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Illusion of transparency
People tend to overestimate how much their emotions, intentions and thoughts are perceived by others.
You are not the one who will use it. Test before concluding it is clear.
We overestimate how much of what we feel and think is visible to others. Nerves before a presentation feel glaringly obvious, and almost nobody notices. An intention that is clear in your head comes out of your mouth half-formed. In an interface this has a practical and cruel consequence: after designing a screen, you can no longer look at it without knowing what it does. The path looks obvious to you, and the only way to find out whether it is to others too is to ask someone who has just arrived.
What the brain does with it
The biological mechanism behind the effect, and how much of it was actually measured.
The person overestimates how visible their own internal state is to others, and the effect is measured by comparing the estimate they make with what observers actually perceive. The medial prefrontal cortexThe part of the prefrontal cortex that thinks about people: what others want, what they think of us, whether they can be trusted.See it in The social mind →See in the glossary → takes part in reasoning about mental states — one’s own and other people’s — which makes it the most likely structure to be involved, but the measure of this effect is behavioural. The round numbers that circulate with this bias, such as the fraction of people who notice someone else’s nerves, come from small, specific studies.
This law seems not to change with the body
Who it was measured on, and what changes when the body on the other side is another.
This is the only law on the site that already deals, on its own, with the distance between whoever designs and whoever uses. It exists to remind you that the clarity felt by whoever designed the screen is not the clarity of whoever receives it. It is the same question this site asks about whom each law was measured in, now turned towards the designer instead of the user.
How design translates it
What to do with it on a screen, without turning a finding into a rule.
How to measure this in your product
In design the illusion is recurrent: whoever designs assumes the intention is obvious and the flow will be intuitive because they themselves understand it. Hence the test with someone who has just arrived, clear writing and validation in cycles. In practice, if someone on the team explained the screen out loud during the presentation, the screen was not explaining itself, and the person on the other side will have nobody to explain it.
Where it breaks
Where the law does not hold, holds less, or holds in reverse.
The bias also works against the usability test itself. A moderator who already knows the right answer hands over the answer in the intonation of the question, and then reads the result as confirmation.
Um caso
A real product where this showed up, with what happened and where to check it.
The screen only you know how to read
In an experiment by Elizabeth NewtonRan, at Stanford, the experiment of tapping the rhythm of a song on a table. The tappers estimated a 50% hit rate; it came out at 2.5%.One reference in this work:1990The rocky road from actions to intentionsSee in the bibliography →, at Stanford, one person tapped out the rhythm of a well-known song on the table and another tried to guess which it was. Before starting, the tappers estimated that half would be guessed right. Out of 120 songs, the listeners got three. Whoever taps hears the whole melody in their head while tapping, and can no longer imagine what it is to hear only the taps. That experiment has a name of its own, the curse of knowledge, and it is this law’s cousin. One measures how much we think what we feel is visible; the other, how much we think what we know is available. For whoever designs, both end up in the same place. It is what happens when you present your own flow thinking it is obvious. You are hearing the song, and whoever is going to use it has only the taps. The label that seems clear, the icon that seems self-evident and the step that seems natural only seem so to whoever already knows the tune. That is why the test with someone who has never seen the screen is not an optional step.
Newton, 1990
Experimente
A piece to check in your own body what the text has just claimed.
Tap the rhythm of a song and hear what the other person hears
Think of a song everyone knows. Tap its rhythm on the button below, with clicks or with the space bar, for a few seconds. Then hear only the taps and answer whether anyone would guess the song.
No taps yet.
While you tap, the whole melody plays in your head, and it is impossible to hear only the taps. Whoever is on the other side has only the taps. It is the same distance between you and whoever is going to use the screen you find obvious.
Neighbouring concepts
Structures linked by a bridge of my own
Sibling concepts
Fontes
Enunciado citado de Gilovich; Savitsky, 1998.
- GILOVICH, T.; SAVITSKY, K.; MEDVEC, V. H. The illusion of transparency: biased assessments of others' ability to read one's emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, v. 75, n. 2, p. 332-346, 1998. DOI
- NEWTON, E. L. The rocky road from actions to intentions. Tese (Doutorado) — Stanford University, 1990. Source
Leitura complementar: Illusion of transparency Wikipedia em inglês