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.
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.
When will Facebook give us an iPhone app that does something remarkable? Here’s one idea.
September 4th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Last week, Facebook released the latest iteration of their popular iPhone app. While the user experience is significantly improved, the Facebook app sadly remains little more than a miniaturized version of the Facebook website. This “lazy” approach to mobile app development certainly isn’t unique to Facebook. iTunes is littered with apps that merely mimic consumer websites, thus failing to offer brand experiences particular to the iPhone and its unique modes of use. (One notable exception is the Amazon iPhone app, which offers Amazon Remembers, an assisted shopping service specifically designed for mobility and iPhone functionality.)
What’s perhaps most disappointing about Facebook’s approach is that they have been slow to develop new services that take advantage of the wealth of in situ user-reported data about our activities, moods, and behaviors.
Consider Facebook’s now dominant role as a photo-sharing site. At its busiest, Facebook loads 550,000 photos each second, and you can assume that a fair share of these photos are uploaded or viewed via Facebook’s apps for smartphones. Now consider the metadata associated with these photos: The user’s GPS location, compass orientation, the time and date the photo was taken, whom else is present (via photo friend tags), and associated captions and concurrent status updates that provide some semantic cues as to what the photo literally and emotionally represents to the end user.
Get the picture?
The Facebook mobile app, and more specifically, the Facebook iPhone app is a powerful generative platform for an entire range of new services that Facebook could (and frankly, should) offer.
Imagine using Facebook’s deep archive of profile data and in situ metadata to find places and events around town that fit your desires at a moment’s notice. Imagine having the ability to automatically view photos from your profile and the profiles of friends associated with a given location, time, or mood (“Placebooks,” anyone?).
To show you what this might look like, here is a very preliminary Facebook mobile app concept called “Sugar” I developed with two of my colleagues from the Institute of Design:
So where is mobile social networking heading? And what may lie ahead for Facebook?
Loopt, a location-based social network certainly grasps the power of in situ real-time user data and has recently begun offering “always on” service for users, allowing them to be alerted of the activity of nearby friends. While it is yet to be seen whether this type of service will achieve wide-scale adoption, it is an indication of what Facebook should be considering in future iterations of its mobile app (with the proper privacy features, of course). And to be fair, it seems Facebook may already be exploring such an idea with Nokia.
Mobile is the future of Facebook. When will Facebook begin to fully grasp this?
