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The lights in the theater dim. Voices die down. All eyes now stare at the giant illuminated screen and silence overtakes the room. Projecting now, the movie begins. Beginning from high above a city, the audiences’ view mimics the flight of a bird. Slowly, as the view trickles down below the clouds, a row of houses appear. Dropping lower, the view focuses to one house in particular. We enter the house, it’s dark, old, and abandoned. Slower now, the camera leads us down the stairs to the basement.

The audience is coaxed into believing something isn’t quite right. Attention is focused on the closed closet door, now bringing and increase in fear and tension. Something terrible is about to happen; the audience waits. The camera leads the audience closer to the door. Closer. Closer. Closer. Not a sound to be heard now. Then it happens! The sound of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” chimes loudly breaking everyone’s concentration. Heads turn and eyes seek to identify the location of the sound and culprit. The patron embarrassingly finds her mobile phone and switches it off.

Yes, it’s annoying when someone forgets to turn off their phone. But hey, people make mistakes. Mistakes happen everyday in our lives. Some mistakes go unnoticed, while others can be quite catastrophic. Some mistakes are caused by us, others by objects in our environment. But many mistakes can be prevented!

That Was Easy

How could the mistake of the lady not turning off her phone be prevented? If only she had an “Easy” button to push that would allow her to start over and turn off her phone prior to the movie beginning. Maybe though a distributed cognitive network, her friends could have reminded her. Or maybe the situation could have been resolved if her mobile device detected that she was in a movie theater and incorporated constraint controls, like automatically defaulting her device to vibrate.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t provide us with a personal “Easy” button to turn a complex situation filled with chaos and mistakes into one of error-free simplicity. Relying on friends, can be well... unreliable. Having our device provide controls and constraints to limit our careless mistakes seems plausible and doable. Therefore, as designers, we need to equip ourselves with a general understanding on why we make mistakes to begin with.

Understanding Our Users

We must accept that we are human and we make mistakes because our body has unique limits. We are limited in our cognitive processing abilities constrained by capacity and duration. We have physical limits such as endurance and strength. We have ergonomic limits such as reach and rotation. We have perceptive limits in what certain electromagnetic and mechanical wavelengths we can detect and filter.

Mixed together with our limitations, we expel a lot of cognitive energy to process and interact with the enormous amount of stimuli in our environment. Our attention on the task at hand will affect which environmental stimuli needs to be filtered, focused on and stored. Think of our mind as a leaky bucket that is constantly being filled. As more and more stimuli are collected through sensory memory, most, during filtering, will be lost. Important stimuli will be processed and stored using our working and long-term memories. There are many theories on cognitive load, attention and problem solving. For further readings, check out Broadbent (1958), Sweets, 1984) and Sweller (1988).

Humans have also developed ways to reduce the mental load required to process information. According to Payette, this is possible because cognition is embodied, situated in an environment and distributed among agents, artifacts and external structures (Payette, 2008). We do not solely rely on our individual human limits to process information all of the time. We can embed our knowledge of the world in objects that serve as episodic reminders to help us recall. We can distribute our cognitive load to multiple agents or devices. Consider a grocery list. We can try and store all of that information in our heads and hope to recall it by the time we get to the store. More effectively, we can situate our cognition on a notebook where we can write down the entire list.

We no longer need to recall each item. We just need to recall that the notebook contains the list. Further, we can distribute our cognitive load amongst others. Let's say we are in a baking class where you only make cakes. Rather than have everyone remember to buy all of the ingredients, we can assign each person a specific ingredient to purchase. Can we reduce cognitive load and error even more? Yes. Let's distribute all cognitive load onto technology. What if your refrigerator monitors your shopping habits, cooking behaviors, and can automatically sense which ingredients you need. Then it sends a grocery list order via SMS to your local supermarket. You mobile device can confirm your order was placed, the amount charged to your bank account, and notify you when your order is ready to be picked up!

Control and Confirmation

Let’s put all of this to use. When designing mobile user interfaces, you must create enriching situations that achieve users‘ goals while predicting human behavior and prevent error. Throughout this section, cognitive frameworks were presented to help us understand how people process information to shape their perceptions of the world. These frameworks apply when interactions require control and confirmations.

Control: Respecting user data and input while protecting against human error, data loss, and unnecessary decision points. This is a key principle of mobile design.

Confirmation: When a necessary decision point is needed, an actionable choice is modally presented to the user to prevent human error. Before adding modal confirmations, consider the following:

Do not use confirmations arbitrarily. They will increase user frustration by:

Increasing unnecessary mental load through the entire process.

For example, let’s understand that a user’s goal is to enlarge an image on their mobile device by touching it. Would this particular situation require control and confirmation to prevent human error from occurring? And if so, can human error lead to a drastic consequence? In this example, the user’s risk for error is low. Security is not compromised, loss of data is not eminent and likely to follow. Therefore, having a control or pop-up modally appear with a confirmation message asking, “Would you like to enlarge this image for viewing?” is not necessary. This will create user frustration by.

Let’s examine another example. This time a user is at an ATM machine with a goal to withdraw money. The user’s risk for error is moderately high. Security can be compromised, money loss can occur. In this case, having a modal message appear to confirm the amount of money withdrawn is viable and necessary.

Patterns for Control and Confirmation