Week 6
Noise in systems, truly user-centric design, working capacity of the human brain, sketchplanations, implicit egotism and my learnings in August.
A little later than usual this time as I was away on a field visit studying public health systems in rural Bihar; the learnings of which shall take up a whole separate article.
This article records my learnings from 29th August till the 3rd of September; before I went on my field trip to Bihar.
[Learnings] Noise in systems
Noise as a concept in Behavioural Economics was first introduced by Daniel Kahneman in his book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement, and was brought up in an internal work meeting by Pratyush Pillai.
‘Noise’ essentially comprises of all the unpredictable elements that affect a system with an otherwise predictable pattern. For example, driving behaviour could be perfectly studied if real-world variables would not come into play at random times; such as the weather, an unfortunate accident causing a traffic jam, etc.
In Behavioural Economics, a noisy system is a system where predictable biases do not seem to be the only ones resulting in a particular outcome. Quoting the wonderfully written Harvard Business Review article by Daniel Kahneman, Andrew M. Rosenfield, Linnea Gandhi, and Tom Blaser:
“Some jobs are noise-free. Clerks at a bank or a post office perform complex tasks, but they must follow strict rules that limit subjective judgment and guarantee, by design, that identical cases will be treated identically. In contrast, medical professionals, loan officers, project managers, judges, and executives all make judgment calls, which are guided by informal experience and general principles rather than by rigid rules. And if they don’t reach precisely the same answer that every other person in their role would, that’s acceptable; this is what we mean when we say that a decision is ‘a matter of judgment’.”
[Projects] Science for kids and human-centred design
I came across a very cool project called Frontiers for Young Minds. Their tagline says, “Science for kids, edited by kids”. What this means is that articles are written by scientific experts, but reviewed by young people (between the ages of 5-15) to ensure that they are easy to understand.
I found the design of this project, especially the decision to include ‘Young Reviewers’, extremely human-centric, sensitive and innocent. Quite a treat as an HCD practitioner.
[Article] How much can the human brain remember?
An overused fact in the UX industry is that the human brain can only remember 3-4 items’ worth of information, something proven by conducting experiments that used simple stimuli. This fact first came into being with Georgle Miller’s paper, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information (1956), wherein he concluded that short-term memory can only store between five-nine pieces of information to which it has been exposed only briefly.
However, in a research article on PNAS, the authors expand on a somewhat variable storage capacity of the human brain, when working with real-world objects instead of simple stimuli. An interesting line from the article says:
“Similar tasks with real-world objects have found that participants remember more items with more time, without an obvious capacity limit. In addition, familiarity or stored knowledge can also increase working memory capacity estimates.”
While working memory may have a capacity limit, it’s fair to assume that the capacity also depends on the familiarity of the objects shown to the viewer. Therefore, the standard rule of keeping 5-9 options may be an untested (and somewhat unnecessary) limitation for information designers.
[Personal Project] Things I learnt in August
For the past month, I’ve been using Obsidian to actively take notes. I mean, the idea of a second brain sounded quite tempting.
What differentiates Obsidian from other applications is that it has the ability to ‘link’ thoughts or notes, making it easy to see patterns for a messy thinker like me.
Can’t wait to see what this becomes over the course of a year.
[Projects] Sketchplanations
A very cool personal project by Jonathan Hey. Jonathan explains a topic every week with a sketch on a sticky note and uploads it on this digital archive.
It has a newsletter too and you should consider subscribing.
[Cool Things] Implicit Egotism and Name Letter Effect
This is by far the whackiest thing I came across in August.
In a random office discussion, Sanjana brought up a hypothesis termed as implicit egotism (in a paper by Brett W. Pelham, Mauricio Carvallo and John Thomas Jones II). She explained how in a study involving US and English census data, researchers found out that men disproportionately worked in eleven occupations whose titles matched their surnames, namely, baker, barber, butcher, butler, carpenter, farmer, foreman, mason, miner, painter, and porter.
Although the above seems like a grand coincidence, a more believable hypothesis is known as the Name-letter effect. First discovered in 1985 by Jozef Nuttin, the name letter effect is the tendency of people to prefer the letters in their name over other letters in the alphabet.
Both (implicit egotism and the name-letter effect), however, just confirm how self-absorbed human beings are or have become. As an observer, it is also slightly amusing.