Glanceability introduction

11.11 / 12.11

Monday was the kick-off of course 2, Tangible and Embodied Interaction. This course is subdivided into a number of different modules. And this week’s theme was Glanceability.

But what is Glanceability?

 

“Glanceability refers to the perception and interpretation of information after
the user is paying attention to the interface“
– Tara Matthews –

[…] enables people to get the essence of
the information with a quick visual glance
– Gouveia et al. –

So in short, an interaction that offers information and lasts no longer than
5 seconds. A simple example of this is: quickly look at your smartwatch to see
if you have received messages.

But before we went into depth on glancebility, we received information about
“cognition”. Because I studied psychology for a year, I came into
contact with this term a lot. And I mainly know cognition in it’s traditional
meaning, namely: “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge
and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”.

But what struck me during the presentation was that here a different meaning was given about the concept of cognition. It was described as a mix between psychology and philosophy. For example, cognition does not only relate to the interpretation of information but also the processing thereof. And how our brains make logic from this information.

It was interesting to think about cognition in this way. However, I do not yet see the relevance of this in relation to the traditional interpetation of cognition. That is also because we went through it quickly, I would like to have elaborated on this. In order to know better how I can use this in my design process.

After the presentation we had to read three articles about Glanceability. These articles were the subject for the seminar that took place on Tuesday and formed the basis for the project that we have to present on Friday.

Seminar

During the seminar we started a conversation about the articles that we had to read. This was the first time I experienced a seminar, and I didn’t know what to expect in advance. In preparation, we had received a number of questions related to the articles.

My overall experience about the seminar is positive. You learn to look at articles in a completely different way than I am used to. My overall experience about the seminar is positive. You learn to look at articles in a completely different way than I am used to. Thus the seminar started with a legitimate question: “Who wrote this article and you checked the author?“

I had not thought about this myself. But of course it makes sense, if the author of the article has a bad reputation, that says something about the legitimacy of the article. I did, however, see that all three studies come from an American university. And normally I try to avoid American research as much as possible because they are often funded. But because they are fairly recent, that is a good sign that they are legitimate. So from now on I will specifically look up the authors of the article to do a check on whether I can trust the article.

Another interesting point that came up during the seminar was the following: “Is my design good for society?”. Everything we are going to design as interaction designers will have a certain impact on society. A glaceble interface requires a lot of attention from a user by continuously sending notifications. Which can potentially influence the condition of a user. It may therefore be good to offer a user the option to turn off these notifications.