petersironwood

Where Does Your Loyalty Lie?

Comes the Dawn

Dog Trainers

The Dance of Billions

Roar, Ocean, Roar

Imagine All the People

Your Cage is Unlocked

I Went in Seeking Clarity

10 Wednesday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized, psychology, creativity, user experience, HCI, AI

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

AI, Artificial Intelligence, coding, parallel programming, problem formulation, problem framing, problem solving, programming, technology, thinking, tools, X10

“I stopped by the bar at 3 A.M.
To seek solace in a bottle or possibly a friend
And I woke up with a headache like my head against a board
Twice as cloudy as I’d been the night before
And I went in seeking clarity” — Lyrics from The Indigo Girls: Closer to Fine

If you think programming is cognitively difficult, try parallel programming. It is generally harder to design, to code, and to debug than its sequential cousin. One of the fun projects I worked on at IBM Research was on the X10 language which was designed to enable parallel programmers to be more productive. Among other things, I fostered community among X10 programmers and used analytic techniques to show that X10 “should be” more productive. Although these analytic techniques are very useful, we also wanted to get some empirical data that the language was, in actuality, more productive.

Photo by Dominika Greguu0161ovu00e1 on Pexels.com

One part of those empirical studies involved comparing people doing a few parallel programming tasks in X10 to those using a popular competitor. But, like many other “chicken and egg” problems, there were no X10 programmers (other than the inventors and their colleagues). I was part of a team who travelled to Rice University in Houston. The design called for one group to spend a chunk of time learning X10 (perhaps half a day) and another chunk of time coding some problems.

Besides the three behavioral scientists like me who were there to make observations, there were also three high-powered Ph.D. computer scientists present who would teach the language. Programmers tend to be very smart. Parallel programmers tend to be very very smart. People who can invent better languages to do parallel programming? You do the math.

Anyway, after the volunteers students had arrived, one of the main designers of the language began to “teach them” X10.

But — there was a problem.

The powerpoint presentation designed to teach the students X10 was far too blurry to read!

Immediately, the three computer scientists tried to issue commands to the projector to put the images in focus. Nothing worked. The three of them began a fascinating problem solving conversation. The conversation concerned what communication protocol(s) among the PC, the projector, and the controller was the likely source of the problem. I suppose it might not have been fascinating to everyone, but it was to me. First, it fascinated me because I was learning something about computer science and communication protocols. Second, it fascinated me because I loved to watch these people think. I suppose many of the advanced computer science students who were in this classroom to learn X10 also found it interesting. Third, I found it fascinating because my dissertation was about human problem solving and I’ve been interested in it ever since.

But the study itself had completely stalled.

After a few minutes of fascinating conversation that did nothing to focus the images, something possessed me to walk over to the projector and turn the lens by hand. The images were immediately clear and the rest of the experiment continued.

The three computer scientists had “framed” the problem as a computer science problem and I found the discussion that sprang from that framing to be fascinating. But one of the part-time jobs I had had as an undergraduate was as a “projectionist” at Case-Western, and it was that experience that allowed me to try framing the problem differently. All of us have huge reservoirs of experience outside of our professional “training” and those experiences can sometimes be important sources of alternative ways to frame a problem, issue, or situation.

———————————-

Essays on America: The Update Problem

Essays on America: The Stopping Rule

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

Labelism

Tools of Thought

Where Does Your Loyalty Lie?

Stoned Soup

Travels with Sadie: Teamwork

The Primacy Effect and The Destroyer’s Advantage

I Say: Hello! You Say: “What City Please?”

09 Tuesday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in AI, creativity, design rationale, HCI, management, psychology, Uncategorized, user experience

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

art, communication, conversation, Design, efficiency, HCI, human factors, photography, primacy, problem framing, problem solving, sensemaking, technology, thinking, UX

In the not so distant past, people would often call directory assistance operators. These operators would find a number for you. For an additional charge, they would dial it for you. In fact, this was a very commonly used system. Phone companies would have large rooms filled with such operators who worked very hard and very politely, communicating with what was often a hostile and irrational public.

Customer: “I have to get the number of that bowling alley right near where the A&P used to be before they moved into that new shopping center.”

Operator: “Sir, you haven’t told me what town you’re in. Anyway…”

Customer: “What town?! Why I’m right here in Woburn where I’ve always been!”

There were so many operators that the phone companies wanted their processes to be efficient. Operators were trained to be friendly and genial but not chatty. The phone companies searched for better keyboards and better screen layouts to shave a second here or there off the average time it took to handle a call.

There are some interesting stories in that attempt but that we will save for another article, but here I want to tell you what made the largest single impact on the average time per call. Not a keyboard. Not a display. Not an AI system.

It was simply changing the greeting.

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com

Operators were saying something like: “New England Telephone. How can I help you?”

After our intervention, operators instead said, “What city please?” It’s shorter and it’s takes less time to say. But the big change was not in how long the operator took to ask the question. The biggest savings was how this change in greeting impacted the customer’s behavior.

When the operator begins with “How can I help you?” the customer, or at least some fraction of them, are put into a frame of mind of a conversation. They might respond thusly:

“Oh, well, you know my niece is getting married! Yeah! In just a month, and she still hasn’t shopped for a dress! Can you believe it? So, I need the number for that — if it were up to me, I would go traditional, but my niece? She’s — she’s going avant-garde so I need the number of that dress shop on Main Street here in Arlington.”

Photo by Tuu1ea5n Kiu1ec7t Jr. on Pexels.com

With the “What City Please?” greeting, the customer was apparently put into a more businesslike frame of mind and answers more succinctly. They now understand their role as proving information in a joint problem solving task with the operator. A typical answer would now be:

“Arlington.”

“In Arlington, what listing?”

“Dress shop on Main Street.”

The way in which a conversation begins signals what type of conversation it is to be. We know this intuitively. Suppose you walked up to an old friend and they begin with: “Name?” You would be taken aback. On the other hand, suppose you walk up to the line at the DMV and the clerk says, “Hey, have you seen that latest blog post by J. Charles Thomas on problem framing?” You would be equally perplexed!

Conversation can be thought of partly as a kind of mutual problem solving exercise. And, before that problem solving even begins, one party or the other will tend to “frame” the conversation. That framing can be incredibly important.

Even the very first words can cause someone to frame what kind of a conversation this is meant to be.

Words matter.

https://petersironwood.com/2018/02/13/context-setting-entrance/

Cancer Always Loses in the End

After the Fall

The Crows and Me

Come Back to the Light

Imagine All the People…

Roar, Ocean, Roar

The Dance of Billions

Travels with Sadie

The Walkabout Diaries: Bee Wise

Donnie Visits Granny!

You Must Remember This

The Pandemic Anti-Academic.

What about the butter dish?

Problem Framing: Good Point!

08 Monday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in AI, America, design rationale, HCI, management, psychology, story, Uncategorized, user experience

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

AI, art, life, politics, problem finding, problem formulation, problem framing, problem solving, technology, thinking, tools, USA

You have probably heard variations on this old saw, “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” I’ve also heard, “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” There is also this popular anecdote:

One night, I took my dog out for a walk and I noticed one of my neighbors under a nearby street lamp crawling around on his hands and knees, apparently looking for something. I walked over and asked, “What are you looking for?”

“My car keys!” He replied.

I have pretty good vision, so I helped him. I didn’t see any car keys so after a minute or so I asked, “Where exactly did you lose your keys?”

He stood up, cracked his back, and pointed back to a nearby park. “Over there.”

“Over there?! Then, why are you looking under the street lamp? Why aren’t you looking over at the park entrance?”

“Oh, that’s obvious! The light is so much better here!”

For a time, I had to very interesting and challenging job in the mid 1980’s at IBM Headquarters to try to get the company to pay more attention to the usability of their products and services. As a part of this, I visited IBM locations throughout the world. At one fabrication plant, our tour guide took us by an inspection station. This was not an inspection statement for chips. It consisted of one person whose job was to look through a microscope and make sure that two silver needles were perfectly aligned.

After we left the station, our tour guide confided that they were strongly considering replacing the person with a machine vision system. The anticipated cost would be substantial, but they hypothesized that the system would be more accurate and faster. It was, our host, insisted, just the nature of humans to be slow and inaccurate.

Maybe.

When I looked at the inspection station however, with my background in human factors, I had a completely different impression of the situation. The inspector sat on a fixed height stool and had to bend his neck at an absurd angle to look into the microscope. He was trying to align these silver needles against a background that had almost the same hue, brightness and saturation.

Other than blindfolding the man, I’m not sure what they could have done to make the task more unnecessarily difficult. I suggested, and eventually, they implemented, a few inexpensive ergonomic changes and time and accuracy improved.

Like other companies in the technology segment, IBM often saw problems as ones that could be solved by technology. At that time, technology systems was their main business. Since then, they have expanded more fully into software and services. In fact, those services now include experience design.

If you find yourself enamored of technology in general, or some specific class of technology such as machine vision, speech recognition, or machine learning, you might overlook much simpler and cheaper ways to solve problems or ameliorate situations. Of course, you might lose some revenue doing that, but you can also win long term customer loyalty.

Even if you are a hammer, everything is not a nail.

That applies as well to User Experience. You might design the most wonderful UX imaginable for a particular product or service. But if it is shoddily made so that it is error prone; if it lacks important functionality; if the sales force is inept; or if service is horrible, those failures can completely overwhelm all the good work you have done on the UX. Because of the nature of UX, you might learn important knowledge or suggestions for other functions as well. It often requires finesse to have such suggestions taken seriously, but with some thought you can do it.

During my second stint at IBM, I worked for a time in a field known at that time as “Knowledge Management.” One of our potential clients was a major Pharma company who felt that their researchers should do a better job of sharing knowledge across products. They wanted us to design a “knowledge management system” (by which they meant hardware and software) to improve knowledge sharing.

Simply building a “Knowledge Management System” would be looking under the streetlamp. They knew how to specify a technology solution from IBM and have it installed.

However — they were unwilling to provide any additional space, time, or incentives for their employees to share knowledge with their colleagues!

Photo by Chokniti Khongchum on Pexels.com

They were convinced that technology would be the silver bullet, the solution, the answer, the Holy Grail, the magic pill. They viewed technology as less disruptive than it would have been to change employee incentives, or space layout, or give them time to actually learn and use the technology system.

This reaction to “knowledge management” was not unique. It was common.

To me, this seems very similar to the notion that health problems can all be solved with a magic pill. What do you think?

—————————————

Since originally writing, we have had the spectacle of DOGE: Destroying Our Government’s Effectiveness under the excuse of making it “more efficient.” It might be (as I strongly suspect) that the destruction was quite intentional. It might be (as some think) that it was accidental. In either case, the result was predictable because the method was guaranteed not to work to actually make things more efficient. If you really wanted to do that, you would take the time to understand a system before trying to redesign it. You would identify all relevant stakeholders and get their input. You would not redesign a system using a gang of young hackers but instead use an interdisciplinary team of experienced experts. You would check out your redesign both with those who were doing the work and with at least one group who were not familiar but had similar experience. Then, on the basis of feedback, you would redesign. When you were sure that you had the design right, you would not then institute it everywhere but in one small trial installation.

There’s a pill for that.

The invisibility cloak of habit.

Process re-engineering comes to Baseball

E-Fishiness in Government

Author Page on Amazon

Tools of Thought

Reframing the Problem: Paperwork & Working Paper

04 Thursday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in AI, creativity, design rationale, HCI, management, psychology, Uncategorized, user experience

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

AI, ethics, leadership, life, philosophy, politics, problem finding, problem formulation, problem framing, problem solving, thinking, truth

Reframing the Problem: Paperwork & Working Paper

This is the second in a series about the importance of correctly framing a problem. Generally, at least in formal American education, the teacher gives you a problem. Not only that, if you are in Algebra class, you know the answer will be an answer based in Algebra. If you are in art class, you’re expected to paint a picture. If you painted a picture in Algebra class, or wrote down a formula in Art Class, they would send you to the principal for punishment. But in real life, how a problem is presented may actually be far from the most elegant solution to the real problem.

Doing a google search on “problem solving” just now yielded 208 million results. Entering “problem framing” only had 182 thousand. A thousand times as much emphasis on problem solving as there was on problem framing. [Update: I redid the search today, a little over three years later. On 3/6/2024, I got 542M hits on “problem solving” and 218K hits on “problem framing” — increases in both but the ratio is even worse than it was in 2021] [Second update: I did the search today, Dec. 4th, 2025, and the information was not given–but that’s the subject of a different post].

Let’s think about that ratio of 542 million to 218 thousand for a moment. Roughly, that’s 2000 to 1. If you have wrongly framed the problem, you not only will not have solved the real problem; what’s worse, you will have often convinced yourself and others that you have solved the problem. This will make it much more difficult to recognize and solve the real problem even for a solitary thinker. And to make a political change required to redirect hundreds or thousands will be incalculably more difficult.

All of that brings us to today’s story. For about a decade, I worked as executive director of an AI lab for a company in the computers & communication industry. At one point, in the late 1980’s, all employees were all supposed to sign some new paperwork. An office manager called from a building several miles away asking me to have my admin work with his admin to sign up a schedule for all 45 people in my AI lab to go over to his office and sign this paperwork as soon as possible. That would be a mildly interesting logistics problem, and I might even be tempted to step in and help solve it. More likely, if I tried to solve it, some much brighter & more competent colleague would have done it much faster.

Photo by Charlie Solorzano on Pexels.com

But why?

Why would I ask each of 45 people to interrupt their work; walk to their cars; drive in traffic; park in a new location; find this guy’s office; walk up there; sign some paper; walk out; find their car; drive back; park again; walk back to their office and try to remember where the heck they were? Instead, I told him that wasn’t happening but he’d be welcome to come over here and have people sign the paperwork.

You could make an argument that that was 4500% improvement in productivity, but I think that understates the case. The administrator’s work, at least in this regard, was to get this paperwork signed. He didn’t need to do mental calculations to tie these signings together. On the other hand, a lot of the work that the AI folks did was hard mental work. That means that interrupting them would be much more destructive than it would to interrupt the administrator in his watching someone sign their name. Even that understates the case because many of the people in AI worked collaboratively and (perhaps you remember those days) people were working face to face. Software tools to coordinate work were not as sophisticated as they are now. Often, having one team member disappear for a half hour would not only impact their own work, it would impact the work of everyone on the team.

Quantitatively comparing apples and oranges is always tricky. Of course, I am also biased because my colleagues are people I greatly admire. Nonetheless, it seems obvious that the way the problem was presented was a non-optimal “framing.” It may or may not have been presented that way because of a purely selfish standpoint; that is, wanting to do what’s most convenient for oneself rather than what’s best for the company as a whole. I suspect that it was more likely just the first idea that occurred to him. But in your own life, beware. Sometimes, you will mis-frame a problem because of “natural causes.” But sometimes, people may intentionally hand you a bad framing because they view it as being in their interest to lead you to solve the wrong problem.

Politics, of course, takes us into another realm entirely. People with political power may pretend to solve one problem while they are really following a completely different agenda. One could imagine, for instance, a head of state claiming to pursue a war for his people when he’s really doing it to keep in power. Or, they could claim they are making cities safe by deploying troops when they are really interested in suppressing the vote in areas that can see through his cons. Or, a would-be dictator could claim they are spending your tax dollars to make government more efficient when that has nothing to do with what they are *actually* doing–which is to collect data on citizens and make the government ineffective in order to have people lose confidence in government and instead invest in private solutions.

Even when people’s motivations are noble or at least clear, it is still quite easy to frame a problem wrongly because of surface features. It may look like a problem that requires calculus, but it is a problem that actually requires psychology or it may look like a problem that requires public relations expertise but what is actually required is ethical leadership.

——————————————————

A Pattern Language for Collaboration and Cooperation

The Myths of the Veritas: The First Ring of Empathy

Essays on America: The Stopping Rule

Essays on America: The Update Problem

My Cousin Bobby

Facegook

The Ailing King of Agitate

Dog Trainers

Ban the Open Loop

29 Monday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, essay, HCI, politics, psychology, Uncategorized, user experience

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

AI, Democracy, life, technology, truth, USA

Soon after I began the Artificial Intelligence Lab at a major telecom company, we heard about an opportunity for an Expert System. The company wanted to improve the estimation of complex, large scale, inside wiring jobs. We sought someone who qualified as an expert. Not only could we not locate an expert; we discovered that the company (and the individual estimators) had no idea how good or bad they were. Estimators would go in, take a look at what would be involved in an inside wiring job, make their estimate, and then proceed to the next estimation job. Later, when the job completed, no mechanism existed to relate the estimate back the actual cost of the job. At the time, I found this astounding. I’m a little more jaded now, but I am still amazed at how many businesses, large and small, have what are essentially no-learning, zero feedback, open loops.

As another example, some years earlier, my wife and I arrived late and exhausted at a fairly nice hotel. Try as we might, we could not get the air-conditioning to do anything but make the room hotter. When we checked out, the cashier asks us how our stay was. We explained that we could not get the air conditioning to work. The cashier’s reaction? “Oh, yes. Everyone has that trouble. The box marked “air conditioning” doesn’t work at all. You have to turn the heater on and then set it to a cold temperature.” “Everyone has that trouble”? Then, why hasn’t this been fixed? Clearly, the cashier has no mechanism or no motivation to report the trouble “upstream” or no-one upstream really cares. Moreover, this exchange reveals that when the cashier asks the obligatory question, “How was your stay?” what he or she really means is this: “We don’t really care what you have to say and we won’t do anything about it, but we want you to think that we actually care. That’s a lot cheaper and doesn’t require management to think.” Open Loop.

Lately, I have been posting a lot in a LinkedIn forum called “project management” because I find the topic fascinating and because I have a lot of experience with various projects in many different venues. According to some measure, I was marked as a “top contributor” to this forum. When I logged on the last time, a message surprised me that my contributions to discussions would no longer appear automatically because something I posted had been flagged as “spam” or a “promotion.” However, there is no feedback as to which post this was or why it was flagged or by whom or by what. So, I have no idea whether some post was flagged by an ineffectual natural language processing program or by someone with a grudge because they didn’t agree with something I said, or by one of the “moderators” of the forum.

LinkedIn itself is singularly unhelpful in this regard. If you try to find out more, they simply (but with far more text) list all the possibilities I have outlined above. Although this particular forum is very popular, it seems to me that it is “moderated” by a group of people who actually are using the forum, at least in many cases, as rather thinly veiled promotions for their own set of seminars, ebooks, etc. So, one guess is that the moderators are reacting to my having simply posted too many legitimate postings that do not point people back to their own wares. Of course, there are many other possibilities. The point here is that I do not have, nor can I easily assess what the real situation is. I have discovered however, that many others are facing this same issue. Open loop rears its head again.

The final example comes from trying to re-order checks today. In my checkbook, I came to that point where there is a little insert warning me that I am about to run out and that I can re-order checks by phone. I called the 800 number and sure enough, a real audio menu system answered. It asked me to enter my routing number and my account number. Fine. Then, it invited me to press “1” if I wanted to re-order checks. I did. Then, it began to play some other message. But soon after the message began, it said, “I’m sorry; I cannot honor that request.” And hung up. Isn’t it bad enough when an actual human being hangs up on you for no reason. This mechanical critter had just wasted five minutes of my time and then hung up. Note that no reason was given; no clue was provided to me as to what went wrong. I called back and the same dialogue ensued. This time, however, it did not hang up after I pressed “1” to reorder checks. Instead, it started to verify my address. It said, “We sent your last checks to an address whose zip code is “97…I’m sorry I’m having trouble. I will transfer you to an agent. Note that you may have to provide your routing number and account number again.” And…then it hung up.

Now, anyone can design a bad system. And, even a well designed system can sometimes mis-behave for all sorts of reasons. Notice however, that designers have provided no feedback mechanism. It could be that 1% of the potential users are having this problem. Or, it could be that 99% or even 100% of the users are having these kinds of issues. But the company lacks a way to find out. Of course, I could call my Credit Union and let them know. However, anyone that I get hold of at the Credit Union, I can guarantee, will have no possible way to fix this. Moreover, I am almost positive that they won’t even have a mechanism to report it. The check printing and ordering are functioned that are outsourced to an entirely different company. Someone in corporate, many years ago, decided to outsource the check printing, ordering, and delivery function. So people in the Credit Union itself are unlikely to even have a friend, uncle or sister-in-law who works in that “department” (as may have been the case 20 years ago). So, not only does the overall system lack a formal feedback mechanism; it also lacks an informal feedback mechanism. Tellingly, the company that provides the automated “cannot order your checks system” provides no menu option for feedback about issues either. So, here we have a financial institution with a critical function malfunctioning and no real process to discover and fix it. Open loop.

Some folks these days wax eloquent about the up-coming “singularity.” This refers to the point in human history where an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system will be significantly smarter than a human being. In particular, such a system will be much smarter than human beings when it comes to designing ever-smarter systems. So, the story goes, before long, the AI will design an even better AI system for designing better AI systems, etc. I will soon have much to say about this, but for now, let me just say, that before we proceed to blow too many trumpets about “artificial intelligence systems,” can we please first at least design a few more systems that fail to exhibit “artificial stupidity”? Ban the Open Loop!

Notice that sometimes, there may be very long loops that are much like open loops due to the nature of the situation. We send out radio signals in the hopes that alien intelligences may send us an answer. But the likely time frame is so long that it seems open loop. That situation contrasts with those above in the following way. There is no reason that feedback cannot be obtained, and rather quickly, in the case of estimating inside wiring, fixing the air conditioning signs, providing feedback on why there is “moderation” or in the faulty voice response system. Sports must provide a wonderful venue that is devoid of open loops. In sports, you see or feel the results of what you do almost immediately. But you underestimate the cleverness with which human beings are able to avoid what could be learned by feedback. Next time, we will explore that in more detail.

As I reconsider the essay above from the perspective of 2025, I see a federal government that has fully embraced “Open Loop” as a modus operandi — in some cases, they simply ignore the impact of their actions. In other cases, they do claim a positive impact but it is simply lies. For instance, it is claimed that tariffs are “working” in that foreign countries are paying money to America. That’s just an out and out lie. So, the entire government is operating with no real feedback. We are told that ICE will target violent gang members and dangerous criminals. The reality of their actions is completely disconnected from that.

The Trumputin Misadministration works with no loop at all that correctly relates stated goals, actions taken supposedly to achieve those goals, and the actual effects of those actions. That can only happen when the government accepts and celebrates corruption. But the destruction will not be limited to government actions and effects. It will tend to spread to private enterprise as well. Just to take one example, if unchecked by courageous and ethical individuals, sports events will become corrupted.

Photo by Mark Milbert on Pexels.com

There’s money to be made by “fixing” events and there will be pressure on athletes, managers, referees, to “fix” things so that the very wealthy can steal more money. Outcomes will no longer primarily be determined by training, skill, and heart. Of course, as fans learn over time that everything is fixed, the audience will diminish, but not to zero. Some folks will still find it interesting even if the outcome is fixed like the brutal conflicts in the movie Idiocracy, the lions eating Christians in the Roman circuses, or the so-called “sport” of killing innocent animals with high power guns. It’s not a sport when the outcome is slanted. Not only is it less interesting to normal folks but it doesn’t push people to test their own limits. There’s nothing “heroic” about it. Nothing is learned. Nothing is really ventured. And nothing is really gained.

Photo by Gareth Davies on Pexels.com

———–

Where does your loyalty lie?

My Cousin Bobby

Essays on America: The Game

The Orange Man

The Forgotten Field

Absolute is not Just a Vodka

Plans for US; Some GRUesome

Travels with Sadie 1

The Walkabout Diaries

At Least he’s Our Monster

The Ant

The Self-Made Man

The Fault is in Defaults

27 Saturday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, HCI, management, politics, Uncategorized, user experience

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

art, Customer experience, defaults, Design, google maps, HCI, printer, scanner, technology, UI, user experience, UX

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Photo by egil sju00f8holt on Pexels.com

So Cassius says to Brutus in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. Cassius was trying to convince Brutus to join the plot to assassinate Caesar. As I recall, things did not turn out well for Julius Caesar. Or for Brutus. Or for Cassius. Or, ultimately, for Mark Anthony either, but that’s another story.

The point is that an interesting tension arises when we imagine that we ourselves are the masters of our fate. We like to imagine that it is our ability, or attitude, or grit that determines how much money or happiness or health we have. On the other hand, we also realize that many things are pretty much beyond our conscious control and due largely to our heredity, our environment, our upbringing, etc. Both views are partly true and both have their place.

If you are a user of a product and you want to get something accomplished, blaming the stupid product will not help you accomplish your goals. On the other hand, if you are a product developer, it will not help you to blame your user. You need to design thoughtfully.

I was reminded of this debate by trying to scan a document. In general, I am amazed how excellent scanners and printers are today, not to mention cheap! I was born in an era of expensive, heavy, noisy, dot matrix printers or teletypes. You’ve come a long way, baby! But the software that actually lets us use these marvelous machines? Here, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Today, I repeatedly tried to scan a one page document to no avail. I think I finally diagnosed what the problem was. The scan screen came up with a default that said “custom size” and the defaulted “custom dimensions” were 0 by 0. Because, obviously, the development team had done a thorough study of users and found, I suppose somewhat surprisingly, that the most common size of image people wanted to scan was 0 by 0. I suppose such images have the advantage that you can store many more of them on your hard drive than images that are 8.5 by 11 inches or 3 inches by 5 inches, say.

This absurd default is not an isolated example. Often there seem to be “defaults” are rather odd, to say the least. My google map application, for no discernible reason, decided that a good default location for me is the geographical center of the continental United States. It was not “born” with this default but somewhere along the line “developed” it. Why? I have never travelled (knowingly) to the geographical center of the United States. I have never wanted to “find” the geographical center of the United States. Yet, for some mysterious reason, whenever I do try to find a route to say, the dentist who is ten miles away, the map app tries to send me from Southern California to the geographic center of the US and then back again. I can eventually get around this, but next time I open up the app, there we are again.

Of course, I am tempted every time to just to see the place (near the corners of Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri. And, “with no traffic”, it only takes a little over 22 hours to get there. The phrase, “with no traffic” in Southern California is equivalent to “when pigs fly.” So, tempting as it is to drive 22 hours to the geographical center of the US and then 22 hours back (provided the sky if filled with flying pigs) in order to go to the dentist who is a few minutes away, I haven’t yet actually taken that particular trip.

I am tempted to rant about the absolute ludicrosity of “sponsored links” (which cheeringly informs me that I could take a side trip to a gynecologist on the way to the dentist) but I’ll try to stay on topic. Where do these defaults come from? Is this just a nerd’s nerd free choice as a perk of the job? Do they seriously conceptualize size in terms of a two dimensional grid with an origin at zero zero and therefore this is a “logical” default for paper size? Are they trying to do the user a favor by saving space?

I am hoping there is a product manager out there who can answer these questions. I am hoping things will turn out better than they did for Caesar and Brutus and Cassius.

Now, a more serious impact of “defaults” have insinuated their way into my daily life. That would be bad enough, but this insinuation has also found its way into the lives of my relatives, my friends, my neighbors, my countrymen, and even my fellow humans throughout the world.

For about 250 years, America had a default that different political parties would play by the same set of rules. Of course, parties sometimes pushed at these rules or interpreted them somewhat differently. They argued and debated about which criteria were most important for various offices. But the default for both parties was that we lived in a democracy; that the citizens choose their leaders; that the truth matters; that we keep our agreements; that our leaders don’t simply use their position of power to line their own pockets and settle their private grudges.

Those defaults are now out the window. All of them. The result will soon be inefficient and ineffective government but it won’t stop there. When government officials are open to bribery, then private businesses will tend to be led by people with lower standards of ethics. They, in turn, will tend to hire people with lower standards of ethics. They, in turn, will treat their customers more cavalierly, more contemptuously. Customers, in turn, will care less about being civil to the people whom they interact with. And so it goes.

Sometimes, there’s a good reason for defaults.

Dick-taters

The Truth Train

Pattern Language for Collaboration and Cooperation

Tools of Thought: What Comes Next?

Tools of Thought

Travels with Sadie 1

The Walkabout Diaries: Bee Wise

Newsflash: MUSAK does not compensate for bad customer experience

25 Thursday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, essay, HCI, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

bad music, customer service, customerexperience, Design, HCI, humanfactors, IVR, Musak, UI, userexperience, UX, wordpress

Newsflash: Playing really low quality Musak while the customer is on hold for 40 minutes does not improve the customer experience. Nor, does always playing the message that you are experiencing “unusually heavy volumes” right now improve your credibility. Now, I admit that someone in marketing who thought about for about 15 seconds *might* think that playing really bad music would be a good thing. After all, people do pay money to listen to music. Not everyone is a pirate. And, people spend a lot of time listening to music. Here’s the thing that might come to you if you study the rocket science surrounding this situation for about 20 or 30 seconds. People pay to listen to the music they choose. They do not pay to hear the music you choose. Furthermore, people pay to listen to music that is high quality. Granted, sometimes, when nothing else is available some of the people some of the time would prefer low quality music to no music at all. But no-one chooses absurdly bad quality music over silence. One more thing: unless you are a love-struck pre-teen, you do not listen to the same short sequence of music over and over and over and over for an hour at a time. No. You listen to a piece of music. Then, you listen to a different piece of music. Then, you listen to a different piece of music.

Now, I do grant that it is somewhat useful if you are going to put your customers on hold for 40 minutes that you give some sort of signal other than complete silence to show that you are still there and haven’t had the system “hang up” on them (which happens all too often but is another topic). But playing loud, obnoxious, very low fidelity music is not the answer.

Back to credibility. If you are really monitoring the call volume and the customer calls at a time of really unusual high call volume, you may want to tell them that they would have better luck another time. But if you always play this message, what do you think it does to your credibility? I am amazed to find that my credit union, an otherwise fine institution, always plays this message. And every single time, it makes me think twice about whether I can really trust my funds to an organization that clearly lies every single day.

You might think that it’s bad for business to lose credibility. Of course, it is. But it’s far more than that. It’s a betrayal of the very thing that makes us human. We did not succeed in covering so much of the planet by having the sharpest claws or teeth. Nor is it because of our great strength. It’s because our language enables us to learn from each other across time and space and culture. That happens when people trust each other and are trustworthy. Of course, one may gain a short-term advantage by lying. But the long term impact of enough lies is nothing less than the complete breakdown of human civilization.

A Lot is not a Little

A Parachute Ripped by Lies

Dick-Taters

You Bet Your Life

That Cold Walk Home

The Pandemic Non-Academic

True Believer

The word “simply” should be banned.

24 Wednesday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, HCI, psychology, satire, Uncategorized, user experience

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

books, Complexity, consumer products, food, health care, packaging, Simplicity, UX

So, in 2013, I changed from four medical plans to four different medical plans to six plans for 2014. Thank goodness we don’t have a “single payer” system because there is nothing I love more than pouring through a hundred pages of text for each plan which is mainly garbage but occasionally has important information. There is nothing more fun than ping-ponging among doctors every time your plan changes. Oh, wait! I forgot that in addition to the plans I *actually* had, IBM also sent me huge packets of information on plans that were no longer relevant. In the midst of all this, I was heartened to find a concise 72 page document from my dental plan which also informs me: “Please note: if you are a previous user of MyBenefits, you can still enjoy all the same features under the new plan. Simply visit (our website) and re-register with an updated username and password for access to your new plan.” It is the word, “simply” that I object to. Indeed, in some parallel universe, there is probably a time and place for the word “simply” but in has no legitimate place in actual 21st century America. It *invariably* signals this message: “We are going to make this difficult for you. But we don’t want to come out and say that so we will preface our instructions with the word ‘simply’ so when you do have trouble you won’t have anyone to blame but yourself.”

(Why do I need a different userid and password?). Anyway, you know the drill. You go to the website and the first six userids that bear any resemblance to your name are taken. But they don’t typically tell you that till you also enter a password. And, of course, there are the typical “security questions” such as “What sized underwear did you wear in the fourth grade?” “What was your second grade teacher’s maiden name?” “What was the name of the company you bought your first ant farm from?” And so on.

This ironic use of “simply” is not confined to websites. It also applies to packaging as in, “SIMPLY remove the plastic overwrap.” Yeah. But, what if you left your chain saw in the garage? “Simply, tear the plastic along the indicated line.” In the rare case, when it is physically possible to tear, it never tears evenly. More typically it is some semi-metalic plastic that requires an industrial laser cutter. the most recent example involved two different kinds of dry cat food. These were nearly impossible for me to “simply” open. I left the bags for a few minutes to get an exacto knife and when I returned two minutes later, my CATS had indeed simply opened the packages and spread the contents around the hallway. For all I know, they might have actually ingested a piece of cat food but it was clear that their main intent was simply to cause a mess. The reason they could open the packages simply is that they have cat claws! I don’t! Not sure what genius came up with the idea that packages of cat food should be opened simply by cats but not simply by humans.

A variant on the use of industrial grade titanium plastic the requires war-appropriate hardware to open, is the soft, slippery plastic around cheese or ham that actually does open easily under a specific set of conditions. You have to be young. You have to have a strong grip. You have to have fingerprints–mine are gone (because of using too many touch screens?) Most importantly, your hands must be completely dry and free of any trace of any kind of oil.

Luckily, when preparing food, one’s hands never get damp or oily. Not if everything you touch is already pre-packaged in a box or a can. Of course, if you’re foolish enough to use fresh vegetables or fruits, you may be tempted to wash off bacteria and poison. You can do that, but you have to wait at least forty hours before attempting to open a package that requires you to “simply” tear off the tab.

And, while we’re on the subject of tear off tabs, did you ever wonder what kind of a bonus the MBA whiz kid who first mathematically modeled the MRA (Minimally Required Area) for a pull-off tab? I sometimes add a dollop of milk to my coffee and get one of two brands of milk. One has a pull-off tab of aluminum foil that allows me to use my bare hands to tear off the tab (even if they are a bit moist). The second brand sometimes has a plastic tab which is usable. But sometimes, it has a tab of aluminum foil carefully calculated to bear a visual resemblance to a usable tab but which, in fact, is only about 1/20th the surface area required to actually use it. The marketers however, have made it quite clear that I can open it by “simply” pulling the tab. And that is true, provided I use pliers.

Since the word “simply” has simply gone out of fashion in its true meaning, I think we should simply ban its use. Period.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Pexels.com

Photo by lil artsy on Pexels.com

Corn on the Cob

Doing the Dishes

The Self-Made Man