Designing for humans

THAT WHICH UNITES US

If there is one trait common to all humans, it is that we all emote. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal, Charles Darwin observed 

the same state of mind is expressed throughout the world with remarkable uniformity; and this fact is in itself interesting as evidence of the close 

What Darwin suggests is that we have a common emotional lexicon guiding us through life. We don’t develop emotions after birth by watching others. We’re born ready to express pain, joy, surprise, anger, and other emotions. Emotion is an essential survival tool. It’s how we communicate our needs to our caregivers, and later in life, it’s how we build beneficial relationships. Though we develop verbal language as we ma-ture, emotion is our native tongue from the moment we enter this world. It is the lingua franca of humanity.

HUMAN NATURE AND DESIGN: BABY-FACE BIAS

We can learn a lot about design and how to communicate effectively with our audience by studying evolutionary psy-chology. As humans have evolved physically, so too have our brains, to naturally select the most advantageous instincts and behaviors that will keep our species alive.

We call these instincts “human nature.” They’re the Rosetta Stone that of-fers insight into why we behave the way we do. Let’s look at a familiar instinct and see how it may inform our design work.
Parents love their babies. If you’re not a parent, you might wonder why people would want to subject themselves to sleepless nights, poopy diapers, and constant caregiving while relinquishing the freedoms and delights of adulthood. On paper, it sounds pretty bad. But in reality, it’s pure magic for reasons that are hard to explain.

Shortly before I began writing this book, I became a par-ent. Holy cow, is it hard work! But when I see my son’s face, I forget that I’m running on three hours of sleep, and that his pants are filled with unspeakables. All I see is pure beauty that is totally worth it.
Evolution has given us baby goggles that help us look past such shortcomings and trigger waves of positive emotions when we see a little one’s face. The proportions of a baby’s face—large eyes, small nose, pronounced forehead—are a pat-tern our brains recognize as very special. Faces that have such proportions are perceived as innocent, trustworthy, cute, and lovable. We’re hard wired to love babies.

I know it sounds kind of crazy, but scientists believe that the original reason we evolved to love baby faces is so that we wouldn’t kill them. Cuteness is a baby’s first line of defense. As the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould explains in his essay A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse, cartoonists have exploited this principle for decades, creating characters with large heads, small bodies, and enlarged eyes that endear them to us.

Designers also use this principle, called the baby-face bias, to their advantage. Can you think of any websites that use a cute mascot to create connections with their audience? 

There are boatloads of them. Twitter, StickyBits (http:// stickybits.com/), Brizzly (http://brizzly.com), and MailChimp (http://mailchimp.com) are just a few (fig 2.1).

The takeaway here is not to make your website cuter. With a little consideration you’ll discover that behind every design principle is a connection to human nature and our emotional instincts. In fact, human nature is reflected in every aspect of design.