How Coda helps people overcome technology freeze.

About ten years ago, I designed an art-and-science summer camp for elementary-age children that encouraged programming games, working with electronics, and crafting art projects. While leading the camp, I was fascinated by the role of identity in children.

Five- or six-year-olds approached working with electronics all the same, but nine- or 10-year-olds picked up on gender-related social cues, like who was in the room and who was teaching the class. Similarly, kids of young ages approached math like any other activity — as something foreign, and possibly interesting — but by middle school, the same kids had a deep sense of “being a math person” or not. A sense of personal and social identity appeared to support or inhibit their ability to learn.

Adults, by and large, seem less neuroplastic than kids, and so what becomes a mild identity hiccup in children about approaching math, symbols, or programming — all things technical — can be quite deep with adults. In this blog post, we’re going to explore how adults freeze up when faced with things that look and feel technical, and how Coda’s interface design tries to soften the freeze.

Cognitive science and intuitive user interfaces.

The connection between how children learn and user interface (UI) design goes back to personal computing. The first personal computer, the Alto designed at Xerox PARC, was inspired by the openheartedness, vulnerability, and inherent self-confidence of children. Xerox created their computers as a way to expose people to complex systems thinking.

Original experimenting on the first PC (from Alan Kay’s “User Interface, A Personal View.”)

Formal cognitive science catalyzed interface evolution. As Alan Kay, one of the leading computer scientists at the time, writes, “the actual dawn of user interface design first happened when computer designers finally noticed … that a better understanding of how [end users’] minds worked would completely shift the paradigm of interaction.” He was influenced by Jerome Bruner’s work on mentalities for uncovering ways of thinking, which are action-oriented, visually-oriented, and symbolically-oriented. Bruner felt that people do best when all three are used together.

Bruner’s supposition is actually at the root of the operating system you are using right now. You point (physical action) with a mouse at windows (visual) that contain code and information (symbols) inside of them. The naturalness of this UI is similar to watching little kids swipe right on a TV screen after learning how to do it on an iPad; it just works. People have to learn a lot of things about computers, but they typically don’t even realize that they had to learn about a mouse pointer and windows because the metaphor just works.

The intersection of UI and neuroscience.

Understanding the influence of cognitive science on personal computer UI, what can neuroscience tell us about interface design today?

the vagus nerve: extending from the head all the way into the gut, a source of having a “gut feeling” about something. polyvagal states the branches of this nerve are what lead to social orientation, fight or flight, or freeze. (image from the Wellcome Library in London)

Polyvagal theory (which you can read about here, here, and here) is one of the leading theories to understanding the nervous system. In a nutshell, polyvagal theory claims that we are wired to be happiest when we are oriented to our social environment and other people. The theory also hypothesizes that, under threat, we fall back first to our flight or fight response and then if that fails to the freeze (play dead) response.

Seymour Papert, a pioneer in how computers can empower learning, claimed that “children begin their lives as eager and competent learners. They have to learn to have trouble with learning in general and mathematics in particular.” He coined the term mathphobia to describe the deeply wired fear that comes up with algebra, symbolic thinking, and math in general.

I noticed the same pattern in 2018 when I interviewed several of Coda’s best doc makers. While each shared their love of the tool, they also articulated their struggles with Coda’s technicality. If we make the leap from math to technicality, we can assume that Coda users are experiencing Papert’s fear and polyvagal theory’s freeze. So, the real question becomes: how can Coda fight the freeze?

Coda’s fight against freeze.

One of Coda’s missions is to give individuals and teams the software they need to run by their own design — a toolkit rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. Assuming a correlation between comfort with a product and collaboration, we’ve attempted to combat freeze by requiring less symbolic reasoning when possible.

Our filtering redesign is a prime example of this. A primarily symbolic experience became a primarily visual experience as our design and product team drew inspiration from TripAdvisor, Kayak, Airbnb, and Yelp, where filtering was already a natural part of the interface. We also redesigned our formula builder to include icons for different types of data and rounded “chips” to identify data sources, which placed the visual alongside the symbolic.

But we realize that the freeze is at some point inevitable — it’s learned. To lessen the impact of the freeze response, we rely on two tools: social connection and orientation. To foster both, we have both a dedicated support team and rotate every (every) Coda team member through the support experience for a day a month, including all leadership. We’ve seen teams build their first doc with us as they learn Coda and then move on to run larger parts of their business with us. By providing that social connection and support, we provide a safe environment for Coda users to explore and grow with the product.

Another part of feeling comfortable and unfrozen in a new environment is orienting to it: looking around, getting familiar, and having a sense of where things are. One of Coda’s core design tension is between ease of use, ease of getting to value, and creating powerful building blocks that can be combined to create the workflow that matches your specific team’s way of working. In-doc templates take individual building blocks, put them together into a meaningful first experience, and give you a quick way to jump in, see what’s in our environment, and get up and running with the experience of using Coda. We aim to help you quickly orient to the building blocks and what you can do with them, creating a chance to get a good first impression of our tool and what it’s capable of doing for you.

At Coda, we’re excited by a world where everyone can make the tools of their choosing and work the way they know is best, whether they identify as technical or not. Creating a toolkit that invites creativity and exploration goes hand in hand with softening the fear and freeze most of us picked up around math and algebra in school.

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