A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a podcast of an interview with Temple Grandin, an animal behaviourist, lecturer, and a designer of livestock facilities. She is also autistic. Her autism, she says, facilitates her understanding of and for animals. And the reason for this is that she thinks like animals. So how does this relate to us in the business of making websites?

The anecdote

Grandin does consultant work with livestock farms and slaughterhouses. In the interview and in her book, Animals in Translation, she tells the following story:

A slaughterhouse called her because they were having a lot of trouble getting their cows to walk up a particular ramp. The first thing that she did was to walk the same ramp that the cows do. And that’s when she noticed a yellow plastic bag stuck to the fence to the right of the ramp. It was blowing in the wind. She that this was spooking the cows and if they wanted them to go up this ramp, they’d have to get rid of it. So they did, and the cows walked up the ramp with no problem.

The lesson

Grandin’s point is that some autistic brains are like animal brains, that they both think not with words, but with pictures. But what’s relevant to us here is that she got on the ramp.

If a designer has a problem, he or she tackles it not from above, but from inside. That’s why we go on and on about personas and about user testing. If the problem is within a website, see what the user thinks of the website. If the problem is with a bunch of cows and a ramp, get on the ramp.

The question

But it’s not that easy. Perception is a tricky thing. For the workers at the slaughterhouse, it was impossible for them to know what the cows were thinking. They could have figured it out if they had started where Grandin did: on the ramp. If they made a list of observations, eliminated or altered things one by one, they could have come to the solution. But that brings me to my point that much of the study of animal behaviour–and with human behaviour–is a guessing game.

For example: an animal, say a prairie dog (not to be confused with The Prairie Dawgs), their perception alters depending on their situation. So for a male, if everything’s A-OK, his concern would probably be “mate mate mate.” So his perception is honed in on females. But if a predator were around, his concern would be “flee flee flee” and he probably wouldn’t notice a female or care because his concern is not to die. If he were hungry, food would be the top of the perception list, and so on.

So when we user test, when we look through the eyes of a person using our website, how much of what we are observing can we hold as a hard truth? What if they had just gotten into a fight with their mother, and so cool colors (blues and greens) are appealing to them? What if they haven’t had much sleep so it takes them far longer to do a task than it normally would?

The answer to this is of course is averaging. But everyone has a context, and everyone’s perception is not entirely penetrable.

So the question perhaps is to what degree can we look into points of view? And does a better understanding of users make us a better or more hindered designer?