UX design or the power of repetitive motions.
The post and comments below got me thinking more about how behaviour could shape values rather than vice-versa. While this notion is fairly radical in marketing where we’ve been taught from day 1 that human values change very little and very slowly; changing values or belief systems through behaviours is actually a very old idea that is established practice in many other areas.
Meditation, for example, is a process of reaching an enlightened state through repetitive behavior. Martial artists also talk about achieving a new state of awareness through the constant repetition of forms. A client of ours told a fantastic story about a woman who was suffering with an abusive husband was advised to perfume herself with myrrh. Because the scent had very holy meanings for the husband he stopped abusing her and (not surprisingly) their marriage improved.
While deep fundamental changes like the ones above take lots of time to affect, it’s probably possible to affect smaller changes over much shorter time frames. For example, being presented with an interface that has buttons reading “protect, lock, security settings, password, etc.” creates a completely different mindset than being presented with an interface that lets you, “create, share, connect, add friends, and so on” Similarly, the actions taken in either “opening up” or “closing off” to others on a daily basis must shape thinking in some way. (As a side-note I wonder if running anti-virus software makes you more suspicious?)
To me, this adds another dimension to usability. Along with the functional and aesthetic concerns of usability, we could also think of the state of mind that we are hoping to enable. More importantly, we could now also think about the larger world-view we hope to reinforce through usage of our interfaces, and we can think about the world-view that our interfaces project. Does the way our software/service work reinforce the values of our brand? I think these are very interesting questions to being asking, because they could lead to a world where there is not just one answer for how to best solve any given usability problem and where more attention is paid to the the emotional outcome of using an interface.