Death… It's A Living

In the past, I’ve written about the passive intake of information that helps determine whether people find various humans and non-human objects attractive. Although I obviously find this area of knowledge interesting, it sometimes only becomes useful in the context of design and content creation. How can individuals and companies create aesthetics or enhance products in ways that work with a user’s cognitive and perceptual processes to relay the information “This is cool” and “This is appealing”? How do they avoid design choices that are near misses or worse still, total disasters?

In aesthetics, psychology, and design, the uncanny emerges when something is just familiar enough to be recognizable, yet novel enough to feel strange. This delicate balance between comfort and unease shapes everything from what we find beautiful to the products we embrace. And for designers, navigating this balance is crucial. Although we might think that there should be a massive gap of information and opinion between “cool” and “awful”, one reminder that the very nature of fashion is cyclical serves to demonstrate that these constructs are closer than we often think. I never thought I’d see the day, but high-waisted “mom” jeans are in again. Skinny jeans are out (or are they??)

In the immortal words of David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap:

In business, the fine line between stupid and clever can make the difference between making or losing millions of dollars. Perhaps the most well-known example of crossing the line into stupid is New Coke. In his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell provides one of the best assessments of how Coca-Cola was fooled by their own research into changing their historic and universally popular soft drink formula. In short, Coke was concerned that its chief cola competitor (PepsiCo) was continuously rated as preferred in the so-called Pepsi Challenge. Despite its significant marketshare, Coke changed its classic formula to something more Pepsi-like. Although I am too young to remember the taste of New Coke, I do remember how mad it made my father. More than just my dad, hordes of loyal Coke-drinking customers hated it. Why? Gladwell places the blame on Coke’s research team not identifying the difference between cola preferences judged after one taste test (i.e., just a sip) and after drinking a full 12-oz can. For many cola consumers, Pepsi’s greater sugar content and lower carbonation is not as appealing after those first few sips. The (re-)introduction of “Cola-Cola Classic” saved face and probably a multibillion dollar global business.

Only rarely is the line between stupid and clever clear at the outset. It’s too early to know for sure, but I have my eyes on English Premier League side Tottenham Hotspur’s recent edict that they no longer be referred to as merely “Tottenham”. Rather, media outlets have been informed to refer to them by either their full name or the preferred short form, “Spurs”. On the face of it, this announcement appears to be a bit of a self-own. Why? Because “Tottenham” is more familiar. It’s already (when pronounced like a North London native) a snappy two syllables. Football fans actually use the term “Tottenham”. (They also use the term “Spursy” as a short form of avoidable self-immolation on the pitch, something for which Tottenham has a not unjustified reputation… but that’s another story.) Perhaps the club is correct that if the media use only the long form (or “Spurs”) then the team will be less identifiable with a single neighborhood in a single city in a single country and more identifiable as a GLOBAL BRAND. Maybe. Their chief historical rival is Arsenal, a team whose name has a locationless feel, despite their history as an athletic club founded by local munitions workers. But I suspect Arsenal’s broader global appeal has more to do with the fact that, unlike Tottenham, they occasionally win trophies, which last I checked, was the point of professional sport.

The Psychology of Familiarity and Risk

Tottenham’s gamble, like New Coke before it, illustrates a truth about psychology: People are drawn to the familiar. But at the same time, too much familiarity can lead to stagnation, making novelty an equally powerful force. Striking the right balance is tricky, and to understand why, it helps to look at where these tendencies come from—our evolutionary past. As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, human beings evolved to strongly prefer familiarity because it is cue towards safety (e.g., if it didn’t kill me the first time, it probably won’t this time either). That said, we also evolved to seek novelty because there is a limit to what familiarity can provide. For example, imagine living during the Pleistocene (i.e., “caveperson times”) in an environment rich in corn but not in much else. You’d likely develop a strong preference for corn and corn-like foods because you would have learned that eating corn is safe and provides enough energy to survive through another brutal, boring day as a caveperson. But you’re hardly eating a balanced diet. Sure, you’re surviving, but you are also seriously lacking in certain vitamins. (In fact, as a brief aside, you’re probably developing pellagra, a condition caused by a lack of niacin that resembles the symptoms of schizophrenia and can lead to a slow death.) Despite surviving on nothing but corn, your continued survival depends on eating something that is anything but corn. So let’s say you find something that looks like food in your primitive environment. Maybe blueberries? You’d love some blueberries to spice up your life and, thank god, they contain niacin. Unfortunately for you, these blueberries weren’t blueberries at all, but the not-dissimilar berries of the nightshade plant. You didn’t know nightshade was poisonous and paid the ultimate price. Your clan members—who were more suspicious than you about trying new things—survived.

In a nutshell, humans evolved to prefer familiarity—but also to seek novelty. At the same time, we’re wired to be cautious of the unfamiliar. We’re a fickle species! The lesson for the modern human is that it is really difficult to design or create something while getting the balance between familiarity and novelty correct. But it’s not impossible. Based on what we know about changes in fashions and trends, we can hypothesize that people should—typically—prefer familiar items with just a hint of novelty. I suspect that mom jeans are back (for now) because other types of jeans saturated the market. Skinny jeans were like the corn in my story above. They were great until they were everywhere (much like Dave Matthews Band). They’ll no doubt be back again (unlike Dave Matthews Band), but only when they start to be seen as something novel again.

Making Fetch Happen

So what choices can designers make to increase the chance that a user will find a particular design choice appealing? What designers—especially those with less experience—should never try is leaning too far towards novelty. You can’t make “fetch” happen without prior buy-in from users.

Of course, leaning too far towards familiarity can also be problematic. However, excluding cases of copyright infringement or out-and-out plagiarism, a designer should be using what is already known as an acceptable design choice to enhance usability. In fact, this is one of the most basic concepts in UX design because familiarity allows the user to avoid wasting valuable cognitive resources on understanding how your product works. A quick glance at the computer screen I am currently using tells me how much battery life I have left and how strong my wifi connection is via familiar and near universal icons:

Likewise, I know that if I want to search for something on almost any device, I should look for the magnifying glass icon. Icons are powerful in UX design because they are recognized quickly as familiar. They are simultaneously useful and easy to ignore. They don’t get in the user’s way. The user’s attention is—and should be—drawn to the novel aspect that the designer wants them to unconsciously focus on.

A Face for Design: Lessons from Human Attractiveness

Although not “designed” in quite the same way, our reactions to human faces varying in attractiveness provide an analog. As discussed elsewhere on this site, faces high in the quality of averageness are considered as very attractive. Moreover, average faces are judged as very familiar. However, the most attractive faces are not purely prototypical; rather, they are merely mostly prototypical with a hint of novelty. (Although, perhaps in the case of faces, “novelty” is the wrong word. Nature has fewer acceptable design choices than a product manager.)

Every so often, popular culture choose a new “It Girl” through a heady mix of cultural influence, media exposure, and fashion impact. The “It Girl” is always pretty, but often in a somewhat unusual way. A cursory Google search of past It Girls (in my lifetime) include Grace Jones, Wynona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Cara Delevingne, Zendaya, and current title holder Sydney Sweeney. Virtually all of these women have at least one atypical facial feature that, placed on another face, might otherwise be judged as unappealing (except for Wynona Ryder, I won’t have anything negative said about her on any blog of mine). Jolie has outsized lips, Delevingne has those heavy brows. While the Internet seems completely obsessed with a different part of Sweeney’s anatomy, I’ve seen few people comment on how far apart her eyes are set on her head. The Grace Jones of my childhood memory looked like she might have been biologically related to the moai statues of Easter Island. And yet, all of these women are also fantastically beautiful—not in spite of these features but because of them. Without these features, they might be lost in the crowd. Another waitress with above-average attractiveness in Southern California. Just another pretty face.

As a a scientist who likes to visualize constructs with data, I find it useful to visually represent what (just a little bit of) novelty might add to an otherwise typical, pretty face. “Face distinctiveness” is a multidimensional construct, and it can be challenging to imagine what a multidimensional space would look like. Because I can only show you something in two dimensions on your screen, a radar plot will have to do.

First, let’s ask ourselves: How many qualities does a face have? The answer is probably more than we can count. This goes beyond the simple facial features I mentioned in the previous paragraph. And it goes beyond even more descriptive qualities such as tone and texture. To truly grasp all of the qualities of an image, we would also need to account for object lighting, shading, and contrast (among others). I mention these dimensions not to overwhelm, but to make the point that, actually, the dimensions themselves do not matter. What matters is how much each quality deviates from the average for each possible face. For example, look at the radar plot below, which represents the distinctiveness of one human face.

In this image, the red dot at the center represents the average value of all possible facial/visual dimensions (although the number of these dimensions is nearly infinite, only nine are shown here, D1-D9). For the sake of simplicity, let’s imagine that the nine dimensions represent facial features (D1 is nose size, D2 is lip size, D3 is skin smoothness, and so on). Points plotted in translucent teal represent how far each plotted facial feature deviates from the average. The difference in area between the red circle and the total amount of teal shading would represent the overall distinctiveness of the face. In this particular case, most data points don’t deviate that far from the center, with the exception of D2. If we were to plot the distinctiveness of the faces of the women listed above, I strongly suspect their radar plots would look a lot like the example above: relatively small teal circles with one large spike. In other words, a lot of familiarity with just a dash of novelty. The small teal area makes the face pretty; the long teal spike makes the face pretty special.

The UX of Familiarity: Guiding the User’s Eye

Likewise, informed design should limit the amount of novelty but also call attention to that novelty by surrounding it in a sea of familiarity. Few companies do this better than Apple. In designing the operating system of the original Macintosh (not the first computer, but perhaps the oldest computer that a child living in 2025 might identify as one), Apple employed skeuomorphism (that is, a design choice meant to remind users of the real-world object upon which it was based). Not only did file icons looked like manilla folders, but everything was so… shaded. All that shading provided the appearance of depth and texture. Those design choices were intentional. They shouted, “Click on me! I’m a raised button! I do something!” Few people could afford a computer in their homes before the Mac, so the folks at Apple knew they had to lean on visual clues from the real world to help users understand how this new invention worked. Slowly, over time, Apple moved away from skeuomorphism and toward a more modern aesthetic: flat design. There isn’t a lot of shading on the Mac running OS 15.3.1 that I’m using to write this piece, but there doesn’t need to be. This user has been trained by (holy crap I’m old) 40 years worth of operating system product releases since then.

The Internet tells me that there have been 24 generations of iPhones since its debut in 2007. I often hear people complain that the newest iPhone “isn’t that different from the previous one”, as if that were a bad thing. Good! That’s the point. If it was wholly different, most users wouldn’t know how to use it, and very few people would want to buy an expensive piece of nonintuitive technology. It’s true that there is not a significant difference between the iPhone 16 and the iPhone 15. But there is a very big difference between the original model and the current. A difference so large that I suspect a large proportion of consumers would not have accepted it as a product. As users, we need to have our hands held. We need a product that gently pats our hands as says, “It’s okay, to have a phone that only has one button” and then years later to say, “It’s okay, you didn’t need that one button anyway. The power was within you this whole time.” The next iPhone will probably be exactly the same as the current, only with a better camera and a handful of new AI assistants. I can’t wait to buy it.

They made “fetch” happen. Slowly, without any of us noticing.

-The Plague Doctor