Four Degrees of Cognitive Surplus
September 4th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
A little sketch I threw together in OmniGS on my iPad to capture a key theme from Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus.
Design Frameworks: History and Usage
August 4th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Here’s a great resource from Hugh Dubberly for those of you who are obsessed with design frameworks, their history and usage. Hat tip to Jessica Striebich for sending this my way. Enjoy.
The Buzz about Google Buzz: Behavioral Economics and Online Privacy
February 14th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Last week Google launched Google Buzz, a new status update and social network aggregation feature for Gmail users. Within minutes of its launch, digerati took to Twitter and blogs to discuss their first impressions of Buzz. Early reviews were generally positive, but my mid-week, the tone had shifted dramatically. It began to surface that Buzz had a fatal privacy flaw that could potentially jeopardize the real-world safety its early adopters. As one widely shared op-ed piece on Gizmodo.com explained, “Fuck you, Google. My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety . . . You have destroyed over ten years of my goodwill and adoration.”
Fueling this vitriol was a naive design decision to eliminate signup procedures allowing users to choose with whom they would like to share information. As the Google Buzz landing page describes, “No setup needed. Automatically follow the people you email and chat with the most in Gmail.” (In the case of the writer above, her abusive ex-husband could now view her status updates and items she shared with her current boyfriend.)
This incident underscores the importance of understanding the behavioral economics of privacy in online settings. Had Google designed buzz to better account for how users make decisions as to the degree of personal information they feel comfortable sharing in initiating a service, this scenario could have been avoided.
Understanding behavioral economics to design for privacy
In Alessandro Acquisti and Jens Grossklags’ 2006 paper, “What Can Behavioral Economics Teach Us About Privacy?,” the authors address the complex and often contradictory behaviors surrounding online privacy. As Acquisti and Grossklags describe, “we feel entitled to protection of information about ourselves that we do not control, yet willingly trade away the same information for small rewards; we worry about privacy invasions of little significance, yet overlook those that may cause significant damages.” The authors explore the behavioral principles that impair or aid individuals in making privacy decisions online, concluding that behavioral economics can improve privacy policy decision making and technology design for end users and data holding entities.
The case of Google Buzz is a clear example of asymmetry of information in decision making. In opting in to the service, users had no way of understanding the algorithm Google was using to automatically link contacts nor the extent of data that would be shared between contacts (at least at the outset). Users were not guided through procedures at signup that would make this clear.
In addition, users were subject to status quo bias due to the simplicity of opting in to the service. To make signup simple, Google intentionally made the “automatic follow” feature a default setting. Thus, many users failed to realize what and with whom they were sharing information until hours or even days after signup. This agrees with Acquisti and Grossklags’ findings, whereby their study of online social networks revealed that the vast majority of users do not change their default (and very permeable) privacy settings (likely due to status quo bias).
But why all the vitriol? While the personal safety violation described above represents an extreme case, negative opinions of Google Buzz circulated widely. It is widely known how Google benefits from the personal data of users of iGoogle and Gmail. In the case of Buzz, Google was looking to capitalize on real-time social data by stealing users from other popular social networking services like Twitter and Facebook. But as Facebook has learned from its own privacy issues, the fungibility of user data and free services is a complex and sensitive issue. Acquisti and Grossklags found the behavioral economics of inequity aversion to be at play when users make decisions to share their personal data: “In the privacy arena, it is possible that individuals are particularly sensitive to privacy invasions of companies when they feel companies are unfairly gaining from the use of their personal data, without offering adequate consideration to the individual.” With Google Buzz, it’s likely the case that users felt they were receiving relatively little in the way of new functionality (beyond what services like Facebook and Twitter currently offer), in exchange for automatically (and often unknowingly) giving up personal and social data. Hence, a sense of privacy violation is apparent in much of the negative backlash.
Privacy principles to consider in future design projects
Setting a user’s expectations of what and with whom their personal information is shared is clearly a critical step in developing a service. And in most cases, it’s not enough to provide a privacy policy at signup. Often, the economic principle of rational ignorance comes into play. As posited by Acquisti and Grossklags:
Ignorance can be considered rational when the cost of learning about a situation enough to inform a rational decision would be higher than the potential benefit one may derive from that decision. Individuals may avoid assessing their privacy risks for similar reasons: for instance, they may disregard reading a data holder’s privacy policy as they believe that the time cost associated with inspecting the notice would not be compensated by the expected benefit.
Privacy policies, often lengthy and rife with legalese, are generally not designed to give online service users greater understanding of the tradeoffs or probability of risks associated with opting in to a service or service feature.
As designers, we must also consider what Google learned from crossing two distinct modes of online social interaction. While Google stood to gain traction quickly by offering Google Buzz to its large installed base of Gmail users, crossing the modes of email and social networking through the “automatic follow” default was shortsighted. Users share different types of information through these two channels and communicate with different degrees of intimacy. This teaches us that when developing services that combine multiple modes of online communication, we need a clear picture of the behavioral norms of each of the channels incorporated into the design.
Brains, Behavior, and Design: Applying Behavioral Economics
February 11th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I took part in a workshop tonight to beta test an applied behavioral economics toolkit created by several of my colleagues at the IIT Institute of Design (the team included Ann Hintzman, Van Vuong, Miguel Cervantes, Jennifer Lee, Nikki Pfarr and Jerad Lavey). As described on the toolkit website:
In the real world, people are often irrational
Over the past few decades, researchers have codified many of the patterns that describe why people behave irrationally. As researchers, how can we be on the lookout for these patterns of behavior when we go into the field? As designers, how can we use our understanding of patterned irrational behavior to help people make better choices?
We are a group of graduate students at IIT Institute of Design working on an independent research project. We are developing tools that apply findings from the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics to the design process. These tools provide a head start on framing research as well as developing new strategies for solving user problems.
I highly recommend experimenting with this helpful toolkit which can be downloaded here. And feel free to send the team feedback as they further develop this system.
Designing for life after chemotherapy at Memorial Sloan-Kettering
December 16th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
For over six months, I was a warrior. From one infusion to the next, there was always another battle. Then came the end of chemotherapy. Driving home from my last appointment, I had to pull over. I was having a panic attack. What next? I was now a warrior without a war. It was just me. And the rest of my life. —Joan, Cancer Survivor
I just wrapped up a project for Memorial Sloan-Kettering as part of a seminar in Service Design taught by Mark Jones of IDEO. Joining me on the project were three of my colleagues from the Institute of Design: Jessica Striebich, Nikhil Mathew, and Julia (Joohyun) Lyoo.
While this presentation represents preliminary thinking toward providing a service design solution, there exists an undeniable void with regard to codified psychosocial care during and following chemotherapy. It’s also undeniable that many of the analytical tools and algorithms used to aggregate and analyze online sentiment can very practically be applied to tracking and visualizing a chemotherapy patient’s emotional journey.
It’s my hope that our thinking on low- and high-tech continuity of psychosocial care aids efforts at MSK and other cancer centers . . . drop me a line if you should happen upon this and find our thinking useful for similar projects.
In Memory of Pam Taucher: Inspiration for Cancer Care Service Design
November 5th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Two years ago today, Pam Taucher passed away following a long fight with breast cancer. Pam was my mother’s best friend and colleague and was like a close aunt to me. Her infectious sense of humor and lovingly brutal honesty are what I cherish on days like today.
I recently interviewed my mother toward better understanding what Pam went through as she received chemotherapy. This little piece of unedited, raw ethnography was conducted for a service design project I’ve embarked on for Memorial Sloan Kettering’s new Brooklyn chemotherapy clinic. With help from some extremely gifted colleagues from the Institute of Design, my hope is to learn from Pam’s experience toward creating a new approach for continuity of care following a course of chemotherapy. And who knows, maybe sharing raw footage like this will help someone on a similar quest.
We love you Pam, ashes scattered in the digital ether.
Microsoft reinvents the Trapper Keeper with Courier
September 23rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
The fanboy web is abuzz with the above conceptual video that demonstrates Microsoft’s proposed Courier in action. The Courier is a notebook-style tablet computer with gesture and handwriting recognition that uses the familiar activities of paper-based note-taking and scrap-booking as metaphors for how one would use the device. With all the speculation surrounding the forthcoming Apple tablet, some have suggested that Courier is a reminder that we shouldn’t take our eyes off Microsoft’s secretive work in the sub-laptop arena. But aside from the very well-produced concept mockup demonstrated here, what fascinates me about Courier is that it is built on a very different design metaphor compared to supposed mockups of the Apple tablet. That is to say, Courier emulates using a notebook . . . or dayplanner . . . or Trapper Keeper.
But is this the right design metaphor?
One could argue that this is the perfect blend of the familiar and the new that could open up a new category of mobile computing. But on the other hand, this could be limiting. Where the Courier demo excels at demonstrating the device’s exceptional on-the-fly note-taking and inspiration-gathering capabilities, it seems ill-fitted for media consumption. I can’t imagine using the device for entertainment content.
And herein lies a clear indication of how Apple and Microsoft will compete in the sub-laptop arena: Apple’s tablet will likely major in entertainment (no duh) while Microsoft will stake out mobile business and academic utility.
Stay tuned to see how this plays out. For now, I’ll take one of each.
Coke versus Pepsi: The humble systems thinker versus the design egotist
September 22nd, 2009 § 1 Comment
Over the past year, there’s been no shortage of press surrounding Peter Arnell’s failings with the Tropicana and Gatorade brand redesigns at Pepsi. I just read Fast Company’s Masters of Design feature on David Butler, head of design at Coke, and was impressed by the stark contrast he represents to Arnell’s approach. David Butler’s philosophy (not to mention personality) certainly sounds markedly different from Arnell’s “purveyor of pop culture” approach which found him on a “five-week world tour of trendy design houses” as a major source of inspiration for the Pepsi assignments:
“It’s great that when David speaks, he doesn’t speak in the language of design,” says Joe Tripodi, Coca-Cola’s global marketing chief. When he talks to folks on the manufacturing side, to the bottlers, to the retailers, Butler’s message, Tripodi says, “is very simple: Here’s what I’m going to do to help you sell more stuff.”
Contrast that with his counterpart, Pepsi’s design consultant, Peter Arnell, who titillated the blogosphere last spring with a 27-page memo he wrote called “Breathtaking,” defending his new logo design. He cited inspiration from da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to his Vitruvian Man, and described the “gravitational pull” of a can of Pepsi on a supermarket shelf. That was before he compared his genius at creating a 3-D Super Bowl ad to Thomas Edison’s invention of motion pictures. Many designers were mortified, fearing Arnell had discredited the whole tribe with his claptrap.
In many ways, Butler is the anti-Arnell, a first-class designer who shuns the latest trendspeak. “I read all the journals. I love design theory. I’m a junkie for that stuff. But that’s at home,” he says. “At work, I don’t use the phrase ‘design thinking.’ Here, it’s about creating more value. How do we sell more of something? How do we improve the experience to make more money and create a sustainable planet?”
David Butler is inspired by design theory and pop culture as much as the next designer, but his real drive comes from approaching big problems through systems thinking:
[Butler's experience at Studio Archteype] and a run-in with Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization changed the way Butler thought about design. He saw how systems thinking could be applied in a more holistic way. In the past, he says, design had been focused on straightforward problems: Come up with a drinking vessel, say. But now it was being asked to solve multipronged problems: How do we get clean drinking water? “We’re moving from linear problems to wicked problems,” he says, and the old default solution — hire a rock-star designer — no longer works. “The model of a master of design creating that magical object that is going to change the business is an old way of thinking. I can’t use it to work on wicked problems. I need to have capability internally.”
Side note: This trajectory was pioneered by Esslinger at frog design and is a major focus of his new book, A Fine Line:
Sensing the Nonsensical
September 17th, 2009 § 2 Comments
I’m a bit obsessed with this print by Chad Hagen, part of his Nonsensical Infographics series. It feels like the elusive framework we’re all searching for — you know, the one that helps us predict what’s next from what we glean from the present and past. A familiar sense from the nonsensical.
