I went Gleaning on Saturday.
If you are looking for a great way to volunteer in your community, it is
an amazing way to go. Gleaning comes
from the biblical idea that farmers should refrain from harvesting the last 10%
of their crops and let the poor come and eat.
Today, that is infeasible because the needy are in the inner city, not
the farmland. Boston Area Gleaners is
a volunteer-driven organization that asks local farmers to donate this last 10%
and we go and harvest it and deliver it to food pantries. It is especially important these days because
many of the needy are in food deserts and have no access to fresh produce. We went and harvested 1100 pound of
carrots, turnips, and mustard greens. We
filled up the truck and had a few bunches of mustard greens left over so we got
to bring a few home (nice perk !!). Not only a great
cause, but also great camaraderie among the volunteers who got all
muddy and sweaty working our butts off to dig up and box the vegetables.
So now that I have made my plug for gleaning, here is my
Human Factors perspective. The carrots
that we dug up were all crazy shapes and irregular sizes. I was shocked, considering the dozens of
straight and equally sized carrots you get in the stores. Some of these could have been right out of a
“mutant aliens take over the Earth” movie.
They had four heads, six legs, and crooked tails. Out of the 500 or so carrots I pulled out
myself, perhaps 10 would have made it to a grocery store. They rest would have been plowed under.
Is the American consumer really so picky about the
shape? I understand that taste is a
major concern, but I tried some of the bizarre ones and they tasted
amazing. Just as sweet as the straight
ones. Have we been trained to like only
pretty carrots? I have heard that
tomatoes are bred to be as perfectly circular as possible, even at the expense
of good taste. I never believed it was that
big a deal until this weekend when I discovered it was 90/10, not 10/90.
How should we define the user experience of buying and
eating produce? Is size and shape even
close to as important as nutrition and flavor?
We have more food than we need as a nation, so we can afford to plow under
the ugly ones. As a nation. But that is the problem with looking at
averages. For the needy or those who
have little to no access to fresh produce, I suspect their priorities are flipped.
As HF professionals, how do we balance what our users tell
us they want versus what we know is best for them? I am not trying to be paternalistic here, but
there are dozens of published cases where users think one version of an
interface is better, faster, easier, or whatever but the objective data says
the opposite. Or when users focus on
short term benefits and select one interface when we know that their long term
happiness and performance will be better if they choose another one.
What is our role here?
I am not sure how to make these tough decisions and I suspect it depends
on the context. With enterprise IT,
perhaps it is the profitability of the company that matters the most, and we
should discount what the employee says.
For healthcare IT, perhaps the patient’s safety and health should matter
the most. For gaming systems, perhaps it
is customers’ subjective satisfaction and enjoyment that should matter the
most.
My agriculture example creates a broader challenge. In this context, two different sets of
customer needs are in conflict and the larger and more profitable group is
making satisfying the other group impossible. Yet it is that other group that
needs our help more. And the metrics
that the large group is using seem kind of superficial. But if wealthier consumers don’t purchase the
ugly produce, farmers don’t make enough profit to donate some to the
underserved.
