Whenever news of an earthquake hits, we are told that the quake had a magnitude of, say, 3.2 or 5.0. Or 7.0, as was the case yesterday in Haiti. We all understand that 7 is worse than 5, of course, but I fear that few of us really understand or appreciate the degree of that difference.

Popularly (but inacurately) called the Richter scale, today’s seismologists measure an earthquake’s energy according to what is technically called the moment magnitude scale.

The magnitude scale is logarithmic: Each increase in the magnitude number actually represents more than 30 times the magnitude of energy released. A 7.0 magnitude quake is 32 megatons of seismic energy, where a 6.0 is only 1 megaton of seismic energy.

I imagine Mr. Richter and his successors prefer to use such a logarithmic scale because it permits them to communicate a quake’s magnitude extremely efficiently. They’re mathematicians, they intuitively understand that 5.4 is actually 5 times bigger than 5.0.

But for the rest of us, even those of us who are numerically literate, the logarithmic scale isn’t something we use every day. To most of us, 5.4 is only a little more than 5. Indeed, 7 isn’t that much more than 5 for us, either — yet in earthquake terms, 7.0 is one thousand times as destructive as 5.0.

I appreciate that the media thinks enough of us, the public, to report using the same technical jargon that scientists use. But in this case, I suspect they are doing the public — and the victims — a disservice. What if, instead of simply calling Haiti the victim of a “7.0 earthquake”, they called it a “32 megaton earthquake”? Or a “32,000 kiloton earthquake”? This would permit people who understand what a 4.0 earthquake feels like (and lots of people do understand this) understand that Haiti is today the victim of an experience thirty-two thousand times worse.

Some ideas on how to help the victims in Haiti:

• Help Haiti with your mobile phone: text “HAITI” to 90999 and a $10 donation to the American Red Cross will be charged to your phone bill. It takes no time at all.
• Nearly half of Haiti is under the age of 18. Make a donation to UNICEF to help.
• Donate to Doctors Without Borders

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Let’s say you own a big building full of valuable stuff. How do you make sure that the night watchman patrolling your factory floor or museum galleries after closing time actually makes his rounds? How do you know he’s inspecting every hallway, floor, and stairwell in the facility? How do you know he (or she) is not just spending every night sleeping at his desk?

The Detex Newman watchclock was first introduced in 1927 and is still in wide use today.

If you’re a technology designer, you might suggest using surveillance cameras or even GPS to track his location each night, right? But let’s make this interesting. Let’s go a century back in time to, say, around 1900. What could you possibly do in 1900 to be absolutely sure a night watchman was making his full patrol?

An elegant solution, designed and patented in 1901 by the German engineer A.A. Newman, is called the “watchclock”. It’s an ingenious mechanical device, slung over the shoulder like a canteen and powered by a simple wind-up spring mechanism. It precisely tracks and records a night watchman’s position in both space and time for the duration of every evening. It also generates a detailed, permanent, and verifiable record of each night’s patrol.

What’s so interesting to me about the watchclock is that it’s an early example of interaction design used to explicitly control user behavior. The “user” of the watchclock device is obliged to behave in a strictly delimited fashion.

But before I go into the interaction theory at work here, let’s look at how the watchclock system works in a little more detail. The fundamental innovation — the trick, if you will — is that the device itself is only one part of a larger, external system.

Photo by Jeremy Brooks.

The Key is the System

The key, literally, to the watchclock system is that the watchman is required to “clock in” at a series of perhaps a dozen or more checkpoints throughout the premises. Positioned at each checkpoint is a unique, coded key nestled in a little steel box and secured by a small chain. Each keybox is permanently and discreetly installed in strategically-placed nooks and crannies throughout the building, for example in a broom closet or behind a stairway.

The watchman makes his patrol. He visits every checkpoint and clicks each unique key into the watchclock. Within the device, the clockwork marks the exact time and key-location code to a paper disk or strip. If the watchman visits all checkpoints in order, they will have completed their required patrol route.

The watchman’s supervisor can subsequently unlock the device itself (the watchman himself cannot open the watchclock) and review the paper records to confirm if the watchman was or was not doing their job.

This is an idea with long legs. The watchclock is built like a revolver, of good old fashioned brass and steel and encased in a thick leather holster. It requires no batteries and almost no maintenance. The “guard tour patrol system” concept, too, has a timeless elegance. The mechanism itself has barely changed for a century: although some more recent models incorporate GPS and other technologies, the mechanical key-based watchclock system is still in wide usage, with many buildings still employing the same keys and the same clockwork devices they’ve used since the 1940s. It’s a genuine example of an “if it aint broke, don’t fix it” kind of technology.

From a behavioral perspective, I find the watchclock fascinating not simply because it’s a kind of steampunk GPS, a wind-up mechanical location-awareness technology. I’m further fascinated at how this holistic system of watchclocks, keys, guards, and supervisors succeeded so completely in creating a method of behavioral control such that a human being’s movements can be precisely planned and executed, hour after hour and night after night, with such a high degree of reliability that almost a century goes by before anyone thinks of ways of improving the system as originally conceived. The watchclock is a primitive form of technology-mediated interaction design and narrowly-focused social engineering: The “interface” is the whole system: The watchclock, keys, and paper records.

Designing for Control

Many in the interaction design field(s) argue that user experience design most definitely is not about behavioral control, or at least it shouldn’t be. Dan Saffer entitled his excellent book “Designing for Interaction“, the “for” being a nod to the idea that users don’t need to interact with systems in exactly the way the interaction designer intended or envisioned. Interactive systems — whether social networks, desktop apps, or multiplayer online games — often shine best when users break the rules. Systems that explicitly and deliberately give users the freedom to interact in creative and unforeseen ways are some of the most interesting and powerful kinds of interaction design.

But the watchclock is another kind of interaction design, one whose function corrals the user into a single, linear, constrained sort of behavior. The night watchman has a fundamental social constraint — the desire to not get fired from their job. This constraint allows the watchclock patrol system to work so effectively (some would say insidiously) as an interaction design instrument of control.

As a former game designer, I think it’s important to recognize that a really fun user experience will often exist somewhere between these poles of freedom and control. The player can kill the bad guys in whatever clever way she wishes, but she’s got to collect the three crystals to operate the teleporter — there’s no other way off the ship, and no other way to get to the next level. (I wonder if it’s more than a coincidence that so many systems of controlled-play in games involve the use of keys, just like the watchclock.)

Giving a user freedom to interact however they wish seems admirable in principle, but requiring the user to jump through precisely the hoops you, the designer, want them to jump through is also a powerful way to create an emotionally and intellectually compelling experience. In a practical sense, it’s also a way to make sure that the user doesn’t get frustrated or even fail to do what they really need to do.

The watchclock’s user experience isn’t compelling or stimulating, to be sure, but in my mind it is truly an archetype of the “behavioral control” side of interaction design.

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A few months ago I heard a fascinating woman interviewed on the radio, Noreen Grice. Ms. Grice is a blind astronomer — something that, while initially surprising to me, actually makes perfect sense when you consider that most of today’s astronomy research is based on radio signals, mathematics, physics, and chemistry — and not at all on optics.

What’s more, she has published a series of books about astronomy specifically targeted at blind and visually-impaired children. When I heard this fact, I knew I had to see that book. Sure enough, Grice’s Touch the Universe is for sale on Amazon. Within days I was holding a copy.

Notice that I said “I had to see that book”. Because ultimately that is how I expected to experience it — with my eyes. Indeed, from the moment I opened the box and laid eyes on it I was drawn to the book’s beauty. But not just because the pictures are visually staggering, which of course almost all astronomic photography is. And not just because the internal design, typography, and layout have a simple grace to them, which they do.

What attracted me the most was the braille. The way the embossed patterns directly translated the images below them, the way there were two languages in play at the same time. This book goes beyond at least my traditional understanding of braille as a language or an alphabet — this is the syntax of touch used for illustration. I closed my eyes and explored the universe.

Here’s a typical spread from the book. Notice how the red spot of Jupiter is expressed as a spiral, and that the spiral is identified in the key below the image area.

Here is a spiral galaxy, NGC-4603, where the density of the raised dots expresses the density of the stars clustered around the galaxy’s core.

The book also features some of the technology used by astronomers, although ironically this is the Hubble Space Telescope, a purely optical instrument.

The funny thing is that this book could in theory have been produced with no ink at all. How unfair it seems that a book for blind people is so pleasant to the sighted, and yet products for the sighted generally proffer so little for the blind.

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In his Time Magazine Person of the Year interview, Barack Obama said “it turns out there’s some spending that has to be done on information technology, for example, that we can do very swiftly.”

If recent speeches by the new President are any sign, I sure hope he’s talking about rural broadband access. Like many others, I don’t think we can be complacent about America’s lagging IT infrastructure, and for a good many reasons.

Some aren’t so sure, however, at least about the rural part of that equation. My friend Adam Greenfield is a well-known advocate for humane connectedness through pervasive urban digital infrastructure (I know “advocate” is not the right word — Adam’s work is equal parts caution and possibility).

From near-term omnipresent wireless broadband to a futuristic cloud of RFID gizmos mediating our social and municipal interactions, the vision of living a seamless networked experience using benevolent technology seems both exciting and inevitable.

And, by all accounts, this will happen most noticeably using the city street as the primary test and launch platform. The urban environment is the easiest and most logical place to implement this vision since the “last mile” (moving information from the big pipes that cross the globe to the little pipes that lead into our homes and mobile devices) will always be an costly obstacle, and since so many people can be reached in a small physical area.

But another friend, David Sleight, opened my eyes to another perspective — the view from the country. Although David is currently a Manhattanite, his family roots are in the woods of upstate New York where for many the idea of getting even regular ol’ wired high speed access to the information superhighway is still an impossibility. David loves the country and would, all things being equal, prefer to live there, but for him urban living is quite simply a necessity for a career in the information and technology economy.

And all things simply aren’t equal.

Millions of Americans still live in rural environments where broadband Internet access is not even an option (except through unreliable and expensive satellite connections). Much of the nation is still unserved by 3G, Edge, or even mobile voice access at all. Living in the country pretty much excludes you from participation in the aforementioned technology economy.

So this is what I hope (and predict) Obama is talking about: Bringing the Internet — the *real* Internet, not the dial-up Web 1.0 of 1998 — to the millions of Americans currently living without it. I’m not just talking about high-bandwidth experiences like Flickr, YouTube, and Hulu. I’m talking about the less-glamourous low-bandwidth experiences that happen every day on the Internet: co-workers exchanging PowerPoint decks, transferring medical records to rural clinics and hospitals, downloading hundreds of emails from friends and family, people debating politics on blogs and message boards, or even just regular everyday surfing through dozens of websites without waiting endlessly for them to load.

Some will argue the current situation isn’t so bad given the disproportionally rural residency of our country when compared to broadband leaders like South Korea, Denmark, or Iceland. Some even argue that people in the country don’t really need or even want broadband access.

I don’t buy either of these arguments. I don’t think we should settle for inequality just because we’re a less urbanized nation than our global competitors. What’s more, I really don’t think people who lack access to technology have any idea about the user experience they are missing. It’s not like we’re talking about force feeding cable TV to the Amish here.

Some, like Adam, might say that people who choose to live in the country have by definition chosen to live a technologically backwards (and, importantly, increasingly unsustainable) existence. That the responsible and ethical choice for any modern human is to live somewhere easily and affordably accessible by wires and roads and mass transit (and food and water), in an economically-efficient and environmentally-benign way — i.e., what cities do best.

I find this argument immensely appealing. But I, too, happen to love oceans, forests, lakes, and mountains almost as much as I love the city. I often entertain a fantasy of living at least part of my life in a beautiful, remote rural setting. Perhaps this fantasy is selfish and wasteful, but I also wonder if ever information technology finally replaces the combustion engine as the primary medium of human economic activity could we not, in fact, flatten this ethical disparity a little and make rural life a little more appealing to those of us who want to leave a slighter carbon footprint?

Want vs. Need

Is supporting rural broadband, then, merely a way to make urbanists’ retirements more luxurious, or to explore an impossible utopian future? Is this a matter of want or need?

I’ve never thought that we should cease to push the boundaries of our science and technology in order to ensure that more down-to-earth and pressing needs are met. We need to find a cure for cancer and land a person on Mars, for example. They’re both noble goals.

And although I am deeply critical of its implementation, I never really opposed the One Laptop Per Child project on principle, nor did I ever think that the money would be better spent directly on food or medicine. We need both experimental and conventional programs.

Broadband for rural America should be seen as a “great work” project, like the Internet itself, whose benefits may take years to be fully realized.

In short, we should be investing in technology for everyone, in cities and provinces. Clearly we should pursue subsidized free public WiFi for densely concentrated urban areas, transit systems, and public facilities — it’s the cheapest way per capita to bring our citizens and our economy to where they inevitably want and need to be. But we should also invest in the likely-far-costlier enterprise of bringing broadband and digital cellular access to people in the country: those who can’t walk to a corner Starbucks, who don’t ride a subway, and who can’t possibly use some cool iPhone app to find a great Korean barbecue only a few blocks away.

Economic Benefits

So why do this? Well, most convincingly there is the economic argument: Can it hurt to have tens of millions more people shopping online, consuming online media, opening vast opportunities for information and education and, most importantly, enabling millions to participate in a future of information-based labor through rurally-situated technology industries, telecommuting and self-employment? Can one argue against having as many people (Americans, if you’re patriotic :-) ) as possible learning to use and navigate what will undoubtedly be the primary medium for any future world economy?

This is a matter of global competitiveness. America has fallen from 4th to 17th in the world in broadband penetration. The US began our critical interstate highway system in the 1950s — 20 years after Germany began building their autobahn network. We shouldn’t once again wait until we are two decades behind to do this.

Social Benefits

Beyond of the plain economics of it, I also can’t help but to advocate this idea as a matter of sociopolitical principal: It does harm to the group psyche to perpetuate a have/have not culture, where one cohort is participating in the emerging cultural and economic hegemony and another is excluded. The free market alone cannot make this happen any more than it could bring about universal education, the interstate highway system, or the Internet. This will take government action.

But it’s more than a simple question of fairness to me. As long as rural America is kept in the slow lane with respect to access to information and culture, the more they will feel isolated and resentful of the mainstream “connected culture”, viewing them, incorrectly, as out of touch elites. They will then, I fear, vote regressively and conservatively. I’ll admit this thinking may be a matter of unjustified faith in certain (liberal) ideals, but I actually believe that exposure to diverse ideas and people, combined with full and equal participation in a healthy economy, produces, in general, increased social tolerance, better education, and cultural and intellectual progress. Wisdom, peace, and prosperity through connectedness.

Perhaps best of all, wouldn’t broadband for the sticks enable an actual reversal of the polarization of our culture, ending the “The Big Sort” phenomenon where conservatives and liberals are increasingly locating themselves in self-segregated homogenous counties. Hell, decent Internet access might make life in the country attractive to snobby urban sophisticates who might otherwise find the boondocks economically and culturally untenable. If I can meet city clients online and connect with city friends online, why do I need to live in the city?

Ultimately if you like to walk to the store to buy food, if you like bright lights and hustle and bustle, if you enjoy bumping into hundreds of interesting and diverse people every day, then no amount of broadband access will draw you from your urban world. You can certainly count me in that camp. But I can’t bring myself to simply write off non-urban America to a life of electronic destitution and information poverty — their deprivation does affect my happiness. We’re all too closely connected to let the digital divide continue to grow.

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Like every other advanced human activity that can be taught and learned, there must exist a set of fundamental skills required to use interactive things. I’m not talking about behind-the-scenes design or development skills, but end-user skills. Not just what used to be called “computer literacy” (although that’s part of it), but more basic cognitive and motor and physical skills. Skills analogous to riding a bike, drawing a portrait, writing a business letter, multiplying numbers, or frying an egg.

Take something super-simple, like clicking a link in a web browser. Any designer who has ever attended a usability test, or watched their relatives use computers, will probably have witnessed perfectly competent and computer literate people double clicking links on web pages, just as they would do with a file icon on their desktop. Clearly such users are muddling through just fine, but with a little less than what might be considered optimal computer skills.

Off the top of my head I can come up with a dozen or so skills that people who use interactive systems must learn to be successful — skills that are, however, deficient in a large number of users I’ve witnessed in user testing:

• Point a mouse at a target
• Construct a simple Boolean search
• Rotate a 3d object with a mouse
• Move the cursor around the page with the keyboard
• Select text — whole words, paragraphs, multiple pages
• Cut-and-paste text
• Resize an image
• Zooming and panning
• Use a trackpad instead of a mouse

There are many angles to this idea: Someone who is great at using Excel may be a total klutz when it comes to using Google Earth. An expert at a twitch-shooter video game may not be able to use a search engine to research a report. People who can pan and zoom with a mouse may still have a very hard time with navigating a folder hierarchy.

And of course many of these skills can be dramatically shaped by physical and cognitive disability (which makes me realize that there are different skills that disabled people must learn, for example navigating the web with a voice browser).

The difference between a product’s success and failure with a given user might come down to a simple degree of mastery of some of these basic skills — not, as we often assume, some conceptual misunderstanding of the product itself. Should designers identify their users’ expected skill levels to this level of detail? Should these skills be reflected in user persona documents?

It would be interesting to gauge how well users do at these low-level skills in a survey or broad-based user study, a comprehensive test of basic skills much like the standardized tests schoolchildren are given. I’d be interested in seeing the test results show not just an overall computer skills course, but a breakdown by skill sub-areas: Hardware skills, search skills, text manipulation, image manipulation, 3D object manipulation. That would be fascinating.

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Debating the merits of competing design ideas is fun and, as I’ve argued in parts one and two, can be extremely productive. But some design disputes are, I think, unanswerable. And it’s important to realize when a debate has crossed over from something you can resolve to something you will never reach any definitive conclusion over. Matters of personal preference, style, and taste.

Any given product or application’s appeal and usability success, or lack thereof, might ultimately come down to each individual user’s personal taste. There is a broad landscape of different approaches to UI and UX design, and the variance often adds up to a question of style — not of simple “good” or “bad” design principles.

The eternal which way to roll the toilet paper controversy, and the more academic terminal serial comma debate both come to mind, where empirical measures of success may indeed be possible but are nonetheless trivial when compared to what different kinds of people actually prefer. If someone likes their toilet paper oriented the “wrong” way, rolling it the “right” way will utterly fail to satisfy them, even if it makes the TP user experience more efficient in every measurable way.

In short, one can decry the very real and plainly egregious usability violations of any particular design decision, and you can even “prove” you’re right in usability testing. But you can’t argue against real users who actually prefer it any more than you can argue with people who prefer boxers over briefs or blue over red.

This doesn’t mean you simply throw up your hands and give up simply because you can’t please everybody. Because guess what? You can never please everybody.
It simply means that in the design process you have to make a choice to make some people happy and other people not so happy. Of course you can give users options or preferences, making life for both groups a little more complicated. Lots of (inelegant and bloated) products do precisely that.

But you can also choose to declare that your product is just for people whose personal idiosyncrasies and tastes are compatible with the product’s nature. And then you simply write off everyone else, letting the market fulfill their needs with a different product. It doesn’t help anyone to be greedy and try to make the same product work for all kinds of people when you are up against factors that cannot ever be decided. Find these factors as early as you can and make those hard decisions, one way or the other.

[tp configuration images by Brian Mathis, whose opinion, by the way, is just plain wrong ;-) ]

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Fish Magic, 1925, Paul Klee

It is said that a fish, even a really smart one, cannot really grasp the meaning of the concept “wet” because it is the only condition they know. There is no “dry” to compare it to.

Humans, too, have a tendency to imagine that the way things are today is the way they’ve always been, or the way things will be from now on. It’s hard to imagine that perhaps we are merely living in a transitional period where our worldview is under a temporary spell, soon to revert to the way things have always been.

It has been observed, for example, that representational art — paintings and sculptures intended to mirror what we see with our eyes — has, for most of human history, been the exception not the rule. Optical representationalism has only been the dominant art form for a few centuries, and only in a few limited places: in Greece and Rome in ancient times, and more recently in Europe from about 1500 to 1900. Outside of those periods and places, most of our art has been highly-stylized or completely abstract, from cave paintings to hieroglyphics, from Islamic mosaics to Kandinsky’s paintings.

Viewing modern abstract art as a kind of degeneration from representational art, as many still do, presumes that representation is somehow the “normal” way of doing things. But history shows that this is simply not true. Representational art was and still is a kind of fashion or style, a way of thinking about artmaking that utterly infatuated mankind for a long while, but which eventually receded into the general pool of possible artistic expressions.

The 20th Century Fishbowl

Looking back on the 20th century and the new forms of media and culture that it produced, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon: Many of the fascinating social and cultural changes transforming the media right now, in the early years of the 21st century, are little more than reversions back to the ways things used to be before the 20th century. When we talk about “revolutions” in technology and media and how they impact our culture, we should remember that a revolution is a 360-degree trajectory, bringing you back where you started.

The 1900’s saw the emergence of a dozen new forms of media and communication, from mass-market publishing to television to online social networks. Each new media’s birth was followed by decades of adaptation to that media, both social (how new media changes our day to day lives) and economic (how these media have been “monetized”). And as each media reaches maturity and settles down, it’s surprising how many of the social and economic changes turned out to be less earth-shaking than we may have thought. In many cases, we’ve come full circle.

Adopt, then Adapt

The 20th century was a period of continuous infatuation with new technologies, particularly in the media, that felt so powerful that we sometimes thought that these technologies were fundamentally transforming, or even doing irreparable damage to, our culture and our world.

And the evidence for the latter is certainly compelling: Families don’t talk at dinner tables anymore, and instead gather around the TV to watch hours of game shows. We spend hours each day driving in cars by ourselves, polluting the atmosphere. Kids glued to mobile phones in schoolrooms. Reality TV. Internet porn. Britney Spears. Have technology and media really made our lives better?

I actually think we’re not doing so bad. Many of the 20th century’s most infamous technology-enabled cultural degradations may, in fact, merely be temporary effects which inevitably trend back to “normalcy”. In the early 20th century, for example, we invented the automobile and drove around with reckless abandon. But then, after countless accidents and horrific smog, we eventually licensed drivers and regulated the vehicles and roadways. Still later, we crashed our cars reading SMS messages on the freeway, but then we made driving while text messaging illegal. We adopted, then adapted. I hate to characterize this in dialectic terms, but much of it has a distinctive thesis/antithesis/sythesis feel to it.

Some examples of 20th-century phenomena whose transformation has, I think, been exaggerated:

• Reading: Much has been said about how “nobody reads anymore”. Steve Jobs recetnly scoffed at the Amazon Kindle, saying “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore”. Despite the numbers, which I don’t doubt, I’ve always been suspicious of the claim that we are less literate than we’ve been historically or than we should be. How much people were reading, say, in 1500 or 500 BC. Or even in 1850 or 1900, before mass-market paperback books and magazines were invented. Ursula LeGuin wrote a fantastic deconstruction of this accusation in February’s Harpers magazine, in a piece called “Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading” (print only –come on, Harpers!). Her gist is that most people never really read all that much anyway, and in that light people are actually reading quite a bit right now. I’ll also add that the supposed high-point of human literacy, which I gather to be the late 1800s and early 1900s, was also the point at which new information technologies exploded on the scene: telephone, phonograph, radio. If people are reading less but they are instead learning things via the spoken word in an electronic media, is that so bad? Were the books and periodicals of the fin-de-siecle any better than the electronic forms that replaced them?
• News: People complain about the increasing partisanship and corporate-bias of the news media. Most of us take for granted the idea that a news organization must be “impartial” or non-partisan. But when was this idea born? I’m not a news historian, but I’d guess that this emerged sometime around the middle of the 20th Century, in particular with the large American corporate news organizations who wanted to avoid favoritism and partisanship in order to maintain a consistent flow of advertising dollars. Before that, however, newspapers were completely dominated either by overt political interests or by their governments. Outside of the USA, too, this is still largely the case. But with the recent emergence in the US of deeply partisan mainstream news media (e.g., Fox news) and the global phenomenon of blogging and citizen/advocacy journalism, we are perhaps witnessing not the emergence of something new or unique, but rather the end of a strange and rather short (50 years?) period in the history of news and information.
• Music: I wrote about this in my last post, which is what inspired this one. Music was once something you could only enjoy as a live experience, in the presence of performing musicians. The 20th century brought us recorded music, which could be bought and sold. This gave everyone the idea that music itself could be bought and sold. With the emergence of digital file sharing, this model is being broken down again, leaving us in a place very similar to where we started, with music being un-ownable, but the experience of music enjoyment being entirely sellable.
• Food: Okay, this isn’t media, but it is definitely technology: From the 1920’s to the 1990’s, the American diet was infatuated with technologically-processed food. Michael Pollen calls this “nutritionism”, a dietary theory that values the chemical composition of food products over the integral food-ness of them, where a loaf of white bread with all the nutrients bleached out of it and then re-introduced through chemical “enrichment” is somehow better than eating a loaf of whole grain bread. The same adopt-then-adapt pattern is here: Humans become so enamored with food technologies — canning, preservatives, refrigeration, and nutritionism — that our diet turns away, for the first time in a million years, from real food. After a few generations of this, and witnessing the resulting horrific health effects, we eventually began to turn away from these foods. Supermarkets now have enormous fresh fruit and vegetable sections in them, incuding organic foods. But when I was a kid in the 1970’s, a trip to the supermarket was like going to a bomb shelter — canned, processed, and frozen foods were pretty much all you could get, because that’s what people wanted. The more the food was abstracted from nature into powders, spreads, flakes, and puffs, the more people desired it — because they perceived it as futuristic, healthy, and convenient. Once we started to realize that the old ways actually had value, when the novelty of snow-white bread and powdered milk wore off, we began to ask for regular food again.

Once I started seeing things this way, I’ve noticed the pattern everywhere: A 20th-century phenomenon is presumed to be eternal, and then its decline is lamented as if it were the end of civilization itself. I learned that nobody plays bridge anymore — but I learned, also, that contract bridge wasn’t even invented in 1925, and had a run of massive popularity for only a few decades before falling into decline by the late 1960s.

Same as it Ever Was?

My whole idea here is admittedly an optimistic argument (and a slightly conservative one, I confess) in which humanity learns valuable lessons by looking toward our past, and where the most troubling social and cultural trends of the 20th century turn out to be merely side-effects of our slow adaptation to rapidly-emerging technologies.

But the opposite is certainly possible: Humanity could continue trending towards technology-enabled illiteracy, junk food-induced decrepitude, social isolation, and retarded media completely controlled by corporate conglomerates. We could quite easily end up with Idiocracy. I could be completely wrong.

Yes, changes occur. Humanity’s greatest social and technological inventions — the wheel, writing, democracy and human rights, the printing press and the Internet — surely have fundamentally transformed the human experience. Some have even speculated that these technologies have brought about physiological changes to our brains, enabling us to use our minds in ways that our ancient ancestors simply could not (see Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind). This may be true (I am skeptical), but I think in the case of most of the 20th century’s most interesting transformations, despite the constant seemingly earth-shattering changes, we are what we are and we will tend to adapt the technology to us, not the other way around.

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I have a tendency to be extremely skeptical about user research in the design process. This is mostly because so much of it is, IMHO, (a) fundamentally bad (e.g., employing sloppy research methods or hamfisted statistical analyses), (b) flatly dishonest (e.g., dressing unscientific research in pseudo-scientific drag in order to justify a desired result), and (c) runs against what I think to be effective design methodologies.

I’m beginning to think my distrust runs even deeper. So deep that I fear I may be gaining a reputation as a “research curmudgeon” who’ll always have a knee-jerk dismissal of any new or clever techniques that pass under my nose. This may be true — I may be overly skeptical sometimes.

But now I think I can explain it with a little more nuance than before, and offer a new and largely positive perspective on research as part of a design process.

In the past, my scorn for user research has been aimed at everything from baroque user persona proceses to no-duh eyetracking studies. The latest technique I reflexively scoffed at is “modemapping” (pointed out to me by David Armano), a technique developed by Stuart Karten Design. Thinking more about the potential uses of modemapping made me realize that my scoffing was not directed so much at the technique itself, but that, instead, I have a deeper problem with the formalization of design research in general.

First, what is modemapping? Well, it’s not so much a research gathering technique as it is a method of interpreting data. To produce a modemap, researchers first interview and observe users (no differently than they would for any sort of primary ethnographic research). Then they use the data to diagram each user’s behavior on a timeline-like chart. The resulting “modemaps” visually distinguish between different types or modes of activity a person may find themselves in during a given timeframe, such as during a typical weekday.

To someone like me, a lover of information graphics (and in particular of timelines), modemapping did have an immediate visceral appeal.

When I thought a little more about modemapping, however, I asked myself: Could the observations gleaned from these modemaps really be any different from — or better than — the observations that a good researcher could have gleaned simply by conducting the interviews, reading the transcripts, and watching the videos? Is this just a way to spend an extra week or two of research budget to develop fun graphics? Is this just infoporn that looks hot but doesn’t reveal new information or insights about the underlying data?

But then I realized that this kind of seemingly-pointless abstraction is exactly what I do when I make a jump from facts to ideas, from thinking to designing. For me it’s not the diagram or the artifact that matters. It’s the process of making the diagram that produces innovation. The most powerful design insights do not simply emerge from the diagram for any third-party viewer to read as if they were reading a billboard. More likely the design insights enter the mind of the diagram-maker while they are assembling it. The final modemap artifact simply serves as a tool to explain the designer’s inspirational process to other people (non-designers, especially, but also to other designers) in the hopes that the customers of the diagram (whether they be clients or collaborators) may understand the merits of the design. The diagram may even, in fact, be let incomplete or even discarded upon completion if the design insights may be better expressed through another means.

My Design Process

When I am designing, I almost always do tons of research first. But at some point I will start doodling and sketching different ways of making the data mean something. I try to visualize and organize the facts into systems. I’ll go through dozens of quick and wildly different sketches of how the data might fit together, almost always with no idea of how the sketching process will end up.

Quite frankly, much of this time might even be spent staring into space and just thinking, visualizing the data in my head. Sometimes the resulting sketches will resemble or even closely conform to known data interpretation techniques such as mental models, flowcharts, affinity diagrams, Venn diagrams, quadrants, and many others. I’ve probably used half the techniques in the visualization periodic table without even knowing it.

The “not knowing it” part is where my user research curmudgeon-ness comes in. I have a passion for letting my mind wander freely and letting it discover revelatory and meaningful visualizations. Rather than letting the visualization lead my idea process, though, I let the idea process generate the visualization. Because I prefer this way of thinking and designing, I have an immediate disdain for any methodology that purports that a particular data interpretation or visualization technique is the right one for a job. How can a great designer know what tools they will use before the design process begins? They simply can’t.

It’s a fundamental quality of design thinking, I suppose, to let the ideas determine the process. What veers us away from design thinking and towards (for lack of a better term) business thinking is the formalization of a research and research interpretation process. Instead of asking researchers to bask in the data using whatever methodology suits their temperament and idiosyncratic thought process, commercial design culture often asks the design researcher to fit their research into a proscribed process, in this case the “modemapping data interpretation machine”. The techniques themselves don’t demand this — the demand for pre-planned processes comes from business constraints where customers need to know what they are paying for.

This is a real conundrum for the research-minded design thinker who needs to keep to a budget: How do you sell a research-based methodology if you cannot say for sure what research-interpretation method you will use? How do you productize or justify the value of “staring into space for a few hours thinking about the problem”, or “sketching in a moleskine for a few days”?

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A running theme here at graphpaper.com is the debunking of shoddy research methodologies and junk science used to lend authority to and help guide decisions in the design professions. I want to encourage my readers, and the industry as a whole, to (a) stop being so gullible about the research they hear about in the press, and to (b) stop performing meaningless research themselves.

Ultimately my objective is to end the cycle of requiring designers to back up their recommendations with the kind of research or data that cannot be accurately or meaningfully collected, a cycle that forces designers and consultants to produce mountains of bad research. Either do the research correctly and make decisions based on sound science, or don’t do it at all and make your key decisions based on wisdom and experience. No research is better than bad research.

Today’s episode attacks addresses the field of advertising research.

Making Up Numbers

I am a man of very little faith in most quantitative research — not because I don’t believe in numbers, but because, usually, when you scratch the surface of a quantitative research report you will find blatantly subjective or qualitative data being used as the basis for the quantitative data.

Don’t get me wrong, I love qualitative research. But for execs who seek cold, hard numbers, qualitative research is often meaningless and untrustworthy. It is seen as fluffy psychobabble or artistic/creative posturing. So when a designer or a researcher wants their insights to be taken seriously, they often feel the need to “translate” their extensive subjective insights into objective numbers, a process that I think is just another flavor of bullshitting.

Here is a simple made-up example of what I mean by “translating” qualitative research into a quantitative report:

I conducted a study on the subway this Monday morning. I examined 50 people’s faces to see if they looked happy or sad. 15 looked happy, and 35 looked sad. Can I say, then, that 30% of the commuters in my study were happy? Sure. But only if you trust my judgement in reading people’s faces. The numbers are a smokescreen — the real insight, the real magic, is occurring in my personal examinations of people’s faces. My own opinion is the linchpin of the whole “study”. If that one part of the process is unreliable — and you have no way of trusting that it isn’t — then the final numbers are also worthless.

Advertising that “Works”

So now here’s a real-world example with similar underlying flaws: An advertising industry study released recently contends that ads that “tell stories” are more effective than those that do not. Sounds interesting. The methodology sounds pretty science-y, too:

Thirty-three ads across 12 categories—from brands like Budweiser, Campbell’s Soup and MasterCard—were analyzed by 14 leading emotion and physiological research firms. The research tools varied from testing heart rate and skin conductance of the ad viewer to brain diagnostics.

The study was looking for patterns among those ads that work better than others. Here’s an example conclusion:

One such pattern was that a campaign like Bud’s iconic “Whassup” registered more powerfully with consumers than Miller Lite low-carb ads that essentially just said, “We’re better than the other guys.” Why? Because Bud told a story about friends connected by a special greeting.

There are many bells going off in my head reading this. Who is to say that “Whassup” tell more of a “story” than the Miller Lite ads? I remember those ads, and they hardly meet my definition of “story” (a story is something in which, you know, things happen). So it begs the question of “what is a story?” We have to trust the researcher’s opinion on that, I guess.

Secondly, how do they know one ad “works better” than another (this, of course, is one of the advertising industry’s biggest existential questions, right after “does advertising work at all”)? What does “registered more powerfully” mean, exactly? Is that even measurable?

This study used “heart rate and skin conductance”, presumably to mitigate the kind of subjective judgement in my face-reading example above. But what exactly do those physiological conditions have to do with the effectiveness of an ad? If my heart rate goes up, for example, does that mean that I am supposed to be more inclined to buy something? Or is it the exact opposite, that physical excitement indicates hostility to the brand while calmness indicates receptiveness to the brand’s emotionally-compatible values?

It sounds like we’re supposed to assume that there is a meaningful correlation here, but I am extremely skeptical. We must question every little aspect of the so-called scientific studies we read, because if any single part of a study is fundamentally flawed then the whole thing is worthless.

Fundamental to the advertising study is the theory that a person can watch an ad and that researchers can then determine if the ad “worked”, in the same way an opthamologist can put lenses in front of your eyes and determine if you can read the eyechart or not. This idea that an ad “works” when it makes you more inclined to buy something is called “purchase intent”, and it is an industry standard term:

In Campbell’s “Orphan” ad, it is about bringing together a mother and her foster child.

Ad research firm Gallup-Robinson, Pennington, N.J., found that the spot, which showed a little girl’s sadness and anxiety melt away into a soft smile once she was given a bowl of soup, generated 80% purchase intent. Most viewers measured said it was believable.

A similar study from Ameritest, Albuquerque, N.M., found it received 42% purchase intent compared to a category norm of 33%.

Okay, big alarm bell here: 33% is the category norm for purchase intent. WTF? Is that supposed to mean that 33% of people who watch the ad actually intend to buy the product? This defies all credulity. The ad industry, of course, loves to pat itself on the back, but 33%? (Maybe I’m just projecting, but I can’t think of more than one or two ads in my life that have ever succeeded in producing a “purchase intent” in me at all.)

What’s more, how do they determine “purchase intent”? Is it from simply asking the test subjects “Do you want to buy this”? If so, maybe the fact that an ad is funny increases the likelihood of answering the question positively, but ultimately has no effect on whether the purchase actually occurs. Is there any evidence that “purchase intent” has any bearing on “purchasing” at all?

Probably not. My favorite paragraph is the last one:

The study does not discuss the ROI of the ads for their marketers. Mark Truss, director of brand intelligence at JWT, New York, said the storytelling theory is correct, but the industry still lacks a way to prove it. “Without the tools to measure and link back to business metrics, marketers and advertisers are not going to embrace [this approach].”

In other words, it’s all crap. Cheers to Mark Truss for, in essence, openly arguing based on his own experience and wisdom instead of relying on the junk science. I’ll always put more trust in imperfect but honest people than in dishonest or meaningless numbers.

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One basic assumption of good experience design is that people fundamentally don’t like change. They can’t deal with it, it’s too risky, and changes will all too often lead to failures.

Indeed, when confronted with the prospect of change, both designers and users shy away, falling back to the tools and techniques they’re accustomed to and passing up on opportunities for improvement, progress, and innovation. But the human mind’s capacity to adapt to change, sometimes rapidly and seamlessly, can be astonishing.

In 1896, a scientist named George M. Stratton, showing an ingenuity that must have seemed like madness at the time, conducted a fascinating experiment in visual perception with himself as the subject. He constructed a pair of goggles with special lenses that inverted his view of the world by 180 degrees, causing him to see everything upside down, as if he were standing on his head, continuously. He wore the goggles for many days, never once opening his eyes without wearing them (he would shower with his eyes closed, for example).

The experiment has been repeated many times, and in every case the results are nearly the same (this description is from The Phenomenology of Space by Shannon Vallor):

Day 1: The subject who puts on inversion goggles initially reports the visual spectacle is inverted, and that the things she sees look ‘unreal’. Motor actions (such as reaching for objects) are disrupted and need to be consciously corrected to be successful.

Day 2: The subject begins to report that things are no longer looking inverted, but her body seems ‘upside down’.

Day 3-5: The body begins to ‘right itself’, particularly when the subject is active. Objects increasingly take on the ‘look of reality’. By the fifth day, motor actions are consistently successful without the need for conscious attention or correction. The time it takes for this process of ‘normalization’ to occur is highly variable, and varies inversely with the subject’s activity level in her environment. When the glasses are removed, objects do not suddenly look inverted, but they look ‘unreal’ again, and motor success is once again impeded.

In other words, at some point things suddenly flip and everything works. Our brains are apparently able to thoroughly adapt to the absolutely bizarre predicament of having ones eyeballs spun upside-down, and apparently this adaptation occurs pretty quickly.

Switching (to Mac) is Flipping

I recently switched from Windows to Mac. And my experience is startlingly close to the visceral nature of the inversion-goggles flip. When I switched, I was immediately completely disoriented by the OS’s peculiar details. I would frequently move my mouse to the wrong part of the screen for the feature I wanted, or I’d stare at the screen for several seconds at a time wondering where I would find a feature that actually did not exist. And I would constantly type the wrong keyboard combinations for cutting and pasting.

But at some point within the first two weeks of using the Mac almost exclusively (I went cold turkey on Windows), suddenly everything just seemed to click. I was doing everything the Mac way. I flipped. In fact, the next time I found myself using Windows (on the Mac!) everything seemed weird again. I was still in my new flip mode, so now the old status quo was alien.

This phenomenon must be fairly common for any kind of highly-immersive user experience: the learning curve begins to rise very steeply slowly, but then has a sudden and radical flattening out ascent where mastery of the new paradigm occurs nearly instantly (and yes, I’ll argue that operating systems are immersive experiences to the extent that most of today’s white-collar professionals spend pretty much their entire days using them).

For me as a user, this means that I don’t need to fear major changes in my working environment. They might even be fun.

As a designer, however, I’m not sure what this means. Any guesses?

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