More Unintended Consequences

I love all aspects of how humans interact with technology, so I was particularly interested in seeing how well the new crimecams of San Francisco would work out. Turns out they're very effective in reducing crime - within range of the cameras. Were the designers of this system not parents? Even toddlers catch on that if you want to misbehave and not get caught, you move out of sight. Mayor Gavin Newsom voiced the paradigm of a generation when he said that the cameras at least made people feel safer. This would seem absurd if it weren't followed by the next quote. Paraphrased, it says that citizens felt safer because crime moved away a block or two, so that their neighbors would have to deal with it instead. The ultimate nimby. Newsom even says that he anticipated some kind of felon shuffle when he had them put up, but that voters generally liked them. The fact that the cameras might be able to zoom in on their bedtime activities doesn't seem to faze them.

Scott Adams and the Demise of Common Sense

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has announced on his blog that he'll be blogging less often. It seems that his original common sensical expectations about how the blog would turn out aren't coming out well at all.

They original expectations included:

1. Advertising dollars
2. Compiling the best posts into a book.
3. Growing the audience for Dilbert
4. Artistic satisfaction.

Of these, only number 4 has worked out. RSS has made visitors go around the ads, the book hasn’t done all that well, and the audience for Dilbert hasn’t been correlated at all with the growth of the blog. As the blog has exploded, the benefits to him haven’t. So he’s talking about blogging less often. It’s a great illustration of how common sense is a lousy predictor of future events. Viva testing and statistics.

Common Sense Sucks

As HCI practitioners who believe in making technology slicker to use, our biggest opponents may be budgets, but coming up strong on the outside is stupidity based on common sense. Human psychology is a weird and wonderful thing, and I love studying it because there's always something unexpected waiting to mug you around the corner. Where others love bar fights, I love getting pasted by new knowledge. And research has shown for a long time that common sense is a lousy predictor of future events. You'd think that humans would be good at prediction by now, but we're not. For one thing, we think in linear terms - one cause, one effect. But the universe is gloriously nonlinear, and every event has many causes. Further, humans tend to predict based on what's going on now. When we ask "how would you like this?" or "how would you feel about this?", the respondent has to extrapolate based solely on how he feels at the moment. When we put this to the test, we find that the respondents don't really feel that way later on. This is why I put no faith in predictive surveys.

When those in power use common sense to make sweeping laws or spend huge sums of money, they too usually screw the pooch. The Freakonomics blog has a short piece on how abstinence-only sex education has actually resulted in more teen pregnancies, something any psychologist could have predicted. The urge to merge is far too strong to educate away, especially in adolescents who haven't yet developed much control over their impulses. The victims of abstinence-only education aren't given the tools to prevent disease or pregnancy, but they're driven to give in to the mating call anyway, resulting in more pregnancies. It's obvious from studies that abstinence-only ed doesn't work, and New York has appropriately dropped it, despite losing millions in federal funds. But the US Congress stubbornly sticks to the plan. Common sense is dooming teenagers and costing millions, all with no substantial foundation, but that doesn't matter.

The lesson for us is to mistrust common sense, both our own and our clients'. I've seen clients cling to old, unusable designs simply out of faith. Analytics, psychological principles, and user testing will eliminate most of the problems if they're used, but they won't be applied if common sense has anything to say about it.

Another Example of Lousy Design

This curtain control is said to be an example of truly bad design. As the cutline says:

There is no natural mapping between the buttons and their functions. I went through quite a bit of trial & error before figuring it out. And the problem is that even once you figure it out, it's not very logical.

But one commentator responded that

From the printing around the buttons,. it looks pretty clear... The right column is for the solid curtains and the left column for the sheer curtains. The top button in either column opens the curtains, the middle button stops them while opening or closing, and the bottom button closes them.

This seems reasonable only after you've studied the panel for a while. In low light, in poor position, or if an old person is looking at it, the design is still bad, in my opinion. Most Americans, at least, tend to think of controls being arranged in vertical clusters, not columns. Maybe they could use some icons to improve effectiveness, or have two controls. Even better is to just use the old-style rods that you pull to open or close drapes. One big plus to the rod approach is that the visually impaired can figure it out, while the electric control doesn't even have a braille equivalent for its labels. Why overcomplicate things?

Ice Cream by the Blues

Here's an ice cream machine that dispenses an amount based on how unhappy the customer is perceived to be. The vending machine does a voice analysis to determine your level of the blues. Some days I'd qualify for a whole week's worth of ice cream production.

What Have I Forgotten?

I'm teaching a graduate course in HCI, and I've learned one thing so far - how awfully much I've forgotten already. We're getting into patterns and pattern languages, and I'm alarmed to say that although I have a vague recollection of this subject, I haven't been able to use them in the field much, so they've receded into my mental archives. The same is true of other things. Names for rarely-used prototype techniques. Details about the types of conceptual models. The difference between categorization and classification. I know this kind of forgetting happens, but it's not supposed to happen to me.

Still, teaching these courses keeps the information fresher, and that's comforting to me. It's one reason why I keep teaching, even though sometimes the cognitive loading of work, home, and two or three simultaneous classes can get stressful.

Boeing Turns to Psychology to Design 787

The September issue of Air and Space Magazine has an article about how Boeing designed the interior of the new 787 using psychologists, focus groups, and other user-centered design techniques. They hired renowned marketing expert Clotaire Rapaille to help. Apparently together they did a load of research about how fliers like to see aircraft interiors. And they're not publishing what they learned, either. Usability as trade secret.

Control is Everything

Scott Adams got me thinking. In his blog entry for August 17, he mentions that one of our strongest needs it to feel like we're in control. He used an old example: A genie offers you two choices. In the first choice, "You can eat at the finest restaurants in the world for free, twice a week. The only catch is that the genie picks the day, when you are not already booked, and he picks the specific restaurant." In the second choice, "You can eat at “good” restaurants, again for free, twice a week. But this time you can schedule it whenever you want, up to two places per week, and pick whatever “good” restaurant you want."

He goes on to develop the theme that the first choice probably wouldn't make many people happy, because they would eventually feel the keen sense of loss of control. The second choice, while gastronomically less appealing, is probably a better one for most of us.

It reminded me that one thing users dearly love is control, or at least the illusion of it. This is something that subconsciously irks me about lots of software and websites, I think. It's why I'm irritated with Flash so often. It just takes off and does things without asking me. The same thing annoys me about flashing ads, shifting menus, and other things that don't help me do things, but invade my locus of control. We humans don't seem to resent losing control if we don't expect it. We accept that the good guy may die at the end of the movie, but we'll shriek in fury if we can't change the channel to another movie. And we accept a loss of control when it benefits us. My car's engine does hundreds of things that I don't need to approve as they're happening. But there are some places where humans just won't accept interference. I wouldn't pay less for a car if it decided by itself when it would start. The same thing is true for software and websites, I think.

Decluttering

A group of scientists at MIT headed by Ruth Rosenholtz, a long-time researcher into vision and technology, has developed a prototype application in MATLAB that determines the amount of clutter on-screen (Link). The HCI profession has long needed something that could separate figure from ground reliably. The program is only in prototype, but apparently it's rather promising.

The problem of figuring out what's vital few from trivial many isn't trivial itself. Nuclear facility control rooms are a case in point. Rows of lights can go from being background hum to suddenly becoming extremely important. How much do you expose to an operator, or to a website user? Hicks Law was an early attempt at measuring how much stuff was too much, but the sophistication of control schemes today needs a better way of knowing when you've overstuffed the interface.

HCI of Casinos and Slot Machines

This is the kind of article I love to read. It's about the human factors that go into designing slot machines and casinos. The article says that a slot machine is designed to be loud and visually appealing, especially when it pays off. The three wheels encourage the victim player to think that he's almost won when two of the wheels align, when there's no such thing as "almost". The slots are positioned just within easy walk of the tables, because table players don't like to hear them, yet the spouses of table players may well play the slots while they're waiting. It also talks about casino design in general, arranging that players can't see the outdoors, or even real outdoor lighting. No clocks, either, no way of knowing how long you've been there.

The slots are insidious in that they pay off only sporadically, which is how positive reinforcement works best. They pay off publicly, so everyone around is encouraged to keep playing. And they keep nurturing that "almost there" feeling.

Users Cannot Prognosticate

One of the favorite usability techniques by the uninformed is to sit a prospective user down in front of an almost-finished application and ask "So...how do you like it?"

This is wrong for at least two reasons. The first is the "New Coke Mistake". Older readers will recall that the Coca-Cola Company's New Coke was released in 1985. It was a sweeter, sprightlier formulation prompted by the enormous success of the Pepsi Challenge, a nationwide taste test that legitimately proved Pepsi to be a runaway favorite of test-sippers. But Coke made a huge mistake by equating sip-tests with long-term purchase and usage. Even hardened Coke drinkers didn't like the sweeter Pepsi, can after can. They wanted their old Coke. The taste tests had panicked the suits at Coke and led to a disaster of such proportions that the whole episode is still taught in marketing classes today.

The second reason is more subtle. It results from our human inability to anticipate. We like to think we're good at anticipating things. What else is a cerebrum for? But in study after study, we humans show a remarkable lack of prognostication skills. We can't correctly predict what we'll like or dislike later, what kind of gifts we'll want down the road, or what we actually do in a crisis. We do very poorly predicting how we'll respond to emotional events. Nor can we reliably predict how we'll like something later that we've just now seen. In actual fact, our conscious mind isn't all that conscious of things, either those things generated within the skull, or from the outside. Drunks aren't aware that they're impaired, for example. Cell phone users insist their reaction times are unaffected while driving, when research plainly shows that reaction is very much diminished, turning 20-somethings into senior citizens. Marketers have repeatedly found to their chagrin that products proposed to focus group members and enthusiastically embraced at the time often fail to catch on when they're actually sold.

That's not to say that focus groups or interviews are useless. They're not, but they're best used for eliciting information about the now, not in anticipating how they will be or feel later. It's almost never worthwhile asking participants to foretell the future.

My Cell Phone, My Death

I've been interested for some time in the hidden cognitive costs of talking on cell phones. I've found that almost nobody believes that their driving is impaired while chatting on a mobile, but the evidence is absolutely unshakable. It's been going on for years. I happened upon an article in Chance magazine from 1997, where the authors provided very strong statistical evidence that individual crashes were closely linked to cell phone use, but it took David Strayer and the University of Utah to actually measure reaction times and prove that cell phone use effectively turned 20-somethings into senior citizens while driving. It's purely a cognitive thing; using a hands-free set doesn't make any difference. Talking with a passenger doesn't have the same effect. Strayer's research shows that using a cell phone degrades change detection.

Of almost equal interest is the refusal of most people to believe the research. We're not conscious of much that happens within us, despite the belief that we are. I find that my usability class students are uniformly indignant at the suggestion that merely talking on a cell compromises their ability to drive. The attention blindness, however, it works, that envelops us during that time is not consciously evident to us. Hence, we remain oblivious to the danger.

The 1997 Chance article by Redelmeier and Tibshirani (cited by Strayer) detailed the meticulous analysis the authors did to conclude that individual car phone users were some four times more likely to crash compared to non-users during crashes. But they also examined why, if the chances soar so dramatically, that the overall accident rate hasn't also risen dramatically, which might by itself make cell users give up the devices while driving. They found that although cell phone use would indeed boost an individual's chances for an accident, the chance of an accident at all is so low that in the aggregate cell phone use doesn't raise the population's rate much at all. Cell phone calls are generally of short duration, which further reduces the overall effect.

A REAL Man-Machine Interface

I see they're shutting down the PEAR, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory. After some 30 years of generating controversy and reams of odd data about telekinesis, the PEAR is closing up shop, done in by exhaustion and time. Opened in 1979, the lab explored whether humans could change physical events with just the power of mind. Turns out, as the lab concludes, they can, but only very slightly, something like 2 or 3 events out of 10,000.

Research into the paranormal isn't what it once was. The Psychophysical Research Laboratories (PRL), also located in Princeton, shut down. Duke University's Parapsychology Laboratory, perhaps the most famous of them all, spun off its parapsychology work into the now-independent Rhine Research Center. It's named after Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine who invented those famous cards while at Duke. Interest in the paranormal appears to have peaked many years ago, and now even the scientists who had high hopes for actual results may be drifting away.

But the PEAR was interesting to HCI'ers because it focused on telekinesis, controlling things with thoughts. If telekinesis could be shown, then it might be possible to change the TV channel just by projecting a thought in that direction. Sadly, the prospect now looks bleak.