Adaptive Path Blog

Many times, the most effective interactions aren’t media- and or technology-based. They are just people, interacting with each other. I was reminded of this today at SFO, waiting for my flight to Las Vegas for the IA Summit.

I travel a lot. As I stood at the check-in kiosk, staring at the “delayed” notice flashing insistently at me, I got that sinking feeling in my stomach, felt my bags get heavier and my throat get drier. Travel stress set in.

I staggered over to the security line, boarding passes and ID in one hand, wallet in the other. My backpack and camera bag were falling off my shoulders.

“If you are carrying mascara, toothpaste, mouthwash, hair gel, whiskey, vodka, liquid makeup, lipstick, lotion, or any other liquid it must be under 3 ounces and you must remove it from your bag for inspection. All liquids must be under 3 oz in size. This means that if you have a 9 oz tube of toothpaste with only one ounce of toothpaste left in it, you cannot take it through security. If you have water bottles you must…”

Like a town crier, the TSA officer’s booming voice listed the things you could bring and the things you couldn’t. He cracked some jokes. People giggled. They asked him questions.

He went on and on. “He thinks he’s funny,” I muttered. But I wasn’t laughing — I was tired and annoyed. Just as I began to feel like some sad proletariat in an anti-utopian novel, I heard the following exchange:

“Do they make you say that stuff?” a passenger asked. My ears perked up.

“No, but it seems to help.” the TSA officer said brightly. “We have this sign,” he gestured towards a sign I had completely missed, “but it turns out nobody reads the sign and nobody listens to recorded voices.”

Standing there, stressed out in the security line, I was reminded:

I can design all the signs I want.

I can record James Earl Jones dramatically reading liquid requirements.

I can make web sites, pamphlets, and kiosks.

But, if harried air travelers don’t listen to recorded voices and they don’t read the signs, well, I might as well be Sisyphus, pushing a giant rock up a hill for all eternity. And I’ll bet a bazillion dollars those harried travelers aren’t checking the web site for liquid regulation updates.

As the TSA officer reminded me, people will listen to a human being, especially a funny one, standing right in front of them. If he tells them what they need to know and nicely answers questions they have, well, the travelers might actually listen. His solution may not be elegant or flashy, but it worked.

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(Or, Making Hidden Costs Visible, Continued…)

“Turn off those lights, you’re wasting energy!”

Growing up, I did it cause my dad told me to, and I do it now because I know in the back of my head that running the lights must be costing me. But it’s hard not to be apathetic about it: The costs of household energy consumption, both to my wallet and the environment, are far too invisible to affect immediate decision-making and behavior.

Lucid Design Group recognized that a once-a-month energy bill isn’t enough to change behavior and developed the “Building Dashboard,” a system with a widget-like interface that aims to “translate consumption into everyday units that a non-technical audience can understand — dollars, lightbulbs, carbon dioxide.”

“It is difficult to motivate building occupants to take actions that conserve resources if they cannot easily sense and react to the implications of their decisions.

Research demonstrates that easily accessible feedback on resource use increases both awareness and motivation to act in ways that change attitudes, minimize resource use and save money.

A Building Dashboard™ display provides uniquely interpretable graphics for a non-technical audience and creates opportunities for active learning through feedback that are not otherwise available.”

It’s a great concept. Unfortunately it’s not something that I, the building resident and consumer, could set up and use — it’s something that must be implemented by a green-minded architect or building manager.

Now if only there were more services like this that could make such information available and accessible to the masses. Perhaps the energy companies could provide such a service? What kind of infrastructure does it take to implement designs for widespread behavioral change?

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At SXSW, David Thomas interviewed me on the subject of what retailers could learn from taking an experiential point of view. Watch the video, or listen to the podcast.

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We wrote about it last week, and today the Los Angeles Times offers a thoughtful opinion on “Starbucks’ ‘venti’ problem”.

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Earlier this week a memo between the Chairman and the CEO of Starbucks titled “The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience” was supposedly leaked out. Here’s a synopsis of some of our thoughts on the memo’s contents:

Ryan says:

I know the memo is allegedly confirmed, but I’m calling bulls*** on this one.

It’s just a too-tidy deconstruction of every problem Starbucks has had in maintaining it’s experience in the last 5 years. It reads more like a paean to the small, folksy store experience that only ever existed in the minds of the people who designed it.

If it is true, and written by the chairman to the CEO, then it’s a remarkable gift to every single one of Starbucks’ competitors. Differentiation based on even one of the points Schultz raises could be a nice way to increase store visits and overall consumer ratings for a Tully’s or even Dunkin Donuts.

That said, every point in there is true.

Andy says:

I agree about the points raised. They are spoken well by someone with a clear insight to the daily operations and vibe of a Starbuck’s store.

I wonder if they can undo some of the things they’ve done “for the better.” It seems inevitable that to grow as fast and efficiently as they did, some of these practices had to happen. But it also seems that it may be too expensive to turn the ship at this point.

Brandon says:

The described progression of choices (no matter who wrote it) is reminiscent of the issues we heard at the MX Conference about how over-reliance on bucket testing and other decision-making tools can lead to a short-term ROI wins but long-term lapses in focus. By making many smaller, logical decisions you may end up painting yourself into a corner, unsure how you got there.

But, hey, I shouldn’t get the last word…

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When it comes to thinking about the true cost of things, ignorance is bliss. People prefer that costs be hidden:

• It feels cheaper to drive to work than to take transit. You see the money leave your pocket for every transit trip. But the annual thousand-dollar insurance bill and depreciation of your car are more easily forgotten.
• It feels better to have taxes invisibly withheld than to write regular checks to the IRS and come face-to-face with the taxes you’re paying.
• It feels better to get “free parking!“ at your apartment or local grocery store than to pay for parking, even if it might mean lower everyday prices.

Now with a little thinking you can calculate the true monetary costs of many things. But environmental and social costs are even more elusive.

Hidden costs lead to a breakdown of capitalism. People are unable to make optimal decisions because they don’t consider the true costs of things. It’s easy to see a price tag, but it is difficult to take into account all of the factors that make up something’s true cost.

How can hidden costs be made visible? An obvious solution is to pass the financial burden on to the consumer.

• Charging for plastic bags (IKEA)
• Transferring the full cost of oil to consumers

Unfortunately, while taking advantage of market forces, these measures also tend to make people grouchy.

Jennie Winhall’s talk at MX on Designing for Social Good has made me think about ways that we, as user experience designers, could use our understanding of psychology and behavior to develop creative and positive solutions that help people see hidden costs and make better decisions. Some examples…

Grouchy experience: Big warning sign featuring fines you’ll receive if you dump toxic waste into a storm drain.
Positive experience: Design storm drains to look like fish. You wouldn’t want to dump junk on a cute fish.

Grouchy experience: A taxi-like money ticker that shows you how much every trip in your car is really costing — in real time!
Positive experience: A taxi-like money ticker that shows you how much you’re saving when you drive more slowly and that turns fuel and money-saving into a game. (”One important reason why hybrid cars result in better mileage is that drivers suddenly have an indication of how various aspects of their driving habits shape mileage.” -Jamaias Cascio)

Other ideas?

But I’ll end with a caveat that experience isn’t everything when it comes to hidden costs. Sometimes facing reality will make us uncomfortable, and that’s not always bad.

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Jennie Winhall

Red Project: Addressing social and economic issues through design-led innovation. How public services can be transformed through design skills. In the past, did work redesigning prisons (design for rehabilitation). Did work on domestic energy consumption, and redesigned better interactions with Members of Parliament.

Big push on public sector reform, for the first time looking at the experience of the end-user.

There are limits on modernizing existing services. Shells of services were designed a long time ago and society has changed. Demand outstrips supply. And now looking at a new range of social issues (climate change, obesity, etc.)

Need to help people co-create their own decisions. Which would be fine if people made rational decisions, but they don’t. Easier to build new power plants than to change every person’s behavior.

The public sector needs a new generation of public services. Preventative, co-created, and around individuals.

Health care project: can we use the characteristics of communities of participation to create new health care services? Redesign the interactions with patients and doctors to be more collaborative and interactive. Created a set of cards with issues and statements that the patient can use to talk to doctors about. Shifts the power from the system to the patient. It forces a different kind of behavior. Very adaptive–allows doctors and patients to get straight to the problem.

Exercise project: How do you make exercise social? Activmobs. werearemobs.org Self-organizing system. Rather than try to prototype it ourselves, actually made three activmobs and watched what they did and designed the system around what arose. Social dynamics were very important: support and peer pressure. A number of the tools developed were about increasing self-awareness. What is important to users. Also a lot about progress and visualizing progress. Especially as a group. It’s important to make things visible.

Designing for Behavior Change
Go beyond shaping products, to realizing that the products we make shape behavior. Metrics have to be meaningful to individuals. Self-assessment.

Can’t use a delivered service process. People need to shape the service itself and thus you can’t design the service entirely. You need to distribute tools to people.

Aspiration is important. Users have to want to participate.

Services have to be more desirable than owning the product itself.
New kind of disciple: transformation design.

Transformation Design
Half the skill of design is identifying the correct problem to solve. Problems are complex and require systems thinking and inter-disciplinary thinking. Integrate non-design aware people into the process.

Reinventing the organization to deliver the new offerings. Top-down structures aren’t working. Need to embed a culture of innovation onto an organization so that when designers leave, it doesn’t all collapse. Build capacity, not dependency.

Lots of non-traditional design outputs. Things like job descriptions, not just things.

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In Geoffrey Moore’s very old post on Digital Ecosystems (I’m still catching up on 2006), he highlights the tension that emerges between the concept of “product” and “service” when your product is delivered online:

“Services Displace Products. In the digital world, as bits substitute for atoms, products are reconceived as services. This is the threat that Google poses against Microsoft.

Services companies still have not completely caught up with this. They tend to describe their offers as products, which, although convenient as a means for integrating them into traditional organizational thinking, profoundly misrepresents their dynamics and causes companies to miss whole dimensions of consumer experience, need and value.”

Now much of the rest of the post was just gobbly-gook to to me, but the mix-up between the notions of products and services felt very familiar. When a service is created online, it’s often still sold as a product: how it’s packaged, priced, and then how it’s delivered.

One easy example of a missing dimension of customer experience is surprise. Off-line services have those well-timed surprises that aren’t built into online services. You get a lollipop at the barber, an occasional free drink at your favorite bar, the revealing of your entrée at dinner. Perhaps we’re working so hard at delivering the expected that we forget to plan for the unexpected?”

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Next week’s near-simultaneous launches of Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii console present a huge challenge for retail stores trying to satisfy eager gamers. To deliver a better experience to customers, Best Buy has distributed a “playbook” to its stores detailing the business value of managing the experience, providing best practices for handling the crowds on launch day, and even mapping out the customer’s path through the store and where to have employees stationed to answer questions.

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I’m having a two-week conversation with Jim Leftwich and WELL members about interaction design starting today over at the Well’s Inkwell Interview series.

Update: Non-members can participate in the conversation by sending an email with your comments to inkwell [at] well [dot] com.

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