Ericsonian Hypnosis and Interface Design
I have a secret… I am a hypnosis junkie. I love to read everything I can get my hands on about hypnosis and trance. At one point I even studied to become a certified hypnotherapist. The truth is that I have always found myself absolutely fascinated with how the human mind works. And while I don’t want to hang up a shingle and become a therapist, learning about the unconscious mind helps me to create great human experiences.
Ericsonian hypnosis takes its name from an MD named Milton Ericson who used hypnosis to cure many of his patients, back when it was illegal to do so. He was so good at inducing useful trances in his subjects that, when the AMA tried to pull his license for using hypnosis, he hypnotized the review board and they legalized the practice.
But what does this have to do with human experience design?
First off - we should look at the idea of going into a trance. In fact everybody goes into and out of trances by accident every day. If you have ever daydreamed, or been absorbed ina good book, or found yourself arriving at a location without remembering the drive - these are just some examples of trance. The human mind has cycles through various stages of arousal and trance all day long - even if we aren’t aware its happening.
Traditionally hypnotists used a very authoritative model of inducing trance: “you are getting sleepy, your eyes are closing, you will do as I say… etc.” the problem with this approach is that many people don’t like being told what to do and resist. Resistance is a hypnotists enemy.
What Ericson did was to develop a way to induce and utilize trance states in natural sounding conversation. His style was conversational, permissive, and utilized his patient’s own creativity and inner mental model. For example, instead of an authoritarian induction, he might say something like, “Some people choose to enter into a deep trance at this point, and others do not, it doesn’t really matter just how quickly you’d like to enter into trance now.”
Liguistically many important things are happening here. First, he is offering the feeling of choice - you can do what you like. Of course, each choice leads to going into a trance. He is also being permissive. This helps bypass the critical factor - the part of you that questions and resists.
In flawless human experience design, our interfaces should also seem permissive, strive to bypass the critical factor, and absorb the attention. How do we take the lessons from deep trance conversational hypnosis and apply them?
- Bypassing the critical factor, as in trance, involves being perceived as a helper instead of a threat. The authoritarian approach to hypnosis and confusing or complicated novel interfaces are threatening and activate the critical machine.
It’s the critical factor’s job to criticise stuff, when it goes away we stop thinking about how to do things and just do them. We have all been guilty of over-thinking something - it is an uncomfortable feeling.
- Be conversational. Just because you are designing a computer- based system doesn’t mean you have to talk like a robot. “Email address required” is less friendly than “Please enter your email address”. Talk to people like they are people.
- Look to absorb the attention. This is done through beautiful design and engaging interaction. I have already written about the flow experience in interaction design. you should review the principles of flow.
- Try to meet your user at their model of the world and not yours. In financial services, normal people want to “save for retirement” not “maximize their pre-tax contributions.” It is your job to find out how your customer thinks about your interface, how they want to use it, what language they use to describe it, and what it should look like.
Ultimately, you are designing of the unconscious. Bad design becomes very conscious, while good design is almost seamless.
