Adaptive Path Blog

Hampus Jakobsson presented a fantastic talk at this year’s MEX conference about the “wild west” gold rush mentality surrounding mobile app stores. Hampus warned most players in the mobile space are merely mimicking Apple’s model, leaving many user experience challenges that hinder the app store experience unaddressed. This talk inspired a host of great discussions about many of the fundamental user experience issues that plague app stores and ways to improve the process through design.

However, Hampus’ talk brought focus to a question that’s been lingering on my mind for a while now. As the once innovative app store strategy quickly becomes “hygiene” for many in mobile, I can’t help but wonder if all this fast follower behavior is an incremental step to something much bigger.

What if the real problem with app stores doesn’t stem from Apple’s ridiculous application approval process, scalability problems, or mediocre social recommendation functionality? What if the real problem with app stores is what they are selling?

What if the real problem is the notion of applications on mobile phones?

Applications as a means for both expressing and manipulating information in a mobile context is an interaction model we’ve borrowed wholesale from the PC. While application stores have solved many issues – ease in application development, downloading applications to a device, payment – it’s easy to forget the application model was originally developed for a fundamentally different context. A static context.

What if we haven’t figured out how to accurately express information in a mobile context and we are simply borrowing the wrong model?

I’ve been thinking a lot these days about the notion expression – how artists, engineers and designers have used creative models and methods to express information, points of view, and the possibilities of their time – and moments when breakthroughs around creative expression have occurred.

The web is a great example of inventing new models and methods to express information.

Back in the days of “Web 1.0″ the internet was a vast and unexplored frontier, ripe with untapped potential. While the internet provided an entirely new way for people to access, distribute, and experience information, in 1996 nobody really knew how to create “web experiences” that unlocked that potential.

Legions of print designers applied their knowledge of graphic design and print design to the Internet, giving rise to the phenomenon of brochureware. Some designers applied immersive spatial metaphors to the web, like the famed SouthWest Airlines homepage circa 1996. And who can forget those web sites where pages had the look and feel of pages from a book. Regardless of the model, the strategy was similar; borrowing. We first borrowed models we understood, found our footing and were then able to invent new and more sophisticated ways to express information in a this new context of the web.

Art movements have followed a similar arc. A favorite example was the transition between Medieval and Renaissance Art.

A defining characteristic of Medieval art was it’s lack of dimensionality. Artisans from the Middle Ages hadn’t figured out how to represent form in perspective. Subsequently the work was highly symbolic and representational. It remains valuable and interesting work. However, from an art-making perspective, Medieval art is a study in abstraction. Artisans from the Medieval period lacked the art making methods to represent form in the way humans visually perceive it.

In contrast, Renaissance art celebrated the discovery of perspective techniques such as foreshortening, chiaroscuro and the use of balance and proportion in the art-making process. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael became masters of depicting form in a way that closely mirrored how humans perceive it. Humans were always able to perceive volume and spatial relationships, but it wasn’t until artists of the Renaissance discovered and honed perspective techniques that artwork reflected these qualities.

Data is similar to physical form in that it has perspective. We think about it along lines of place, time, and social dimensions… yet mobile applications rarely allow us to truly experience the multi-dimensional aspects of information. Instead, similar to Medieval art, mobile applications flatten data. Users are forced to either burrow deeply into single application or pogo stick across a host of lightweight applications, often with no through lines for the data. As we begin to prism data through more and more devices – televisions, car dashboards, screens in public spaces – the application model becomes brittle. It locks us into a way of thinking about information that doesn’t accurately represent the multi-dimensional ways we perceive and use it.

What if the app stores and “wild west” application development we’re seeing today in the mobile space is a re-enactment of the evolution of the web? What if mobile applications we download through Apple’s app store are the “brochureware” of what we will experience five years from now? What if applications are a borrowed and broken model we’ll ride out until the “perspective techniques” of data representation and manipulation in a mobile context are discovered and celebrated.

If applications go away, what will replace them? Compelling data visualizations? Adaptive interfaces? I’m not sure, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts…

Our pal Jeffrey Veen just posted a talk he gave at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo. Those who attended UX Week 2008 got to see a version of that talk seven months earlier (and you can see it here).

Given the coverage that Jeff’s talk is getting, I thought you might be interested in a couple other talks from UX Week 2008 that look at interface and interaction innovations. The first comes from Michal Migurski at Stamen, discussing their approach to data visualization (17 minutes):

Michal Migurski | UX Week 2008 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

The other comes from Darren David and Nathan Moody of Stimulant, sharing how they approach the design of large-scale multitouch interfaces (25 minutes).

Darren David & Nathan Moody | UX Week 2008 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

What’s most exciting for me is that Michael, Darren, and Nathan will all be teaching hands-on workshops at UX Week 2009. This will give you a chance to learn directly from these experts, and prepare you for the imminent design future. (Use the promotional code BLOG and get 10% off the registration price!)

Will we look back on the desktop experience of today in much the same way we reflect on computer punch cards of yore? If so, when will the desktop and mouse become irrelevant? How do people who want to explore the world of technology experiences that are free from the tethers of the keyboard and mouse begin?

These along with a host of other thought-provoking questions were among the topics of discussion, debate, and jest at last week’s Beyond the Desktop panel discussion. I was honored to be in the company of six brave and talented designers who are exploring the frontier beyond the desktop and thrilled to see such active interest in this topic by the San Francisco UX community.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes of the evening:

We’re still skeptics and I think that is an important perspective to have. I wouldn’t say the technology that we work with is better than anything out there right now, it’s just different. A lot of this is still a hammer looking for a nail. People come to us and say, “we want a multi-touch application.” and we say, “Why?” The challenge for us is developing an understanding for what this technology is well suited for. ~ Daren David

We use play in a lot of our design process. We find as we design stuff, we end up opening a box of things and emulate experiences on the table that way. That is one of the big things that has changed for us – our deliverables have gotten more physical and less visual. ~ Nathan Moody

The truth with all these emergent interactions and interfaces is that the conventions haven’t been established, so you don’t actually know how to work and you end up experimenting a lot more. ~ Noah Richardson

Prototyping used to be a luxury, but these types of emergent interactions, it is an important part of the design process. ~ Daren David

Often times the technology we’re designing for is still being developed. So there’s a lot of give and take and trying to understand what is possible… so we often have to attack from both ends. ~ Jennifer Bove

How do we go from bling to kaching? This is new and shiny right now, but five years from now when this become ubiquitous, what will be the meaningful experiences? And what will be the proper uses of these kinds of technology? ~ Daren David

It really comes down to experimentation. The recognition about a lot of this stuff and the reason I think a lot of people are here is that everybody recognizes and has this feeling that there is potential in this stuff, but we don’t really know what it is.
~ Jeevan Kalanithi

The common element all these interactions share is that they’re all more sociable. ~ Brett Fitzgerald

I have two Roombas in my house and they engage in gladiatorial combat. It’s awesome. I don’t feel like they’re gonna get hurt because they look like frisbees. ~ Nathan Moody

When your Roomba saves your life you won’t feel so cavalier about them. ~ Daren David

… there was a project that reminded us how different emergent interactions can actually open up different affordances and provide accessibility to people who haven’t had it. I have a two-year-old daughter and she instinctively knows how to use my iPhone. It’s frightening. And to see her walk up to the television and try to swipe it… you realize that some of the things being created by natural user interfaces really open things up…. I tend to be fairly optimistic with respect to technology and I think there is this notion of accessibility in a lot of the work that we are doing that we can take a fair amount of pride in. ~ Noah Richardson

I would advise people who want to start exploring interactions beyond the desktop to start by looking at the applications or experiences on the desktop they are currently designing and understanding that it is an instantiation of something that is probably broader. Start thinking about what happens when a user walks away from the computer. What are other the other opportunities? ~ Jennifer Bove

For those of you unable to attend the event, here’s a video of the 90 minute discussion:

Beyond the Desktop Panel Discussion from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Sketch note by Kate Rutter

Photo credits:
Panel discussion photo courtesy of Allison McCarthy
Sketch note photo courtesy of Jennifer Bove

Last week, Tim O’Reilly delivered a short address at the Web 2.0 Expo where he offered insight into the five applications he believes point the way for the evolution of the web.

Two themes stood out: sensors will surpass humans in front of their keyboards as the primary data source on the web and Moore’s Law will need to be applied to humanity’s greatest problems. (via ReadWriteWeb)

He cited Google Voice Search on the iPhone, an application that combines both voice and sensor input, as an important technology to watch.

One of our panelists – Noah Richardson, manager of Tellme’s Mobile User Experience group – will share his expertise designing voice-driven systems and interfaces.

He’ll be joined by the following all-star lineup:

I hope you can join us. If you can, please head over to Upcoming and let us know. And if you have ideas about the panel or the topics you’d like covered, comment here or twitter with #btdpanel

A podcast of Jesse James Garrett’s impassioned closing plenary from this year’s IA Summit is now available online via Boxes and Arrows.

Jesse’s assertion that we are all experience designers has stirred controversy within the community, and justifiably so. Professional identity is a slippery slope. However, I can’t help but feel Jesse’s important message is getting lost in these discussion threads. Arguing over the definitions of our roles and judging the value of the contributions of each does little good if it becomes divisive within our community. Instead, it distracts us from working together towards the more important common goal: to elevate the understanding of the user experience field to the world at large.

Regardless of your position on this issue, I hope you will give this podcast a listen. It is packed with inspiring messages and ideas. My hope is that it will inspire you to generate a discussion about how we can work together to pursue the ideas – not discussions about our roles, or our processes – but ideas about how we can improve broken experiences in the world, and the big problems our industry can help solve.

Mobile is a realm of user experience that has long held my imagination because it’s an accessible opportunity space for designers to explore, prototype and ultimately invent new ways for people to interact with information. Mobile is a place where we can experiment; it’s a place where designers can test the tethers of the PC desktop legacy and create interactions that begin to bring Mark Weiser’s original vision of ubiquitous computing closer to reality.

There have been clear and consistent signals over the last year that indicate the technology landscape is rapidly evolving beyond the boundaries of the PC and mobile devices …

The demo from MIT’s Pattie Maes’ and Pranav Mistry’s wearable Sixth Sense device as well as David Merrill’s Siftables demo were the buzz of TED 2009. These presenters gave the audience of thought leaders insight into the exciting interactions that will be possible in the not-so-distant future.

IBM’s research scientists in India have developed a technology that will offer users the ability to talk to the Web and create ‘voice’ sites using mobile phones.

Barcodes can now hold entire video clips and games with Mobile Multi-Colour Composite, a 2D barcode technology. Better than a QR code, users don’t need internet access to discover associated media—the data is all in the picture.

These signals as well as a host of others indicate we’ve arrived at an important and magical technological inflection point. We’re entering an era – a Golden Age of sorts – that is encouraging interaction designers and user experience professionals to explore the frontier that lies beyond the desktop.

Within this broader trend, I’ll be hosting a discussion on Wednesday, April 8th at Adaptive Path titled, Beyond the Desktop: A Panel Discussion on Emergent Interaction Paradigms. I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to have the opportunity to facilitate a discussion between these thought leaders who are actively exploring this exciting frontier…

• Aza Raskin, head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs will discuss the progress of Ubiquity and represent the promising world of intent-based systems.
• Brent Fitzgerald, and Jeevan Kalanithi of Taco Lab will share their experiences developing Siftables and exploring the realm of physical computing.
• Noah Richardson, manager of Tellme’s Mobile User Experience group, will share his expertise on designing voice-driven systems and interfaces.
• Nathan Moody and Daren David of Stimulant will share their perspective on designing NUI and multi-touch interfaces for the Microsoft Surface Table and other public, multi-user computing installations.
• Jennifer Bove, a Principal at Kicker Studio, will share her perspective and expertise in designing products with gestural interfaces.

I hope you can join us. If you can, please head over to Upcoming and let us know. And if you have ideas about the panel or the topics you’d like covered, comment here or twitter with #btdpanel

Would you take a moment to support me in the Pay Yourself First savings blog-off? I still need 8000+ more votes by March 31. It only takes a click (on the homepage, click my icon to vote): http://www.pyfchallenge.com

In my last post, I wrote about some common human tendencies that keep us from doing what we want to do (like save money) and lead us to do what we don’t want to do (like overspend or overeat).

As one of the minority INTPs in the world, I’m actually more likely to be “ridiculously rational” than “predictably irrational.” I’ll suffer through a 2-layover flight because I realize that in the long run, I’d rather have the $100 I’m saving. As such, I’ve found a few ways to overcome some of these biases. These tactics include:

Reframing scenarios to see if I’d change my mind by changing my thinking. A $15 checked bag fee doesn’t seem like much in light of a $250 flight, but if someone offered to pay me $15 to drag my stuff around in a carry on, I would probably do it!

Multiplying costs over time. At $20 a month, AT&T’s premium DSL service costs an extra $240 a year. Was the extra speed boost worth it? I decided it wasn’t, and downgraded.

Translating dollars into concrete examples. $240 a year is the cost of an iPod Touch. Would I rather have an iPod touch, or faster internet? While it might be nebulous, it makes me think. An iPhone would cost me $1500 more than my current plan over 2 years. While it might be convenient — when I’m out and don’t know where to eat — the savings alone wouldn’t justify the cost. (I could take a lot of dining risks for $1500!)

While these strategies can help anyone think more rationally about financial decisions, this way of thinking doesn’t come naturally to most people, and even if it did, there are other barriers to saving that are difficult for even the most disciplined individuals to overcome. This is where interaction design can help.

For anyone designing for consumer finance — banking, investing, billpay, money management tools, insurance providers or any business selling “savings” as a value proposition (as a consultant, I’ve learned a lot through having had opportunities to touch all of these areas) — here are some design principles you can employ to make saving a little easier for us all:

Create perceptions that motivate.

Create attachment to savings.
A sense of ownership creates attachment and an irrational resistance to giving things up. (That’s why those Tempurpedic “30 day in-home trials” are so successful.) Why not leverage this inertia to create attachment to savings? My dad has a jar of quarters he’s been collecting for years. He hates tapping into it except on special occasions. While it’s no different than the money in the bank, his sense of attachment to it is much stronger. Could designers foster this same sense of attachment to “virtual” money — or perhaps to the things you’re saving that money for? If you’re saving for a house, perhaps as you save, you earn more and more digital pieces of your dream house. Tapping into savings takes away those pieces.

Cultivate accurate mental models.
Because most investment communications emphasize the current value of your portfolio, people tend to panic and sell low, when they’re “losing” money, and buy high, when stock prices are soaring. What if instead, investment communications made shares feel more tangible — something you want to hold on to and only sell when you can get a good price for them? After all, buying a share of stock is simply like buying an object — say, a rare painting or trading card — that goes up and down in value. As long as you have the painting, you don’t really lose anything until you sell it. Would you rather sell your rare painting when the going price is low — less than you paid for it — or when it’s high?

Reframe.
Instead of raising auto insurance rates for bad drivers, State Farm offers discounts to good drivers. Think about it for a moment, and you’ll realize it’s the same thing — but the way it’s framed affects people’s motivations and perceptions. People perceive budgeting to be about restricting oneself. But what if budgeting were reframed as buying gift cards for each category — Entertaining, Dining, Gifts, etc. — that you can feel free to spend until they’re gone?

Make the abstract concrete.

Map concepts to real-world counterparts.
Budgeting doesn’t have to feel like complex accounting. Financial advisors have been recommending the easy-to-grok “Envelope Budgeting System” for years. Instead of treating budget categories like database categories, some budgeting software lets people divide their money into virtual “envelopes.”

Translate dollars into reality.
Retirement calculators often project savings in terms of how many “millions of dollars” you’ll have saved by retirement. By what does a million dollars mean 20-30 years from now? Is a million dollars a good thing or a bad thing? Instead of using loaded numbers (who doesn’t want to be a millionaire?), show what a million dollars looks like in terms of lifestyle: A million dollar retirement, which amounts to about $40,000 a year, won’t get you a mansion on the beach, but for a retiree, it could still mean a modest home in a decent neighborhood.

Provide immediate, emotional, actionable feedback.
I’ve heard that keeping my idle devices and power supplies plugged in all day could be costing me, but not knowing how much that really amounts to makes it hard to feel motivated to unplug everything daily. While this visualization helps  — I’m glad I don’t have a Plasma TV, or I’d be spending $160 a year to keep it plugged in! — seeing my energy bill add up like a Taxi fare would help and seeing trees dying might be even more compelling. (As Robert Fabricant joked, vines are the future of interaction design).

Make hidden costs visible.
I’ve already blogged enough about hidden costs, but here’s one more example. Being able to see the true cost of a credit card purchase at the point of sale — based on your own card’s APR and your payment patterns — might change your mind about dipping into credit.

Equip the mind to control the flesh.

Arm the mind.
Humans are conflicted beings — “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” When we’re feeling rational, we try to find ways to reign in or control the flesh — we put our alarm clock on the other side of the room, we rid our houses of chocolate and sweets, and even freeze our credit cards in ice water to force a waiting period before making impulse buys (Google it!). The mind wants to be able to control the flesh. Stickk.com arms the mind to do so by letting people create goals and set up their own punishments/rewards for meeting these goals.

Leverage social nudges.
Everyone’s been talking about the energy bill that compares you to your neighbors. But less known is the “boomerang” effect that it had. According to Nudge, when people were told their power consumption was less than their neighbors, below-average users actually increased their use. But when the message was accompanied by a smiley face icon, this effect disappeared. If even an icon of social approval or disapproval can make a difference, real social pressure could be even more powerful. What if people could hold themselves accountable by keeping public spending logs, the way TheDailyPlate lets people keep public food logs?

Make saving as easy as spending.
If it were as easy to save as it is to spend, the mind wouldn’t have to plot against the flesh so much! Charities know that the checkout line can be a powerful place to solicit donations — adding a few dollars to your grocery bill to provide milk to school children feels painless. What if there were a way to leverage these “open-wallet” moments to prompt savings? Instead of asking if you want cash back, what if the register prompted you to transfer $20 to savings?

Architect complex choices carefully.

Complex financial decisions — like setting up a 401k — are especially challenging and full of hurdles. People procrastinate about joining 401k plans because they don’t know how much to set aside, and once they do, they don’t know how to allocate it. When they do set it up, people are often unwittingly influenced by the language used, the options offered and the order in which they are presented. For example, when offered a choice between just two funds — an all bonds fund and an all stocks fund — people tended to engage in what Nudge calls, “naive diversification” — splitting their money 50/50 between the two. “Choice architecture” can have significant and costly impacts on people’s futures, which means there is a lot of responsibility to get it right. Nudge offers much more detailed insight into architecting complex choices.

These are some of the most interesting principles I’ve been reading about, thinking about or uncovering through work on consumer-facing finance tools. If you have other ideas or principles you can share, I’d love to see them in the comments!

If you’re not familiar with Siftables, watch the TED Talk.

Peter Merholz: At TED, you demonstrated Siftables, small “smart” blocks that can interact with one another in interesting ways. What opportunities does Siftables provide in overcoming existing computing paradigms?

David Merrill: Computation used to be in short supply. In the old days of punch-cards, a programmer had to check, double-check, and triple-check their program before they dared to feed it into the machine, because once it ran they were kicked to the back of the queue. If the program had a bug it could be the next day before they got a chance to run their program again. The high cost of bugs meant that experimentation was risky, and programs were written conservatively.

As a result, most people back then had a rather limited view of what computers were good for. They calculated missile trajectories and year-end figures, but the lucky researchers that had enough free access to create video games or embryonic electronic music systems were few and far between.

Today computation has become incredibly plentiful. The netbook I am using to write this essay is so powerful it would have been a classified state secret 30 years ago. The result of our surplus of computation is that we can now use computers in ways that are much more exploratory. Programs can be recompiled in seconds when a bug is discovered. It is often more efficient to whip up a code experiment to try a new idea and see what happens, rather than spending too much time deliberating and double-checking. We now have UNDO.

The observation that has driven my work throughout graduate school, and that continues to drive it forward, is that computers can still be so much more than they are today. Our present-day surplus of computation has been a game-changing advancement towards making the computer a better tool. Looking forward, the major problem is not anymore the amount of computation we have, it’s how we can interact with that computation.

User interface advances can expose new possibilities for how the computer can become a more seamless extension of our minds and bodies. Consider the Nintendo Wii for example. The gestural interaction brought many new users (women, the elderly) into the action, and — equally importantly — created possibilities for gameplay that didn’t even exist before. The graphical user interface (GUI) was a similar (but even larger) revolution in usability that expanded the expressivity of our interaction with the machine, and we are vastly more productive as a result. In both cases the user interface advance tapped into a latent skill that had not yet been utilized by computers; the Wii leverages bodily motion and the GUI leverages spatial memory and visual recognition.

The motivation for Siftables was a realization that there was no human-computer interface that simultaneously leveraged our visual search/pattern-matching capabilities and our manual dexterity for handling collections of objects. Imagine a pile of Legos on the table in front of you, and think about how you would inspect, then sift and sort the pieces in search of particular ones or to categorize them into groups. We skillfully manipulate collections of objects all the time — when we interact with game pieces and playing cards, stacks of photographs, toys such as marbles or toy cars, food bits when we are cooking, and more. These activities involve our eyes (scanning, recognizing) and both hands (grasping, moving), and the vision for Siftables is that they would replicate this type of interaction but for digital content, taking advantage of our existing skills.

Siftables offers a new point in the interaction design space between tangible and graphical user interfaces. It combines elements of both paradigms — physically embodied manipulatives that can be grasped and moved by hand, and screens that can show arbitrary visual information. The inclusion of a screen on each Siftable is a key feature, since it allows interactive roles and content assignments for programs to be visually legible to the user and dynamically assigned at run-time. Tangible systems that use non-graphical blocks or tiles must either assign fixed behavior to each manipulative (which is not as flexible), or project graphics around them (which limits mobility). Siftables attempts to be mobile and physically embodied, while retaining the flexibility of graphical displays.

It is worth noting is that we do not necessarily need to overcome existing paradigms for every task that we do with computers, and Siftables are not a user interface panacea. For instance, I don’t think Siftables are the right tool for writing text documents. For that activity, the keyboard and mouse — or perhaps speech recognition systems — are already doing a pretty good job.

In my opinion, the most exciting step forward that Siftables provides is the possibility for new types of applications and interactions. Think about the millions of flowers that bloomed (software flowers, that is) after the GUI supplanted the command-line. Siftables has the potential to offer a similarly fertile platform for application areas like gaming and entertainment, logistics and scheduling, controlling large-scale complex models, musical performance, education and beyond. We have just scratched the surface with the applications that have been created for Siftables at MIT.

This is a pretty special time in history when electronics and sensing have become so miniaturized, so inexpensive, and so capable. The technology to realize the next generation of interactive tools has arrived, and our task is to invent them. Siftables is a step towards this next generation. I truly believe that as we invent interactive systems in the twenty-first century the limiting factor is no longer the technology, rather it is our own imagination.

Would you take a moment to support me in the Pay Yourself First savings blog-off? I still need 8000+ more votes by March 31. It only takes a click (on the homepage, click my icon to vote): http://www.pyfchallenge.com

If I’ve been quiet on the AP blog lately, it’s because I’ve been busy blogging about ways to save money as a finalist in FNBO Direct’s Savings Competition. Since money is also hot topic around Adaptive Path (be sure to read about Julia’s upcoming “It’s Your Money” event!), and we seem to be working with a lot of financial clients lately, I thought I’d start a blog series on The User Experience of Money. Whether you work in the financial industry or are looking to influence your own behavior, I hope these posts will be helpful!

What makes saving money so hard? If people were truly rational — if we were the self-interested, perfectly rational “homo economicuses” that most economic theories assume we are — saving would be easy.

We’d understand that financial security will ultimately satisfy us more than a $5 mocha on a chilly day.

But humans are curious creatures — as a growing number of books are bringing to popular attention, from our own Subject to Change to Dan Ariely’s bestseller, Predictably Irrational — and we tend to make “irrational” decisions again and again. Interestingly, despite the complexity that makes us human, behavioral economists like the authors of my favorite, Nudge, have begun to notice some trends. Humans, unlike Homo Economicus, don’t always make optimal decisions, we make intuitive decisions.

These automatic decisions are not whimsical, however, but rather they reflect consistent biases towards that which is:

• Concrete (hot chocolate vs. retirement)
• Immediately Available (those darn M&Ms at work — I don’t even like M&Ms!)
• Free (in an Ariely study, while only 27% preferred 1 cent Hershey kisses to 15 cent Lindt truffles, 69% preferred FREE Hershey kisses to 14 cent Lindt truffles)
• Familiar (if Hershey is the only name you recognize in a list of investment choices, you might be tempted to pick it, just as a lot of young investors gravitate towards familiar brands like Apple)
• Perceived to be Normal (if you’re sitting with friends who are all drinking espresso, you might be dissuaded from being the only one drinking whipped cream-laden hot chocolate)
• Already Ours (studies show that while people might not buy a $1000 espresso machine, if they won one in a raffle, they’re quite resistant to selling it, even for the same price)

Because of these biases, we are especially likely to make inoptimal decisions when:

• We can enjoy the benefits now and won’t see the cost til later (so we crank up the heat in the winter and rarely make adjustments based on a monthly energy bill)
• We don’t really know what we prefer (so we choose the 401k options with the greatest past returns, since we don’t know whether we prefer a “capital appreciation” fund or a “dynamic dividend” fund)
• We don’t receive immediate, concrete or actionable feedback (so we put off transferring money to savings, because we can’t wrap our brain around how much interest we’re losing)

While most of the great trials of our age, from healthcare to sustainability, are characterized by these kinds of decisions, the good news is that interaction design is uniquely suited to fill these information gaps.

In my next post, I’ll explore how design can (and has) helped. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about biases and choice architecture, I highly recommend any of the books mentioned above, especially Nudge.