CHAPTER 12 The Design of People
care and energy. You game?” Dave signed up. In that moment, I became not
only a friend and peer designer, but also a client.
We split the work between ourselves. I would be responsible for the
information architecture. He would be responsible for visual design and
front-end markup. We agreed to collaborate through it all. With that, I
went to the drawing board to work on the information architecture. A
week or so later I posted the wireframes to Basecamp. Dave reviewed them,
we had a quick phone call, and he set out to turn the skeleton into a full-
color being. A few days later he posted a color composition of one of the
pages to our Basecamp project to give me a quick peek at the art direction.
Needless to say, he really liked what he’d created. It’s only natural, right?^9
Unfortunately, I could not see what he saw. Where he saw beauty, I saw
the opposite. It was almost as if he was functioning in a reality entirely
different from mine.
And, as the ingenious Sally–Anne test illustrates, he was.The SallY–anne TeST
I first came across this gem in Kathryn Schulz’s excellent book, Being
Wrong. The Sally–Anne test is taken by children between the ages of
three and four. It involves staging a simple puppet show involving two
characters, Sally and Anne (figure a on the next page). Sally places a marble
in a basket, closes its lid and leaves the room (figure b). Shortly thereafter,
the very naughty Anne flips open the lid of the basket, pulls out the marble
(c) and places it in a box sitting in the corner (d). Now, the child who has
witnessed all of this is asked a simple question: when Sally returns, where
will she look for the marble (e)?
Almost every child in this age group exclaims with confidence, “In the
box!” This answer is baffling to adults for the obvious reason:9 The tendency to fall in love with our own work is quintessentially human. It’s beyond the scope of
this chapter to deconstruct all the factors that go into this behavior, but a significant contributor is
something known as the Ikea Effect.