Stephen Anderson

Did he want a hard or soft cheese? Aged or young? Goat or cow? There were just too many options, and it was nearly impossible to understand.

It's an example of information overload that Stephen Anderson (@stephenanderson), author of the upcoming book From Information to Understanding, believes could be greatly improved by understanding how vision, spatial memory, or physical interactions contribute to sense making. Armed with these principles, we can move from “I don’t understand…” to “This finally makes sense!”

Designing for understanding is the focus of Stephen's workshop at Fluxible. We caught up with him recently to learn more about this design philosophy, and here's a bit of that conversation.

Q: How does the shift to the Internet of Things (IoT) impact designing for understanding?

Stephen: At first, it may appear that screens will be hard to displace for data visualizations (and for some contexts, perhaps that's true.) But for most scenarios, this shift opens up possibilities. First, we need to understand how our brains process spatial and visual information. Then, based on these, we can design visual interactions that encourage the exploration of difficult concepts, regardless of the interface.

And once you start looking at problems through this lens, you can't shut if off! My friend and I were in a coffee shop the other day, and he was explaining the healthcare system to me. He took objects on the table — the sugar, the salt, packs of sweetener — and used them to represent the different players in the system. Then he moved them around to spatially describe their relationships. While not the IoT, it's an example of how, once you understand a few key cognitive science principles, you can design for understanding with any interface.

Q: So, how much impact does one's learning style have on being able to understand?

Stephen: I'm conflicted on this one. If you take a look at the research, it shows that there's some superficial effect on understanding. But at the end of the day, we are all visual and sensual learners. That's how are bodies were designed and it's how we fundamentally interact with the world. If you can enhance learning with through use of these senses, then you improve recall and understanding, no matter the context.

Q: What's something attendees might not know about your workshop?

Stephen: Bring popcorn because there will be movies :-) There's a scene in Iron Man 3 where he interacts with a hologram — we'll deconstruct those interactions as they prove to be very interesting when we look at the broader issues. Karl Fast, who's co-authoring the book with me, did his masters thesis on 13 timeless ways we interact; not like sorting, or filtering, but more human things, like rearranging and chunking. These are the kinds of interactions that we build on when designing for understanding, and will be a big focus of the workshop.

Well cheese whiz — it all sounds awesome to us! Register for Stephen's half day workshop, Design for Understanding, on Friday September 25 or check out his talk, Sweating the UX Details, during the main program.