Pizzas
Warning: Pizzas on the loose.
They are the characters of ABC.PIZZA. Between one video and the next they live here and never sit still: they have a real weakness for pizza. Yours, in particular.
The Pizzas are standing still because your device asks for reduced motion.
Hidden game on this page: the Pizzas are after the pizza. Drag it away from them, or reach it with the Tab key and move it with the arrow keys. Grab a Pizza and a portal opens at one edge of the screen: drop the Pizza into it to score a point. You have five seconds before it breaks free (ten with the keyboard).
Three drivers
Core, Capa and Mano
There are lots of Pizzas, but only three personalities. Each one moves on its own driver, and you can tell them apart by the color of their body.
Why slices
A slice for everyone
A slice for a body, a round head, two dots for eyes. No gender, no hair, no age: that way anyone can see themselves in a Pizza.
In the videos they’re funny, but they’re working: they act out what happens to people when they use a product or a service. They lose patience, take wrong turns, choose at random. Just like us.
The model
The other ABC
The Pizzas aren’t a cast picked for laughs. They’re built on the ABC model of attitudes, which social psychology has used since 1960: whatever we make of a product, a person or a pizza comes in three parts.
- Affect
- What we feel. Core, the yellow one.
- Behavior
- What we do. Mano, the black one.
- Cognition
- What we think. Capa, the white one.
The three parts don’t always agree, and that’s where most design problems live: the app we love but can’t use, the better option we understand and never pick. Designers know the same split from Don Norman’s three levels of design: visceral, behavioral, reflective.
So these aren’t three types of people. They’re three parts of everyone, taking turns at the wheel. Each video shows which one is driving.
Sources: Rosenberg & Hovland, Attitude Organization and Change, 1960 · Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 1979 · Zajonc, Feeling and Thinking, 1980 · Norman, Emotional Design, 2004 · Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011.
You’ll find them in every video
A slice of theory, a gag, not a single word.