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Expectations & Usability: Habits

This is part two of my series on expectations and usability. I have to apologize for originally saying this entry would be about standards. By "standards", I meant standard practices, not web standards (W3C, etc.), so, to avoid confusion, I've decided to use a broader word: habits. When we browse the web, many habits come into play, and just about all of them influence our expectations.

What Are Habits?

As a cognitive psychologist, I use the word "habit" pretty loosely, to refer to just about any learned pattern of behavior. A habit is generally learned through repetition and may be influenced by industry standards, cultural standards, technological and environmental restrictions, and even personal preferences.

Biology vs. Habits

Some of our expectations are essentially built into our biology. We tend to perceive the color red or large text as being more important, for example. On the other hand, our reaction to something like italicized text represents a habit. We've learned to accept certain publishing standards in written text, including the idea that italics indicate emphasis. Of course, the line between biology and habits isn't always black and white, but to understand expectations, it's important to recognize the difference between how we're hard-wired and what we learn along the way.

Two Types of Habits

For web users, we can roughly split habits into two types: (1) Cognitive habits, and (2) Industry standards. Italicized text indicating emphasis is a cognitive habit: we generalize it to reading text in just about any modality, including books, newspapers, the internet, and our mobile phones. Cognitive habits often have a cultural component, such as English being read from left-to-right. Industry standards drive habits specific to web browsing, and are a consequence of standard practices over the past 10-20 years. Blue, underlined links are an industry standard. Interestingly, the worldwide nature of the web means that industry standards are often cross-cultural, a fact which is slowly changing expectations for global users.

Example: Banner Blindness

To understand how habits affect expectations (and with them, usability), a couple of examples would probably be more useful than more explanations. One phenomenon that has become well documented in the usability world is that of banner blindness. Put simply, people ignore web-page elements that look like banner ads. This is entirely a learned habit, and one based on industry standards. A 468x60 pixel rectangle has no intrinsic or cultural meaning for us, but we've learned to expect it to be an ad, and so we ignore it. This not only drives expectations, but demonstrates just how quickly a habit can be learned by a large population of users. In less than a decade, banner blindness is a virtually automatic response for most of us.

Example: F-shaped Pattern

Another well-researched habit is the so-called F-shaped browsing pattern (see image above). Although this habit has some cultural components (such as the Western tendency to read left-to-right and top-to-bottom), it has also been driven by web design standards, which have tended to place critical content near the top and left edges of a website. Over a relatively short-time, this has driven our expectations, causing us to automatically move our eyes in an F-shaped pattern over a new site.

Habits & Expectations

Whether our habits are general or specific to browsing the web, these habits drive our expectations. If, as developers, we ignore these habits, we risk violating people's expectations and creating mental roadblocks that our visitors may find difficult to cross. Understanding habits is key to understanding and meeting user expectations.

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