Neil Wehrle

I was at the Wired Store a couple days ago. Its filled with all manner of (mostly) electronic gadgets, televisions, a Camaro, and a drop of camping gear. Leaving, I felt nothing. In years past – actually a good 20 or more years ago, I would have been excited at the sight of all that expensive equipment.

What really struck me is how I use my time now. I’m sure it has a lot to do with my stage in life – with two kids and a mortgage, who’s got time for all that anyway? And a don’t think parallel parking a new Camaro in NYC would be much fun. But its more than that. I like to do active things – building things like websites, and engaging with people – much more than sitting passively at home listening to music or watching TV. If I do listen to music, its in the background while I’m doing another task.

Clay’s talk on cognitive surplus (and a forthcoming book) really drives this home. While my attention is more fragmented these days, I’m also doing much more with my time. Online social tools allow me to use my time better and to discover new things, and entire new classes of engagement (compared to 20 years ago) are stimulating and fulfilling.

A short but interesting article in the WSJ goes into the use of “nudges” and social pressure to encourage people to modify their behavior. The basic idea is that people don’t always behave rationally or in their best self-interest. While this wasn’t big news to the rest of the world, apparently it is for many mainstream economists, who continue (or did, until recently) to believe that markets are always efficient because people will always carefully weigh choices and make the best one.

One of the bits that stood out for me was the theme of social pressure being used to modify electrical use in Sacramento. By making neighbor’s power use known, utility customers will actually lower theirs to meet or beat their neighbor’s. When we think people are watching us, our behavior is quite different, it turns out. A lot of this is covered in “Nudge”, a great read on the subject.

This kind of feedback, along with ordering choices and playing off people’s tendencies to overvalue free things, can be useful tools in designing user experiences. We’ve been exploring this at Chartbeat (betaworks), and I’ve been wanting to leverage this more in fund-raising at my children’s school (where we already have had some success using social media).

I’ve been an Amazon user for almost 14 years now, starting with books and moving on to just about everything else they sell. For the last couple of years I’ve downloaded MP3s (initially just to avoid Apple’s DRM, but now because I can find music much more easily). Every time, though I have had to download and install a new copy of their MP3 downloader (nicely done for what it does, by the way).

The number of times I’ve bailed on downloading music is much higher than the number of copies of this that are in my Downloads folder (and I’ve deleted a few copies over time as well).

Today, though, Amazon did something new, which they always do in their subtle, tweakish way. Just below the confirmation message, they offered several answers to what they must know to be common problems. One of them, it immediately occurred to me, was mine.

Even though I’m pretty good with computers and such, for some reason I had never thought to associate the Amazon file type with the appropriate application in my browser. It’s something I’ve done in the past, but not in this case. Anyway, a couple of clicks later, I think I’ve solved my problem.

The reminder for me is to keep on iterating on everything I put out there. Small adjustments can make a massive change, while massive changes may just introduce more inadequacies to be cleaned up later.

I saw this on the AirTran site and thought it was a pretty effective way of communicating – in a positive light – what type of seat you can choose for your flight. I can’t say that I’ve ever seen an airline illustrate what seats actually look like, and frankly most seat selection tools seem to be oriented to the experienced traveler. Perhaps that’s intentional, and I have no idea what percentage of people stay with their default assignment. The options for “sit together” and “leg room” seem useful ways to prod fliers into thinking ahead and selecting appropriate seats. I imagine this saves the airline a bundle in time savings not having counter personnel playing musical chairs before takeoff.

Not to pile on, but recent personal experiences with the AA.com (American Airlines) site underscore just how dreadful the user experience on the site is, no matter what the excuses are. I’ve been using – with some success – the aa.com site for some time now, ever since I worked at Yahoo and AA was the preferred airline and I racked up so many miles. I’ve always found it to be difficult to use, and somewhat stress-inducing given the cramped layout, tiny controls, wonky nomenclature, and tedious performance.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been planning a couple trips, one to Mexico for the family at the end of the year, and one for myself to attend my niece’s high school graduation in Madison. I found a good itinerary to Mexico and booked it, then played with several to Madison (putting a couple on hold) before settling on one. The AA site does provide a display of itineraries, which is great, but like most of the site it is poorly rendered.

Here’s what it looks like actual size:

My nits:

• The type size, width, and row height of this table makes it feel very cramped.
• A plethora of uppercase acronyms make it hard to tell which flight is which.
• The “Reservation Name” isn’t user-friendly or even user-generated. It can also be horribly inaccurate: it only shows the first leg in any multi-layover flight. So if I had a flights to Mexico and Madison, both with layovers in ORD, that I ticketed in close succession, I could easily get confused.
• The Cancel link only takes me to a confirmation page, not one with any more information about the flight, which would be an easy way to help people understand what they are doing. There is no email generated confirming this, no cooling off period, etc.

So what happened to me that was so bad? Well, I blew away the family vacation to Mexico and didn’t even know it. I’m sure there are excellent business reason for the way things were designed here, but I also know that they all could be accomodated in a different and much more user-friendly manner.

Don’t get me started with the voice-activated phone system I had to use to straighten this out (kudos to the human who did!).

Wired Science has a short discussion about how humans recognize and process facial characteristics and why we sometimes stare at people with facial deformities. An evolutionary response causes our brain to momentarily stumble when we see people that don’t have symmetrical features:

To decide, your eyes sweep over the person’s face, retrieving only parts, mainly just his nose and eyes. Your brain will then try to assemble those pieces into a configuration that you know something about.

When the pieces you supply match nothing in the gallery of known facial expressions, when you encounter a person whose nose, mouth or eyes are distorted in a way you have never encountered before, you instinctively lock on. Your gaze remains riveted, and your brain stays tuned for further information.

“When a face is distorted, we have no pattern to match that,” Rosenberg said. “All primates show this [staring] at something very different, something they have not evolved to see. They need to investigate further. ‘Are they one of us or not?’ In other species, when an animal looks very different, they get rejected.”

Some of this response might be applicable to interface design, one would think. How do we respond to interfaces that aren’t symmetrical or don’t fit a recognizable pattern? Are the same processes at work? Some studies show interfaces that are better designed are percieved as more usable than funtionally identical, but poorly designed ones.

Douglas Bowman posted today on about his decision to leave Google, where he was a Lead Visual Designer. He sounds torn: on the one hand it is a fast-paced environment where you can define an entirely new practice with the ability to affect millions of users. On the other hand it is a strongly engineering-driven culture, where decisions are made based on hard data. I’ve encountered workplaces that fit that description and almost every other one as well. Whether its engineers, MBAs, marketers, or even other designers, an environment that doesn’t understand and respect the role of design can be extremely hard to work in.

Douglas is right in identifying what has always been a deal-breaker for me: if top management doesn’t get it, forget it. I don’t expect CEOs to have degrees in design, but they should have an appreciation that it is more than styling, more than just the touching up at the end of a product development process. I’m willing to work with a CEO that is willing to be brought around, too, but its almost hopeless when your role is not understood and poorly utilized (true for anyone, but I’m focused on design here). I’m perfectly happy to discuss the merits of any design decision I’ve made, but I’ve encountered a lot of dishonesty when the guys who cooked up the numbers in the Powerpoint deck are unwilling to acknowledge so, or the tech team won’t concede that there are many more solutions available to the problem at hand. I’m not saying people are intentionally lying, but many fields have the veneer of science so that people are convinced they are actually producing scientifically valid work.

So what happens then is a Science vs. Art debate. Design decisions are percieved to be all a matter of opinion – most people have eyes, and therefore the ability to judge what’s in front of them. Paradoxically, the designer’s judgement is not respected when the subject matter is so easily manipulated. What can happen next is the descent into data.

In an effort to placate a manager who just doesn’t like what he sees, design decisions are subjected to quantitative analysis. In many cases, there are strong arguments for using data to guide design decisions, whether usability issues are at stake, page load times are affected, and even brand perceptions. In many cases, incremental design decisions can best be informed by data. I’m a huge proponent of incorporating testing into the product development process – not as a validation at the end, but a part of the process. But when people are spending time testing between 41 shades of blue, clearly some time is being wasted.

All of us rely on judgement to make it through our daily lives and our work. Designers rely on judgement (based on years of training and practice), along with data and input from stakeholders, users, competitors, etc. to develop solutions. The solutions are indeterminate, and often not apparent until after the solution has been arrived at. And of course, there are several available options. All this makes the ability to arrive at a solution extremely valuable.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “Black Swan” offers tips for life and accept randomness: http://bit.ly/a2ni

Taleb’s top life tips

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

(via Boingboing)

One of the pleasures of holiday breaks is the opportunity to read an entire book in a short period of time. Many books I have read were consumed in fits and starts, at night or on the subway. Over the winter 2008-09 break I had the pleasure to read The World Without Us, which came recommended by my friend Yetsuh. I recall when it came out that it would fit neatly into the kind of pop-science writing I enjoy, but for some reason never picked up a copy until I was shopping for presents in the local book store (one for me, one for them).

To start, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is well-written and well-researched, but I most enjoyed the central device of the book, which is an Earth where humans have instantly and completely disappeared. The author Alan Weisman uses this to deliver a not-altogether uplifting picture of the destructive impact we have on our planet. He moves from the obvious constructed world to the less noticed, but perhaps more consequential, environments of the undersea and forests, then ancient civilzations (for the latter, Jared Diamond goes into equally sobering depth).

The author’s technique of zooming into and out of a problem to gain perspective reminded me of methods I use to do the same in approaching design problems. He does this literally by discussing microbes around us to space vehicles we’ve sent out, as well as moving rapidly through time to cover the impact of mankind in prehistory. The section on plastics and their utter foreign-ness to our planet was deeply disturbing.

Over time I’ve read most of what’s in this book, I’ve never seen it all put together in a way that reveals so many connections. For example, I’ve heard theories about why megafuana in North America disappeared abruptly about 13,000 years ago. Speculation is that humans migrating from Asia easily slaughtered giant sloths, mammoths and camels that weren’t used to them. Weisman goes further and suggests that African megafuana still exist because they evolved with humans over millenia, and this might be their only hope for survival. Weisman traces the diaspora of humans to the point of their tragic re-introduction to their ancestors in Africa in one particularly moving passage.

At the end few remedies are offered outside of the premise of the book, but this is powerful enough to make one realize the scope of work that must be done to salvage what’s left. It’s clear that life will continue on without humans, and will in many ways be better off without us. As a designer, I have some choices in the life cycle of products, but it is as a consumer and citizen that I can have the biggest impact.

http://www.someecards.com/upload/get_well/i_dont_mind_if_you_get.html