5.5.3. In Real Life
Knowing that location information is carried along between stimulus and response is handy for any kind of interface design. My range has four burners, arranged in a square. But the controls for those burners are in a line. It’s because of the Simon Effect that I have to consult the diagram next to the controls each and every time I use them, not yet having managed to memorize the pattern (which, after all, never changes, so it should be easy). When I have to respond to the pot boiling over at the top right, I have the top-right location coded in my brain. If the controls took advantage of that instead of conflicting, they’d be easier to use.
Dialog boxes on my computer (I run Mac OS X) are better aligned with keyboard shortcuts than my stove’s controls with the burners. There are usually two controls: OK and Cancel. I can press Return as a shortcut for OK and Escape as a shortcut for Cancel. Fortunately, the right-left arrangement of the keys on my keyboard matches the right-left arrangement of the buttons in the dialog (Escape and Cancel on the left, Right and OK on the right). If they didn’t match, there would be a small time cost every time I attempted to use the keyboard, and it’d be no quicker at all.
And a corollary: my response to the color of the cars in the traffic experiment was considerably easier when it was verbal rather than directional (tapping left or right). To make an interface more fluid, avoid situations in which the directions of stimulus and response clash. For technologies that are supposed to be transparent and intuitivelike my Mac (and my stove, come to that)small touches like this make all the difference.
5.5.4. End Notes
Simon, J. R. (1969). Reactions toward the source of stimulation. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 81, 174-176.
In fairness, we should mention that the Simon Effect was actually noted a hundred years before Simon published, by the pioneering Dutch experimental psychologist Franciscus Donders. Donders, Franciscus C. (1868). Over de snelheid van psychische processen. Onderzoekingen gedaan in het Physiologisch Laboratorium der Utrechtsche Hoogeschool, 1868-1869, Tweede reeks II: 92-120. Reprinted as Donders, Franciscus C. (1969). On the speed of mental processes. Acta Psychologica, 30, 412-431.
5.5.5. See Also
You can read about the early history of measuring reaction times at “Mental Chronometry and Verbal ActionSome Historical Threads” (http://www.mpi.nl/world/persons/private/ardi/Rts.htm).
Taken from : Mind Hacks
