Rhythm method 2

The comments to the first Rhythm Method post are really intriguing. They point out how thoughtful and remarkable the CPU readers really are. It’s readers like this that make writing a blog so much fun. It’s not just an exercise in writing stuff down, it’s a many-way conversation!  (If a "dialog" is between 2 people, is this blog a "polylog"?) 
 

If I were to organize the comments into logical clusters, I’d group them like this: 

a. use of rhythms to coordinate actions (sea shanties to pull together better, precise timing of conversational actions back and forth, entrainment between participants in a group behavior)

b. rhythm as defining element of flow states (flow seems to happen with rhythmic patterns)

c. non-rhythmic events that disrupt behavior, primarily exogenous events such as hunger (chocolate!) or software imposed interruptions (“you have mail!”) and delays (waiting on Perforce).

What I found especially interesting were the practical suggestions of rhythm use. It’s obvious what use rhythm has in coordinating teams to work together in close synchrony. But it’s also fascinating to think about using rhythm to go around bottlenecks (as Tim O’Reilly speculates about Larry Bird breaking rhythms in driving to the basket around defenders).

This leads me to point out that rhythms have many uses – as organizers of time and as ways of coordinating groups of people (and processes). But if you can’t perceive the rhythms, you’re in a heap of trouble.

It’s clear that some of our tools help to coordinate behaviors – IM, email, calendars – they all help to align people in time. And it’s true that every tool seems to have its own natural rhythm: IM beats to a faster pulse than email, and if you’ve got multiple IMs going, it’s often a polyrhythm as beats go against other pulses in time.

And we’ve all had those moments of sudden expectation in IM or email when someone doesn’t respond at the right moment. (“Has she forgotten about me?” you wonder… then a few seconds later, the reassuring IM arrives. Whew!) It’s the rhythm telling you when you should begin to worry.

The ability to perceive a rhythm is a fundamental one… as is the ability to generate a rhythm. Yet, it’s still a bit of a mystery how people recognize a rhythmic beat. Some things are clearly rhythmic – think of your favorite Sousa march or Ludacris rap – they both pulse and move along regularly, with both short-term and long-term pulses going on in layers. But how, neurologically speaking, does your brain do this neat trick? I’ll spare you the various theories, but I don’t think we’ve figured this one out yet.

Regardless of what mystery mechanism we use to pick up on rhythms, it’s clear that we humans can detect both simple beats as rhythms (a heartbeat, the gallop of a horses’ hooves) and the wonderful layering of many kinds of events over longer periods of time (the rhythm of weather systems moving across the Pacific Northwest, the rise and fall of Orion in the night sky).

And it’s clear that we coordinate our actions based on what rhythmic devices we sense and the regular pulse of time we feel. Breaking that pulse is a terrible thing to do. 

While latency in responding to a user input is bad manners, creating an unpredictable delay that breaks the perception of rhythm is even worse.

In a kind of extension to the variable reinforcement schedule Kathy discussed earlier, unpredictable delays in response only serve to make the entire experience awful. Passionately bad, in fact. 

But note the difference!  While unpredictable rewards are great for training, for a system that requires moment-to-moment interaction, unpredictable response times are the antithesis of flow. Using such an irregularly reacting system takes up lots of cognitive attention just to recognize when the next event is going to happen. The user ends up having to be constantly vigilant to know when the next event’s going to happen.  It’s ultimately tiring and a pain to use. Worse of all, the irregularly responding system is generating interruptions… that’s the one thing we know we really shouldn’t be doing.

If you (as a designer) have to make the tradeoff, go with the slower, but more regular response so people can entrain their rhythms and get into that flow use condition. That will create the sensation of a more regular and reliably responding system. Faster isn’t always better!