What is the meaning of this sign?
Let me ask you again. What was the meaning that you first perceived? Did that meaning change soon after?
The chances are that you first saw a visual message 'STOP' and then, upon reflection, decoded the sign to mean 'GO'. Perhaps you might even see this image as an ongoing paradox that cannot be resolved.
The image of the word 'GO' as set against the international symbol for STOP came to me today when I was thinking about the difference between functional design and user experience design. They don't have to be at odds with each other but they often are.
The potential conflict comes largely from a clash between two fundamentally different ways of finding meaning - i.e. through a subjective or through an objective point of view. Through the heart or within the mind. Image versus word.
In the development of software applications it is a common practice to begin with the identification and implementation of the functional components. User experience factors are often considered much later, or not at all. It's hard to deny the power of an objectively functioning piece of code. Fire up the algorithm and there it is, sorting-a-list or scaling-an-image or what have you. It's also hard to pretend that non-functioning code is useful in any way. It's like Monty Python's Dead Parrot. It has to be fixed and the sooner the better.
But the rubber meets the road in the domain of user experience. The user's perception of functionality is directly linked to the quality of their experience. However it is not possible to objectively measure such a subjective phenomenon as a quality of experience. User behaviour can be measured to a degree through various 'objective' or scientific means but the quality of experience is not numbers but rather a story of human emotions.
We all know that the scientific method is means to establish an objective view of things through the elimination of 'noise factors' that stem from the individual (subjective) experience. Emotions and feelings are not considered a very reliable source of data in scientific research*. The objective conclusions arrived at are deemed to be the true measure of reality itself and this very perspective is validated by further objective arguments.
But I believe we forge our objective concepts from the raw materials of pure subjective feeling. We feel and then we process.
Neural structures within the brain and nervous system effectively perform their own 'scientific method' of analysis by filtering out the noise elements of the peripheral senses**. In vision, for example, even the focused light beams that fall on the retina are meaningless to the higher levels of the brain. The processing of the 'noisy' light that hits the eye begins right in the retina itself. A lot of 'filtering' takes place at this level, even before the signals get to the optic nerve. And this continues through many more stages in the brain's vision system. The image that we believe is 'reality' is not merely projected in to the brain but actually constructed within it. Somewhere, much further along, the connections are made to more abstract concepts such as language or cultural meaning.
So we grasp the meaning of the shape of the "STOP' sign before we parse the meaning of the word 'GO'. In such a transitional flash of consciousness we are actually traveling the route from subjective experience to objective reason.
This is the aspect of human behaviour that we must pay close attention to in designing usable and ultimately functional software applications. Simply assembling all the functional components on a screen is not enough to form an overall functional system. In order for the user interface to function as a system, there must be ways to let user get a feel for the consequences of their actions and decisions. That predictably is the measure of the reality and the value of the application.
If the various functional components do not interrelate in a way that caters to the real needs of the user, the user will experience them as random 'noise'. Ambiguity can cause frustration and even harm. And this kind of dysfunction can put the business objectives of the software vendor at risk.
The image of the STOP/GO sign is a very simple illustration of how easily paradoxes can occur. In application design, there are countless ways that the reality of the user's subjective experience of an application can contradict or undo the objectives of its functionality.
If you are producing software, you can minimize the risk of such business disasters by incorporating usability factors into the development process from the very start. Otherwise your project may come to a speedy stop.
Footnotes
* Some might say that psychology is a science that deals with feelings and the like. But there is significant debate about whether or not to regard psychology as a science. I tend to agree with the side that it is not. See http://www.arachnoid.com/psychology/index.html
(back to story)
** It might be better put that the scientific method is a (albeit unwitting) distillation of the behaviour of neural systems. In both cases the effect is to identify what is most real about what our senses are telling us - the creation of objective truth.
(back to story)