微处理 (Microprocessing)

In Microprocessing, columnist Angela Lashbrook aims to improve your relationship with technology every week. Microprocessing goes deep on the little things that define your online life today to give you a better tomorrow.

在 微处理中 ，专栏作家Angela Lashbrook的目标是每周改善与技术的关系。 微处理深入探讨了定义您今天的在线生活的小事情，从而为您带来更美好的明天。

Whenever a popular web interface gets any kind of significant visual change, a lot of people react with confusion, dismay, and even anger. This month, it’s the new Google Docs sharing interface: The Next Web wrote an entire piece detailing complaints about the new sharing menu. One podcaster says she “just doesn’t like it,” and others are “completely baffled.”

w ^ henever一个流行的Web界面得到任何显著的视觉变化，很多人困惑，沮丧，甚至愤怒React。 本月，它是新的Google文档共享界面： The Next Web撰写了整篇文章，详细介绍了有关新共享菜单的投诉。 一位播客说她“只是不喜欢它”，而其他播客则“ 完全困惑” 。

Though the obvious reason people react so negatively to product redesigns and updates appears straightforward enough — people dislike change — the mechanisms behind why people get so frustrated, and what designers and companies have to do to mitigate that anger, is more complicated.

尽管人们对产品重新设计和更新做出如此消极React的明显原因似乎很简单(人们不喜欢变更)，但人们为什么如此沮丧以及设计师和公司为减轻这种愤怒而必须采取的行动背后的机制却更加复杂。

One theory, the “endowment effect,” helps explain this aversion to the new. It posits that people prefer what they already have, regardless of the benefits they may gain from adopting something new, because they are afraid of what they might lose. A 1990 study, one of the first to provide evidence for the idea, helps illustrate how it works. The study separated participants into three groups. The first group was given a choice between two objects: a mug or a chocolate bar. The group was more or less evenly split between their choices. A second group was given mugs, but they were allowed to later exchange it for a chocolate bar if they so desired. A third group was given a chocolate bar and likewise allowed to later switch it out for a mug.

一种理论，即“ effect赋效应”，有助于解释这种对新事物的厌恶。 它假定人们更喜欢自己已经拥有的东西，而不管采用新事物可能带来的好处，因为他们担心自己会失去什么。 1990年的一项研究 (第一个为该想法提供证据的研究)有助于说明其原理。 该研究将参与者分为三组。 第一组在两个对象之间进行选择：杯子或巧克力棒。 小组或多或少地在他们的选择之间平均分配。 第二组被给了杯子，但是如果他们愿意的话，他们可以稍后再换成巧克力棒。 第三组被分配了一块巧克力棒，同样允许后来将其换成杯子。

The two latter groups largely refrained from switching out their original items for something new, despite the first group being evenly split on what they went with. The researchers gathered from this experiment that even though people may equally prefer two items if presented with them simultaneously, they’ll almost always prefer the item they already have when offered something new later.

后两个小组在很大程度上避免了将自己的原始物品换成新东西的做法，尽管第一个小组对所使用的物品进行了平均分配。 研究人员从该实验中收集到，即使人们可能同时偏爱两个物品，但在以后提供新物品时，他们几乎总是会偏爱他们已经拥有的物品。

Thus the “endowment effect” — people favor what they’re already “endowed” with over what they could have instead. Another, relevant theory is known as the “status quo effect,” which says people prefer what they’re already familiar with versus something new, even when there’s a strong possibility that the new thing could dramatically improve their lives. It is, quite simply, easier to stick with what you know than adapt to what you don’t; adopting a new technology means you need to disrupt your workflow and take the time and energy to learn something new. The lazy approach (which, to be clear, most people take) is to stay with the old, crappy version.

因此，“ end赋效应”-​​人们偏爱他们本来可以“拥有”的东西，而不是他们本可以拥有的东西。 另一种相关的理论被称为“状态效应”，即人们更喜欢自己已经熟悉的事物而不是新事物，即使新事物很有可能极大地改善他们的生活。 很简单，坚持自己知道的事情比适应自己不知道的事情容易。 采用新技术意味着您需要中断工作流程，并花费时间和精力来学习新知识。 懒惰的方法(很显然，大多数人会采用这种方法)是保留旧的，version脚的版本。

So, even if the change to Google Docs was objectively better than what everyone had before, people were still going to be pissed off, because they’re naturally inclined to prefer what they already had. Looking at it from another angle, though, consumers aren’t the only ones with an issue: Designers tend to overestimate the value of their products, or at least how much consumers will value them. John Gourville, a professor at Harvard Business School, calls this the “9x effect”: Consumers value what they have as three times better than what they stand to gain, while designers overvalue their new creation by the same factor. “The result is a mismatch of nine to one, or 9x, between what innovators think consumers desire and what consumers really want,” Gourville wrote in a 2006 piece for the Harvard Business Review.

因此，即使从客观上说，对Google文档的更改要比每个人都好，但人们仍然会感到恼火，因为他们自然倾向于喜欢已经拥有的内容。 但是，从另一个角度来看，消费者并不是唯一一个有问题的人：设计师往往高估了产品的价值，或者至少高估了消费者对产品的重视程度。 哈佛商学院教授约翰·古维尔(John Gourville)称其为“ 9倍效应”：消费者认为自己拥有的产品要比获得的产品好三倍，而设计师则以相同的因素高估了他们的新产品。 Gourville在2006年为《 哈佛商业评论 》撰写的文章中写道：“结果是创新者认为消费者期望与消费者真正期望之间存在9比1或9倍的不匹配。”

This disconnect between designers and consumers is a frequent contributor to innovations that don’t quite hit the mark with users, says Lars Perner, an assistant professor of clinical marketing at University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.

南加州大学马歇尔商学院临床营销助理教授拉尔斯·佩纳(Lars Perner)说，设计师与消费者之间的这种脱节是导致创新的常见原因，而创新并未给用户带来任何好处。

“With technology-driven companies run by engineers, they may go more with values of technical excellence,” without taking into account what users truly want or need, Perner says. At these companies, designers are “surrounded by people who are more technically savvy and who will maybe be more receptive to some of those designs.”

Perner说：“在工程师驱动的技术驱动型公司的情况下，他们可能会获得更高的技术卓越价值，”而无需考虑用户的真正需求。 在这些公司中，设计师“被技术上更精明的人所包围，并且可能会更愿意接受其中一些设计。”

So, if the company does limited public testing and instead relies on its employees to gauge how positively users are going to react to a new release, it’s going to get a skewed perspective. Communities built around specific industries tend to place higher demands on their product than the general customer base; compare, for example, the sort of wine a sommelier may prefer compared to your average, run-of-the mill drinker who just wants a $10 bottle of pinot noir.

因此，如果该公司进行有限的公开测试，而是依靠其员工来衡量用户对新版本的React有多积极，那么它将有一个偏颇的观点。 围绕特定行业建立的社区往往比一般客户群对产品的要求更高； 比较一下，例如，一位侍酒师可能会喜欢的葡萄酒与您只想要10美元一瓶的黑比诺葡萄酒的普通，磨坊般的饮酒者相比。

This isn’t to say you can’t eventually work those $10 pinot drinkers up to, say, an unfiltered sparkling wine. It just needs to be done with a customer-first strategy that fully takes into account that people need to be eased into new features and product changes. Designers should emphasize how painless it is to level up, focusing only on the advantages of the new product in later messaging. A 2016 study investigated how study participants might be persuaded to rent electric cars instead of the diesel cars they were accustomed to. It found that users were overwhelmed by the new technology and afraid that it would inconvenience them or that they would have to change their behavior to use it. Consumers almost always prefer inaction, as it is cognitively easier, the researchers state. So, if designers want to effectively market new technology to users, they need to do so in a way that emphasizes how easy the changes are to implement instead of focusing on how amazing they are.

这并不是说您最终不能让那些10美元的品脱饮用者最多只能使用未经过滤的起泡酒。 只需使用“客户至上”的策略来完成，该策略应充分考虑到人们需要简化新功能和产品更改。 设计师应该强调升级的过程很轻松，仅在以后的消息传递中重点关注新产品的优势。 一项2016年的研究调查了如何说服研究参与者租用电动汽车而不是他们习惯的柴油汽车。 它发现用户对新技术不知所措，并且担心它会给他们带来不便，或者他们不得不改变其行为才能使用它。 研究人员指出，消费者几乎总是喜欢无所作为，因为它在认知上更容易。 因此，如果设计人员希望向用户有效推销新技术，则他们需要以强调变更实现起来的容易程度而不是专注于其惊人程度的方式进行。

Of course, as with the Google Docs update, customers often aren’t given much of a choice. Allowing people to opt in to changes can potentially make them more amenable to them, even if they decide to hold off. “Sometimes just the option of ‘Do you want to use the beta now?’ or ‘Do you want to wait until this officially rolls out?’” can improve how well a new release will land with consumers, says Mark Hall, a user experience strategist and instructor at the University of California San Diego Extension. The Google Docs rollout, on the other hand, did not offer this. “Control is a big thing, especially when we have fewer things under control now,” he says.

当然，与Google文档更新一样，客户通常没有太多选择。 允许人们选择更改，即使他们决定推迟进行更改，也有可能使它们更易于接受。 “有时只是'您现在要使用Beta的选项吗？' 加州大学圣地亚哥分校扩展中心的用户体验策略师兼讲师Mark Hall说，“或者您是否要等到正式发布之前？”可以提高新版本在消费者中的占有率。 另一方面，“ Google文档”卷展栏未提供此功能。 他说：“控制是一件大事，尤其是当我们现在要控制的东西越来越少时。”

I tend to sign up for the beta option, as I find it fun to experiment with new features before they’re released to the general public. I’m even more likely to endure any glitches and bugs if I signed on voluntarily. But when sites roll out significant product changes without warning or explanation, without any apparent input from their wider customer base, and with little prospect of going back to the old interface, it’s easy to see why people will get frustrated, especially in a time when we’re already feeling powerless and unmoored. Does a change to the Google Docs sharing interface or how Twitter displays reply threads really matter? Beyond a few moments of initial irritation and a learning curve, no, not really. We’ll acclimate eventually. Companies know that and count on our irritation fading with time, though there are exceptions. (I’m still angry at Apple’s introduction of the dongle, which I felt forced into adopting and years later don’t believe has been anything other than a nuisance.) But customers aren’t robots, and design hits us on an emotional level, even if it isn’t anything close to a life-or-death issue. And right now, everyone’s a little raw.

我倾向于注册beta选项，因为我发现在将新功能发布给公众之前尝试这些功能很有趣。 如果我自愿签约，我甚至更有可能忍受任何故障和错误。 但是，当站点在没有警告或解释的情况下推出重大的产品更改，没有广泛的客户群提供任何明显输入，又没有回到旧界面的可能性时，很容易看出人们为什么会感到沮丧，尤其是在我们已经感到无能为力，无所适从。 更改Google Docs共享界面或Twitter如何显示回复线程真的重要吗？ 除了最初的刺激和学习曲线以外，不，不是真的。 我们将最终适应。 公司知道这一点，并指望我们的刺激会随着时间的流逝而消失，尽管有例外。 (我仍然对Apple引入的加密狗感到愤怒，我感到这种加密狗被迫采用，并且几年后不相信这只是滋扰。)但是客户不是机器人，设计在情感上给我们带来了打击，即使这不是解决生死攸关的问题。 而现在，每个人都有些不成熟。

“Designs that advance the organization’s ego instead of solving the customer’s problem are the most frustrating and the least likely to succeed,” says Jeffrey Zeldman, a creative director at Automattic, the company behind WordPress and Tumblr, and an instructor of interaction design at the School of Visual Arts. “Folks will forgive shoddy graphic design, slow performance, and other sins if the design, for all its other failings, lets the customer feel empowered.” Smart design, he says, works with customers, rather than dictating down to them.

WordPress和Tumblr背后的公司Automattic的创意总监，互动交互设计的讲师Jeffrey Zeldman说：“提高组织的自我意识而不是解决客户的问题的设计是最令人沮丧，最不可能成功的。”视觉艺术学院。 “如果设计能够解决所有其他缺点，让客户感到被赋予权力，那么人们将原谅拙劣的图形设计，缓慢的性能以及其他缺点。” 他说，智能设计与客户合作，而不是要求客户。

So, sure, maybe your brain, like nearly everyone else’s, is lazy and fearful, and that’s why you’re struggling with the new Google Docs, or Twitter threads, or whatever. But if customers are a group of rowdy, disagreeable children, designers are the adults in the room who are tasked with communicating and delegating changes sensitively. When they release new changes to people’s workflows at a time when their jobs and lives are already massively disrupted, is it any wonder people are going to be upset?

因此，可以肯定的是，也许您的大脑(就像几乎其他所有人一样)是懒惰和恐惧的，这就是为什么您在努力使用新的Google文档，Twitter线程或其他东西。 但是，如果客户是一群讨厌，讨厌的孩子，那么设计师就是房间里的成年人，他们负责敏感地交流和委派变更。 当他们在工作和生活已经受到严重破坏的时候对人们的工作流程进行新的更改时，人们是否会感到沮丧呢？