of rugby. However, the stadium plays a huge part too.

Ninian Park is a classic ‘old style’ stadium, well beyond its useful life yet still possessing the hallmarks of bygone eras: terracing, woeful facilities, and some intangible ‘character’. High among Cardiff fans’ many concerns for the future is the worry that atmosphere and indeed a piece of the club’s identity will be lost as we move into our new stadium (at top) in May.

On my travels with Cardiff I’ve been to some dismal grounds, and loved them all (a foggy January week night in Mansfield where you couldn’t even see the other end of the pitch comes to mind). Below, Watford’s stadium: ugly and an easy target for ridicule, but possessing far more character than many other grounds I’ve visited.

And then there’s always the rare occasion when your team performs and suddenly you find yourselves part of something huge:

This is my best shot from last year’s FA Cup Final, which Cardiff pretty much fluked our way into. Wembley is of course enormous, and again the atmosphere is shaped by the architecture. Expensive facilities and location make for expensive tickets. This (and the sponsorship derived from TV coverage) means money spare for banners, flags and other paraphenalia. Huge crowds make for huge expectations, high ceremony and lengthy big build-ups, but they also make co-ordinating singing impossible. Many Cardiff fans said they didn’t get the same sense of atmosphere as at a traditional away game, since the noisiest fans were spread across the ground rather than, as is common, concentrated in a group.

The nosebleed-inducing height also changes one’s experience of the match. From here you can see the sweep of the game, like a general, but not the blood and sweat of the touchline.

This post is clearly an excuse for me to indulge a slight stadium fetish; however, I do think they provide great examples for how our identities, attitudes and actions can be shaped by the built environment. A branding exercise writ large in brick, if you will.

One may ask why this tipping point has happened first in the UK, rather than the States or elsewhere. One possible explanation is that a small number of influential celebrity types have hastened this outcome, and it’d be easy to fall into a daft sociocultural analysis of Britain the country and Britain the network. Stephen Fry as the powerful Gladwellian connector, uniting the geeks and the unwashed, previously so suspicious of each other!

My money’s on random chance. The initial conditions were set, after which chaos theory is the dominant force (yes, perhaps I have been listening to Jeremy too much).

The practical upshot is plenty of new users, including several of my real-life friends. They’re perhaps still on the early adopter side of mainstream but they’re not the type to, for instance, write blog posts about why people are joining Twitter. While it’s great to have them on Twitter, I have my own selfish concern: will I be able to cope?

I’ve previously mentioned that I have an approximate following threshold of 250. My workload and lifestyle enforce that personal limit, and I can’t realistically keep up to date with more people. So if my less geeky friends continue to join, whom do I drop? The model’s different from Facebook, where I can simply accumulate “friends” (a virtual notch on the bedpost) and then largely ignore them. So do I drop existing Twitterers, many whom I’ve never met but still give me a wealth of inspiration and knowledge, or friends whom I miss and am always eager to hear from? Ambient intimacy or friendship?

It’s a quandary. I’ve been trying to convince friends to join Twitter for a long time and it would be an irony if, once they join, I admit I don’t want to follow them. Yet I’m already operating a one-in-one-out policy, and something will have to give. My likely approach will be to take a much more relaxed and liberal approach to unfollowing people. Just as I’ll go and talk to various people at a party, so my attention will shift around a bit online. It’s either that or I face a cacophony in which I can hear no one.

However, I’m aware that people have very different attitudes to being unfollowed, so I’ll treat this post as a prophylactic excuse. Seriously, it’s not you, it’s me.

200 inputs is my approximate upper limit. Any more and I struggle to keep up, and eventually have to admit information bankruptcy. I can handle a few more on Twitter, a few fewer on RSS subscriptions, about that number on Facebook. This ballpark figure isn’t particularly surprising, as anyone who’s read The Tipping Point or read about Dunbar’s number will tell you, but I’m interested less in the theory as the consequences of overconsumption.

An elegant social dance is being performed across the web, as people realise they’ve bitten off more than they can chew, and decide to cut back. The resultant social politics are fascinating. Is unfollowing someone on Twitter a meaningful act of disapproval? At what level of ‘busy’ is it ok to ignore a friend’s forwarded email? Can a friendship survive a Facebook defriending?

Mostly these are rhetorical questions, or at least ones where the answers are so personal it’s hard to give a definitive judgement. Whatever the answers, this phenomenon is occurring so regularly I’m amazed we don’t seem to have a name for it yet. So what the hell, I’ll try: “social topiary”.

Some things aren’t meant to be measured. It’s bad enough that people read so much into their blog stats, follower numbers etc, but now we have more evil forces like Twitterank. The number of people willing to surrender their privacy to its password anti-pattern is even more astonishing given its payoff: a dimensionless, reference-free number. Can this really tell you anything of value? Every day, social networks are clogged with this kind of pointless egotism, not mentioning the high-end vanity apps like Qwitter, which just add more fuel to the flames.

I understand that people love hearing about themselves. But if you listen hard enough there’s plenty of real human feedback on a network like Twitter. You don’t need to run an algorithm to tell you how much you’re getting out of it.

MAYA, Most Advanced Yet Acceptable, is a heuristic coined by Raymond Loewy, who explains it thus:

The adult public’s taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the solution implies too vast a departure from what they have been conditioned into accepting as the norm.

What Loewy is saying is that a local maximum exists for creative work: the behaviour, understanding and mental models of our userbase anchor us and cause work that’s too far removed to fail.

Matthew Dent’s recent Royal Mint coin designs, at left, are a great example of the MAYA Principle in practice.

The task of redesigning currency is daunting. British coins hadn’t changed since 1968, and as such represented a great deal of tradition and cultural identity. Over the years, we’ve literally come to accept the portcullis, three feathers, thistle, lion, double rose and Britannia as icons of our nationality.

Individually, Dent’s new coins are unashamedly modern. They feature aggressive cropping and striking full bleed layout, with the 5p being a particularly bold example. Britannia they aren’t. However, taken as a holistic whole, the full suite of coins form the royal shield of arms. The design makes admirable use of the concept of closure, whereby our minds fill in the gaps to maintain a coherent pattern. The coins are also wonderfully tactile and interactive: the process of arranging them, jigsaw-like, to reproduce the bigger picture is novel and enjoyable.

Both the common historical thread and the design’s interactive nature were a conscious choice:

I can imagine people playing with them, having them on a tabletop and enjoying them… I felt it was important to have a theme running through from one to another. – Matthew Dent, in The Times

While a traditionalist may not appreciate the individual coin treatment, the strong nod to British history should placate him. The designs also encourage us to reexamine these everyday objects as a result of their interactivity, causing us to refocus on our money, the patterns they display and the connection to our identity they inevitably form. In short, this redesign skilfully mixes the old and the new in a way that is advanced, yet acceptable, to a potentially intransigent public.

“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” – Mario Andretti

Control is a slippery thing. It’s important to our lives; we need it to rationalise and justify our decisions, but sometimes it’s simply beyond our influence. The well-known fundamental attribution error is a clear example of how we overstate human involvement in random events – in short, we don’t like the idea that we or, failing that, another human, are not in full control of a situation.

With technology this is particularly prevalent. When we are asked to to let a machine act on our behalf we become nervous if we don’t feel at least partially in control. One example of this is the excellent writing tool Scrivener which has an elegant autosave built in, running after every pause of two seconds. This ensures that flow, very important for writers, isn’t interrupted, but provides the peace of mind that reams of text won’t be lost in the event of a crash. However, even with this tight policy in place, Scrivener offers a force save mapped to the regular keyboard shortcut Cmd-S.

Gmail offers a similar redundant safety net when composing a new mail. State is of course saved in the background via Ajax but Google again allow users the comfort of saving at a point of their choosing.

Sometimes genuine control is not possible, in which case the answer can be to hide this from the user to keep them happy. Lift buttons are a classic example; below, a picture of the lift controls in my apartment block.

Lift / elevator passengers essentially volunteer to be shut inside a metal box suspended hundreds of metres off the ground. Not only that, but they abdicate responsibility for their safety to a computer. Few sane humans would be willing to do this on these terms. As a result, lift designers have to be very careful to ensure passengers feel in control of the system, even though in reality they have only partial control at best.

The Door Close button is a result of this pretence of control. On the majority of lifts it has absolutely no function since the lift is on a predetermined timer. However, tests show that users like the peace of mind of the Door Close button, providing as it does the belief that there is no element of the lift experience that we cannot influence. Ethically, there might be concerns that this is flat-out manipulation of users. However, situations where a little interaction white lie works to reduce anxiety of users, it’s probably acceptable.

Appendix 1: As it happens, some lift models do have an important role for the Door Close: enabling debugging modes for engineers. Certain button combinations (e.g. floor number + Door Close) activate express modes, stop the lift running, and so on. Other models use a lock and key to prevent public access to these functions.

Appendix 2: For more info, try Up And Then Down, an excellent New Yorker feature article on elevators, their design challenges, and a mildly terrifying account of Nicholas White, who was stuck in a lift for 41 hours.

Of course, increasing conversion is generally a Good Thing because it makes big red lines point up and to the right. To achieve this wonderful state of affairs, e-commerce designers tend to focus on incremental improvements, hoping to push 17.0% to 17.3%, for instance. There are some straightforward means of doing this: tweaking help copy, clarifying calls to action, shiny Buy Now buttons, etc. And it works, but it’s far from sophisticated, and I think we’re missing a bigger trick here. For the last few days I’ve been playing around with the idea of approaching it from the other angle, and exploring the role of cognitive dissonance in the purchase process.

Cognitive dissonance is a tension arising when we have to choose between contradictory beliefs and actions. A classic example is the fable of The Fox And The Grapes. In it, we see our protagonist conflicted by a dissonant state which he then rationalises, much to his satisfaction.

Initial dissonant state:

• Fox wants grapes
• Fox can’t reach them

Resolved consonant state:

• Fox did want those grapes
• Fox couldn’t reach them
• It’s ok, they were sour anyway.

Although written 2,500 years ago, this fable perfectly outlines our typical response to cognitive dissonance: we seek to resolve its tension immediately, in one of two ways. The easy way is to change the belief, usually by introducing a new one that modifies it. The hard way (much less frequently practised) is to change the behaviour that’s causing us the conflict. In our example, the fox took the easy way out, reducing his mental anguish by introducing a new belief: the grapes were sour.

The Fox goes shopping

The same process happens regularly in commerce (for example, I’d contend that both buyer’s remorse and store cards both have their roots in cognitive dissonance). Let’s say a potential buyer is about to spend £50 on a Super Widget. It’s highly likely they’ll experience some dissonance:

• “I want a new Super Widget”
• “£50 is a lot of money, I could buy Jake a new cricket bat with that”

Being human, our shopper will find this dissonance uncomfortable and want to resolve it as soon as possible. So typically a third thought is thrown into the balance, which will modify one of the existing thoughts. This will cause consonance and will result either in the purchase being approved or rejected. A negative consonant state could be:

• “I want a new Super Widget… but I don’t know if this one’s the right size”
• “£50 is a lot of money, I could buy Jake a new cricket bat with that”

Net result: no sale. A positive consonant state could be:

• “I want a new Super Widget”
• “£100 is a lot of money, I could buy Jake a new cricket bat with that… but I’ve spoiled Jake rotten this year, his old bat will last until next summer”

In which case, the Super Widget is bought.

A lot of the time, we can’t do much to bring about a positive modifying statement. It’s often intrinsically generated, based on one’s life circumstances (“I’ve earned it!” / “It’s OK, I’ve been to the gym a lot recently” etc). But we can do a lot about negative statements, because a lot of the time we simply hand them to our users on a silver plate. People with biases look for means to confirm them. And by forcing them to surrender their details before the appropriate juncture, giving them tiny photos, burying our phone numbers, we make it all too easy. In short, the more opportunities we give them to introduce negative modifying statements, the less likely they’ll buy from us.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to have thought of this, but looking at things from the other side can reveal facets previously hidden in shadow. So here starts an experiment: rather than focusing on increasing sales (in effect, pushing people into purchasing), I propose we’re far better off removing the barriers that prevent them. It seems to me a more humanistic, less sales-driven approach, and one I think is better for us all in the long run.

Have a listen and see which you prefer. [From Design Observer]

And, well, I’m still not hugely talented, but I must admit I surprised myself. Somewhere, previously untapped, is a minimalist and amateurish style that I appear to have plagiarised from Julian Opie and John Porcellino.

Of course it was a very fun day, but it’s also not entirely frivolous. Let me explain.

Scott McCloud talks about closure being an important part of the appeal of comics. We see faces in all kinds of inanimate objects: plug sockets, houses, fishsticks – this is an effect called pareidolia. Even the simplest of structures are recognisable: two dots and a line.

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=409536472&size=m.

But this face obviously lacks detail, state and emotion. So we interpolate these; in effect we fill in the gaps with our selves. In this way it’s possible for us to relate more to a stick figure than a highly-detailed 3D rendering.

And this empathy is precisely what User Experience folks try to achieve with personas.

Now, honestly, I think some people go too far with personas. I’ve heard tales of UX people dressing up as their personas, adopting their accents and basically acting them out over the course of a day. I’ve heard of people decorating entire rooms with the artifacts of the personas’ lives: “Bob’s room” etc.

If you have time to do all that then you’re clearly not busy enough – get on with your wireframes! (Although must confess I do actually like the idea of lifesize cardboard cutouts to take to meetings.)

Comics can be much quicker, particularly if you spend a bit of time up front to create a character sheet, showing how to draw them, what clothes they wear, what their regular scenarios are like. Using these prefab elements, we can knock up a quick storyboard in 10 minutes before a meeting. And the comic can act as the agenda: “Here’s the scenario we need to design a solution for” or “User tests show the following reaction to X. What can we do to improve it?”.

But we’ll see. There’ll be some people who ‘get it’ right away, and some who think we’re just faffing around with cartoons. If nothing else, at least I know I can now draw a passable female arse.

Tags: comics, personas, userexperience, drawing

No? You sure?