For a large country, the US does alright

Via Infosthetics, the above graph (culled from the Flash visualization here):

...maps the base pay of the world's parliamentarians, ranked by country and expressed as a multiple of per capita GDP, versus a "Good Governance Index", which itself is a combination of the Democracy Index, the UN's Human Development Index and the Perception of Corruption Index.

In short, the further away the country dot is removed from the yellow cross, the more their MPs are being paid. The larger the (counter-clockwise) angle from the yellow line, the worse their corresponding governance.

Some commenters on the Infosthetics post have decried the visualization as unnecessarily flashy, but I think it's actually pretty useful, at least for relative comparisons. The best cluster of countries in this analysis are all countries with small, fairly homogenous populations such as Switzerland, Iceland, Luxembourg, etc. Not all such countries are in the same cluster (notably Austria and Belgium), but the biggest country (population wise) in the best cluster is Canada, with about 33 million people.

The second-best cluster of countries includes much larger countries, including the US, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Japan (Japan is the line that extends to the right out of the image). In general, these countries are more also more diverse (namely the US, the UK, and France).

So, in general, the trend seems to be that smaller, more ethnically homogenous countries get more for their money than large, ethnically diverse countries. This isn't all that surprising. But what was a little surprising for me was how relatively well the US does, considering that it is both the largest country in the upper-right quadrant and also the most diverse. Of course, it should be reiterated that the US' position on the graph is likely heavily influenced by the fact that the base pay is normalized per GDP, and the US' GDP is quite a bit higher than some of the countries in its cluster.

So that's what an A/B test is...

The other day I was reviewing this great Alertbox article on user experience methods, and I came across a method with which I was unfamiliar--A/B testing. Well, sure enough, just like when you learn a new word and then it suddenly seems that you hear it used a couple times within the same day, this 37 Signals post points to a real world example of A/B testing. In this case, Less Everything simply measured the number of "conversions" (I guess the number of people who tried the application for free?) when a button was placed on the left side of the screen versus when it was placed on the right side and found that putting the button on the right led to a conversion rate of 13.8% versus a conversion rate of 12.3% for when the button was on the left.

The study seems to follow the guidelines for A/B testing in that the sample size is large ("thousands of users") and it was performed on an essentially finished design where it was easy to change only one part of the design and observe the effect of that change in isolation.

Target Price Tags Lead to Shopper Confusion

While browsing through the food aisles at the SuperTarget in St. Louis Park, I observed two separate incidents of shoppers not understanding Target's price tags. Since I didn't observe that many total incidents of shoppers interacting with the price tags, this seems like an abnormally high error rate.

In the first instance, two women were chit-chatting while casually picking up food. As they passed by the barbecue sauce section, one of them remarked to the other that Sweet Baby Ray's (a brand of barbecue sauce that's fairly popular in Minnesota and Wisconsin) was on sale. As a fan of Sweet Baby Ray's myself, the comment piqued my interest (I'm always looking to stock up on something I like when it's on sale) so I looked over to the rack to inspect the price. To my dismay, Sweet Baby Ray's was in fact not on sale. But, the item directly above it (some sort of marinade) was on sale, and the large 'on-sale' ticket was hung directly above the various bottles of Sweet Baby Ray's. As far as I can tell, the shoppers mistakenly associated the 'on-sale' ticket with the Sweet Baby Ray's and used it to justify its purchase, which one admitted to the other was an "impulse purchase."



In the second instance, two teenage boys were shopping with a limited budget (this sounds like some made-up persona, but it's true!) and I passed them in the snacks aisle. One of them saw a bag of Munchies and mentioned to his friend that he loved Munchies and that they sooo good. But he ended up not buying the product because, as he explained to his friend, "Seven dollars is too much for Munchies." Not a fan of Munchies myself but nonetheless an occasional purchase of bagged chips, I thought to myself that seven dollars IS too much for Munchies...something must be wrong. So, I checked the price (since the item was not on sale, the price tag was a standard tag like the one pictured above) and found that the price for the object adjacent to the Munchies (some sort of package of several "lunch size" packs of chips) was $6.99 (i.e. "seven dollars"). However, the Munchies, whose price tag was a bit to the left of the bag and therefore easy-to-miss, were $3.99, a far more reasonable price (I think it was a super-size bag). So in this case, the shoppers' confusion led to a lost sale for Target.

In both cases, the shoppers were confused about which price tag applied to which item, which to me calls into question the effectiveness of the price tags' designs. I'm guessing they were not designed for maximum usability, as they are similar to the tags one would find at any big-box store and are probably merely the default style that the tag manufacturer provides. But, this being Target, I'm surprised that the company hasn't unleashed its army of designers on this problem, something that could be costing the company lost sales and, if solved, could possibly result in greater revenue and most-likely in greater brand equity.

One idea I had was to, at least on the larger 'on-sale' tickets, put a picture of the sale item on the tag. Manufacturers already spend a lot of effort on distinguishing their packaging from their competitors, so why not leverage that effort and simply show a picture of the item next to the price? If this isn't possible, then perhaps the price tag could at least feature an easy-to-read, non-technical, non-abbreviated description of the product. "Munchies, $3.99" would probably be sufficient.

Images from here and here.

An Idea for Reducing Energy Usage and Subsidies

I had a thought while driving home after softball today and listening to an NPR report about the complex issues involved in developing a multilateral coordinated response to the problem of climate change, something that will be addressed head-on at climate change talks in December of 2009 in Copenhagen.

Here's my idea. Once Google PowerMeter and/or similar services becomes ubiquitous, each homeowner's energy use could be compared to all the other homeowners in the same city or county. Utilities would include a homeowner's energy usage percentile rank (lower is better) on each month's bill (or paperless statement, if the homeowner so chooses) so they could see how/whether their changes in behavior are affecting their rating and private companies (such as DIY KYOTO) could provide devices that deliver feedback on energy usage in real time.

So, nothing too revolutionary with the above paragraph (see pages 195-196 of Nudge). But to really incentivize people to strive for the best ranking possible, what if receipt of the home ownership subsidy (more commonly known as the mortgage interest tax deduction) were subject to a homeowner attaining a ranking below the median homeowner. That is, as long as a homeowner's energy usage is in the lower 50th percentile of their peers (across a given municipality), they receive the full subsidy (just like they already do today). But homeowners with energy usage in the upper 50th percentile receive no subsidy.

The program could be phased in over time, so that in Year 1 no subsidies are withheld from homeowners but those who are in the upper 50% would be notified that next year, they will not receive the full subsidy. In each subsequent year, the subsidy offered to energy-intensive households would decrease (e.g. 75% in Year 2, 50% in Year 3, etc.) such that eventually only homeowners with energy usage in the lower 50th percentile would receive the full home ownership subsidy. And maybe over time the 50th percentile threshold could change or become multiple thresholds, so that homeowners not near the 50th percentile mark will still have an incentive to save energy (after all, if you're already in the 90th percentile, it may be unrealistic to think that you'll ever be below the 50th percentile, so you might just give up). The gist of the idea is to tie receipt of the home ownership subsidy to some level of energy conservation.

Not only does this chip away at the market-distorting home ownership subsidy, it also offers a progressive (as opposed to regressive) nudge to homeowners, since wealthier homeowners are more likely to use more energy. As discussed in the book Nudge, often people (Humans, not Econs, in the terminology of authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein) will respond more readily to incentives with high salience than those with low salience, even if the value of the behavior changed by the incentive isn't directly proportional to the value of the incentive. The threat of losing a generous subsidy for not reducing energy usage may in fact be a more salient incentive than a utility bill that is $10 higher in a given month.

One final point: it's important to reframe the concept of the home mortgage interest deduction as a home ownership subsidy, since (1) that's what it is and (2) a tax "deduction" sounds like something to which you're entitled but a "subsidy" sounds like something that has been granted onto you and is subject to removal.

Einstein Expanded on Newton, but Newton is Still Relevant

A great exchange from the two bloggers at Defective Equilibrium, the New Zealand version of Marginal Revolution:

Udayan Mukherjee:

This doesn't mean we have to argue that markets are always and everywhere a non-starter. It is merely an acknowledgment that the model proferred by neo-classical economics is not the final draft of economic explanation, but that it is akin to the Newtonian Physics awaiting its Einsteinian upheaval. For me this is tremendously exciting, as it opens up the study of economics and allows its foundations to be put under the experimental zoom lens. If people are predictably irrational, then it is something we need to be aware of as empirical scientists and integrate into our models of market behaviour.

Tom Mathews:

Uday used a useful analogy of Newtonian vs. Eisteinian physics. Newtonian physics gave us a good approximation of how the world worked for hundreds of years - but as Einstein showed, it turned out to be fundamentally misconceived. Einstein's insights gave us a deeper, more accurate understanding of how things actually work.

But have we since abandoned Newtonian physics? Of course not. In the vast majority of observable situations (that is, except for research physicists) Newton's laws still appear to hold. Engineers need not worry that people moving around in their buildings will increase in mass as they move and thus crash through the floor, for example.

While earning a master's degree in mechanical engineering, I don't think I ever learned about Einstein's theories beyond the cursory mention that Newton's stuff is really just an approximation for how things really work, but it's so accurate for most real world applications that it's all we're going to teach you. Ten years from now, perhaps this is how neoclassical economics will be thought of.

Image from here.

Inspiration

There's something incredibly inspirational about seeing Danny MacAskill attempt something extremely difficult and then finally master it. That's what happens in the first 1:30 of this video. The rest is just awesome.



Via Kottke, who aptly describes the above feat as "parkour on a bicycle." Although I think the actual term is "bike trials."

Are stoplights really necessary?

Via Tom Vanderbilt, the London borough of Ealing is about to conduct an experiment in which they observe whether traffic flows better at some intersections without stoplights:

Ealing found evidence to support its theory when the lights failed one day at a busy junction and traffic flowed better than before. Councillors have approved a report which recommended that they “experimentally remove signals since experience of signal failure showed that junction worked well.”

I observed a similar phenomenon sometime around March of 2009 at an intersection near where I work.  For about a week, the intersection shown below, which is usually regulated by stoplights (including a left turn arrow), was regulated solely with stop signs as a 4-way stop. My personal observation was that traffic flowed no worse than usual, and if anything may have been better. Ultimately, I think the best solution for the intersection shown below is multi-lane roundabout.



View Intersection where stoplight was out of service in a larger map

Fostering Increased User Participation in Healthcare

IDEO's Tim Brown thinks that "participation is key to the next big wave of innovation in business and society." In a post specifically about healthcare, he envisions EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) and HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) as two ways to enable greater participation in healthcare.

Fundamental to this collaboration is the creation of platforms that encourage participation. By this I don’t mean goading people into eating healthier food or taking more exercise. These may be beneficial outcomes of other more systemic innovations, but they are not, on their own, going to create the major shifts that we need.

Two platforms that are already under discussion and, in my opinion, offer huge potential for improved collaboration and participation, are e-medical records and health savings accounts (HSAs). With the risk of sounding like a health-care reform lobbyist, here is why I think they are important, but also why I think current ideas about these platforms run the risk of limiting their impact.

The Obama administration has already embraced EMRs, but HSAs have typically been championed by libertarians and conservatives. I agree with Tim Brown that HSAs help people become more engaged with their healthcare decisions, but I'm skeptical that HSAs will gain much traction in the foreseeable future.

Image from here.

Dynamic Haptic Displays: The Next Big Thing?

Dynamic haptic displays like the one shown above (from Chris Harrison) seem to really be gathering momentum and I wouldn't be surprised if they become the next big thing in interaction design. The feedback channels of sight and sounds are already maxed out, but the sense of touch is currently underutilized (we can do better than just a vibrating phone). Another cool dynamic haptic display technology comes from Artificial Muscle:

Corporate Nationality As a Branding Tool

Matt Yglesias on corporate nationality:

Beyond CEOs, Nestle has 15 directors. Of them one is Indian, one is Swiss/American, seven are Swiss, and the rest are from other European countries. But there’s nothing especially “European”—and certainly nothing Swiss—about the company’s actual operations. They earn a lot of money in Europe, but the majority of their revenue is from outside of Europe, and there’s production all over the world. It’s also totally normal for large multinational firms to be disproportionately owned by shareholders located in their “home country” and home continent.

Corporate nationality, in other words, doesn’t matter. But it seems as if it actually does. And for somewhat mysterious reasons.

One reason I can think of is that corporate nationality can and is used as a branding tool. There's probably some serious brand equity in Nestle being thought of as a Swiss company because Switzerland is know for its luxury brands and chocolate. And American companies practically flaunt their American-ness (at least here in America).

Image from here.

Customer Experience In Healthcare

Jay Parkinson:

I’ve started collecting photos I take of medical clinics vs. veterinary clinics in the same neighborhoods. If anyone has some good examples, send them my way…but here’s the first. Just goes to show that when people pay their own hard earned money for healthcare, providers start competing on price and quality and appearance…essentially, the consumer experience.

Interaction Design Ethics

This post at the IxDA Discussion forum got me thinking about a thought I had a while ago about the ethics involved with applying the results of user research/usability testing to product design. I was thinking about users' misperceptions regarding what a product does or how it works and then how to deal with those misperceptions in successive product iterations. Specifically, when is it alright to allow, or even exploit, users' misperceptions and when is it inappropriate? Where is the line separating ethical decisions from unethical ones, and what defines that line?

The way I thought through this problem was by considering two extreme examples. One example where it seems acceptable, maybe even preferable, to just let users continue to misperceive how something works is whether a hypertext link needs to be single-clicked or double-clicked. One needs only to click a link once to follow the link, but a lot of [less-experienced] users often double-click links, probably confusing this action with the action required to open a file or a shortcut on a Windows desktop. Designers of web browsing software allow single-clicks or double-clicks for links, but technically allowing double-clicks allows users to continue to not correctly understand how the browser actually works. Of course, it's really no more work for the user to double-click instead of single-click, and their lack of understanding of how links really work is likely never to matter. In other words, the cost of misperceiving the functionality is essentially zero.

However, what about a product with an interaction that has a higher cost of misperception, say a medical device? Imagine a product with an interface that has, among other things, a green circular button and a switch labeled "Auto-protect." The way the system actually works is that once the various parameters have been programmed elsewhere on the interface, the operator presses the green button to deliver a drug intravenously. The "Auto-protect" switch is not related to the drug delivering functionality. However, since the "Auto-protect" switch is positioned a little too close to the green button, some users misperceive the "Auto-protect" switch to have the functionality of protecting against an inadvertent overdose and, as a result, are observed to always flip the "Auto-protect" switch on before pressing the green button.

In this example, it would be obviously unethical to conclude that since users want the device to include a mechanism that protects against overdoses, we can just fool them into believing that the device offers that functionality by moving the "Auto-protect" switch even closer to the green button, to better afford a relationship betwen the two. Of course, allowing device operators to mistakenly believe that they are protected from delivering an overdose, when in reality they are not, has a very high cost (i.e. patient death), so there seems to be no room here for allowing users to think whatever they want as long as they're able to use the device.

So is the cost of the misperception the thing that determines where the line separating ethical from unethical decisions lies? Or is there something more to it?

Image from here.

Protectionist Law Impeding Competition, Consumer Choice

This issue should be a non-issue.

The developer aiming to bring the popular Trader Joe’s grocery chain to Minneapolis got a wary reaction from residents and others at a Whittier neighborhood meeting Monday night. Some residents spoke in favor of the plan, but others—including the Wedge Natural Foods Co-op less than a half block away—say the corporate retailer shouldn’t get any special favors that might give it an unfair marketing advantage.

Mark Dziuk is hoping Trader Joe’s will be the anchor tenant in a large commercial and residential project on a busy block of Lyndale Avenue South. The problem is Trader Joe’s won’t sign on unless the store is allowed an adjacent wine and beer store, but state law prohibits liquor stores within 2,000 feet of one another in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Hum’s Liquors, a neighborhood icon for the past four decades, is practically right across the street. If Dziuk wins the exemption to the state law, it would be the first in Minneapolis.

I agree with the Wedge in this case in that Trader Joe's shouldn't be given special treatment. But the special treatment Trader Joe's seeks shouldn't even be an issue in the first place. This is all the fault of some arbitrary protectionist law from 70 years ago (that would be 1939) that isolates liquor stores from competition by prohibiting competing stores from being within 2,000 feet of each other. A defensible (but not necessarily correct) argument for this law is that it might prevent any single area from becoming "liquor store alley." Even if that line of thinking is valid and even if that's a value which the community consents to, then surely the law could be written better. For example, instead of always using one distance (2,000 feet) to regulate liquor store density, why not allow more liquor stores for denser-populated areas or areas with greater pedestrian/vehicle/transit access? There's no reason a small rural town of 500 people should be bound by the same law as a densely-populated corridor in a large cosmopolitan city.

Sarcasm Is Good

With talk of a CPSIA for food getting me all worried, I appreciated this bit of sarcasm from Reason's Jesse Walker regarding an odious Pennsylvania food safety law:

Unfortunately, the inspectors' fight doesn't go far enough: What about the home meal loophole? Every night across America, parents cook unlicensed dinners for their naively trusting kids, and perhaps even a guest or two. Are the kitchens dirty, the ingredients expired, the pots unwashed? We don't know! How many lives will be lost before the government steps in and says, ¡No más!?

Have Novel Touchscreen Interfaces Fulfilled Jef Raskin's Vision?

For a class called "The Psychology of Human-Machine Interaction," I was assigned to read Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface (cover pictured to the right). At the time (2004, probably), I was really intrigued by Raskin's idea of zoomable interfaces and the notion that discrete applications are an inefficient way to facilitate users' desired actions, but it all seemed sort of far out and futuristic.

However, with innovative touchscreen interfaces such as the Palm Pre's "deck of cards" metaphor or Bumptop's 3D desktop (demo shown below), it seems that Raskin's visionary ideas are finally being realized. I love the idea of enabling users to use their spatial faculties, a cognitive ability that is severely under-utilized in traditional hierarchical 2D desktop interfaces.

How People Spend Their Time During Work

This map showing Zappos purchases in real-time across the US is very interesting. What I found particularly intriguing is that as lunchtime occurs in a given timezone, purchases seem to slow to a trickle. Meanwhile, there seems to be a post-lunchtime flurry of activity. All anecdotal observations, of course.

Via Marginal Revolution.

CPSIA For Food

You know that new law that was passed that requires excessive testing of products to prove they don't contain lead (CPSIA)? Well, now there's a proposal to do the same thing for food! Thanks, government, for trying to make farmers markets illegal!

Image (with some editing) from here.

Design Thinking and Government

I'm very intrigued by the potential that design thinking has to offer government. Of course, nothing has more inertia than government and it is inherently ultra political, so altering the way government works is extremely challenging. Nevertheless, I remain hopeful, and stuff like this from IDEO's Tim Brown is encouraging:

What if design was used to test some of the rules our government leaders are proposing? Could we go through some experimental cycles using design and prototyping as a tool before final decisions are made about what rules to adopt? Might this help us avoid our tendency to create new rules and then walk away, under the assumption that our finance, health and global energy systems will now behave in the way we want them to?

This is of course an excellent idea. In the private sector, when systems are created they are rigorously tested. Good system designers/engineers understand that a critical part of any system are the humans it affects and relies on, so good system design incorporates a lot of use testing and design iteration to ensure that the system will behave in real life and its designers intend. Almost every government action is a case study in the law of unintended consequences, so it stands to reason that government-designed systems more often than not do not behave in real life the way their designers intended. Ergo, government needs to start using design thinking!

Image from here.

The growing importance of experience design

This is a very interesting post by David Armano which does a good job of putting into words what has been in the back of my mind for the last couple of months. Basically, he's seconding the proposition of this Economist article, which is that the economic crisis has hastened the phenomenon of people second-guessing whether the constant struggle to keep up with the Joneses by acquiring as many gadgets/knick-knacks/kitchen applicances (i.e. "junk") is really the best way to spend their disposable income. As Armano puts it, we're entering the "post-consumer era." I think this passage is rather salient:

...Credit lines have ensured that we can purchase beyond our means and advertising has had years to perfect it's craft making us believe that we don't want the latest and greatest product—but that we actually NEED it. In fact, if we can't have it our lives will be empty—we will be missing out we won't be living life as it was meant to be lived.

This of course is a lie.

But it's worked for years. Bigger, better, faster, newer. Get it and get it now before your neighbor does. It's a myth that's stood the test of time and fueled a global economy because it could. When it's old, throw it out or give it away. Then one day, the housing market collapsed, the stock market collapsed and we woke up scratching our heads as to why. And some of us are re-thinking the economics of mass consumption.

I think a lot of people are finally realizing that they reached the point of junk saturation a few years ago and there is just no longer a need to rabidly acquire stuff like there's no tomorrow. As such, I think the term "post-junk" may be more appropriate than "post-consumer," for as long as we live in a capitalist society there will always be "consumers" and "producers," per se.

One consequence of such junk fatigue will be an increased desire for fewer high-quality products rather than more low-quality products. Jason Kottke highlighted this a while back in this post, in which he talked about "upgrading oneself" by, for example, replacing off-the-rack dress shirts with tailored shirts.

As Armano goes on to point out, the ever increasing interconnectedness of humanity that has been enabled by the internet is going to push people into becoming smarter, more demanding consumers. This may not necessarily be the result of conscious decisions by each consumer, but rather as a simple consequence of our digital surroundings (e.g. Facebook, Google, Twitter, whatever's next, etc.). Without even realizing it, the inputs into our decision making processes will in effect be pre-screened by the recommendations, purchases, and comments of our trusted peers.

From my perspective, these two phenomena (junk reduction and increasing consumer awareness) pretty clearly point to a greater role for good experience design amongst both products and services. People are going to want better stuff that simplifies/de-clutters their life, and whether they know it or not they're going to be nudged away from objects/services that they perceive as junk and toward objects/services of trusted value.

Imeem...please let me scroll with ease!

I love imeem, but I think their user interface has plenty of room for improvement. One small thing that's really been annoying me recently is how scrolling through a playlist works. To see what I mean, try clicking on the "up" or "down" arrows in the following embedded playlist:

Smart

The scrolling increment (how much up or down the list moves when you click on an arrow) is way to small. Right now, one click scrolls the list about 1/5 of a song, so to scroll to the next song you have to click the down arrow five times. At a minimum, a single click should scroll the list by one whole song, but I think a more optimum increment would be 4-5 songs.