A fever can teach you about Design and Usability

A couple of months ago I had a nasty fever. Nasty because it was high in temperature, I felt like crap and took me around a week to feel better. The interesting thing is that I didn’t have any other symptoms, only the fever, so I figured out there was something inside me, that the immune system didn’t like. And that is the whole idea about fever,  it is actually a good thing by DESIGN! Is one of the methods your body has to fight harmful organisms (those that pass the first line of defenses): by design it increases our body temperature.

For some reason we react to a fever as a bad thing, when it is there to alert that something is wrong and that we need to rest a bit (that is why you fill like crap).

When we design a product or service, we have to inform the user of what is going on, when he/se is using it. However we have to be good at transmitting the message. If you are developing a program/website/app that shows alert messages as MS Windows does, then you are screwed, because people will react to them as they do with the actual windows alerts (dismiss them with disgust). The same happens with the fever, we are so used to it; then at some point  society saw it as a bad thing. Unfortunately for you or me, we can’t redesign how the body should inform us of what is happening inside our bodies. However you can find new, non intrusive ways to inform the users of your products and services: that something good or bad is going on. To summarize this analogy:

• Standards are good when you want people to know how to use your product or service, but can be troublesome when informing users of what is going on
• Periodically observe how people react to the your product, and determine if cultural changes are affecting how they interpret the messages (and controls) presented to them
• Best way to determine if something works is to test periodically and often

Update (21 Aug 2009): Yamil Gonzales acknowledge to me, that he liked this post. To my shame, I realized that I had some grammar mistakes, so I tried to fixed them.

Suddenly when reading  I remembered this post “Anatomy of a malware scan” where it shows how the mind behind malware/spyware, used “XP Chrome look and feel” (See image below), to trick people to click on the image. This will then download and install the malware.

It is basically the “fever effect”, but the other way around:  we interpret something as good, when it is bad.

Popup with the XP chrome that actually is just one image, hyperlinked to a file with malware