Measuring Time
Do posts that start or end with smart quotes feel smarter? I'll leave you to answer that but start with a quote from Einstein anyway:
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."
One of the fun parts of working as a Design Researcher is thinking deeply about how people perceive things. Time is one of those things. With interactivity and flow being such an integral part of today's applications this becomes even more important.
So this week I'm spending some time trying to understand perceptions of time and what an experiment design to measure some of the questions I am interested in might be.
One interesting thing I learnt about were the two classic theories of time perception:
1. The Internal Clock Model
2. The Attentional Gate Model
The internal Clock model roughly underlines the fact that humans/animals are capable of learning the temporal structure of tasks. (via an internal clock - hence the name)
The Attention Gate Model deals with the estimation of time and the influence on that estimation by the "secondary task" (which is introduced as a method to check 'counting' of time - because counting makes time estimation much more accurate)
The real interesting part, however, is that the nature of this secondary task turns out to have an influence on the estimation of the interval. If the secondary task is very demanding, people’s estimation of duration tends to be shorter than when the
secondary task is less demanding. The attentional gate theory accounts for this by assuming that fewer "pulses" accumulate when another task demands attention, leading to a shorter estimate.
For now I'm devising ways that I can use both these theories to better study some interaction design issues that I'll be testing in the lab to better inform our designs!
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."
One of the fun parts of working as a Design Researcher is thinking deeply about how people perceive things. Time is one of those things. With interactivity and flow being such an integral part of today's applications this becomes even more important.
So this week I'm spending some time trying to understand perceptions of time and what an experiment design to measure some of the questions I am interested in might be.
One interesting thing I learnt about were the two classic theories of time perception:
1. The Internal Clock Model
2. The Attentional Gate Model
The internal Clock model roughly underlines the fact that humans/animals are capable of learning the temporal structure of tasks. (via an internal clock - hence the name)
The Attention Gate Model deals with the estimation of time and the influence on that estimation by the "secondary task" (which is introduced as a method to check 'counting' of time - because counting makes time estimation much more accurate)
The real interesting part, however, is that the nature of this secondary task turns out to have an influence on the estimation of the interval. If the secondary task is very demanding, people’s estimation of duration tends to be shorter than when the
secondary task is less demanding. The attentional gate theory accounts for this by assuming that fewer "pulses" accumulate when another task demands attention, leading to a shorter estimate.
For now I'm devising ways that I can use both these theories to better study some interaction design issues that I'll be testing in the lab to better inform our designs!
Comments
Bruce Tognazzini wrote about a Apple user study where users reported that keyboard shortcuts made them complete the tasks faster than mousing. But the actual time measurements proved mousing was faster. This is because recollecting and using keyboard shortcuts made users perceive time was moving slower than when they were mousing.