Human-Centered

A tiny experiment in behavioral economics

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:00:37 -0500

An illustrator friend was telling me over dinner recently how she was struggling to put together her portfolio. As anyone who’s ever had to create one knows, it’s a big, complicated effort. There’s lots of strategizing about the story you’re trying to tell, lots of visual design to create new samples, and a lot of revising old projects to bring them up to your current standards. So it wasn’t surprising that she was running into trouble motivating herself, day after day, to keep working on what can seem like an endless uphill climb.

A few weeks before that dinner I had seen Dean Karlan, professor and development economist at Yale, speak at a conference called PopTech. Amongst other things, he spoke about using economic incentives to change patterns of motivation - decreasing the cost of virtue and increasing the cost of vice. His personal example: making an agreement with a friend to hand over $100 if he ordered dessert, thus increasing the price of dessert to $108 from $8.

So while we were at dinner, that talk was still floating around my brain, and I decided to see if we could make something concrete out of it. I asked if she’d be up to put money on the table. She said a friend had offered to make a contract already - if she didn’t finish a portion of the portfolio in the allotted time she had to hand over cash. According to her, it didn’t work in practice. The friend didn’t force her to give up the money when it came down to it, and the whole thing felt awkward.

We decided to try a different, more direct approach:

she paypal’ed me $100 immediately
if she finished in five days, I’d paypal her back $125 (I figured $25 was worth an interesting experiment for a friend)
if within a week I’d return $110
for every five days after the week was up she’d lose $10
On the sixth late day, it would all be forfeit (any money that she didn’t get back was supposed to go to charity).

The results, in her words:

A few things [happened] — I really accepted the deadline as a real thing and not something I could violate (like a weak agreement with myself). Once I believed I would certainly be getting a finished piece at the end, it made me excited to get started.

A few times I hit a wall or got discouraged that it wasn’t looking good, which is what always happens, and that’s where I usually give up and start over or start a new project or just go watch tv. But since I really wanted to get it done by Friday, I forced myself to push through those blocks. I didn’t have time to start over so I needed to be more decisive and resourceful. So that was different this time.

Another interesting result was that even though I had less time to finish the work (less than with no official deadline), I mixed in lots of skill building activities like plein air painting, watching art tutorials and learning new tools. I’ve been meaning to do more of that, but since it was less important than portfolio work, I put it off. This week I felt more free to do those things.

Large, unstructured, intimidating, deadline-free tasks can be the enemy of forward progress. And as we procrastinate, as we watch ourselves fail to get things down both large and small, it can be hard to get out of the negative spiral. I think what mattered most here wasn’t the money, but the fact that there was a structure and a social commitment, that I was more deeply invested in her success or failure, that she owed something to not just herself, but someone else, and that there was a clear metric of what we both set as the goal.

And just in case it wasn’t already clear, she finished the three pieces we agreed to in just five days.

Product as a collaborative, service role

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 02:25:00 -0500

I’ve been doing more product management than design lately, which I generally enjoy, but it’s also a very different role within a team than what I’m used to. Primarily, I’ve been struggling with the disjoint that can arise between product management, design, and engineering, or to put it another way, product management cast as an overseer/director and design/engineering as “maker” roles.

One facet of this - there’s a common concept within some project processes of a PM-type as “product owner”. Basically the one who lays claim to what this thing we’re making should be, and who dictates whether the current form has or has not yet actualized that. The way the rhetoric around this goes (and this is not inherent in everyone or even most people who do agile, just in some of the theory), product manager generates stories, implementation team makes them happen, loop back to product manager who then accepts or rejects said stories.

That’s all well and good at a large company, where there’s a ton to oversee and direct and work may be more planned. But at a startup, I don’t think it should be that way. I think the product manager, designer, engineer should all be sitting next to each other, specs should happen beforehand as well as on the fly, design should inform product, product should inform engineering, and feedback shouldn’t wait till the next sprint review. If there are positive relationships among the team, this shouldn’t be a problem and no one should be stepping on anyone’s toes.

Basically, I prefer to work as a PM the way I’d work as a designer. Collaboratively with my teammates, iteratively as we make new discoveries, and flatly, as we all share equal ownership in shipping an awesome product. In my mind, I prefer to recast the PM not as an owner, but as a service role, providing direction and support when needed, getting tactical things in order, listening to problems and solving them if possible, and if there’s nothing else to do, getting his/her hands dirty in design and engineering. I recently saw a quote from a speaker at Pop!Tech that captured this notion well for leadership, but I think it applies to all forms of management, coordination, and team direction:

”The first job of a leader is to define reality, last to say thank you and, in between, to be a debtor and a servant.” — Max DuPree

This is how you create emotional connections between people and...

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:00:05 -0500

This is how you create emotional connections between people and your product/brand/company. You add subtle, small elements that remind everyone that everything is just made by another human being living another human life who likes and deals with probably a lot of the same human things.

A friend of mine was talking about how her approach to sales [and I think it’s pretty common] is just to befriend people, to drop a sympathetic note if she knows that a contact has been working really hard instead of only pushing to close. Same idea could be applied to product design - try thinking of the people who interact with your products as friends, and then see how that changes what you might make.

I’ve had evernote for a while now, maybe a year+. Just...

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:59:04 -0500

I’ve had evernote for a while now, maybe a year+. Just started using it again for a new research project, and just e-mailed a note to myself for the first time. Their e-mail back was a perfect example of information just exactly when you need it - didn’t know about the tips, was new to e-mailing notes even after a year of usage, but not new to evernote in general, and so the feedback they provided was super-focused and brief. Good thing to keep in mind in UX design - when does a person need new information, when are they open to receiving that information [not always the same], and through what channel can you best provide that information? And that this doesn’t just apply to a slick tutorial [often the worst place to provide lengthy information if the user just wants to jump in], but to continuing education and support as the person grows and engages more with your application.

Really like the visual design on find friends. For me brings up...

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:06:00 -0400

Really like the visual design on find friends. For me brings up associations of personal, hand-bound journals, physical address books/planners, worn wallets, and old maps (color scheme), without explicitly overdoing any of those metaphors. It’s hard to definitively say what it looks like, which is as it should be as there are few real-world mental models of location tracking that should be tapped. But the app still uses familiar design elements to convey notions of personal, private, relational, etc.

Edit from April 2012: all the above might still be true, but I could do with a bit less mock-leather texture in my life (apple might have played that one out).

Edit from Nov 2012: I was tempted to remove this post as I really disagree with my past self on this one - but I’ve decided to leave it up as an example of how design ages. Intense skeuomorphism, perhaps even past skeuomorphism to just abuse of metaphor, starts out looking quite nice, and ends up seeming pretty off once the pendulum starts to swing back to flatness and minimalism. Maybe it’s that way for any design that goes out of style, but it seems all the more true that designs that mimic our physical world remind us more of their own decay.

Sometimes the FB Connect permissions copy reminds me of the tone...

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:00:06 -0400

Sometimes the FB Connect permissions copy reminds me of the tone used in the “threat level orange” airport security announcements. It’s pretty threatening - “access my data at any time” - when in reality I would guess the most common use case for this particular permission setting is to let you stay logged in to a mobile or web app without going through the FB connect login flow every single time.

Yes, technically that app can then look at whatever other profile info you’ve authorized at any time. So they could look at your birthday, or your e-mail address [if authorized] or, maybe your time zone at any given moment. Odds are they won’t, and odds are if the language weren’t as it is the majority of people wouldn’t care. I definitely understand the need to address privacy concerns, worries about irresponsible or malicious apps, and the desire to be extremely transparent. But that can be accomplished in a clearer, more user-friendly tone. Say, provide examples of common use cases for this permission, or even, as a tiny example, sub in the phrase “offline” [“access my data when I’m offline”] for the more intimidating “any time.” Lots of ways to wordsmith the various permissions so that using FB connect is not just a big, scary threat to your data, and maybe more importantly, your social presence.

"There are so many apps in the app store? How do you get people to find yours?"

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:10:05 -0400

““There are so many apps in the app store? How do you get people to find yours?””

- From my Mandarin teacher. And that of course, is one of the key questions. From what I’ve heard and personal experience, unless you’re launching on a new frontier platform [i.e. first one on Bada in Spain, Windows Phone launch app], lots of possible answers [and lots of people working on this problem]. The main thing is not to rely on the app store as your main marketing venue, but rather as just a point of distribution. The field of dreams strategy probably won’t work. Whether you then use PR pushes, cross-platform promotional strategies, cross-app advertising, targeted niche marketing, attempts to get featured for using new functionality, viral strategies, etc. depends on the app category and situation. From the user’s standpoint the app store is set up for search far more than browsing [especially after the top apps which are generally dominated by games]. Every so often I’ll hear from someone who just went skimming through apps out of boredom, but not the most common thing.

Sidenote on mobile marketing + UX: I suspect there are very few fans of the “like it? review it!” alert, though that’s entirely a hunch. Seems to have fallen out of favor in the past year thankfully.

Best account stats ever. Just started playing around with...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:27:47 -0400

Best account stats ever. Just started playing around with things, but Urban Airship already gives me the impression that they’re really dedicated to a positive customer experience.

Observational Skills workshop

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:46:05 -0400

Observational Skills workshop:

From last year, but I’ve never cross-posted it over here. As part of my time at Catapult Design, we put together workshops on various foundational product design and engineering skills. Mine was on basic observational research skills - it’s a quick read and the exercises can be applied within organizations to get the conversation started. There are more of these on Catapult’s blog [www.catapultdesign.org/blog] in case you’re looking to use any of this within a budding design team. Most applies to UX as well, though potentially with some tweaks.

"The purpose of an app is for convenience, not for beauty."

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 10:00:05 -0400

“The purpose of an app is for convenience, not for beauty.”

- A friend in Atlanta. I know lots of people who would disagree with her. I think it varies depending on whether the app is necessity/task-based or more “frivolous,” but I suspect we habituate to appearances faster than usefulness,

Ugly apps scare off users

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:01:05 -0400

Was reading about mobile UX research techniques the other day and stumbled upon this great article on iPad usage patterns. What got me thinking most, though there are lots of good points, was this:

people feel that if the UI design has problems, then the underlying security structure cannot be trusted.

Using the appearance of something as a heuristic to judge underlying characteristics is a longstanding human tradition. You try to avoid walking through a sketchy neighborhood with run-down houses - there’s a sense of danger, lawlessness, chaos in an area where the residents [if there are any] haven’t managed to or bothered with upkeep against the forces of the world. Likewise most people intuitively sense that there’s something wrong with a website that feels like it’s from the nineties or an app that looks like it’s thrown together from UI flotsam.

That may not be an accurate heuristic - there are lots of well-dressed thieves and slick looking websites designed to steal information. But it’s still a major cognitive factor to consider when developing an app. If beautiful interface design isn’t your strong suit that’s fine, but try to do the basics. If custom elements aren’t going to look sufficiently polished, stick to standard UI. Make colors match, avoid pixellated images, organize the layout, make basic interactions flow nicely, eliminate obvious bugs, add feedback, etc.

Design is considered important in many quarters so this isn’t a groundbreaking thought, but there are still a lot of apps with a lot of emphasis on engineering feats and not enough emphasis on minimal UX polish. It’s not overly difficult, but it’s the difference between someone feeling secure using an app or not using it all.

"No, I never post to Google+, always to Facebook. [Why?] Because no one checks google+, no..."

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:02:06 -0400

““No, I never post to Google+, always to Facebook. [Why?] Because no one checks google+, no one’s on there. If I post to Facebook I know everyone will see it, more people respond.””

- An SF friend, but I’ve heard the sentiment from a number of people. Most social networks, like many parts of social life, are about performance, identity, acting and sharing in front of people to gain praise or strengthen social connections. As long as Google+ seems empty, even if lots of people would actually see your post, it’ll feel pointless.

[real] crowdfunding! Maybe.

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 10:00:05 -0400

[real] crowdfunding! Maybe. :

I am ridiculously excited about what’s presented in this article. Background: about two years ago I worked for a few months on a business plan to create a Kiva-style investment platform for genuine social businesses. Two friends and I, having both come back recently from international education work, felt a bit tired of the pity-plays that happen even on Kiva, and we wanted something more dignified. We wanted more of the respect that comes along with real investment instead emotionally-driven 0% interest loans. Our goal was to allow anyone to be involved in equity or debt investment in triple-bottom line businesses around the world.

At the time I’m not sure that the deal-flow in the “missing middle” [i.e. small to medium-sized enterprises that aren’t ready for international growth-level VC or private equity, but are beyond the microentrepreneurship stage] was quite ready for the concept, but the biggest immediate block* was all the depression-era SEC regulations on investment [I’ll skip the details but if curious check out: http://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/qasbsec.htm#eod6]. Essentially, in order to even start offering any sort of investment to the average person, you’d need to register an official offering for each new investment opportunity with the SEC - a long and expensive process [companies like Prosper Marketplace and Lending Club deal with this for their P2P loans]. I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Ours was not a very unique idea, and lots of other people have tried to make it happen [Profounder, a company called Sprowtt Marketplace, some others]. I’m sure that if the legal environment changes, the companies that are currently well-positioned in the space [Kiva for international/social-focus, Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and others for more local, profit-oriented ventures] will probably be quick to move in. They already have the engaged user bases, the brand, etc. And I’m super excited to watch that happen - sometimes when you work on an idea long enough it’s just genuinely because you want it to be real, not because you want it be yours. Crowdfunding is awesome, and has the potential to unlock all sorts of possibilities in people [imagine if your friend who has an awesome cafe idea or your cousin who wants to start a medium-sized environmentally-friendly t-shirt company could access capital other than friends and family or heavily-scale oriented angels + VCs]. Democratizing entrepreneurship, as long as the risks are controlled, is definitely a good thing. I hope it becomes a reality.

* some other lesser, but not insignificant blocks included legal complexity with international investment, the various risk factors involved in intl investment, scale necessary to achieve profitability, etc. Not the easiest idea to implement, though I do believe someone [maybe Jessica Jackley and Profounder] will nail it if crowdfunding becomes legally feasible.

** also for more detail on some previous efforts to change the situation, check out http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/06/campaign-legalize-crowdfunding/

Lightness vs. weight in mobile UX

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 11:01:06 -0400

On the desktop and the web, people like to talk about how many clicks it takes to get a given task accomplished. More clicks is usually considered less desirable, so high-frequency actions are pushed more front-and-center, hierarchies are flattened when possible, and task flows are simplified. All of that can make sense, but I’ve heard some try to transfer that idea directly to mobile, talking about an interface in terms of the number of taps required to accomplish an action. On well-designed smartphones, that’s not the most useful way to see things.

If you actually watch someone play with an iPhone app, they just kind of tap around everything. There’s less friction at play in a single tap - your fingers are more natural to manipulate than a mouse [no matter how good we are at mousing these days], there’s less screen area to concern yourself with, and as long as the app isn’t horribly implemented, the transitions between states are relatively painless, even enjoyable in the way they bounce and fade. The cost to see what happens if you tap on that table cell or that blue text is very low, and the back button’s pretty easily available. If you take five taps and 30 seconds to input something but it flows seamlessly and makes intuitive sense, that may be far better than taking say three taps and 25 seconds to accomplish a task in a less intuitive, less beautiful way.

This compared to the traditional web where users have to navigate the mouse to a certain area and then click, wait while whatever it is loads, move up to the back arrow and click, wait for reloading, etc. But even on the web, services like Google+ manage to make potentially weighty, click-heavy actions [sorting your friends] painless through playful animations, rapid response times, and a fairly clear UI [for more on how the number of clicks rule never really applied, even on the web, check out: http://www.uie.com/articles/three_click_rule/].

The idea of number of clicks is really just a quick proxy for how cumbersome, how weighty, how “slow” an interface comes across as to the user. But in a mobile touchscreen context, where taps carry less cost, we need to think less about simple metrics and more holistically about why we wanted to reduce those clicks in the first place. How we might make an app really feel fast, regardless of what actual speed its tasks clock in at. How we can make interfaces that are truly lightweight, that carry as little mental burden as possible.

A few possibilities come to mind, though there are obviously more:

1) Make sure your interactions are intuitable, applying a few extra menu layers if necessary to better organize options. If you’ve flattened your hierarchies to the point that every option is on one page the user can’t figure out where to make that single tap for a given task, the weight of the frustration will outweigh any minor speed gains.

2) Make sure individual actions are as smooth as possible - don’t make people wait as much as possible, and when people have to wait, let them know why they have to wait, how long they have to wait, and even better let them do something else in the mean time.

3) Reduce start-stop, if people have to wait try to batch it into one clearly marked longer chunk rather than many shorter stalls [unless they can be short enough to be genuinely ignored].

4) Good visual design. If an interface is unattractive, it feels clunky instantly. People have to fight a slight negative reaction just to use it. Beyond that, a good designer can communicate both the right mood to support using the app as well as provide subtle visual cues of how to get things done without weighty tutorials or instructional sentences.

5) Reduce feature bloat. The more features an app has, the more an app can do, the more your brain has to sort through complexity to figure out exactly what you want to do, where to go to do it, and inhibit distractions from the other options. Excess features can create a mental pressure to use them. People like to know clearly what problem an app solves, and they want that app to have only as many features as necessary to support accomplishing that.

Now of course, you still want to make sure that the important tasks aren’t buried, and that there aren’t twelve layers of hierarchy to navigate back and forth to get anything done. But when it comes down to it, the ultimate goal is not to worry about number of clicks, not to reduce task time by five seconds, but to make interfaces that feel responsive, keep users in control, and, whether they’re explicitly faster or not, are ultimately more gratifying.

"Digital cameras are kind of bad in a way right? It’s so easy to snap like nine hundred photos,..."

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:49:25 -0400

“Digital cameras are kind of bad in a way right? It’s so easy to snap like nine hundred photos, and then suddenly you look up and you have all of these albums you’ll never have time to look through or organize.”

- Guy getting his hair cut to the hair stylist

Heard something interesting a while ago at the Institute for the Future about the mental weight of digital possessions. They don’t take up physical space, but for some it’s definitely another thing to manage, worry about, curate, etc.

Unexpected placement, artistic script, and authorial anonymity...

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 02:13:42 -0400

Unexpected placement, artistic script, and authorial anonymity can take an ordinary phrase, one that you might ignore or dismiss as cliche if a friend said it to you, and turn it into something that communicates with deeper, more associative parts of our brains. It almost comes across as if the building itself is imploring you to cherish the moment - a more abstract, and difficult to argue with entity than a proverb-happy friend.

"So I didn’t really use twitter, all my friends have twitter, but I wasn’t really..."

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 18:39:52 -0400

“So I didn’t really use twitter, all my friends have twitter, but I wasn’t really interested in using it because I didn’t know why it would be useful to me. Until I started coming to Squaw, and I wanted to follow the bad road conditions. So I joined, and started following unofficialsquaw, and i80chains…”

- a friend in a ski house. Just an individual data point in the broader move towards creating better channels for content consumption on twitter, now that there is so much content creation, now that it’s the place to go for real-time updates on what you care about.

"I’ve started doing social media for this women’s group I’m a part of. And you know..."

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

““I’ve started doing social media for this women’s group I’m a part of. And you know how it is, with twitter people have started talking to us, and you’ve gotta be responsive, so I’m on there responding all day now.””

- Freelance yoga teacher [among many other hats].

I’ve been talking to a lot of people lately who say interesting tech/UX things in the course of conversation. Playing with the idea of documenting that as a regular part of this stream.

"Can you believe I just joined facebook a month ago? But I’m always on it, typing away, finding..."

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:23:28 -0400

““Can you believe I just joined facebook a month ago? But I’m always on it, typing away, finding old friends. My brother asked me to find my nephew on facebook, he’s been traveling for four years, maybe to try to convince him to come home. But I encouraged him, I just want to keep seeing the photos he’s posting!””

- Woman on the bus, lives in SF, from Mexico City, traveled for twelve years.

"Soon you’ll be able to just bump your phone to the register to pay for those mandarins"

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 03:17:02 -0400

““Soon you’ll be able to just bump your phone to the register to pay for those mandarins””

- Farmer’s market vendor when I realized I had only $1.50 left in my wallet.