Parking Meter

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Chris Wragg, Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing Peter's inability to use a parking meter. Okay Peter, tell us about it. What went wrong with the parking meter?

Speaker B: 00:00:32

Well, there's a car park I often go to when I'm going to the gym in Sidcup and it has what appear to be fairly standard parking meters where you pay your money and get a ticket so your car doesn't get clamped and they're all over the public car parks all in that area and it has license plate recognition as you come in so your ticket's not transferable etc. And the really annoying thing about these parking meters is they have a keyboard on there so you have to say which registration is yours but the keyboard is not a normal QWERTY keyboard which a lot of people are now proficient with. It's alphabetical, presumably to be accessible to those who aren't familiar with QWERTY keyboards and it's incredibly difficult to use. It's incredibly difficult to find and it's in alphabetical order so it's not incredibly difficult but it's much more time consuming than knowing exactly where it would be on a QWERTY keyboard and this got me thinking is why is there such a block here? I know the alphabet, why is it so hard to find the right letter?

Speaker A: 00:01:39

And if we leave aside for the moment my surprise that you go to a gym, if we leave that aside for a moment, what do you think the answer is to your question that got you thinking about this?

Speaker B: 00:01:49

I think because I'm so familiar with the QWERTY keyboard I use it every day for many hours of the day. I'm just more used to it. I have a more automatic response between thinking of a letter and being able to place my finger on it than I would do with an unfamiliar ordering of letters or positioning of letters. But it's like this experience just hit home, made it hit home exactly how much of a difference an unfamiliar interface made.

Speaker C: 00:02:24

Yeah I, sorry.

Speaker A: 00:02:26

Well you know your alphabet right? I do, more or less. When it comes to an interface you know your QWERTY and so the problem is the interface is suddenly just having to work with an interface that's in a standard alphabetical order which actually also makes one wonder about if I asked you to recite your QWERTY alphabet right now you probably wouldn't be able to.

Speaker C: 00:02:45

No that's the interesting thing isn't it? I can't tell you what's on the typewriter. I can only type it out. Yeah. No I was just going to say it's a bit like the numpads you know which. What's a numpad? A numpad is the number keys on the right in a square formation. I never use them. I can't use them. No I never use them. I'm a top row of the keyboard man right so I'm very very fast at typing numbers from the top row of the keyboard but you asked me to use a numpad and that's been specifically designed for entering numbers and I can't do it and it's made worse by the fact that numpads are non-standard so the one on your computer is likely to be different to the one at an ATM and your calculator might be might be one of those you know. And but yeah no I think this is obviously very very prevalent and we have to put a lot of effort in to be able to use really simple things. Watching my kids learning how to use the computer and realising actually how challenging something that seems incredibly intuitive to us like the mouse or the old you know the sort of familiar WASD to move and the mouse to look around which you know once you've got the hang of it is just like looking around. You don't think about it. You don't pay any attention to what your hands are doing. You're looking at the screen and you're making things happen on the screen in much the same way that we don't think about sending nerve impulses to our fingers to make them move you know we don't think about which muscle yeah we don't I mean and actually I don't know if you've ever tried this but if you look at your arm and you think well I'm going to try and make my my biceps contract and lift my arm up you can't do it right you can actually the only way you can make that happen is by lifting your arm up you can't do it by trying to control your muscles. So you know this is obviously a big big issue with the way we interface with technology.

Speaker D: 00:04:27

I think I think it really is sort of all of these kinds of examples you know another one is where you can't actually remember somebody's telephone number until you try to type the telephone number in and it's showing that link between movement and physical space and cognition and this is sort of this is part of embodied cognition theory and the idea that our ability to think is closely connected to our sort of sensory motor experience and interaction with the world which is why you get all of you know these various types of phenomenon like there have been studies that have shown that when you encode a memory you are more likely to be able to recall that memory when you are in the same position the same posture as the point at which you encoded the memory so this kind of explains that that phenomenon of you get up and you go to the kitchen and you forget what it is that you you wanted from the kitchen you come back come back again to the same sort of environments where you where you first had the the sort of thought and you sit down again and that's the point at which you you recall what it was you were suddenly realized

Speaker C: 00:05:55

that one of your buttocks is bleeding profusely that's right yeah he's going to call an ambulance

Speaker B: 00:05:59

yeah yeah so that kind of thing don't do exam revision lying on your bed because you're

Speaker D: 00:06:04

not going to do the exam no no it's unlikely yeah exactly so um so yeah it's it's just it's just an in and and you know as nick was saying um making sure you understand that that link is part of good software design so you know where where we where we take away the physical world and our ability to move around it and we move it into a virtual world sort of trying to ensure that link through um is something that's important in design so uh you know right-handed people um again there have been uh sort of studies looking at this right-handed people associate things on the right-hand side uh as being more more positive uh and things on the left-hand side as being less positive and and the reverse is true of people who are left-handed um and so you know for example uh you know swipe right or swipe swipe left can have an implication for that and it might be that actually you want to reverse it for for a left-handed user so that you know they're swiping things they want to the left and they don't want to the right ideally you'd match

Speaker C: 00:07:14

a right-handed and a left-handed person to go on a date and then you'd sit them side by side but you know because then they then they'd be on the right side for each other it'd be brilliant but woe betide you if you got it the wrong way around yeah exactly instant instant hatred i think and it's interesting that these uh there are sort of meta conventions not to do with individual bits of software but ways that we're learning to understand what technology does that have become almost conventions that actually we we understand but find quite hard to articulate so if you think about the difference between a left mouse click and a right mouse click i think most people intuitively understand that left clicking is like picking something up or selecting something and right clicking is doing stuff to it but i think most people find it quite hard to articulate that you know that if i want to you know and and um and i think uh i don't know do max have have two buttons yet or are they still on the one button paradigm they they you can you can buy an

Speaker B: 00:08:10

additional button at a cost i've okay i've got a track out so i don't know branded a second yeah

Speaker A: 00:08:16

but actually just going back is it really intuitive though how do we know how do we

Speaker C: 00:08:20

know we're not just conditioned i think because when you get a new piece of software i think you expect to be able you know you you expect but isn't that because of your previous

Speaker A: 00:08:29

experience in the sort of the the i mean um chris used a great phrase oh yeah i'm not saying there's

Speaker C: 00:08:36

anything special about left and right clicks i mean it could quite easily have turned out the other way around right okay i don't what all i'm saying is that that has now become a convention that's really deeply ingrained and so it comes it's quite it's quite surprising when you when you can't do what you want to do by right clicking or left clicking you know on on something and you know selecting things with the right mouse button could quite easily have turned into the the standard way of doing it on some you know old computer games and stuff that they they're sort of the wrong way around and it's quite weird um to have to select things with the right mouse button but i think we now know you know it's it's left to select right click to do stuff so you you pick the objects up with your left click and you send them somewhere with your right click and the

Speaker D: 00:09:16

design you know design needs to build on those things so if you suddenly started trying to reverse that that pattern for people it would make them feel like they were they were work you know working uphill um and you know uh it's the transfer all the way through so we've now got virtual conventions about sort of physical movement and uh operations on a on a computer but it's also you know bearing in mind the the traditional ones and that they are um also culturally specific so you know um uh for example um japanese people and taiwanese people are um more likely to draw a circle in a clockwise direction whereas um you know the rest of the world is more likely to draw a circle in an anti-clockwise direction can confirm i've just

Speaker C: 00:10:12

drawn a circle you know and if you'd have asked me i'd have i'd have sworn i was about to do it

Speaker D: 00:10:16

clockwise so it's little things like that that if you are you know if you've got some operation where you've got to um like the the twiddle round on a uh an ipad for example where you know you've got people doing something in a clockwise direction or anti-clockwise direction if you can work with those things you're obviously building on uh cog you know cognitive pathways that are already in place and that's you know what designers should be should be contemplating but of course the problem

Speaker C: 00:10:46

is when you have to invent one of those sort of languages physical languages from scratch um and it's quite i mean i think the early you know those early pioneers didn't they in the sort of actually quite early 60s were thinking about what you could do with a mouse and that was it's so commonplace now that we it's hard to it's hard to realize how revolutionary that was but sorry i just want to

Speaker A: 00:11:06

dive in here because you know i want to try and move it get a little bit deeper because we've established okay that um the the link between physical and mental space um and the implications of that for design but if we sort of move it you know back to what we tend to talk about analysis and decision making can we can we sort of move this a little bit further can we go a little bit

Speaker C: 00:11:31

deeper with this well i think the the traditionally there's been this distinction made between um uh declarative knowledge uh you know which is knowledge or propositional knowledge which is knowledge of things that whether they're true or not you know so you can um it's just sort of knowing facts um and procedural knowledge which is being able to do stuff um and i think the i think actually the the there's a question of whether actually they're they're more similar than that they're not they're not two fundamentally different types of thing and that when we when we learn to uh know things are is there something that we're learning how to do you know is the ability to distinguish between states of the world um actually a skill that we learn or is it is it something you know is it something more traditionally cognitive you know is it is it that we you know we have um just some things in our head which we which we call facts and and we say that they're true and it's not a skill at all um now if you take something like being able to spot red objects that's uh seems very clearly something that you learn it's a skill to understand what the word red means is to is to have a certain skill of being able to pick red things out um uh or is it i mean it's a very interesting book i read uh called on blindness by uh McGee and Milligan and um it's it's two philosophers one of whom was blind having having and a set of letters between them about what it was that you know was was being blind did that stop you being able to know something or did it stop you being able to do something um and the blind one McGee he was fairly sure that actually what it was was an inability to do something and Milligan was seemed equally sure that actually being blind must stop you from knowing something um but anyway that's you know this the question is when you think about um sort of types of let's say mathematical knowledge or something you know knowing that something's uh say a prime number and getting a feeling for what that means whether that's actually the ability to run a certain algorithm and to and to say yes that is and that isn't with it with really that's what that's what knowing that 13 is prime involves or if it's

Speaker A: 00:13:40

something else okay um we're actually getting fairly close to needing to wrap up so either of

Speaker B: 00:13:47

you two anything to respond to what Nick's just said i think well we've covered things that have a very good physical metaphor so moving your mouse pointer around or um looking using the mouse as a sort of metaphor for your position of head or eyes but where it gets more interesting potentially more challenging is in a more abstract domain where um so think of pages web pages or large collections of information like wikipedia um they you have to work very hard to maintain navigability and way finding within these large collections of things it would be very easy to get lost if you didn't have some indication of where you are in a hierarchy or where you are along a path or or landmarks i think they're generally called in psychological literature um they could be physically could be sort of physical representations of representations of landmarks like things you would see in in in your visual field but or they could be uh like mini maps and things would show you where you are in position to other things well like the thing

Speaker C: 00:14:54

that's the little marker at the side which shows you how far down you are the web on the web page

Speaker B: 00:14:59

i don't know what that's called so without without these without these visual cues you get very lost very quickly and a lot of work gets put if you look at wikipedia old versions of it more and more and more furniture has been added to make navigability more easy and i think um you know

Speaker D: 00:15:19

that that navigability uh understanding that there's nothing there's nothing universally true there are all sorts of things which we imagine are universally true that we take for granted um so for example if you are um if you're arranging things in a chronology right so you you're asked to put um there's a there's a famous board game where you have to put events in in the chronology um and um we would all start with the soonest thing being on the left and the rather the the the thing furthest back in time being on the left and the thing most recently being on the right if we were doing a chronology if you were a hebrew or an arabic speaker you would start with the most recent uh thing on the the left and the thing furthest away on on the right and uh you know we understand so that that meaning of what left to right is and what right to left is differs um and you know they're even yeah i mean but you know but there there is still the concept

Speaker C: 00:16:20

of an ordering which is in violence i mean there are i doubt there's any cultures where they start they put the earliest things in the middle uh well there are cultures interestingly where

Speaker D: 00:16:29

where find someone somewhere where where east to west is the predominant conceptual direction so um depending on the orientation they're sitting in they would order a chronology east to west so if i'm sitting facing you they put it one way and if if it was you doing it you'd do it the other way and they would all they would all understand that effectively um so so i i just think it's sort of um you know this idea of um showing things in in order um you know is is is not necessarily something something universal and something which you need to be be kind of careful when build

Speaker A: 00:17:11

building into um structures just just one thing um we need to finish off but how good are you at taking notes on a on a on a computer do you sometimes because i i now do it all the time to say to to save time and to have ease of access later and also because i've got terrible writing especially when i'm note-taking but um you know on on so i will take notes on a computer if i'm on a skype call to someone or something but i don't particularly like doing it and i don't feel it's going into my head as in the same way as if i was writing it down what are you where are you on that are you sort of full-on 21st century and you can type straight in or do

Speaker C: 00:17:49

you still like to write for words i don't really mind uh typing it's it's just no different to me but the uh with maths i can only do maths with a paper and pen i can't there's nothing there's no equivalent uh that lets you sort of do the kinds of things you need to do on a computer there's nothing anywhere near it where you can sort of you know draw a circle around something and have a little arrow and try out a little proof in the corner and then you know when you find a result put a line around it and uh point it somewhere else you know it's i've not encountered anything remotely as good as that that you know in in software form i can't i don't have that problem because i can't do maths well peter's now going to tell me that there are brilliant there's loads of brilliant bits of software to do that but well there are lots of options but they're not they

Speaker B: 00:18:32

don't quite have the the physicality the paper gives you um you yeah we we could get we could get nice um touch screens with styluses that mimic paper pretty well yeah physicality i mean

Speaker C: 00:18:47

you know this whole um it's like people board games for example which you know there are some things which work fine as board games and they're no good as computer games because it's something about the physicality of having a little territory and having little physical actual men on it seems to make a difference to how we perceive something you know it's sort of i don't know if that's something that is merely a technological constraint that at some point you know with the right sorts of haptic feedback technology we will eliminate altogether but um i still feel like there are some things which um the physicality of it is is i remember you know i read some somewhere about the way that people remember information when they're reading a kindle um and they don't they don't recall it as well and and partly that's thought to be because when people read something in a book they kind of remember where in the book it is how far through they they are of the book and where on the page it was and of course they don't have you don't have that very easily with a with an electronic book um and i just wonder if there are you know we sort of suggest there might be fundamental physical you know factors which we we have to have in order

Speaker A: 00:19:51

to be able to do thinking properly also one thing we we need to wrap up but one thing we haven't talked about is a link with emotions and memory and physicality as well which we haven't got time yeah well we're aleph insights we don't have emotions um i would like to bring in chris but we don't have time um so um we'll we'll finish there i'm not upset because i haven't got any emotions thank you very much chaps so um i'm fraser mcgrew we've been with chris ragg peter coghill and nick hare of aleph insights you've been listening to the cognitive engineering podcast thank you for listening and until next time bye