magazines

The latest issue of the Tufts University alumni magazine has a letter from the editor about how great magazines are. He lists the benefits of hard copy magazines:

• easy to flip through
• higher resolution than displays
• faster page download (once the magazine has arrived of course)
• good visibility of how much content there is total
• great magazine smell

All of these will be exceeded by computers pretty soon (except maybe the smell). And computer-based magazines also allow you to link to archived articles, extra content, video, email the authors, author's blogs, readers comments, and many other extras. So in fact, the computer magazine is really much better.

But I still love my paper magazines. I can walk down the sidewalk or sit by the pool with it. I can curl up on the couch with it. Maybe we will get flexible displays that can handle these features too, but I think we have a few years to wait. Until then, I am keeping my subscriptions.

Usability is now the law !!

Well, its not the law yet, but the House of Representatives passed the Plain Language in Government Communications Act of 2008. Now we just need the Senate at GW to join up.

The basic idea is that all government documents will now include "language that the intended audience can readily understand and use because it is clear, concise, well-organized, and follows other best practices of plain language writing". Sounds like usability to me (and to Caroline Jarrett at Usability News - thanks for the pointer).

This is only half the battle too. Its one thing for the government to promise to make its documents user friendly. The next step is to require other people to make their contracts easy to understand and use (see my book chapter on how to do this). The lack of readable contracts is part of what got us into the credit card mess, subprime mortgage mess, health care insurance mess, and many others. We wouldn't need half as many lawyers if contracts were understandable. But of course, lawyers write the contracts, so . . . .

And for anyone who thinks that regulating contract language is anti-free market, think again. This is a strong libertarian idea. If companies had to make their contracts understandable to their intended customers, those customers could be freed to sign up for any kind of contract they want (except for the universal taboos like slavery etc). They would know what they are getting themselves into and be "allowed" to make that choice.

The reason we need regulation that actually limits behavior is because customers don't/can't understand the fine print. So we have to prevent companies from putting nasty stuff in that fine print. But if the customer understands all of the details and still wants to enter into the agreement, why not let them? This only works when we have understandability.

This new Act is a good first step. Go Congress Go !!!

Looking, but not seeing

A recent study looked at the effects of familiarity on drivers noticing important changes in road signage. As you might expect, when drivers get familiar with a road, they look less and less at the signs because they have committed them to memory. This is basic expert behavior and is generally a good thing.

You might also expect that when the signs are changed, the familiar driver is less likely to notice the change. In this case, they changed a right of way to a yield (making it very important for the driver to slow down/stop because cars coming across the intersection will not be stopping). You might expect that familiar drivers remember the right of way sign so they don't bother looking, and therefore don't notice that it was changed to a yield.

But what this study found is that the drivers do look at the new sign. But they still don't notice the change. My suspicion is that there is so much top-down processing that they still "see" the right of way, even though it now says "yield".

There are several important consequences of this. For one, it means that when you change a design, it is important to take steps to saliently inform users of the change. Kind of like when IVR phone systems have a message that says something like "please listen carefully because the options have changed."

It also makes it important to get your design right the first time. Many web businesses are launching early betas and using the "new" design strategy to launch half-done businesses to get first mover advantage and let customer comments drive future design. I applaud the focus on users, but this study shows that there are consequences of doing this if you let users get too familiar with the early stuff. You may get stuck with some bad features.

Third, it impacts the forensic work that many of my colleagues and I do. When we explain to a jury why a driver blew right through a stop sign that is obvious from the photo of the scene, it is not because the driver was inattentive and irresponsible. It is because he/she was an expert.

Loss Aversion and the expensive placebo

One of the cognitive underpinnings of maximizing (see previous post) is "loss aversion." Basically, it means that we maximizers get buyers remorse, always wondering about the "one that got away." We don't necessarily search for the best answer because we enjoy the process or because we really need the best option. The whole definition of satisficing is that the selected option is good enough. But we experience significant negative affect if we later see a better option out there, or even suspect that there is one.

Which is why I am not at all surprised by the recent study that found that expensive placebos work better than cheap ones. Basically, when participants were told that a placebo pretending to be a pain killer cost $2.50, it worked better than one that they were told cost 10 cents. Of course, both were identical sugar pills. How is this related, you may ask? Well, it is the loss aversion experienced by us maximizers (this is my interpretation, not the study authors). If you spend $2.50 on the pill, it better work. The negative affect that we feel for having made a $2.50 mistake is much bigger than what we feel from a 10 cent mistake. So the top down processes that make placebos work in general are stronger for the expensive placebo because of the greater fear of having made a mistake.

Which also explains Eliot Spitzer's call girl scandal. When I first heard that the escorts cost up to $5500 per HOUR, I could not imagine how they could be worth this much (not that I have much experience with call girls of course). But I bet it is the same as the expensive placebo. When you spend that much, the loss aversion kicks in and your brain makes sure that you enjoy the experience five times more than that $1100 per hour girl.

This also explains my fondness for self-deception. Life is great when you go around taking placebos all the time and feel great 24/7. And if you can further convince yourself that the 10 cent pill is the expensive version, then it is even better.

Mazimizers and satisficers

I topic I have long been very interested in, perhaps because of my own decision making struggles, is the satisficer/maximizer continuum that is so well described in Barry Schwartz book the Paradox of Choice. The basic concept is that there are two 'personalities' (my word, not his) for making choice decisions. In the satisficing strategy you choose an option that is good enough to satisfy your needs, and don't worry about whether there is another option out there that might be even better. The maximizer is willing to put in the extra effort to find the best option, even after a satisfactory option is found.

Part of this of course hinges on the availability of information. If you are buying a breakfast cereal, you can easily get the price, look at the nutrition label to get the grams of fat, protein, and fiber, the levels of each vitamin, and you probably have a sense of the taste from experience or advertising. So it is easy to compare 100 different options and pick the best one if you are willing to spend the time.

But for something like health care, it is impossible to know which doctor is better or even what they will charge when you go for a visit. I switched to a high deductible health plan with a health savings account (the new "free market solution" to the health care crisis) so I have tried to do this for the past two years. I go online to find a doctor, and I find no way to compare them. I call doctors' offices ahead of time and ask what the charge will be, but they can't tell me because it depends on the diagnosis and treatment, which they don't know until I get there (and have already committed to paying). So I am forced to satisfice, even though it drives me crazy (this is why I call it a decision making 'personality'). And I no longer believe this is the free market solution we were looking for.

Usability wins again!!!

Many years ago, there was a battle between Sony Betamax and VHS for the video tape standard. Beta was technologically superior, but it lost. Why - because of usability. The tapes were not long enough to hold a full length movie. Had Sony done a good job of understanding user requirements, they would have realized that interrupting a movie midstream to change a tape is a dealbreaker.

Well, Sony seems to have learned its lesson. In the Blueray HD-DVD war, Sony has won. Toshiba announced today that it will stop making HD-DVD players. Even though HD-DVD is technologically superior (by most accounts), Sony signed up more studios for Blueray. Variety is also a user requirement. In the Era of the Long Tail, users want access to as many movies as possible.

Yeah for usability!!!

Social Networking

This is a good post to follow the previous one. About 3 years ago, I switched my focus from Web 1.0 to Web 2.o and 3.0 research. Of course, the words don't matter - the hype around using version numbers is kind of silly. But the basic idea (at least as I define it) is that in Web 2.0, things are more interactive (using Ajax etc.) and allow users to contribute (upload content, tag content, respond to content, etc). Web 3.0 takes it up a level, with semantic analysis that helps to organize all the masses of content out there. Web 2.0 + Semantic Web = Web 3.0.

Right now, most social networking is Web 2.0. Anyone can add content (with some filters and restrictions), but finding what you want relies on older search tools (no offense Google). I suspect it will only be a few years until we have real Web 3.0 social networks to use.

So it was interesting to see Google announce its sort-of rival to Wikipedia. Knol (I am not sure who drummed up that name) is also an on-line encyclopedia-type resource, but instead of a wiki, users upload their articles as units, each one associated with the bio of the author. They are not editable by others. So readers get a sense of how much they can trust the content based on the credentials of the author. Readers can also rank each article and higher ranked articles will bubble to the top. Google added reputation management but removed the "wisdom of crowds."

It will take a while for Knol to catch up to Wikipedia in the amount of content. Until then, it is impossible to compare the approaches. But when (if) it does, it will be interesting to see the difference. I am sure there will advantages and disadvantages of each one.

Usability and marketing

As anyone familiar with my Web 1.0 research would know, I am very interested in the relationship between usability and marketing. If marketers really understand their users/customers from a deep usability (my research domain) perspective, then the line between the two fields really blurs.

For example, if I know that a customer is price sensitive when it comes to desserts (a marketing insight) and time sensitive when it comes to shopping (a usability insight), then presenting an ad for my low-price cookies in a way that is easy/fast to redeem and during the dessert-shopping activity, satisfies both goals. The customer doesn't see it as intrusive and frustrating (like the general population is starting to do with many ads these days) because it is a direct match to the current task and is customized to her personal preferences. Its not perceived as advertising but as assistance.

This comes to mind as I read an announcement in MIT Technology Review describing Microsoft's new business designing software for screens on shopping carts. Basically, the software would know who you are if you swipe your loyalty card and where you are in the store based on RFID tags. If you pause in front of the cookie shelf, it can present the ad I describe above. Of course, this only works if they effectively mine their loyalty card database well. If they present an ad for the expensive cookies to the price-sensitive shopper, it will be perceived as an annoyance. But I wish them well. When marketing becomes truly integrated with usability, we won't see another "ad" ever again.

A recent paper by Jonathan Lazar and others has a very insightful conclusion about blind computer users that contradicts a common stereotype. I am glad that it did.

Part of this is my interpretation of the results, but I don't think I am making any big leaps. Basically, they found that blind users are more likely to look for workarounds when faced with limitations of an interface and are more likely to blame the interface than themselves - compared to seeing users.

My interpretation is that blind people face challenges more often than seeing users. Rather than developing a sense of learned helplessness and dependency - which is the stereotype I referred to - they develop a talent for workarounds. They don't blame their disability, they recognize that it is unimpaired designers who did not do their homework about blind users when designing their systems, who are at fault for the challenges they face.

Not only is this a very healthy, productive response, but it is one that we all can learn from.

consumer decision making

I was just reading an article on the Journal of Consumer Affairs about consumer decision making in a very emotionally charged, confusing, and time pressured context (funeral services). This is a tough combination of a challenging environment, novice decision makers, and aggressive sales practices.

Not a situation I would wish on anyone, but a great scenario for research because it is an serious edge case - bringing out the extremes of the human decision making process. The researchers found that consumers of these services generally used many of the cognitive load-reducing decision heuristics that have been called biases specifically because of these results. I don't blame any consumer facing the death of a loved one for trying to reduce the attention dedicated to picking a coffin, plot, embalming services et&c. But the problem is that they

1. evaluated very few alternatives
2. trusted the reliability of the information they were given (by salespeople)
3. did not search for additional information

The authors suggest government regulation. My default opinion about regulation is that we should give consumers all the information they need, but not to constrain their choice. But in this case, perhaps stronger regulation is needed because it is hard to require consumers in this context to be responsible information acquirers and processors.

chicken sexing

OK, this is my favorite example of fractionation. Thanks to Jared Spool who talks about it in his webcast The Dawning of the Age of Experience. Basically, chicken farms profit by identifying the gender of their baby chicks as early as possible. Unfortunately, there are no physical differences between the male and female babies for several months. With no expertise, that gives them a 50/50 chance of guessing correctly. There are experts who can get up to 80/20, but they can't articulate how they know. They have fractionated their male/female schema so that they can recognize the differences, but there are no connections to any labels. They "just know."

So the training process simply repeats the learning process. A new hire categorizes the baby chicks by gender (at an accuracy of just 50/50 because they don't have any clue), and the expert hits them on the shoulder when they are wrong (feedback). After a few weeks (and hundreds of chicks), the new hires can get up to 70/30 accuracy rates, even though they also can't say quite how they know.

It is a great example of how much cognition goes on in areas of the brain that are simply not accessible to conscious examination.

decision heuristics and power of the media

I heard a great comment on NPR this morning by host Scott Simon. He was discussing former Illinois Governor George Ryan, who has many good and bad events in his history. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize for his suspension of the death penalty in his state because of uncertainties and unfairness in how it was applied. He also was the manager of a corrupt government that accepted bribes, one of which led to a horrible accident where several children were killed.

What makes this story relevant to human factors is that Scott Simon remarked that if you tell the story beginning from the traffic accident, Ryan comes across as a terrible person. Listeners may cynically discount the death penalty suspension as an attempt by Ryan to make friends in the prison system, knowing that he may end up there soon. On the other hand, if you tell the story beginning from the Nobel Prize nomination, listeners may sadly wonder how a principled man could be tempted by the power and influence of politics.

It is amazing how much power the media has in the way it presents stories. A little bit of knowledge about anchoring bias, confirmation bias, representativeness bias, and others can make a newspaper or TV news editor incredibly influential. You could craft a series of stories, without doing anything deceptive, unethical, or improper, that significantly skew public opinion one way or the other.

And it can be done so subtly that no one would really know the difference. It would not be like Chavez, Putin or Musharraf intimidating the opposition media.

direct to consumer ads for medicine

There was a paper in this year's Human Factors Conference that got me thinking. The results of the research described are not new, but they cited some past work that always gets me so frustrated by regulatory cluelessness. DTC ads for prescription drugs are required to include both the benefits and the risks. But the regs don't show any knowledge of HF by the regulators. We all have seen or heard the ads where the benefits are promoted in 90% of the ad with smiling faces, well designed graphics, etc. And then the risks are in small print on the bottom or in 1 second of babbling audio. What a waste of an important regulation.

In order to make good health care decisions - and reduce the tremendous cost of health care, we need to be able to make intelligent decisions about our care. Or at the very least, please don't make it worse by encouraging patients to march into their doctors offices demanding the latest name brand drug that is 100 times the cost of the generic but only 1% more effective (or not even that).

This study found that only 5% of people reported that their doctors turned down the request. Doctors would rather give the patient what he/she wants, avoid the conflict, and make the drug rep happy (after getting some sweet perks).

And who cares - its the insurance company that pays the tab. Except that when our policy premiums go up at double the rate of inflation, we wonder why. Duh !!

Anchored to aging

We all know that we will inevitably get old (assuming nothing even worse happens first). Getting old leads to reduced physical and mental abilities, and is generally perceived as a negative. But because our society has accepted it as inevitable, we become acculturated to accepting it. To deal with it even better, we develop excuses for why it is a good thing. It prevents overpopulation. It makes room for young people with new ideas. Life would get boring after a hundred years. Etc.

So whey Aubrey de Grey says that he is developing medical/genetic methods to prevent aging and allow us to live to be at least a hundred and stay healthy and strong, he gets the weirdest response. People call him evil and crazy, not because he thinks he can do it, but because he wants to.

This is one of the most extreme cases of anchoring. Because we have already developed our schema of aging, and connected it to “good” or at least “a necessary part of life,” we can’t accept the alternative.

What does this say about us?

Creativity and Jeff Stamp

If anyone has a chance to see Jeff Stamp, the director of the entrepreneurship program at the University of N Dakota's business school, I strongly recommend it. His specialty is generating creativity and focusing it on entrepreneurship. And his workshops are great for business leaders trying to find ways to build creative capability in their organization or professors who want to help their students do the same. For me, I enjoyed taking everything he said and modeling it with the schema model I use in human factors. It all fits, which is good evidence that his advice is effective.

Also, he has some great stories. For anyone who hasn't heard of Jeff, he was Director of New Product Development at Frito Lay and Pepsico, and is responsible for the invention of Baked Lays, Pepsi Max, the current formulation of Betty Crocker cake frosting, and others. I plan to borrow many of them to use as great examples of user requirement analysis.

Finally, he shared that he intentionally gives his students vague assignments because that is the way the real world typically works. My students often complain that my assignments are too vague, and now I have some support that it is a good thing, not a bad thing, for their education.

User requirements

I am constantly faced with situations where a product is missing some little tweak that would have made it much better for the particular context I am in. It usually is something that would have a very low cost in development and in added interface complexity. I wonder why the company didn't see the need. Is it the method they use to identify needs? Are they not looking at a broad set of contexts?

For example, almost everyone has a cell phone now. Cell phones have easy to use clocks. Since we are carrying cell phones everywhere we go, we don't need watches anymore. I don't know how many people have given up watches (especially since they are also a fashion statement), but I imagine there are at least tens of thousands. I am one of them.

So when I travel by plane, and the announcement comes on that I have to turn off my electronic devices, I suddenly am without a clock. Sometimes, I just want to know the time because I am impatient. But last week, I needed to take some medication at a particular time. Wouldn't it be pretty easy to design the phone with an "airplane mode" in which the communication parts are turned off, but you can still access the rest (clock, alarm, games, etc). I bet there are lots of features people would like to use in the plane. Is this enough to get people to choose one phone over another? Or at least to be more satisfied with their current phone and less likely to jump?

One I am less sure about is to have the clock on your computer persistent even when Powerpoint is on slideshow mode. It would be helpful if you could see the clock on the screen when giving a presentation so you don't have to look at your watch (or phone) to see how much time you have left. Its not very big, so I suspect it wouldn't change the slide appearance much. Maybe it could be something you could add to the Slide Master.

loss aversion

There has been a lot of talk about loss aversion lately in many different places. The housing market is a great example, with homeowners who need to sell their houses refusing to take less than their original purchase price, even though that "sunk cost" is totally irrelevant in today's market. Stock market investors have been doing it for decades, refusing to sell a stock for less than they paid. This is part of the basis for the entire field of technical analysis. These investors can predict huge volumes of buying and selling when a particular investment reaches a level where many people bought in.

Greg Mankiw today has a great example. Even a great financial economist, who can see himself falling victim to this bias, can't use a brilliant investing strategy that he himself invented because of the fear of a regretful situation (the basis for loss aversion).

And one of my favorite weekly comics has a great example from politics. (warning, if you click here after Oct 5, you will need to manually find the Sept 30 edition).

page load times

Since UIE has decided to bring this topic up again, I figure I may as well. Users constantly complain about "slow" websites (or applications, or elevators for that matter). But what does "slow" really mean? The elevator example is the key to understanding. When elevator designers received these complaints, they looked into making elevators faster, but it was too costly. It turns out, putting mirrors near the door gives people something to do while they wait. That reduced the perceived wait and reduced the complaints.

The same thing works with web sites (etc). Instead of worrying about making the whole page load quickly, give users something to do while they wait. I read the Boston Globe sports section every day. Each article is supplemented with a video related to the article. Those pages have the text load first, allowing me to read the article, and then if I want to watch the video it will have loaded by the time I finish the article. Even if the article was my goal, I would have something to do (read the article) while I waited.

The same thing can work with ads. Many sites load the ads first because they are afraid the ad will not be seen if it loads second. But with most connections, the ad will load before the user is done reading the article, so the ad view will still get recorded. But more importantly, the user can proceed with his/her task without waiting. The important part of the download time is fast.

Another part of "perceived" delay is how long the user expects the site to load. If the site is heavy (graphics etc) and the heavy items are part of what the user is there for (as opposed to ads), then the perception is much lower. So heavy pages can take longer to load with no usability penalty if the heavy content is relevant.

A third factor (and the subject of the UIE study) is how much fun the page is. When we are enjoying ourselves (or being very successful in a task), the perceived time is again lower. In this study, users actually thought the page loaded faster when they were successful in a task then when they were not, even though this has NO correlation with the actual time. Users reported that a 8-second page was slower than a 30-second page.

These results show why it is important to know your metric. The important metrics may be "perceived" download time or task success, but it is not the actual time the page takes to download.

Forecasting the Future

There is a piece on foreignpolicy.com's blog today on forecasting the future and why it is so hard. Interestingly, the one current forecast that the blogger finds promising is that nanorobotics will allow us to think faster and directly connect to wireless networks. I think the problem is not our lack of processing speed. Searching for information is already fast enough. The problem we have is evaluating this information. We can already get a million hits on every Google search.

What we need are better filters and evaluators. That will take something totally different. We need wisdom engines to go along with our search engines. We need a way to get people to stop using our information processing capabilities (natural and electronic) to look for holes in positions we don't like (and not in the ones we do like) and to stop using them to find personal rationalizations to discount good arguments.

Unfortunately, I don't see that in our future.

really understanding your users

There was a great story in BusinessWeek last week that really highlights what it means to understand your user. Bicycle use has been trending down significantly over the past few years and the major bicycle manufacturers (Trek, Giant, Shimano etc) were getting concerned. Gut instinct might blame it on obesity and baby boomers getting older and becoming less interested in cycling. But it turns out, that was not the case. The problem was poor human factors. While avid cyclists loved the new bicycles that were coming out, with high tech components, 30 gears, etc. It turns out, there were millions of people out there who would have loved to get a bicycle but they were intimidated by the prospect of going into a bicycle store and dealing with the cycling experts who worked there, choosing among the complex components (handlebars, seats, brakes, tires), and so on.

So the solution was to apply human factors. Shimano was the leader, but they got Trek and other brands on board. What they did was:

1. Create simple bikes. “Coasters” have comfortable seats, automatic gear shifting (a small computer that is powered by pedaling so it doesn’t need a battery), puncture resistant tires so that novices don’t have to change tires during a ride, chain guards to keep the grease off of pants.

2. They also made changes to the purchasing process. They added staff at bike stores that have expertise in dealing with people rather than experts in cycling. They changed the web site designs to make it easy for novices to find a bicycle that was appropriate for what they wanted.

3. They also advocated in local governments to make bike paths wider and safer.

There are higher profit margins in selling to hard core bikers. But because there are so many potential casual bikers out there, the impact could be greater with the new strategy.