Large retail stores and fast-food restaurants have a simple choice when designing their checkout customer experience:

• Multiple registers, multiple lines, one line per register
• Multiple registers, single line

This problem is known in the retail industry as “queue management”. The New York Times today features an article comparing the checkout experiences of several New York City supermarkets, and concludes that Whole Foods’s single-line approach is the most efficient. The article suggests that the multiple-line approach is common in the suburbs, but that a different approach is needed for Whole Foods’s New York stores… so a “single-line, bank-style system was quickly chosen for its statistical efficiency.”

Um, duh. Don’t we all know this yet? Isn’t this common knowledge. Isn’t it just common sense? Well, apparently a lot of retailers haven’t yet gotten it.

But customers know it.

Lately I’ve noticed that when presented with multiple registers, customers (at least in New York City) will naturally form into a single line when given half a chance, even when store policy doesn’t ask for a single line. Maybe it’s because it just seems rude to slide up to an open register when somebody else is already waiting in line behind another customer at another register. It’s taking advantage of another person’s bad luck or complacency.

In fact, the multiple-line system almost deliberately encourages people to treat each other as rivals, asking them to think hard before choosing a line, to make tactical decisions to switch lines to maximize their own efficiency, even to send spouses and children to “hold places” in multiple lines to hedge their bets… all of this adds up to a kind of laissez-faire capitalist, survival-of-the-fittest model of the customer experience. In short, these stores are making the customers do their queue management for them.

This system is not only statistically inefficient, but (more importantly) it is a bad customer experience on an emotional level. It implicitly treats customers as animals, like pigs at a trough fighting for food. While some customers may complete their checkout happily, others will feel screwed because they chose the wrong line, or because they didn’t quickly switch to a more efficient line at the right time. It alienates customers from each other, too, by forcing them to focus on tactics and not on normal social niceties, which can’t be good for the store’s sense of community.

In short, the multiple-line system lacks grace. Customers want to be polite and social, not rude and anti-social. We feel better about our experiences when they don’t bring out the worst in us. We want experiences that enable us to behave graciously.

I can’t believe this is still subject to debate, but many retailers are sticking to their guns. In the local CVS and McDonald’s stores near my office, whenever the customers naturally and politely queue up into a single line the staff has to step in and practically yell at them to break up and form separate lines.

Why do they do this? Is it because, as the Times article suggests, customers are scared by long lines and, presumably, can be fooled into thinking that 10 lines with 5 people in each is a far shorter wait than 1 line with 50 people in it? Is it because of space/design constraints? Is it in order to better discipline and monitor unskilled cashiers? Is it because in many communities customers don’t yet understand the mechanics of the single-line approach? Or is it just plain old corporate inertia and stupidity?

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Sartre would be proud.

The shocking (and to many viewers, utterly disappointing) ending of The Sopranos series finale was perfect. The tableau itself was a perfect jewel: the nuclear family all together, happy it seems for the moment, but completely surrounded by unknown and unseen danger. David Chase pumped the scene full of more tension than any other moment in the series’s history — is the whole family about to get whacked? — but ultimately there is no concrete evidence for the audience to be sure that any violence is about to happen.

Most of the predictions made about the finale, even the ones in our office pool, are still possible, as they always have been. The violence that surrounds the Soprano nuclear family has always been the subject of the series, and the finale simply wrapped that up into a single vignette, a microcosm of the whole 8-year series.

Consider the Seinfeld series finale, where the core cast found themselves in jail for, apparently, eternity. This ultimate predicament was a microcosm, too, of the series itself and the relationship between Seinfeld’s four core characters, the Seinfeld nuclear family, if you will. Seinfeld was often called a show about nothing, but it was always about the characters. Every episode we learned more about, and dove deeper into, the four main characters and explored a little bit about some unique and colorful secondary characters.

The Sopranos finale was similar. We’ve never asked The Sopranos for long-arc plots with carefully-planned setups, mysterious clues that come to fruition later. Generally, all that ever happens on The Sopranos is that we are drawn deeper and deeper into our understandings of the characters, particualarly Tony, and occasionally we find surprises inside of them. This is what The Sopranos is about, not plot. My wife, Peggy, noted that ultimately The Sopranos was not a “gangster movie” but a “soap opera”. And in a soap opera, ultimately, nothing ever happens. Dr. Melfi’s decision to end Tony’s therapy also reflects this realization, that despite all her efforts over eight years, Tony has not changed and will not change. The final moment of the show encapsulated this tense stasis perfectly.

The Behavior office pool got almost nothing correct, but we had one phenomenal write in winner: “Cliffhanger”. Some of us got Phil Leotardo’s hit. But that’s it. And nobody predicted that Christopher would come back from the dead as a cat.

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UPDATE 6/11: See the results of the pool, and my take on the Sopranos finale, here.

In anticipation of The Sopranos series finale this Sunday, everyone I know is making predictions about who lives, who dies, and all other kinds of plots and events. To help make the speculation even more interesting, I’ve put together this handy-dandy grid of characters and plot developments to help you keep track of how good your predictions are.

Download the Sopranos Finale Pool (33k PDF, two pages including grid and rules)

If you’d like to make all this predicting a little more interesting, I’ve also included some suggested rules that you can use if you want to turn this into a good old fashioned high-stakes office pool.

Suggested Rules

1. Choose any number of combinations of characters (along the left side) and fates (along the top), then initial each of your predictions in the corresponding cell.
2. Each prediction (each cell) will cost you ____ of play money.
3. Hand in your game sheet and play money by ____ to the game administrator, ____.
4. Winning cells will be identified by the game administrator during the final episode of the Sopranos on June 10, 2007 (ex: If Uncle Junior commits suicide, C-17 will be a winner. If Dr. Melfi has a hallucination, P-9 will be a winner). The game administrator makes the final decision regarding any plot ambiguity or dispute.
5. There will almost certainly be multiple winners, in which case the pot is divided proportionally among the winning players according to each player’s number of correct predictions. (ex: If one player makes six correct predictions, a second makes three, and a third makes one, then the pot is divided 60/30/10% among the three winners.) The game administrator is responsible for all mathematical calculations!

FAQ

Q: Where’s [missing character]?
A: Not every character is included. Whaddaya gonna do? Game administrators may, however, add additional names in the blank spaces provided along the right side of the grid (optionally, admins may also permit players to add their own characters).

Q: What about [your personal plot prediction]?
A: As above, the game administrator may add several additional plot events in the blank spaces provided along the top of the grid (and, as above, admins may extend this privilege to the players if they wish).

Q: But [character] is already dead!
A: In order to both (a) avoid spoilers for those players who may have missed a few episodes, and (b) permit flashbacks, dreams, and other alternate-reality developments to occur, a small selection of deceased characters have been scattered throughout the grid. (Predicting that a character will die who is already dead does not count as a correct prediction, smart-alec!)

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Will Wright’s cryptic, clip-art crazy PowerPoint slides make sense when he’s right there talking about them.

Microsoft’s PowerPoint is frequently blamed for the poor quality of many presentations and for a supposedly- disastrous state of communication in both the private and the public spheres. Public speakers are lambasted for their wooden stage presence, crippled by their over-reliance on projected slide shows and meaningless bullet-points. The slides themselves, too, are often rife with design crimes ranging from clip-art diarrhea to impenetrable verbosity.

And because of the ubiquity of the tool and the technique, because public speakers from Al Gore to members of Australia’s Parliament use slideshows to support their speeches, the software itself has become the de facto target of criticism. I don’t think this is quite fair.

[For the purpose of this argument, Keynote on the Mac is basically the same animal as PowerPoint, so with apologies to both Microsoft and Apple I’ll just use the term “PowerPoint” to mean any slideshow method or tool.] MORE…

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A fascinating article in last Sunday’s New York Times documents a recent study in which it is shown that predicting the success of cultural products (such as movies or music) is impossible, and that a phenomenon called “cumultive advantage” — where people prefer something largely because other people already prefer it — will usually overcome any empirical qualitative preference individuals may have for one product over another.

Marketers, for all their reliance on research, have long suspected this, which is why for years they have been looking to “coolhunters” to help them locate emerging tidal waves of coolness while the “cumultive advantage” is still building up steam. Instead of trying to create new products that will succeed because they were designed to meet a known and measurable consumer demand, they try to emulate products that are ascendant and that reveal previously-unknown consumer preferences.

This phenomenon may seem perfectly reasonable when it comes to movies and music, but I think it’s also true for user interface design: To the extent that any given UI can be called a “cultural product”, it is vulnerable to the wild unpredictability of culture. We may not always recognize it, but almost every UI is a type of cultural product.

This might seem hard to accept. Obviously, Justin Timberlake and Star Wars are cultural products, but the iPod, too, is a cultural product. The Nintendo Wii is a cultural product. Windows Vista is a cultural product. Amazon.com is a cultural product. These products have particular timeliness, particular aesthetics, and particular creative voices — thus they are cultural.

All of these cultural products have pure usability components to their user experience, but the cultural component — the product’s style — is often a major factor in the product’s success or failure. Sometimes it is the predominant factor, outweighing usability and feature-richness, as I think is the case with the iPod.

The ability to predict the success or failure of a UI design before a product is released is the foundation for the entire careers of many of us in the user experience design profession, so this argument may be troubling to many of us who think that there are empirically right and wrong ways of designing a UI. It’s hard to accept that a product’s hot color scheme, seductive finish, or ornamental trimmings — not to mention the brand name, ad campaign, or celebrity spokesmodel — could be far more important to the product’s success than the product’s long feature list or elegant ease-of-use.

I see the Times article as further evidence that no matter how many tests we do to show that one UI convention is better than another, when it comes to cultural products the “it depends” option is so overwhelmingly dominant that no conclusive best practices can ever be stated with confidence. Until you actually build something and have people use it, you will never know. And until then, the product development team’s resident “coolhunter” may have better insights into the product’s potential for success than anyone on the user research team.

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The word “experience” comes from the Latin word “experīrī”, or to try.

It’s strange, then, that in modern English the two words, “experience” and “try”, have such different meanings: when we try something we tend to take a sip or a nibble, get our toes wet, or go for a test drive around the block. But when we experience something, we allow it to overtake and engulf us, we admit it fully into our spaces, our lives. A deeper and more lasting understanding is achieved, something fundamentally different than what we get from merely trying something.

The purpose of user experience design, or UXD, is to understand that user behavior can be seen as part of a holistic experiential model instead of as a shallow, temporary hit-and-run encounter. In the domain of user experience, then, we must not mistake trying something for experiencing it.

The most revolutionary products, the things you “never knew you wanted but can’t live without”, only catch on when people are able to move quickly from trying to experiencing.

Some of the ramifications of this distinction include:

Product Reviewing: When testing a new product to see what it’s all about, consider adopting it thoroughly instead of just tinkering around with it. As you explore the product, ask yourself if you are using it like someone who actually bought it with the intention of using it, or if you are merely sweeping through it for a quick overview. At a wine tasting you aren’t supposed to swallow the stuff, but sometimes if you want to understand what it’s really all about you simply have to drink the Kool Aid.

Restaurant reviewers will visit the same establishment five or six times, on different days of the week and at different times of the day. When exploring a new product, consider taking the same approach — how differently would you use it on a busy day versus a slow day, at home versus at work, in a good mood or in a bad mood?

Trying new Social Apps: This is particularly important with social apps, where this phenomenon is exponentially true. You cannot experience a social app unless you are part of a group of people who are all experiencing it together. You cannot, for example, understand what Twitter really is until 20+ people (people who you actually care about) are connected to you as friends and all 20+ of you are using Twitter in your own idiosyncratic ways. A social networking app does not even really exist until there are groups of users trying it out.

Usability Testing: The purpose of usability testing is to simulate the planned user experience as closely as possible. By being conscious of the fact that some experiences involve long commitments and/or large numbers of participants, a usability test may need to be structured very differently than they are today. A prototype for testing may need to be pre-populated with legacy cruft and clutter, as if the test subject had been using it for years. And again, for social apps, this is even more pronounced: Public Betas are, in fact, the best way we currently have to test social apps, but maybe someone will devise a way of simulating the cruft and clutter by simulating real people in a network where few real people actually exist.

Product (or Website!) Design: Allow your users to rapidly transition from trying your product to experiencing it, by making the initial stages of the interaction with the product as seductive and addictive as possible. Apple’s “out of the box” seduction is the gold standard for this, but the tradition goes back to the simpler arts: James Bond movies always open with a high-voltage action sequence. And the most basic rule of journalism is to catch the reader’s attention in the first paragraph.

In Dont Make Me Think, Steve Krug posits that the first question a web site should answer for a user is “what is this?” It’s surprising how many sites fail utterly at this. If your web page cannot tell a user immediately what the hell it is, why it’s useful, etc., you’re already putting up a major obstacle between trying and experiencing. Krug’s book, in fact, can easily be seen as a concise manual on how to smooth the path from try to experience.

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I am speaking next Monday at the 2007 ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas.

My topic will be “Interaction Design Style“. It will be a highly visual romp through a variety of topic having to do with the concept of style and how it fits into the design of interactive systems:

• The definition of style.
• The history and meaning of the concept of “style”, across many disciplines including art, architecture, music, design, writing, and more. Style is not not just fashion!
• How a consciousness of style can and should fit into a user-centered design process.
• How style constrains the design process, through both the anxiety of influence and through the availability of overly easy solutions.
• How style inspires the design process, opening us to new ideas we might never have thought of.
• How style guides the design process through pattern libraries, best practices, and more.

I was inspired in part by Stewart Brand’s 2003 IA keynote speech, in which he dismissed style (and fashion, and art) as an ephemeral, superficial, and ultimately flimsy basis for design strategies, an assertion that rubbed me a little wrong. Lately this has come back to me because style, broadly defined, is not brushed aside at all in so many other worlds of design and development. It’s not a dirty word.

Maybe, I thought, there are in fact major stylistic drivers behind much of what interaction designers and information architects do, in the same way that style drives much of architecture, music, etc. Maybe we shouldn’t reject stylistic influences, but should instead embrace them.

I’m working feverishly to make the most thought-provoking and interesting 45 minutes I can craft. It’s not going to be a research paper nor will it be a case study — it will be something I hope will be at least a little entertaining and educational, but most importantly a little eye-opening and inspiring. There will be lots and lots of pretty pictures!

Monday at 9:30 in the “Mesquite Room”. I hope to see you there!

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