Nathalie Bonnardel

The impact of colour on Website appeal and users’ cognitive processes

One of the challenges today in human–computer interaction is to design systems that are not only usable but also appealing to users. In order to contribute to meet this challenge, our general objective in the present study was to enhance current understanding of the perceptual features that favour users’ interactions with Websites. This is a particularly important issue, as users’ first impressions when they land on a site determine whether or not they stay on it. We conducted two experimental studies, focusing on one specific perceptual feature: Website colour. The first study investigated designers’ and users’ preferred colours for a Web homepage. Although researchers generally flag up differences between designers and users, we found that the latter also had several favourite colours in common. On the basis of these initial results, three colours were selected for a second study exploring colour in relation to an entire Website. The main originality of this second study lays in the fact that we used both subjective and objective measurements to gauge the impact of colour, analyzing not only users’ judgments but also their Website navigation and the items of information they memorized. Results of this second study showed that colours were a determining factor in the way that users interacted with the Website. Their influence was also observed afterwards, when users were asked to exploit the information they had gleaned from the Website. As such, these findings will have a practical value for Website designers.

Creativity as action: findings from five creative domains

The present paper outlines an action theory of creativity and substantiates this approach by investigating creative expression in five different domains. We propose an action framework for the analysis of creative acts built on the assumption that creativity is a relational, inter-subjective phenomenon. This framework, drawing extensively from the work of Dewey (1934) on art as experience, is used to derive a coding frame for the analysis of interview material. The article reports findings from the analysis of 60 interviews with recognized French creators in five creative domains: art, design, science, scriptwriting, and music. Results point to complex models of action and inter-action specific for each domain and also to interesting patterns of similarity and differences between domains. These findings highlight the fact that creative action takes place not “inside” individual creators but “in between” actors and their environment. Implications for the field of educational psychology are discussed.

Enhancing Creativity in the Educational Design Context: An Exploration of the Effects of Design Project-Oriented Methods on Students' Evocation Processes and Creative Output

One of the challenges in today’s society is to satisfy the growing need for creativity and innovation, especially in design contexts, where designers have to come up with products that are both new and adapted to their users. Although designers’ professional experience is crucial, we consider that their creative skills can be nurtured in design schools. We therefore explored the effects of two types of design project-oriented methods, which were operationalized as specific courses offered to design students. As our objective was to determine the impact of this training on creativity, we looked at both the students’ evocation processes and their creative output. In the first of two studies, 32 design students had to perform the same creative design task, but half of them received training based on brainstorming principles and the other half training based on constraint management. Here, we focused our analysis on the students’ evocation processes. In the second study, we asked 16 teachers specializing in creative activities to assess the students’ output according to different criteria. These two studies showed that the two types of training had a differential impact and allowed us to explore relationships between constraints and ideas in creative design.

Playing ‘Pong’ Together: Emergent Coordination in a Doubles Interception Task

In this contribution we set out to study how a team of two players coordinated their actions so as to intercept an approaching ball. Adopting a doubles-pong task, six teams of two participants each intercepted balls moving downward across a screen toward an interception axis by laterally displacing participant-controlled on-screen paddles. With collisions between paddles resulting in unsuccessful interception, on each trial participants had to decide amongst them who would intercept the ball and who would not. In the absence of possibilities for overt communication, such team decisions were informed exclusively by the visual information provided on the screen. Results demonstrated that collisions were rare and that 91.3 ± 3.4% of all balls were intercepted. While all teams demonstrated a global division of interception space, boundaries between interception domains were fuzzy and could moreover be shifted away from the center of the screen. Balls arriving between the participants’ initial paddle positions often gave rise to both participants initiating an interception movement, requiring one of the participants to abandon the interception attempt at some point so as to allow the other participant to intercept the ball. A simulation of on-the-fly decision making of who intercepted the ball based on a measure capturing the triangular relations between the two paddles and the ball allowed the qualitative aspects of the pattern of observed results to be reproduced, including the timing of abandoning. Overall, the results thus suggest that decisions regarding who intercepts the ball emerge from between-participant interactions.

Enhancing Collective Creative Design: An Exploratory Study on the Influence of Static and Dynamic Personas in a Virtual Environment

Abstract In this paper, we propose to extend an existing method, ‘the personas’, and to develop a ‘dynamic persona’ in a virtual environment. To determine the interest of such a dynamic persona, we compared the influence of dynamic vs static personas in groups composed of two professionals (a designer and an ergonomist) who had to deal with either a dynamic or a static persona, while being engaged in a creative task. Their creative performances were also compared with those of 11 groups of three lay-participants who performed the same task, in the same virtual environment, with the same communication modality (i.e. chat). Moreover, we analysed the quality of collaboration in groups with personas and their level of empathy toward the dynamic or static personas. Results tend to be in favour of the dynamic persona condition, concerning the fluency and originality of ideas, and with regard to quality of collaboration and empathy.

Special issue on the 11th conference on naturalistic decision making

The naturalistic decision-making (NDM) approach deals with how humans make decisions in natural settings, especially professional situations, which can be difficult to reproduce in experimental laboratory studies. NDM explores collaboration and cooperation both between humans, and between humans and systems, as well as situations of diagnosis, planning, supervision, and control processes. Basically, decision researchers focus on the analysis of humans at work and their interactions with systems in context, including both environmental and social dimensions. Since the movement was founded, more than 20 years ago, several models of decision making have been developed, each offering a fresh view on how humans perform complex cognitive functions to accomplish situated activities. This very different way of studying human interactions in modern work environments has given rise to a worldwide research community sharing the same issues and a common theoretical background, and relying on ecological models of decision making (Brehmer 1992; Endsley 1995; Hutchins 1995; Rasmussen et al. 1994); models of intelligence, perception, and action as mental models (Johnson-Laird 1983); and activity theory (Engestrom 1999; Kuutti 1996; Nardi 1996). Looking further back, the field of naturalistic decision making can be seen to have its historical roots in the ground-breaking work of Vygotsky and Leont’ev (Leont’ev 1978; Leont’ev and Luria 1968), and even Piaget’s intelligence theory (Piaget 1972, 1977). The NDM approach, which is predicated upon a strong relationship between application fields, research, and models of complex cognitive tasks, is responsible for a now well-established definition of decision making (Klein et al. 1993): ‘‘eight important factors characterize decision making in naturalistic settings, but frequently are ignored in decision-making research. It is not likely that all eight factors will be at their most difficult levels in any one setting, but often several of these factors will complicate the decision task.

Division of labor as an emergent phenomenon of social coordination: The example of playing doubles-pong

In many daily situations, our behavior is coordinated with that of others. This study investigated this coordination in a doubles-pong task. In this task, two participants each controlled a paddle that could move laterally near the bottom of a shared computer screen. With their paddles, the players needed to block balls that moved down under an angle. In doing so, they needed to make sure that their paddles did not collide. A successful interception led to the ball bouncing back upwards. Importantly, all communication other than through vision of the shared screen was excluded. In the experiment, the initial position of the paddle of the right player was varied across trials. This allowed testing hypotheses regarding the use of a tacitly understood boundary to divide interception space. This boundary could be halfway the screen, or in the middle between the initial positions of the two paddles. These two hypotheses did not hold. As an alternative to planned division of labor, the behavioral patterns might emerge from continuous visual couplings of paddles and ball. This was tested with an action-based decision model that considered the rates of change of each players angle between the interception axis and the line connecting the ball and inner edge of the paddle. The model accounted for the observed patterns of behavior to a very large extent. This led to the conclusion that decisions of who would take the ball emerged from ongoing social coordination. Implications for social coordination in general are discussed.

Towards the Evaluation of Emotional Interfaces

The emotional design approach has become increasingly preponderant for the design teams. However, we observed that most of the efforts of the designers to elicit positive emotions are based on empirical and subjective approaches. This paper shares the state of our current research towards the proposal of heuristics for emotional and empathic interfaces. We focus on the actual design practices, and discuss methodologies to assess the emotions elicited by these design strategies.

Impact of project-oriented educational methods on creative design

Due to current challenges in our society, education in the field of design is increasingly oriented towards work. Thus, the objective of this paper is to contribute to determine ways of favouring creativity in design by providing project-oriented training for design students. In accordance with cognitive models, we proposed and compared two educational methods intended to allow students to focus on either the management of constraints related to the design project at hand or the evocation of creative ideas. A total of 32 design students were trained in one of the two methods and they all had to solve the same design problem. The elements they evoked during the early stages of the design process were subjected to quantitative and qualitative analyses, and the creativity of their final designs was assessed by two design teachers. Results show that the type of method has a significant effect on the ideas and constraints evoked by designers but no correlation was observed between method and design outcome creativity. However, this research shows that it is possible to promote certain ways of thinking in design students and to train them with techniques they can use later on in their professional lives to satisfy the specificities of the design projects they undertake.

The Creative Process in Design

Society’s need for innovation is constantly growing, driven by a demand for new products. To help designers meet this need, we have to fully understand the creative process in design. In this chapter, Bonnardel, Wojtczuk, Gilles, and Mazon characterize creative design activities and provide descriptive models of creativity and design thinking. They then describe two complementary studies. In the first one, professional designers had to identify key stages and factors for their process of creative design thinking, via interviews and questionnaires. In the second one, design students were exposed to specific teaching methods, which allow an analysis of aspects of the design process related to divergent/convergent thinking. Bonnardel et al. use these results to highlight components of the creative design process that could be enhanced by particular teaching methods and/or computational systems.