Apple's iPhone

I was interviewed by the Arizona Republic newspaper yesterday about the Apple iPhone. The hype is getting ridiculous. 30 minutes of every hour-long news show is about the iPhone. What ever happened to the important things going on in the world that some of us would like to hear about?

But to the point, the phone is probably going to be a success, given Apple's history in consumer electronics and the fact that they are getting all this free publicity. But what kind of annoys me is that everyone focuses on the wrong things. The journalist who interviewed me only wanted to talk about the cool technology and the touch screen. That is not what will make the iPhone successful or not. It will come down to whether it is a better combination of phone, music player, and web browser than other portable devices, and at a price customers can afford. Cool can make it successful in year one, but not after that!! After that it comes down to functionality and usability.

Knowledge v Intelligence in management

Great post in the Becker-Posner blog this week!!! They discuss why brilliant individuals often fail when put in leadership positions. The core issue they discuss is that the brilliant person is often a lateral transfer. In other words, he/she may have general brilliance (information processing and analysis skills), but no knowledge in the particular field. Take someone who has made a career in politics who is made Secretary of Defense. If he/she has no knowledge of the nuances of the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, etc. can he/she understand the detailed information coming from the career civil servants in the department and make policy decisions? It is the civil servants who have the extensive situation schema of the issues that arise.

From a HF point of view, perhaps not. It depends on whether the person also has the ability to how to get that information from the civil servants in a way that can be integrated into the policy schema that must be used to make the ultimate decisions. This takes a different kind of skill than intellectual brilliance. A good focus group facilitator may be more effective in this position. Or maybe they just need a facilitator to run the meeting. The leader must be able to defer to the more knowledgeable civil servants in terms of the basic information and analysis. Many brilliant people have difficulty with this.

Then the President has an even tougher challenge. He/she has to take the information provided by the cabinet ministers, which has already been through one level of "brilliance" filtering and do his/her own filtering to make the ultimate policy decision. If the cabinet minister has lost important details, then the President can't make good decisions. Its like the game telephone, except with lives at stake.

I guess that why government seems so dysfunctional all the time. It is set up to fail.

set points or variable talent

Arnold Kling's recent post on Econlog got me thinking. He wonders what attributes are limited and which ones can be improved with practice. Clearly, we can exercise our muscles and get physically stronger. Can we do the same with things like altruism, self-control, self-regard, dogmatism, etc.?
For example, if we only have a limited amount of self-control, and we are forced to use it in one area (i.e. to watch our weight), then we have less self-control in other areas (to stop smoking). But if we practice self-control a lot, then maybe we can gain the ability to do more of it.


From a cognitive science point of view, we should be able to practice. If we can strengthen the schema associated with the attribute (self-control), then we can connect it to more responses (smoking). But no one has really looked at what cognitive neurophysiological structures give us things like self-control. I am not sure if it works.

delayance v deterrence

I was reading a PhD dissertation on military strategy (don't ask!), and the theory that the author was presenting was called delayance. The idea is that what many people consider a kind of deterrence (which is officially defined as when a country (or guerrilla group) doesn't attack because the cost of achieving the victory is greater than the value of the victory) is really delayance (which is when the risk of losing is too high right now, so the country waits/prepares until the risk goes down to an acceptable level.


The difference is subtle but important. In deterrence, you think you will win, but the cost is too high. So you don't try. In theory, unless something changes, you never try. In delayance, you can't win yet, but hopefully you will be able to win later. So you wait, expecting the change to happen.

The same thing can be said of using a system that is too complicated. The equivalent of deterrence is when I think I can figure out how to use a particular function, but the time it would take is too high so I give up. And I don't expect to try again later. This may cause my satisfaction to go down because I have recognized defeat. In delayance, I think maybe I will try later, perhaps when I have more time to read the manual. This optimism may keep my satisfaction from going down, even though most people never get around to trying again. Every time they see the function, they again think - maybe next time.

I suspect that the deterrence/delayance difference is related to locus of control. For users with an internal locus of control (who feel that they are in control of their lives), they probably feel delayance. For users with external locus of control (who blame the world for their failures and credit the world for their successes), they probably feel deterrence.

This is why it pays to keep up on other fields of study. You never know when something will light up an idea in your own work.

transparency

Sometimes I am joking when I say this, but usually it is true - Human Factors is the solution to many of the world's biggest challenges. Here are two examples I thought about on my way to work this morning, primed by NPR stories on the radio:

1. The sub-prime mortgage crisis

As usual, the proposals coming out of Congress are way off the mark. Either they will underregulate and not solve anything, or they will overregulate and keep people with mixed credit histories from getting mortgages. What they need to do is apply human factors. The regulation should not say what mortgages are allowed or not allowed (but keeping the basic framework defining what borrowers can afford). It should require lenders to inform applicants exactly what the terms and risks of the loan are and then let them choose. This requires human factors because the current financial and legal gobbledygook is incomprehensible to the average borrower. A good human factors analysis could identify some structure that would solve the problem.

"The payment will start out as $1000 per month. It will stay at this level for 2 years. After that, it can go up by as much as $250 per month every year. So in 6 years, the worst case is that you will be paying $2000 per month. Given the low level of current interest rates, this is likely. If you are unable to pay, it may be possible to renegotiate, but more likely is that the bank will foreclose on your house and you will lose it."

2. The multiple challenges of prescription drugs (costs v benefits, risk communication). Again, the government is going to regulate by determining what can be sold, where, why and for how much. Instead, they should use a market-based solution, but requiring enough information for consumers to make informed decisions.

"Nine out of 10 people who take this drug for heart disease will not die from it for at least ten years. But one person will. One out of ten people will get pancreatic cancer. Three out of ten will have trouble sleeping. If you are willing to take these risks, go ahead."


And then when approving drugs, we can do a cost/benefit analysis to estimate if the aggregate effect on health care will be positive. Then leave the individual decisions up to the people.

Econlog had a post a while ago (sorry - I couldn't find the link) suggesting special (i.e. well marked) stores that sell unapproved drugs. As long as the information is good, people should be allowed to take the risks - knowing that if something goes wrong they can't sue or use public money to pay for the consequences. Not all unapproved drugs would be there, but the ones that are either promising and just not fully tested yet, or the ones that have significant benefits, but also high risks or side effects. For example, if I have cancer and 5 years to live, I should be able to buy a drug that will extend my life by 6 months, even if it increases my risk of developing some other disease ten years down the road. Or maybe I am willing to take a 20% risk of incontinence to eliminate my allergies. It should be my choice.

Any other examples???

customized for the customer

I have always been a strong supported in getting a good understanding of the customer as the basis for product and service design. There are so many great examples of this, that it should be a no brainer. But then there are so many examples where companies develop a new technology that they force on customers assuming they will love it, that apparently it is not a no brainer after all.

This week's issue of Business Week (June 11, 2007). provide great examples of both.

1. Jamba Juice wants to go beyond just a smoothie company. So they are trying to find some new products that will expand their product line. They conducted real user testing and focus groups to find ways to convert the juice smoothie into a light meal. And when at first they failed, they put the idea on hold - they didn't sell it anyway and hope for the best. Next month, they are rolling out a series of new products that succeeded in their recent testing. Good for them!!

2. DeBiotech discovered that one of the problems with current insulin pumps for diabetics is that they have to replace the whole unit - which is very expensive - or use self-injections, which is inconvenient. So they developed a pump with a replaceable reservoir. Simple mechanically, but it shows that they thought about the details from the patient's perspective.

3. Marriott and Nickelodeon are partnering on some new hotels that immerse the kids in the Nickelodeon experience. They did some real user research and found a balance that makes kids and parents happy. They also found a way to integrate business services so that all kinds of family trips can be supported. This is the kind of new product that has a huge capital investment up front, so it is great that they did some serious testing before throwing these sums of money at the idea.

4. Disney has a big and growing market in Russia. But rather than increase the supply of American movies they ship over, they decided to make some local movies using Russian actors, speaking Russian, using old Russian fairy tales for plots. This is even though the new Pirates movie hit a record for foreign film box office.

5. Sotheby's discovered that their clients fear risk. So they innovated their business model to alleviate the client's risk. They guarantee minimum prices for some art auctions in return for a cut of any price above the minimum (in addition to their normal commission). This takes on some risk for themselves, but not as much because they have more expertise at predicting the final price, and if they do enough of them, they can balance their risk by winning some and losing some.

6. Several consumer electronics companies are coming up with 'tweeners, products that are between a laptop and a smartphone. Sometimes you need more than a smartphone (in function), but less than a laptop (in size and weight). So for these times, you need a 'tweener. But who can afford a third device (selling at $1000-2000)? Only business travelers. So I am less sure that they have found a market, or if they are forcing the market.

7. Joost is a service that provides full length TV shows via the Internet. Instead of going the YouTube route, they are providing only official content and protecting the copyright. To get the content, they have to sign agreements with the content providers (the channels). Jumping ahead a few years to when they will have the needed bandwidth, HDTV is every household, and all of the channels signed up, is this a service people want? Is it any different than on-demand services we already have? They claim that because they will have lots of information about each user, they can replace five untargeted ads (for products the viewer has no interest in) with a single targeted one (a product they are likely to be interested in). So users will be willing to watch the ad because there is only one. Hmmmm. Not sure about this one either.

When irrationality is rational

Bryan Caplan, one of the bloggers on one of my regular blog reads, has a great insight. When an irrational view has no personal consequences but feels good to have, such as when we argue about how great our favorite sports team is (when it really isn't all that), there is actually a net benefit of having the irrational view. We can happily let ourselves succumb to biases such as the confirmation bias to strengthen the view still further. We see the teams latest win as evidence of how great they are, but ignore their last seven losses as a streak of bad luck.

The problem arises when these all add up. There are many political views that we have very little impact on as individuals, but may feel good. For example various forms of protectionism. Even if the economics shows that free trade, open immigration, etc are good in the long run for the economy, it may feel good to blame your work-related stress on an anonymous worker or company in a foreign country. The more foreign, the better.

But what if thousands of people walk around feeling good about blaming these anonymous foreigners. Pretty soon, the politicians who really do have an effect on economic policies start listening. In order to get re-elected, they have to enact policies that are wrong. All of a sudden, these safe irrationalities have real consequences. A characteristic of our cognition that may have been evolutionarily adaptive now because damaging at the society-level.

What can we do about this? We can force everyone who wants to air their political views to get some policy education and really think about their views first. But of course, this is not realistic. I don't have a solution to this, but I am willing to hear proposals.

niche products for niche customers

We often talk about making sure that our systems match the needs of expected users. That is the basis of Human Factors. But you can also go in the opposite direction - find some very unique users and customize an existing system that they currently don't use. This is the basis for some very interesting business models. This month's Trendwatching (one of my favorite sources of unique business ideas and innovations), has a good strategy for this. There are many people who want to purchase products or services made locally. This can be for environmental reasons (less gas wasted on transportation), supporting the local economy, or just because some people like to support their neighbors. Many are even willing to spend extra money for the same product if it is local. So the trick to this strategy is to create the marketing around your product promoting its local story.

And there there are the VERY unique niches. How about this one at Omlet. They have a product that enables urbanites to raise their own egg-laying chickens. People who live in city apartments can raise 2 egg-laying chickens in a nice compact "Eglu" and have fresh eggs every morning. I can't speak for the usability of the Eglu design, but if they have identified enough of a customer base to make the business profitable, all I can say is "wow."

moral decisions

I have blogged on this before, but I just read an article in the Washington Post that made me want to revisit the issue. As with emotional decisions, moral decisions seem to draw on different parts of the brain than intellectual decisions. So rather than integrating moral and intellectual attributes into an overall cost-benefit kind of decision, two different responses get activated (if the moral and intellectual answers diverge) and we are forced to decide which one to accept.

This is one of the consequences of the way our brains evolved. Since only one response is possible, it would be nice if we could integrate the two sets of criteria and come up with one overall best response. And we try to do this in reality (I have a whole course dedicated to doing it for public policy analysis). But it is so hard because of this brain structure.

System designers have to be careful when their designs have a moral or emotional component. If users will have moral or emotional responses, the decision they make when using our systems may not be what we expect. It is important for more of us to learn what we can about emotion and moral cognition.

innovation and usability

I met with two budding entrepreneurs this morning. I won't steal the thunder of their launch by telling you what their business is about, but it is a good niche application of social networking. As any regular reader of this blog knows, social networking is a passion of mine. I honestly believe that social networks and professional communities of practice will be the true future of the web. My paper at last year's Human Factors Conference presents my views in more detail (email me for a copy if interested).

This morning, we focused on the two main things that a web-based business (and really any business) need to provide to be successful. They have to:

1) provide some useful function that users are willing to come to your site for, preferably over and over again.

2) do this in a way that is easy to figure out and simple to use. Otherwise, they will give up pretty quickly and try somewhere else to satisfy this need.

For social networks, this means providing information, links, communication, and other services in a way that protects users' privacy, is easy to filter, bubbles the good stuff quickly and reliably to the top, and provides a strong sense of that community. This can be accomplished in many ways, for example through reputation management, meta moderation, social and semantic filtering, and other algorithmic techniques. Add good information architecture and support discovery. Of course, this is easier said than done, but Peter Morville's work (Information Architecture, Ambient Findability) are both good places to start (or you can take my course at Florida International University).

A recurring challenge to human decision making is that when an alternative is inconvenient or undesirable, we are very good at convincing ourselves that it won't happen. For example, when the dog is barking late at night, we could worry that there is a burglar, but instead, we assume it is a bird or raccoon and yell at the dog to shut up. Hopefully, it really is a bird, or at least the burglar won't steal much.

Unfortunately, this challenge manifests in proportion to the importance of the decision. For really really really important situations, the inconvenience is likely to be huge (war for example). One that we are seeing more now is global warming. This recent article in Fortune explains it well. The conclusion: "To the extent that dealing with global warming is a) expensive and b) inconvenient, it isn't going to happen any time soon."

The reality is that we have to make small changes now or big changes later. The big changes later will be much more inconvenient. But because we are avoiding the small inconvenience now, we are forcing our kids to deal with the big ones later.

unintended consequences

Here is a good one about unintended consequences and multi-functional devices. The obvious benefit of multi-functional devices is that you only have to carry around one device instead of several. So in theory, you are more likely to use a function because you are more likely to have it with you when you feel like using it.

But companies have discovered there is leverage involved in this relationship. Sometimes, people use the device just because they have it, even if they don't really have a specific desire for the function. The cliche is that when you are holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Another product use insight is the risk curve. People are comfortable with a certain level of risk. So if you reduce the risk associated with a product, it does not make users safer. Instead, they use the product more aggressively or more often so that the experienced risk stays the same. This was seen in tests of non-lethal weapons given to soldiers and police. Because the person being shot was not killed, users lowered their threshold for use. In other words, they didn't need to be quite as sure an adversary deserved to be shot in order to use the weapon because they didn't have to worry that an innocent person would die. They would just be hurt/inconvenienced. This occurred with weapons such as stun guns, laser guns (that shoot bursts of intense heat that don't actually burn the skin), etc.

So here is a new proposal that I think would do wonders for public civility. A company proposed combining a taser with a cell phone. Imagine if everyone not only had a taser with them, but it was often right in their hand. Want to shut up that annoying person on the subway? Taser them. Your friend giving you a hard time across the table at the restaurant? Taser them under the table. How long would it take for us to start being really nice to each other????

fictional schema

One of the challenges that we face when working in the real world is that people have all kinds of experiences in a variety of contexts. Because schema develop unconsciously in a non-differentiated way, except when there is a specific reason to differentiate them. So if we think of a reason to differentiate after the fact, it is too late, even when the aggregation directly violates a task objective.

That is a complicated way to describe the following example. When people watch Law and Order, the develop an opinion of Fred Thompson's character. On the show, he is strong, tough on crime, and several other good qualities. But of course, these are written by the scriptwriters and director, not Fred himself. But since viewers only know him as the character, they have no reason to have two schemas of him, one of the character's attributes and one of his real attributes.

But now that he is running for president (his real person), it is too late for people to associate the older episodic memories with "fictional" and the new ones with "presidential candidates." They can when they concentrate on it, but most people generate gut instincts without this kind of concentration. In fact, that's what makes it a gut instinct.

In studies of this kind of situation, people will attribute the fake qualities to the real person when asked to describe the real person. When pushed to report how they know, they will try hard to think of real events, and failing this, stretch the truth until something matches. This is not an intentional deception, but a natural, unconscious, brain function.

So in effect, people will be evaluating his qualifications for president based on his Law and Order characteristics.

I even find myself doing that. I like the show and I like his character on it. On the other hand, I don't like his real politics (he actually was a Senator from Tennessee for 8 years). But when I see him, I can't help but like him because of his character. Even though I know the difference.

I guess it doesn't really matter though. People get elected for a lot worse reasons than that.

Easy and simple

There have been a ton of articles lately in all of the business magazines, newspapers etc that discuss how products that have tons of features and are complicated to use are losing out to simpler products with fewer features but that do a few things well.

There are examples in video games (the Wii), cell phones, portable word processors (the Neo), and many others. I love reading stories like these because it shows that usability beats sexy technology every time (at least as soon as customers figure out which models are the usable ones).
The research studies that look in more detail into this phenomenon find that new customers make their first purchase based on the number of features because they don't know what is usable and what isn't. This is especially true for "early adopters" who care more about bragging rights than use anyway. But the bulk of the customer base cares more about usability because they need to use the core functions on a regular basis. If they were unlucky and purchased an unusable model, they switch on their next purchase. So new customers get suckered, which explains the popularity of the sexy models at first, but the usable ones win out in the end.

Go Team!!!

Bad bets in health care

I hope this link stays active long enough for anyone interested to read it. It makes an interesting point about public policies that are "bad bets" that have a strong human factors component.

Consider this example: There are two people who are very sick and require medical care that costs $25,000 to treat. Person A has a 50% chance of getting better with treatment. Person B has a 5% chance of getting better with treatment. You can either:
1) give Person B the treatment
2) give Person A the treatment
3) split the money and half treat them both, which reduces their chance of improving by 90% (so it would be 5% and 0.5% respectively.

Most people would select option 2. It gives the best bang for the buck. But what if there is no Person A. We can either:
1) treat person B and have a 5% chance of having an effect
2) distribute the $25,000 in medical care to other people in general, who have an average chance of improving of 50%.
3) distribute the $25,000 to the entire population to spend however they want.

Now which one should we do? Option 2) in the second situation is identical to option 2) in the first example in its effect. So if you preferred option 2) in the first example, you can't choose option 1) in the second. But the problem faced in our health care system is that when we are faced with a real Person B on one hand and a vague, unseen population on the other, we find it very hard not to treat person B and hope for the best. And the when we have a lucky 5%-er, it makes the news and makes it even harder to choose option 2) the next time.

This is why our health care system is so wasteful. We keep funding the bad bets because we can't look at a sick person and say no.

after a big error

When is the best time to be a patient? Ironically, it is immediately after your doctor makes a salient error. The reason is simple - that is when he/she is going to be paying the closest attention and double checking everything. If the error was a slip (insufficient attention) then the doctor will be paying extra attention. If the error was a mistake (incorrect situation schema) then the doctor will be double checking and studying the situation. If the doctor doesn't know why the error was made, he/she will probably be doing both.

Ironically, the way most organizations deal with big errors is to suspend the person from doing the activity. Quarterbacks are taken out of the game, employees are suspended, children are grounded, etc.

The better thing to do is to send them right back out with maximum repetitions so that the extra carefulness gets cemented into their normal routine. At the same time, the system needs to be evaluated to identify the root cause of the error. Are employees not sufficiently trained to recognize situation schema? Are there distractions that hide important information? Is the information not readily available?

Of course, this is when it was an error. If the person intentionally violated a rule, then the correct response is punishment. But people violate rules for many reasons. It may be that the rule was not presented with sufficient importance and consequence. Or the person was trying to satisfy one requirement by violating another. Even intention does not 100% indicate that the root cause is the violator him/herself.

This is a subject for a different post. Or you can take my upcoming summer course at FIU on performance management. It is available by Internet if you don't live in Miami.

speech fire alarms

I heard today about a new product that claims to be a more effective smoke/fire alarm. Instead of a siren, the alarm is a recorded voice. The idea is that when little kids wake up to an alarm, they are disoriented and confused. To hear specific instructions coming from their mom's voice is supposed to be helpful. The recording can be more than just "wake up." It can have detailed instructions like "There is a fire!! Get up and go out the back door right away!!!"

But I am conflicted on whether this is really better. I think that from a pure sensory salience perspective, there is not way that a voice is as loud or alarming as a siren. Also, the mom's voice is a common thing, so they won't instinctively associate it with an emergency. If they are sleeping, they may not hear enough of the voice to know it is the fire alarm. Also, as early as 10 years old, I am sure kids are trained to ignore their mom's voice waking them up: "Mom, I don't want to go to school today."

So the tradeoff is that a siren is better to wake them up and the voice is better to remind them of where to go. So which is more likely, that they fail to wake up or that they panic and forget where to go? I don't know this answer, but I suspect that the designers did not do the study to find out either. They guessed that this would be better and the lives of thousands of children will depend on them being correct. I hope they are.

airline pilot pay

The salaries of airline pilots is a great example of a way to structure pay that is misaligned with performance. The hardest part of flying is takeoff and landing. So if salaries is based on the task difficulty, then short haul pilots would get paid more. But in fact it is the opposite.

I suspect that these salaries are based on the size of the plane. Long haul flights generally have bigger planes. This could make a little sense if it is based on responsibility - more people in the plane = more people relying on the pilot's skills. But if takeoff and landing are really the hard parts, then many smaller flights still has more responsibility.

Or, they are influenced by seniority. Since longer flights are easier (the plane mostly flies itself), more senior pilots get them. Basing pay on seniority is somewhat controversial. It is common in unionized organizations. It makes sense to reward employees for staying at the company, especially in industries where there is tacit knowledge that makes the employee better at his/her job. But I personally think it is better to link the salary to this tacit knowledge directly - not the predictor of job tenure.

But this is a good example of the complexity of the real world. If pay were structured based on what really motivates performance (long term and short term), seniority would have some impact, but not nearly as much as it does. Politics and other non-engineering factors still play a large role.

Business Week on Usability

Another plug for Business Week. In their brief "Up Front" section last week they had an item saying that technology companies should stop adding features to their gadgets as a competitive advantage, and instead focus on the "wow factor." But then they described what they meant by the "wow factor" and it turns out to be simple usability. It is pretty sad that something so obvious, well-established among design professionals, and universally beneficial is so rare that is elicits a "wow" reaction among users.

But thanks to Business Week for pointing that out - although they didn't mention how sad it is.

Business Week on Work Design

Last week's Business Week had a great article on Danaher Corp. Much of the article promotes the business side, discussing the great way that Danaher has built a conglomerate of industrial companies that has outperformed GE, Berkshire Hathaway, and 3M. But they also have a pretty strong argument that the reason for this outperformance is the Danaher Business System, which is modeling on the Toyota Production System. According to the article, Danaher was among the first companies to promote lean process design. Key points include: "every employee, from the janitor to the president, to find ways every day to improve the way work gets done" and "a Danaher manager clutching a clipboard, a tape measure, and a stopwatch, in search of wasted motion, to tick off how many steps a data analyst has to take to get to the copier." They even use 5S: "floors are covered with strips of tape indicating where everything should be" . . . "managers determine the most efficient place for everything so a worker won't have to walk a few extra yards to pick up a tool."

But why haven't we heard of Danaher before? Because they "worried others would notice their results and copy the strategy" and "they didn't want to be raided for talent."

But that's Ok - because we are creating the talent and promoting the strategy in the Florida International University Industrial and Systems Engineering Department. For those readers in my class, prepare to read this article next week :-D.