I’m not going to lie. I like David Attenborough.

And so when I saw that one of his documentaries was on the BBC yesterday I snuggled into my sofa to watch it. The series is called “Attenborough’s Life in Colour” and this episode’s name was ‘Hiding in Colour’. In it, Attenborough covered animals who tricked other animals into thinking they were something they are not by making use of colour. Butterflies, fish, snails, zebras, birds all make use of colour to trick a member of their own species or to trick a member of another species.

And then he said something that hit home. The definition that I had been looking for for a while now: ‘Search Image’. Attenborough explained it as something that an animal looks for and that matches the picture that they have in their minds.

An example could be of a totally harmless frog that copies the colours of a poisonous frog so that predators are less likely to eat it. The other way around a predator may copy the looks of a friendly animal to trick another animal in thinking that there is no danger.

Humans

The search image is also true for humans. We too look for an image that we recognise by the template image that we have in our minds. When we shop for oranges we’ll look for orange coloured balls and if we want bananas we’ll look for something that matches the image of a yellow tube-like ‘thing’.

That is why when something radically new is introduced, it will first resemble something that resembles the thing that we are already familiar with before it ends up as its final manifestation.
The first cars really did look like horseless carriages. The first websites often resembled brick-and-mortar stores. The first mobile phone looked like a landline phone and the first digital books that you downloaded to your phone were placed neatly on your virtual bookshelf made out of wood.

This is called skeuomorphism. It is when the user interface contains ‘objects’ that resemble their real-world counterparts in how they appear and/or how the user can interact with them. It helps people understand and adapt to new technology. It is not new. When electricity was rolled out in New York in the late 19th century, people needed a search image that matched the image that they had in their minds. So what they simply replaced their wax candles with electrified candles. It is easier to wrap one’s heads around: these were new and improved candles that shone brighter and emitted no black smoke instead of talking about new technology.

a victorian candle holder with electric candles – image credit: David Castor (dcastor)

That is why best practices or heuristics are so valuable. We know that people have a certain image in mind when they look for something and they expect a certain type of behaviour when they interact with it.

The User Experience Honeycomb

One of these best practices for usability is presented by Peter Morville in his books where he presents his User Experience Honeycomb:

Morville is an information architect and in his book, he notes that in order for there to be a meaningful and valuable user experience, information must be:
1. Useful: As practitioners, we are often expected to do what managers want. And even though we often know better we also have to choose our battles wisely. Even so, as professionals, we are required to challenge the status quo and should always ask is if the things that managers cook up are useful for the customer and if so, how? The more useful the information is, the better the experience.
2. Usable: Ease of use is vital for a satisfying user experience. The easier it is to do something the more inclined people are to do it (again). We can make something more usable by getting rid of all friction points first.
3. Desirable: To desire is emotional. Too often our tendency is to look at our product through the eyes of a mathematician. We don’t always appreciate the power of something that is designed emotionally. but in fact, that is where we should start. In our high paced society, we aim for lean, clean efficient processes and are surprised that the end result has little to no appeal to the end-user. Applying the rules of Emotional design to your product is akin to breathing life into it.
4. Findable: Strongly linked to our first rule —useful. The easier something is to find the less effort it requires from someone and the more appealing it is to that person. This is what Fitts’s law of least effort teaches us: An action that requires less effort always wins from the action that requires more effort.
5. Accessible: Our website should be accessible to more than 10% of the population that struggles with some form of disability. To design for accessibility from the first day of production is not only keeps development costs at a minimum but is plain ol’ good practice.
6. Credible: The Stanford Web Credibility Project researches design elements that influence to what extent users trusts us and believe what we tell them. The project takes a look at the following questions:

1. What causes people to believe (or not believe) what they find on the Web?
2. What strategies do users employ in evaluating the credibility of online sources?
3. What contextual and design factors influence these assessments and strategies?
4. How and why are credibility evaluation processes on the Web different from those made in face-to-face human interaction, or in other offline contexts?

7. Valuable: Our sites must deliver value to our sponsors. For non-profits, the user experience must advance the mission. With for-profits, it must contribute to the bottom line and improve customer satisfaction.

What it means

There is a base layer to your app or website on which everything else runs. This base layer is made out of user tasks and journeys. For you as a designer, this means that if you follow the rules above you will ensure that your design meets the requirement for findability, accessibility, and delight.

It really doesn’t take much more.