Career Advice from Polonius

20 Saturday Mar 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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career, HCI, human factors, usability, UX

Career Advice from Polonius: To Thine Own Self be True

“To thine own self be true.” This advice comes from Polonius who is giving advice to his son in Act I, scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Polonius says: “This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Let’s focus on the first part.

One of the dreams of education is to customize teaching to the specific learning style(s) of individual students. This was a hot topic when I was in graduate school.

Around 50 years ago.

Some day, your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren may be the beneficiaries of learning experiences that are individualized to their specific styles. I wouldn’t hold my breath, but it could happen. It isn’t only a question of research on what various styles are and how to present material that resonates with these various styles. There is also the question of priorities and dollars and personnel.

But meanwhile, here’s the good news. You don’t have to wait for another 50 years of research and a reshuffling of priorities so folx spend more money on education and less on, let’s say, cosmetics and professional sports. As I say, don’t hold your breath.

But let’s get back to the good news. The good news is that you can discover for yourself how to maximize your own learning as well as what your particular talents are.

One cautionary note: Don’t be a jerk about it. If you’re in a group dealing with grief, don’t say, “Well, I learn best if a subject is reduced to a few hundred polynomial formulae. So, let’s start right there. Let’s reduce grief to three dimensions. Later, of course, we can do a proper multidimensional scaling exercise to determine the optimal number of dimensions.”

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No. Don’t say that. Of course, you’re free to suggest that approach, but chances are, in this situation, and in most realistic group situations, you will be treated to information in the same manner as many others who have different styles from yours.

However, in many situations, you are, far and away the main important stakeholder. You can use your knowledge of how things work for you in order to strategize and plan how you will learn about things. You can organize and arrange your work so you’ll be more productive.

Here’s a trivial example. I have learned that my eyes have a wisdom of their own. If, for instance, I’m going out for a walk around the garden to take some pictures of the sunset on the flowers, I grab my stuff and find myself turning and staring at the hat-rack on the way out the door. When I was younger, I would ignore this. But what I have learned is that my eyes are really good at knowing what to look at. So, even if I’m in a hurry, I take a moment to reflect on why my eyes are looking there. And, then, it comes to me. I’ll do better if I wear a brimmed hat to keep the sun out of my eyes while I look at my iPhone.

By paying attention to this little quirk, I’ve saved myself a lot of grief over the years; e.g., not left the house without my wallet, etc.

Here’s another example. I’m very good at seeing “patterns” emerge from a small number of examples or when there is considerable noise involved. This serves me well as my hearing diminishes because I can use top-down processing. Generally, but not always, I understand what people are saying. If I try to listen to a foreign language tape that is only isolated audio words, I have no hope of knowing what they are saying. “Key” “Tee”, “Pea”, sound exactly the same.

Seeing patterns easily is generally a nice capacity. However, I’m horrible at finding my own typos immediately after I write something. I actually “see” what I meant to type. A week later, I’m pretty good at catching the errors. If I had more patience, I would wait a week to proofread for every blog post, but being patient isn’t a strength either. I do go back over old posts occasionally and fix the typos (which I never saw at the time).

When I go to the movies — remember when we used to go to movies? — anyway, if I went to a comedy, I was very likely to laugh too soon. I “hear” the punchline two lines earlier than it actually occurs. There’s no benefit to my laughing early! But that’s when the punchline hits me. I do keep it soft so as not to disturb the others in the audience. On the other hand, I’m pretty good at “discovering” the playing patterns of my tennis opponents and anticipating what they are going to do. Naturally, I don’t always guess right, but I do way better than chance.

I bring up these examples to illustrate a generality; that most of these individual differences have an upside and a downside. Mainly, learning about my own styles and capacities is something I learned well after leaving high school. That makes sense. In school — or at least, the schools I went to — everybody got the same instruction in the same way almost all the time. But as an adult, you often have a lot of control over your own timing, flow of information, etc. I think it’s worth your while to look back at your experience and discover what you have difficulty with, what you’re OK at and what you are exceptionally good at. When you have a choice, use the approach you’re really good at.

—————————————-

More background on “knowing yourself”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself

History of Know Thyself

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

16 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

efficiency, HCI, human factors, problem framing, problem solving, 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 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 impact on the average time per call. Not a keyboard. Not a display. Not an AI system.

It was simply changing the greeting.

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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 is 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 John 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.

The Primacy Effect and The Destroyer’s Advantage

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

Essays on America: Wednesday

Author Page on Amazon

Getting Into (the “right”) Shape

07 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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Tags

cats, consumer products, Design, form, function, HCI, human factors, kittens, usability, UX

A truism we have all heard is that “form should follow function.” I tend to agree with this as a good general principle, but only if the designer has given more than 30 milliseconds of thought about what the actual function is. Even better is to observe function being used in practice. Below, I give examples of how form may look like function but not actually follow (actual) function.

The first comes from the complex and technical domain of nail clippers. My nails are tough and I actually need to use toenail clippers to cut my fingernails. But the same principle applies to both fingernail clippers and toenail clippers. I see many many examples where the designer has attempted to curve the surface of the nail clipper to “match” the curve of nails. This is a brilliant idea, but only if every nail on every human being on the planet has the same curvature. A priori, I would tent to think this is not the case, but being empirically oriented I decided to test it out by actually looking at real nails. I looked at my thumbnail and the fingernail on my little finger. Sure enough, my hypothesis was borne out. They are NOT the same. What this means is that a nail clipper that is curved so that it fits my pinkie will wreak havoc when applied to my thumbnail. I am probably going out on a limb here, but I suspect that if one were to include fingernails from other people in this sample, one might find an even wider variation in curvature. What are people thinking when they make curved nail clippers? I can only speculate that they have never looked at the fingernails of more than one person and that, indeed, they never looked at more than one fingernail on that one person.

If only there were a solution. Sigh. Oh, wait! There is a solution. Make the cutting surface of the nail clippers flat. This enables the person to clip nails of any curvature. It does, of course, require multiple cuts. It has the added advantage, that if you so wish, you can sharpen your nails so they resemble cat claws.

Cats bring me to my second example. When we moved to California amid a large garden, we wanted to let our cats to spend most of their time outdoors, partly so litter box cleaning would be at a minimum. Unfortunately, we soon discovered that while the outdoors here offers many opportunities for cats to be hunters of lizards and mice, it also offers even more opportunities for them to be prey for bobcats, cougars, eagles, and especially coyotes.

Now, here is a beautifully shaped litter box (a gift). It even has a place for the cats to clean their paws before they track litter back into the living room. Nice. Unfortunately, this is a beautiful shape by someone who has never cleaned a litter box, at least not by litter box shovel. Perhaps they clean litter boxes with their bare hands? Anyway, this curved shape does not jibe well with the typical litter box shovel. Of course, the cats could choose to do their business along the gently curving side of the litter box. And, of course, they never do. They choose instead the places along the edge of the litter box where there is maximum curvature.

The idea that there is a place for the cats to clean their feet before venturing back out into the living room or pouncing up on the kitchen counter is a sweet idea. It is an idea that would never occur to the owner of an actual cat, however. Here are two cats we obtained from a shelter (Tally on the left, Molly on the right).

They are cute, but defective in that they do not speak English, nor so far as I have been able to discover, any other language. So, despite my explanations that they are supposed to wipe their feet on the way out of the litter box, they do not. Instead, they do their business on the foot-wiping section of the litter box. So, apart from the annoying high curvature, if you are unlucky enough to get a cat who either does not understand complex sentences or just doesn’t care, this is probably not the litter box for them either. It might work for cats who: 1) speak your language fluently and 2) are cooperative. (Recent estimates indicate the total number of such cats is zero).

The third example comes from health care and is a bit more abstract. On my insurance ID card is a field which is labeled: “Identification number.” In order to use this, I have to go to their website and “register.” In order to register, the website says I need to enter my “identification number.” But in actuality, that does not work! No. Instead, I am supposed to leave off the first three characters in what is labeled my identification number. The website doesn’t say this. But the help desk is quite familiar with the issue and will happily explain it to you after you listen to musak for three or four hours. This is not so much shape not matching real function, but label not matching function.

The fourth example comes from some of our “bookcases.” Why, I hear you ask, are there scare quotes around bookcases. I will tell you why. I put scare quotes because although the shelves are flat and just the right size for books, and although this piece of “furniture” is sold as a bookcase, in fact, it is a nick-knack shelf. My wife and I foolishly tried filling it with books and it collapsed. So, in this case, the label and the shape lead one to believe it serves a particular function but the underlying functionality is insufficient to fulfill that dream of ours (that the “bookshelf” would actually hold books).

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The fifth example comes from my experience with companies who want to simplify things for their customers. That sounds worthwhile. So, they launch major efforts to make their products “consistent.” But they soon learn that making products behave consistently years after they were independently developed is way too expensive. So instead, they focus on making them look the same and using consistent terms across products, while leaving the underlying functionality behave quite differently. To me, this is quite akin to the bookshelf case. Making things look the same while continuing to have them act differently is actually worse for the user than having things that act differently also look different!

The moral of the story? It’s fine to have form follow (and signal) function, but you need to understand how users actually behave. They won’t necessarily behave as you imagine they are supposed to any more than a cat will read your mind in order to please you. Of course, if you see yourself, not as a partner of your users, but rather out to deceive them into thinking they are buying and using something different from what they really are…

—————————————

Introduction to Pattern Language for Collaboration and Cooperation.

Index for Collaboration Patterns

Author Page on Amazon

Using Stories and Storytelling

What do you do when the client insists you solve the “wrong” problem?

Cars that Lock too Much

20 Friday Mar 2020

Posted by petersironwood in America, driverless cars, psychology, story, Travel

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

AI, anecdote, computer, HCI, human factors, humor, IntelligentAgent, IT, Robotics, story, UI, UX

{Now, for something completely different, a chapter about “Intelligent Agents” and attempts to do “too much” for the user. If you’ve had similar experiences, please comment! Thanks.}

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At last, we arrive in Kauai, the Garden Island. The rental car we’ve chosen is a bit on the luxurious side (Mercury Marquis), but it’s one of the few with a trunk large enough to hold our golf club traveling bags. W. has been waiting curbside with our bags while I got the rental car and now I pull up beside her to load up. The policeman motioning for me to keep moving can’t be serious, not like a New York police officer. After all, this is Hawaii, the Aloha State. I get out of the car and explain, we will just be a second loading up. He looks at me and then at my rental car and then back to me with a skeptical scowl. He shrugs ever so slightly which I take to mean an assent. “Thanks.” W. wants to throw her purse in the back seat before the heavy lifting starts. She jerks on the handle. The door is locked.

“Why didn’t you unlock the door” she asks, with just a hint of annoyance in her voice. After all, it has been a very long day since we arose before the crack of dawn and drove to JFK in order to spend the day flying here.

“I did unlock the door,” I counter.

“Well, it’s locked now.” She counters my counter.

I can’t deny that, so I walk back around to the driver’s side, and unlock the door with my key and then push the UNLOCK button which so nicely unlocks all the doors.

The police officer steps over, “I thought you said, you’d just be a second.”

“Sorry, officer”, I reply. “We just need to get these bags in. We’ll be on our way.”

Click.

W. tries the door handle. The door is locked again. “I thought you went to unlock the door,” she sighs.

“I did unlock the door. Again. Look, I’ll unlock the door and right away, open it.” I go back to the driver’s side and use my key to unlock the door. Then I push the UNLOCK button, but W’s just a tad too early with her handle action and the door doesn’t unlock. So, I tell her to wait a second.

Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

“What?” This luxury car is scientifically engineered not to let any outside sounds disturb the driver or passenger. Unfortunately, this same sophisticated acoustic engineering also prevents any sounds that the driver might be making from escaping into the warm Hawaiian air. I push the UNLOCK button again. Wendy looks at me puzzled.

I see dead people in my future if we don’t get the car loaded soon. For a moment, the police officer is busy elsewhere, but begins to stroll back toward us. I rush around the car and grab at the rear door handle on the passenger side.

But just a little too late.

“Okay,” I say in an even, controlled voice. “Let’s just put the bags in the trunk. Then we’ll deal with the rest of our stuff.”

The police officer is beginning to change color now, chameleon like, into something like a hibiscus flower. “Look,” he growls. “Get this car out of here.”

“Right.” I have no idea how we are going to coordinate this. Am I going to have to park and drag all our stuff or what? Anyway, I go to the driver’s side and see that someone has left the keys in the ignition but locked the car door; actually, all the car doors. A terrifying thought flashes into my mind. Could this car have been named after the “Marquis de Sade?” That hadn’t occurred to me before.

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Now, I have to say right off the bat that my father was an engineer and some of my best friends are engineers. And, I know that the engineer who designed the safety locking features of this car had our welfare in mind. I know, without a doubt, that our best interests were uppermost. He or she was thinking of the following kind of scenario.

“Suppose this teenage couple is out parking and they get attacked by the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Wouldn’t it be cool if the doors locked just a split second after they got in. Those saved milliseconds could be crucial.”

Well, it’s a nice thought, I grant you, but first of all, teenage couples don’t bother to “park” any more. And, second, the Creature from the Black Lagoon is equally dated, not to mention dead. In the course of our two weeks in Hawaii, our car locked itself on 48 separate, unnecessary and totally annoying occasions.

And, I wouldn’t mind so much our $100 ticket and the inconvenience at the airport if it were only misguided car locks. But, you and I both know that it isn’t just misguided car locks. No, we are beginning to be bombarded with “smart technology” that is typically really stupid.

man in black suit sitting on chair beside buildings

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

As another case in point, as I type this manuscript, the editor or sadistitor or whatever it is tries to help me by scrolling the page up and down in a seemingly random fashion so that I am looking at the words I’m typing just HERE when quite unexpectedly and suddenly they appear HERE. (Well, I know this is hard to explain without hand gestures; you’ll have to trust me that it’s highly annoying.) This is the same “editor” or “assistant” or whatever that allowed me to center the title and author’s names. Fine. On to the second page. Well, I don’t want the rest of the document centered so I choose the icon for left justified. That seems plausible enough. So far, so good. Then, I happen to look back up to the author’s names. They are also left-justified. Why?

Somehow, this intelligent software must have figured, “Well, hey, if the writer wants this text he’s about to type to be left-justified, I’ll just bet that he or she meant to left-justify what was just typed as well.” Thanks, but no thanks. I went back and centered the author’s names. And then inserted a page break and went to write the text of this book. But, guess what? It’s centered. No, I don’t want the whole book centered, so I click on the icon for left-justification again. And, again, my brilliant little friend behind the scenes left-justifies the author’s names. I’m starting to wonder whether this program is named (using a hash code) for the Marquis de Sade.

On the other hand, in places where you’d think the software might eventually “get a clue” about my intentions, it never does. For example, whenever I open up a “certain program,” it always begins as a default about 4 levels up in the hierarchy of the directory chain. It never seems to notice that I never do anything but dive 4 levels down and open up files there. Ah, well. This situation came about in the first place because somehow this machine figures that “My Computer” and “My hard-drive” are SUB-sets of “My Documents.” What?

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Did I mention another “Intelligent Agent?”…Let us just call him “Staple.” At first, “Staple” did not seem so annoying. Just a few absurd and totally out of context suggestions down in the corner of the page. But then, I guess because he felt ignored, he began to become grumpier. And, more obnoxious. Now, he’s gotten into the following habit. Whenever I begin to prepare a presentation….you have to understand the context.

In case you haven’t noticed, American “productivity” is way up. What does that really mean? It means that fewer and fewer people are left doing the jobs that more and more people used to do. In other words, it means that whenever I am working on a presentation, I have no time for jokes. I’m not in the mood. Generally, I get e-mail insisting that I summarize a lifetime of work in 2-3 foils for an unspecified audience and an unspecified purpose but with the undertone that if I don’t do a great job, I’ll be on the bread line. A typical e-mail request might be like this:

“Classification: URGENT.

“Date: June 4^th, 2002.

“Subject: Bible

“Please summarize the Bible in two foils. We need this as soon as possible but no later than June 3^rd, 2002. Include business proposition, headcount, overall costs, anticipated benefits and all major technical issues. By the way, travel expenses have been limited to reimbursement for hitchhiking gear.”

Okay, I am beginning to get an inkling that the word “Urgent” has begun to get over-applied. If someone is choking to death, that is “urgent.” If a plane is about to smash into a highly populated area, that is “urgent.” If a pandemic is about to sweep the country, that is “urgent.” If some executive is trying to get a raise by showing his boss how smart he is, I’m sorry, but that might be “important” or perhaps “useful” but it is sure as heck not “urgent.”

All right. Now, you understand that inane suggestions, in this context, are not really all that appreciated. In a different era, with a different economic climate, in an English Pub after a couple of pints of McKewan’s or McSorely’s, or Guinness, after a couple of dart games, I might be in the mood for idiotic interruptions. But not here, not now, not in this actual and extremely material world.

So, imagine my reaction to the following scenario. I’m attempting to summarize the Bible in two foils and up pops Mr. “Staple” with a question. “Do you want me to show you how to install the driver for an external projector?” Uh, no thanks. I have to admit that the first time this little annoyance appeared, I had zero temptation to drive my fist through the flat panel display. I just clicked NO and the DON’T SHOW ME THIS HINT AGAIN. And, soon I was back to the urgent job of summarizing the Bible in two foils.

About 1.414 days later, I got another “urgent” request.

“You must fill out form AZ-78666 on-line and prepare a justification presentation (no more than 2 foils). Please do not respond to this e-mail as it was sent from a disconnected service machine. If you have any questions, please call the following [uninstalled] number: 222-111-9999.”

Sure, I’m used to this by now. But when I open up the application, what do I see? You guessed it. A happy smiley little “Staple” with a question:

“Do you want me to show you how to install the driver for an external projector?”

“No,” I mutter to myself, “and I’m pretty sure we already had this conversation. I click on NO THANKS. And I DON’T WANT TO SEE THIS HINT AGAIN. (But of course, the “intelligent agent,” in its infinite wisdom, knows that secretly, it’s my life’s ambition to see this hint again and again and again).

A friend of mine did something to my word processing program. I don’t know what. Nor does she. But now, whenever I begin a file, rather than having a large space in which to type and a small space off to the left for outlining, I have a large space for outlining and a teeny space to type. No-one has been able to figure this out. But, I’m sure that in some curious way, the software has intuited (as has the reader) that I need much more time spent on organization and less time (and space) devoted to what I actually say. (Chalk a “correct” up for the IA. As they say, “Even a blind tiger sometimes eats a poacher.” or whatever the expression is.)

Well, I shrunk the region for outlining and expanded the region for typing and guess what? You guessed it! Another intelligent agent decided to “change my font.” So, now, instead of the font I’m used to … which is still listed in the toolbar the same way, 12 point, Times New Roman … I have a font which actually looks more like 16 point. And at long last, the Intelligent Agent pops up with a question I can relate to! “Would you like me to install someone competent in the Putin misadminstration?”

What do you know? “Even a blind tiger sometimes eats a poacher.”

7B292613-361F-4989-B9AC-762AB956DECD

Author Page on Amazon

Start of the First Book of The Myths of the Veritas

Start of the Second Book of the Myths of the Veritas

Table of Contents for the Second Book of the Veritas

Table of Contents for Essays on America

Index for a Pattern Language for Teamwork and Collaboration

Symmetry

23 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by petersironwood in management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Business, Design, HCI, human factors, Human-Computer Interaction, politics, truth, UX, Web design

{Something went wrong with WordPress the first two times I tried to post this. I tried to track it down. As best I can tell, my problems came from trying to cut and paste pictures from my Pages file. Even though it looked fine in the editing interface, it appeared blank in the actual viewing interface.}

Symmetry

(Original, free-hand drawing by Zoe Colier).

There are many varieties of symmetry. In many cases, symmetry exists rampantly in nature and symmetry is incorporated into many human designs as well. In this short essay, I want to remind people of several varieties of symmetry and then show how symmetry may also be used as a tool of thought to help solve problems by simplifying the space of possibilities that must be considered.

Symmetry is a concept with far broader application than cutting out paper snowflakes or choosing a nice looking Christmas Tree, Menorah or other Holiday decoration. It is fundamental in logic, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and even in social science. Symmetry exists at many different scales as well. Planets are generally roughly spherical and their orbits are roughly circular.

The human body, along with most other animals, exhibits rough bilateral symmetry in external appearance. If you examine your own fingerprints or the pattern of your moles, for instance, you will see that one side of your body looks slightly different from a mirror image. If, like me, you are a righty who play tennis, you will find the forearm muscles on your right arm are slightly larger than those on the left. What is remarkable to me is not that there are slight variations between left and right but just how slight those variations are! And, we are not alone. Fish, insects, flatworms, roundworms, snakes, turtles, lizards, horses, dogs, cats, apes, and humans are all roughly bilaterally symmetrical in appearance. I say “in appearance” because our internal arrangement of organs is not at all symmetrical.

External Appearance and Internal Organs

In general, it seems to me that most animals possess more complete or “perfect” bilateral symmetry than do most plants. I suspect that this is because animals generally move through a physical environment. Since we can move around, the environmental forces are generally symmetrical and so our ability to react to those environmental forces is also symmetrical. A tree, on the other hand, may have a genetic “blueprint” to be bilaterally or (more likely) radially symmetrical, but it may be subject to strong asymmetrical forces such as wind, a water source, or sunlight versus shade.

Our designed objects are also most often (at least) bilaterally symmetrical, and particularly for those objects which must interact and move through the physical world. Cars, boats, motorcycles, busses, trains, trucks, bikes, skis, surfboards, roller skates, ice skates, snowshoes and tennis shoes all tend to be bilaterally symmetrical. On the inside, however, again just like us, there are often some irregularities. The arrangement of controls of the car, for instance, are asymmetrical. (Each control in itself often does show symmetry. In some cases, this makes it easier to use, especially without looking. I suspect that the symmetry may often be for aesthetic reasons, for ease of manufacturing, for ease of maintenance or replacement or some combination.) The asymmetry of arrangement “works” because the arrangement of displays and controls does not interact with the natural world the way that the car body and wheels do. The controls are designed to interact with a human being. There are also rough conventions for where controls are laid out, how they operate, and what each type looks like. Asymmetry of arrangement is also evident under the hood. However, some of the components such as the engine, the battery, the radiator have symmetry within them. The radiator, which arguably has the most interaction with the outside world, is symmetrically placed though its plumbing is not.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

In the design of User Interaction and Experience, an argument can be made for certain kinds of symmetry. For example, in the Mac editor Pages, which I am using to write this, if the B for bold button background turns blue when bolding is turned on, I expect the background will turn back the way it was (white) when bolding is turned back off. I also expect that italics and underlining will behave the same way, especially because all three are in the same toolbar.

Where possible, it also generally makes sense, I believe, to design so that the functionality of a system is symmetrical. This isn’t always possible. Some actions are necessarily irreversible. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who has toddlers or who has cats as pets. In the real world, if you shoot someone dead, you cannot “unshoot” them. Unlike a computer system who asks, “Do you really want to delete all your files?” before doing so, guns do not ask that. If you are designing what can be done with a toy robot however, if you can make it go forward, you want to make it so it can go back as well. If it can turn right 90 degrees, you would like to enable it to turn left 90 degrees. Saying, “Oh, yes, but don’t you see, you can, in effect, make it turn left 90 degrees by making it turn right 90 degrees three times?!” does not cut it, IMHO.

Typically, you not only want the functionality to be symmetrical, you also want the control functions and appearances to mirror the symmetry of the functionality. For example, if you can issue the command: “MOVE ROBOT FORWARD THREE PACES” you want the symmetrical function to be evoked this way: “MOVE ROBOT BACKWARD THREE PACES” and not, “THREE PACES BACKWARD FOR ROBOT MOVE.” If you decide to give auditory feedback for the first command that says, “ROBOT MOVING FORWARD THREE PACES” you do not want the reverse command to provide feedback that says, “ROBOT THREE PACES BACKWARD MOVING.” (Oh, by the way, if you cannot provide symmetrical functionality, please do not pretend to do so with a facade of symmetrical looking commands that actually behave asymmetrically!)

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A lack of symmetry (or consistency) in the functionality, command structure, or visual appearance often arises because of a lack of communication within the development team. If different functions of the robot are to be implemented by different people, then it’s important that those various people use an agreed upon style guide or Pattern Language or that they communicate frequently. Of course, this is not the only cause of asymmetry. Even if your team communicates really well, they can’t design an effective gun with an “unkill” function.

There are, of course, various types of symmetry. Bilateral (mirror) symmetry is what the external appearance of our bodies has. There is also translational symmetry, where the same shape is repeated along a line. The string ABCCBA shows bilateral symmetry while ABCABC exhibits translational symmetry. Most human factors people now agree that hot water faucets (usually on the left) and cold water faucets (usually on the right) should both be turned off by turning to the right and turned on by turning to the left (translational symmetry) as opposed to having the faucet on the right turn off to the right and the left faucet turn off to the left. But you will definitely experience both types.

In both music and poetry, at least in the culture I am most familiar with, translational symmetry is more common than mirror symmetry. It does sometimes happen that musical composers experiment with playing a tune backwards or even with the staff turned upside down. But this is far less common than repeating a theme or melody. Similarly, a rhyme scheme like ABCABC is much more common than is ABCCBA. {In this notation, ABCABC means that the first line rhymes with the fourth line, the second line rhymes with the fifth line and the third line rhymes with the sixth line.}

black and brown millipede on a green and brown branch

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In biology, we also find translational symmetry or something close to it. The segments of a tape worm, the segments of the body of a millipede or centipede, the small legs of a lobster, and even our own vertebrae and ribs show translational symmetry. In social structures as well, we find both mirror symmetry and translational symmetry. For instance, the Golden Rule says to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In addition, as it happens, if we are nicer to other people, then, generally speaking, they are also nicer to us. This is not always true, however. Some people simply take advantage and view all of life as a zero sum game. Whatever you gain, they lose and vice versa. This is a very limited, inaccurate, and self-defeating attitude in most social situations. Most social situations, are, of course, much more complicated. Generally speaking, there are a great many situations that both you and your “opponent” or even your “enemy” would agree are good and a great many others that both of you would agree are bad. If you are playing tennis or golf outdoors, for instance, you may be fiercely competitive but both of you would probably find a game that brings out the best play is better for both of you. Both of you would probably also agree that being rained out is a bad outcome.

men in black and red cade hats and military uniform

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In the military and in many industrial settings, there is a great deal of translational symmetry. The “ideal” set-up is to have many groups at each of many levels and each group is meant to be as similar as possible to all the other groups at that level. The marching that military groups learn is both symbolic of this translational symmetry and practice in behaving as a unit composed of identical parts. Whether or not this is the best way to run a military is debatable. To me, it’s undeniable that this management style has been imported into a huge number of organizations where it is definitely not the best way to organize.

The last thing to note is that symmetry also pops up in design. There is often a whole series of information exchanges from people who have quite different areas of expertise. These exchanges can result in mutual learning, solutions that work, and often patents, and occasionally, some really cool, transcendent, game-changing designs. In my experience, it is much better to have a design process based on symmetrical relationships founded in mutual respect than to have a design process based on having someone in a hierarchical power relationship make decisions that are to be implemented by an identical set of “underlings.”

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The Takeaway

Symmetry is everywhere. There are many forms. If you start looking for symmetry, you will find examples in nature, in mathematics, poetry, art, music, machine design, the military and even in design problems and design processes. Thinking quite consciously about the types of symmetry that exist in a problem space and what could or should exist in that problem space, can lead to novel solutions.

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Author Page on Amazon.

Fraught Framing: The Presumed Being-ness of State-ness

17 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, creativity, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

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#therapy, framing, fun, HCI, human factors, innovation, learning, politics, problem formulation, sports, UX

Fraught Framing: The Presumed Being-ness of State-ness

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As I understand it, in Spanish and Portuguese, for example, there is a linguistic distinction between current state of being and habitual state of being that is signaled by the use of different verbs. In English, we say, “That is an angry dog” to mean “That is a dog who is generally and habitually angry” and also to mean, “That dog is in an angry mood right now.”

woman and man wearing brown jackets standing near tree

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But, regardless of what native languages we write and speak, we humans often make statements about something and treat something according to the unstated and untenable presupposition that what is true about the current state of affairs is true about eternity.

This habit of mind, reinforced by language, is often incredibly useful. For instance, near me right now are a table, and on the table, among other things are a coffee cup filled with coffee and a checkbook. The table is mainly composed of wood and marble. For many purposes, this is an adequate description. Of course, none of these so-called objects were always in their current state. Once, the wood was part of a tree. And, before that, the material in the tree was mainly rainwater and dirt. It was transformed into a tree by a mere seed of information using energy from the sun.

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Meanwhile, even the marble portion of the table was not always in its current state. At one point, in the distant past, this marble was limestone. The limestone was transformed by temperature and pressure into marble. Before the limestone was limestone it was mainly the shells of tiny animals living in the ocean. If we trace the table back far enough we will come to the “Big Bang” that started the universe as we know it. The transformation of the table from one sort of thing into another did not end when it became a table nor when I bought the table. Some day, it will no longer be a table. Eventually, the material nature of the wood, and eventually even the marble will be different. The checkbook and the coffee cup will likely cease to be a checkbook and a coffee cup long before that.

For the purpose of drinking my coffee, it is just fine to think of this cup as being a cup. It holds my coffee and keeps it somewhat warm. The table works just fine as a place to hold the coffee cup. I don’t need to think more deeply about the lifecycle of the table or the cup or the checkbook.

Usually.

But sometimes, it is useful to deconstruct these categories. A fairly common test of creativity, for example, is to think of alternative uses. What could this table be used for besides a table? It is a pretty sturdy looking table, so I would say it could be used as a seat by one or two people pretty safely. It could be used as a deadly if awkward weapon. The bracing cross-piece could be detached and used as less awkward weapon. It could be used as a barrier. The wood part could be used as firewood. The thing that I habitually use as a coffee cup could be used as a container for many types of liquids or solids and even, with the help of the checkbook, could be used to hold gasses though not very effectively. The checkbook can be used as a weapon against a mosquito. In a very different way, the checkbook could be used as a weapon against a person or even as a weapon against a nation; e.g., by writing checks to steal an election.

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While all of these “objects” have histories, they also have futures. Generally speaking, the people I know give little thought to the future of the objects that they interact with. But slowly, and likely too slowly, this is gradually changing. We often now recycle or reuse objects. Thinking about the future of an object also influences my choices about what I buy. This kind of thinking is particularly important to when it comes to radioactive material which can pose very long term hazards or it can be stolen and used to cause fairly short term mayhem. Collectively, the plastic that we use gets discarded and then, does not vanish into nothingness. It finds its way into the air we breathe and the water we drink. Now that the population of the earth is 7 billion, we can no longer afford to ignore how the objects we interact with were created and we cannot afford to ignore what becomes of them. What we call a “table” or a “cup” or a “checkbook” is really only a “table for now”, “a cup for now” and a “checkbook for now.”

The fluidity of things also applies to human beings. It should be pretty obvious to most adults that someone we call “a toddler” or a “teen-ager” is not in that category forever. Most people evolve over time both physically and mentally. The change from “toddler” to “teen-ager” takes many years. Physically, the person usually seems stable from one hour to the next (even physical stability is an illusion; we create over 200 billion new cells a day!). Socially and psychologically, however, we are unstable even at a macro level. A sixteen year old, for instance, may act very much like a mature adult in hundreds of different circumstances. Yet, if they are overly influenced by “friends” or under the influence of alcohol for the first time, their behavioral self-control may easily revert to that more like a ten year old or even a two year old.

girls on white red jersey playing hand game

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We Limit Others by our Categories

It is human and common but not useful to observe a small slice of someone else’s behavior and thereby make inferences about their habitual behavior. Even if we know about someone’s habitual behavior, it doesn’t mean that they always behave that way and it doesn’t mean that they can’t change over time. When we say, “Oh, don’t pick Chuck for the baseball team; he’s such a spaz” or “No, I’m sure Sally wouldn’t like to join us; she’s really a loner” or “You can’t count on Jim; he never follows through” we are almost certainly over-generalizing. Perhaps Chuck never learned baseball as a kid and he simply needs to learn and practice basic skills. Maybe Sally has no real friends precisely because no-one asks her to join them because everyone thinks she’s a loner because she’s always alone – because no-one ever asks her to join them. Or maybe her idea of a good time is hiking and she’d be happy to do that, but has no interest in going clubbing and getting drunk every day. Maybe Jim is completely overworked and/or needs to learn better time management skills.

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“How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change.”

People may be changed by circumstances but therapy often works too. As the joke implies, it won’t work very well if the main reason the “light bulb” goes to the therapist is to feel better rather than to get better, it’s an opportunity lost. Others who frequently interact with the “light bulb” often hold views and use names that subvert therapy. For example, a person who is never assertive and wants to change that may find that when they do so, their family and colleagues at work, who have been taking advantage of them for their own purposes may say things like this: “Oh, you used to be so nice!” {Translation: I used to be able to manipulate you for my own purposes so much more easily}.

We Limit Ourselves by our Categories

While we unwittingly define others into boxes that may serve to limit what they can do, we humans are generally “equal opportunity destroyers” and also limit our own potential through self-talk as well. I like to play golf and have therefore asked many people over the course of my life, “Do you play golf?”

Take a guess what response I have heard at least two dozen times. “Golf? Oh, no. I tried that a couple times. I’m no good.”

silhouette of man playing golf during sunset

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After picking myself up off the floor, I try to explain as nicely and politely as possible that if you’ve literally tried it a couple times, you have no idea whether you would be any good at it. You very likely have no idea whether you would like it either. The same goes for painting, writing poetry, playing video games, eating healthy food, exercising regularly, and so on. In each case, your initial level of skill and your initial level of enjoyment are very poor predictors of the long term. It is most often, not our ability, but our self-definitional boundaries and self-talk that limits us.

Exercises for Flexibility.

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Life is complicated and complex so I understand that many folks may be reluctant to expand the scope of what they and others are capable of. But if you do want to become more flexible in your behavioral repertoire, there are several things you can do.

First, you can become aware of your statements about yourself and others. When you find yourself thinking, “Jim never follows through,” try to restate that in terms of empirical evidence. It could be: “Well, once I asked Jim to help plan the office party and he never showed up for the first meeting. Another time, he said he would help teach my daughter how to parallel park, but nothing ever came of it.” You might immediately see that you have precious little evidence to back up your claim that Jim never follows through. You might also ask yourself whether you ever asked Jim about these incidents. There may be hundreds of legitimate reasons that he didn’t “follow through.” His name might have been left off the distribution list for the party planning meeting. And so on. Generating these alternatives is explored in more detail in “The Iroquois Rule of Six” which basically says before acting on an explanation that is inferred you should generate five alternative explanations.

Second, you can read fiction, watch movies, attend stage plays, do some amateur theater or even answer a questionnaire from someone else’s perspective. In working with Heather Desurvire at NYNEX, on a usability evaluation of a prototype, we did a variation on heuristic evaluation in which we had people look for issues and offer suggestions from a variety of different perspectives; e.g., a behaviorist, a cognitive psychologist, a worried mother, a physical therapist and so on. With the total amount of time controlled for, people found more issues and offered more suggestions when they looked at the application from the perspectives of many people.

Third, and my current favorite, is “Attitude Dancing.” I’m not sure this is what Carly Simon and Jacob Brackman meant by their song title, but when I turn on music while I am cooking or cleaning, I spent part of my dancing time dancing as though I were in a completely different mood or even as though I were a completely different person.

Give it a try!

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Author Page on Amazon.

Desurvire, H. and Thomas, J.C. Enhancing the Performance of Interface Evaluators Using Non-Empirical Usability Methods. In the Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 37th Annual Meeting, October, l993

Imagination

14 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, creativity, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

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creativity, Design, fun, HCI, human factors, imagination, innovation, neurosis, sports, testing, truth, UX

Imagination.

It seems odd to bother to remind people that imagination is a tool of thought. I have four kids and twelve grandkids and they all use their imaginations. I also worked as a camp counselor, Y leader, child care worker in a psychiatric hospital, and a sixth grade science teacher. Kids use their imaginations! In many cases, they do this for “fun” but they also are constantly using their imagination to do creative problem solving.

When I did therapy with adults however, I found that many had convinced themselves that they had no imagination. This is rather sad as well as being completely inaccurate. Furthermore, in the very ways that such adults exhibited neurotic symptoms, they were using their imaginations. But instead of using their imagination to further their enjoyment or to solve problems creatively, they mainly seemed to use their imaginations for one main purpose: to make themselves miserable.

For example, few of us enjoy being stuck in stop and go traffic. As it turns out, you can actually impact the traffic flow around you by driving differently. You can read about how in this link, but you can come to much the same conclusion by using your imagination to empathize with the drivers around you. Instead, the neurotic train of thought goes something like this: “WHY oh WHY are all these people out on the road?! MOVE! Oh, crap, I am going to be late. My boss is going to scream at me. Probably fire me. CRAP! MOVE! I’m going to be late. I’m getting fired. Damn! It’s not my fault. My boss doesn’t care. He hates people who are late. I should have left earlier. Where will I get another job at my age? I’m sunk. Once I lose my job, my spouse will leave me too. Crap. He won’t write a good letter of recommendation. Should I get off the highway and take surface roads? That might make me later. Damn! I’m sunk. Life sucks!”

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That train of thought certainly uses imagination!

But in all the wrong ways! That person is not using imagination to enjoy the moment, but using imagination to quite literally make themselves miserable. And it isn’t just the commuter. Plenty of people use their imagination to “awfulize” about situations. They think of the worst possible outcome and then imagine that that worst possible outcome is bound to happen.

Instead, if you are in a situation that you can’t change, you could use your imagination to have some fun. So you’re stuck in traffic. There are literally a million things you could do instead of writing a tragic screenplay in your mind’s eye. I won’t list all million, but here are a few. You could design a better transportation system. You could construct a joke to put your boss in a better mood. You could turn on the radio or listen to a podcast or a book on tape. You could look at the scenery. You could make up a rather salacious spy thriller about the people around you who are also stuck in traffic. And so on.

So too, in solving problems….hold on… someone’s at the door. I’ll be right back.

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Well, that was weird! Two of the characters from my last blog series came to the door! They wanted me to hurry up and finish this series on tools of thought so they can come back to life. I had to explain to them that my translator is on vacation and that there’s nothing else to write until more of the myths can be decoded. Right now, there is growing interest in recent, though mythological, archeological digs that will give us further clues about the Veritas. My own command of the mythical Veritas language is extremely rudimentary and I’m not even absolutely sure I understood correctly what they were asking. But I am sure it was She-of-Many-Paths and Shadow-Walker. It was definitely them, more or less as I pictured them, but taller, and more ripped than I had imagined. It’s also clear that the two of them are more than friends. Anyway, they seem to be of the opinion that I need to write their myths so that we real humans can avoid making the same errors that people made in their mythical universe. I don’t quite see how that’s possible, but I will use my imagination to try to understand how it might be done. I hope they don’t bother my neighbors.

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Meanwhile, back to the catalog of thinking tools in general and to the use of imagination in particular. Under some circumstances, of course, it is a useful skill to use imagination to think of what can go wrong. I use imagination in this vein for example, when asked to evaluate something from a user perspective. I try to imagine how various icons, words, transitions and so on can be problematic for users. Even though I am pretty good at that, when users are actually observed in real life, they still manage to demonstrate problems that neither I nor anyone else on the design team had thought of!

Even in UX work, it is also important to use your imagination to think of additional opportunities. “You know, we’ve been thinking about this calendar application as a passive recipient of the user’s information. But some users might also like seeing a weekly summary of their activity in different categories.” Or, you might think, “Suppose we tie the calendar in with the message system. The system knows where the user is; we could send a reminder when it’s time for them to leave for an appointment.” Or, you might think, “In some places the time to drive somewhere depends on traffic and weather. We could tie this calendar and reminder in with the map and weather apps to give better estimates of when to send a reminder.” Such musings could result in a better product. Of course, timing is important as well. Your colleagues will tend to appreciate these thoughts a lot more if you are not currently in beta test but instead at the conceptual design phase!

Even knowing that, your imagination might be more likely to kick in later in the project because the application seems more real. You can imagine the reactions of your colleagues and frame your response this way, “Trying this app makes me realize that we can make a number of enhancements in version 2.0, 3.0 etc. I’m going to start this shared file of potential additions, changes, and enhancements that we can all contribute to. We should take a look at this when we are doing 2.0 brainstorming.”

More generally, there are many possible triggers for using your imagination and you may find that some kinds of triggers are more fun for you. For example, you might read fiction and you enjoy following along with the story being presented. This requires a lot of imagination work.

You can also start with a goal or even desire and work outward from this internal state to imagine ways you might accomplish your goal or fulfill your desire. But you can also work inward. You look at what is before you; e.g., a computer screen like the one I am looking at now and ask yourself how it might be different in the future.

Such musings can follow a thread based on the characteristics. The screen is flat, for instance. What if it were curved, or dynamically reconfigurable, or foldable or moldable? What if I could shrink the actual screen depending on circumstances? You can inject your screen (and possibly yourself) into a different and unusual situation. What if I had the screen available on the tennis court? Well, I could project things on my glasses; e.g., as I walk over to retrieve a ball, I could be reminded of how to hit a kick serve. What if I had special lenses that I could pass over any word or icon on the screen? One might give me the history of any given word. Another might give me the definition. Another might give me alternatives that are more esoteric or are easier to understand; more general or more specific; more positive or negative in tone. Another tool might enable you to select a sentence, a paragraph or an entire article and ask, “Who has written similar things before?” Even without AI, a purely statistical approach might lead you find out about people with similar interests.

Another way to practice using your imagination is to pose a question or see how two things are or could be related. On the table beside me are a number of objects: a set of keys, an iPhone, a coffee cup, a checkbook, two of the books I wrote, copies of some papers that I reviewed for a recent conference, a quarter, some business cards. How could these be combined? It doesn’t necessarily matter at this point that the combination is feasible. Let’s just try it.

Putting together a set of keys and an iPhone suggests to me having an app wherein I could photograph all my keys and then, if I lost any (or all!) of the keys, I could have one 3-D printed at a local store or my home 3-D printer. I can also imagine that for another layer of security (at a cost of inconvenience) my iPhone would not turn on unless I took a picture of a particular physical key. A coffee cup and a checkbook seem to belong to different worlds indeed, but that only makes it more of a fun challenge! I like coffee. I don’t particularly like writing bills. On the day before the bills are due, perhaps the coffee machine might not deliver coffee till I wrote the bills. This strikes me as too controlling. For me, it might work better to have an ironic message delivered on the coffee cup such as, “Have a nice day! And save the insane interest rates for paying $25 a day late by paying your bill on time! Or, make some rich banker even richer. The choice is yours!” This approach would not be everyone’s “cup of tea” but that doesn’t matter. The point is to reawaken your imagination.

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What about a quarter and two books I wrote? I could offer a 25 cent rebate. I could write about about the history of the quarter. I could mail people books with a quarter inside. I could make an advertisement about The Winning Weekend Warrior that is aimed at tennis players and suggest that every time they lose a set, they put a quarter in a piggy bank. When they get to 40 quarters they can buy my book. I can design strategy and tactics sheets for different sports that are sold separately. The reader/user places quarters on the sheet to reinforce strategy. In tennis, for instance, such a sheet might be static and the user could use four quarters for the positions of the four players on the court. They could be asked to select smart shots, given the positions. Similarly, I might have 4 or even 18 sheets for golf and on these sheets I would show the slope and terrain and ask people to put the quarter on for their target. Eventually, I imagine, there is a way to capture the data of how the player actually hits the golf ball on real courses and that could be incorporated into what the best shot is for that particular player. This data could also be used as input to computer golf games so that a player might use the game to help select better clubs and targets. We are no longer necessarily talking about my book or about quarters. That doesn’t matter! All that really matters is that I have used these arbitrary objects to trigger my imagination. And you can do the same!

I’m done. Hold on. Doorbell. II see that it’s the Veritas power couple again. I’m inviting them in for coffee. I wonder if they’ve ever had coffee before….

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Choose one of these four books for everyone on your gift list!

Metaphors We Live and Die By: Part 2

13 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, health, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

cancer, disease, HCI, human factors, innovation, politics, testing, UX, war

Metaphors We Live and Die By: Part 2

men holding rifle while walking through smoke grenade

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Today, I want to delve further into the topic of metaphors that we often unconsciously adopt. In particular, I want to look at a common metaphor in four areas: disease, business, politics, and and the role of UX in the entire cycle of product development.

Although I am fascinated by other cultures, my experience is overwhelmingly USA-centric. I am aware that all of the four areas I touch on may be quite different in other countries and cultures. If readers have examples of how different metaphors are used in their culture, I would love to hear about it.

Disease is an Enemy to be Destroyed.

In most cases, American doctors view disease as an enemy to be destroyed. In fact, this metaphor is so pervasive that American readers are likely puzzled that I used the verb “view” rather than “is” in the previous sentence. In American culture, there is also a strong thread of another metaphor about disease: “Disease is a punishment.” This latter metaphor is behind such statements as, “Oh, they had a heart attack! Oh, my! Were they overweight? Did they smoke?” Perhaps I will consider this more fully another time, but for now, I want to examine the view that disease is an enemy to be destroyed.

It seems as though it is an apt metaphor. After all, aren’t many diseases caused by other organisms invading our bodies and doing harm? There are many examples: bacteria (Lyme Disease, pneumonia, ulcers, TB, syphilis), viruses (herpes, Chicken Pox, flu, common cold), protozoa (malaria, toxoplasmosis) or even larger organisms (trichinosis, tapeworms, hookworm).

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When it comes to considering causality, our thoughts usually travel along linear chains of causes. So, we may admit that while Lyme disease is “caused by” Borrelia bacteria, the “deer tick” that spreads the disease is also partly at fault. Similarly, although malaria is caused by a protozoa, the most effective prevention is to reduce the mosquito population or to use netting to keep the mosquitos from biting people. Similarly, you might try to prevent Lyme disease by wearing light clothing, using spray to keep the ticks off, checking for ticks after being in tick infested areas, etc. So, even in common practice, we realize that saying that the little organism causes the disease is an over-simplification.

Once one “gets” a disease, however, the most commonly invoked metaphor is war. We know what the enemy is and we must destroy it! I grant you that is one approach that can be very effective, but consider this. The “human” body contains approximately as many bacterial cells as human cells. What you think of as your “human” body is only half human! It is half bacteria! Furthermore, since we all have trillions of bacteria in us when we are well, the picture of treating bacteria as an enemy to be destroyed is at best an over-simplification. In fact, more recently, medical science seems to indicate that under-exposure to bacteria in childhood can make you more not less susceptible to disease. If you use anti-antibiotics to “destroy” the “enemy” bacteria in your body, many of the “good” bacteria necessary for digestion are also destroyed. This sometimes, though rarely, requires exotic treatment to return to health.

In cancer, both doctors and the general public mainly think of the cancer cells as “enemies” who must be destroyed! And yet, it seems that people may often have mutations that could lead to cancer but don’t. There are even very rare cases of spontaneous cures of cancer. What are some alternatives to thinking of cancer as an “enemy” that must be destroyed?

Clearly, I don’t know of a definite answer or you would have already heard about it on the news! But let’s consider a couple alternatives. First, instead of thinking you have to “destroy” this enemy, imagine you thought of cancer cells as confused. People get confused all the time. Sometimes, we put them in jail. Sometimes we put them in mental hospitals. Sometimes, we simply teach them what they need to know. Sometimes, we do end up killing them. But it is not our approach to kill someone just because they make a mistake. So, we might seek a way to “re-educate” cancer cells so that they “realize” that they are part of something even larger and more wonderful – the human body! How would one go about this? Using the metaphor of a confused person, we would have to understand just why they were acting confused. Then we would have to provide situations so that they could learn (or re-learn) what they needed to know in order to become a productive member of “society.” We could “remind” a liver cell that, after all, they were born to be a liver cell and they’re potentially quite good at that. We could think of cancer as cells that are misinformed or have amnesia about their true nature.

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We might also think along a different line. We could try to discover the best possible environment for these cancer cells to thrive – and then offer it to them somewhere else. For example, perhaps they really prefer an extremely acidic environment. Say you have a skin cancer on the back of your hand that thrives in a really acidic environment. You provide a gradient of acidity next to the tumor and encourage all those acid-seeking cancer cells to migrate into a really acid tube that is next to the tumor. The farther away it gets from you, the more acidic the environment.

You might also think of cancer cells as being rebellious. For whatever reason, they “feel” as though they are not experiencing enough of the “good life” being part of your body so they “take matters into their own hands” and begin leading a rebellion of cells out to steal the food supply and multiply in an unrestrained fashion. A solution might be to “convince” them that they are better off retaining their initial function rather than becoming a lawless gang of cells. I am not sure what the best metaphor for thinking about infection or cancer is, but surely it is worth imagining others rather than sticking to just one based on war as a metaphor.

Business is a Sport.

I treat this at greater length in The Winning Weekend Warrior, but the basic idea is simple. Yes, there are many strategies and tactics from sports that apply to business. But there is at least one crucial difference. Sports are designed to be difficult. They typically require skill and training if you are to do well. The parameters of the sport are fixed at any given time though they will vary somewhat over time. In golf, for instance, the hole is small and the distances are great. Though the rules of golf are complex, there is one over-arching principle. If it would help you to do something, doing that thing is penalized!

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If golf were a business, many CEO’s would nonetheless approach it as a sport. They would try to hire the “best people” – that is, people with a proven track record of good golfing. They would then proceed to offer incentives for people to do even better. If people shot a high score repeatedly, they would be fired. Eventually, such a CEO might get good results by having skilled people who are well motivated and well trained. But why? If putting a golf ball in the hole is what gained you profit, simply shorten the fairways, widen the hole, and eliminate the hazards! Of course, as a sport this would make golf no challenge and no fun. Everyone could win. But having everyone win is exactly what you should do to maximize profit. Yet many in management are so taken with the “business is a sport” metaphor that they do not change the situation. Some do “change he game” and with spectacular results. Google and Amazon come to mind.

Politics is War.

If you belong to a political party and believe the “other” party or parties are enemies to be destroyed, you are failing to understand the dialectic value that parties with different views can bring to complex situations. Life is a balanced dance between strict replication and structure on the one hand, and variation, exploration, and diversity on the other hand. A species who had no replication of structure from one generation to the next would die off. But so too would a species that had no variation because the slightest change in environment would also cause the species to die off. So it is with human cultures. If every generation had to start from scratch in determining what was edible, how to get along, how to avoid predators and so on, humans would have died out long ago. On the other hand, if a culture were completely unable to evolve and change, they would also die out. Typically, “conservative” parties want to keep things the same for longer and “liberal” parties want to change things more quickly. There is no obvious answer here. But what is vital is that members of each party see that there is value in the debate; in the dialogue; in the dialectic.

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The other party is not an enemy; it is the balance so that you can do what you do best. If you are predisposed toward exploration, science, new experiences, and so on, great! On the other hand, if you are more predisposed toward tradition and loyalty and repetition, great! If you did not have the people of the opposite predisposition, you would have to incorporate all that within yourself. Conservatives are what allows liberals to be liberal. And liberals are what allows conservatives to be conservatives. A huge problem arises, as it has recently in American politics, when one party decides they are just “right” all on their own and “victory” is worth lying, cheating, and stealing to get it. This is not unique to contemporary America of course. History is littered with administrations who were so convinced that they were “right” that they wanted to destroy all opposition. It has always ended badly. Politics is not war. (Though the failure of politics often leads to war.)

UX is All that Matters vs. UX Does Not Matter. Development is war!

As you might guess, neither of these extreme positions is useful. Price matters. Time to market matters. Marketing matters. Having good sales people matters. Having excellent service matters. Having a good user experience matters. It all matters. Depending on the situation, various factors matter relatively more or less.

(Original artwork by Pierce Morgan)

As in the case of political ideologies, it is just fine for UX folks to push for the resources to understand users more deeply; to test interaction paradigms more thoroughly; to collect and observe from more and more users under a wider variety of circumstances. Similarly, while you are pushing for all that and doing your best to argue your case, remember that the other people who are pushing for tighter deadlines, and more superficial testing are not evil; they simply have different perspectives, payoffs, and responsibilities. Naturally, I hope the developers and financial people do not view UX folks as simply “roadblocks” to getting the product out quickly and cheaply either.

The first half of 2018, I tried to catalog many of the “best practices” in collaboration and teamwork. You might find some of these useful if you are embroiled in “UX wars.” You and your colleagues from other disciplines might also find it useful to consider that it is worth taking the time to affirm your common purpose and common ground. You are meant to work together. Development is not war!

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Buggy Whips to Fingertips

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

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computers, Democracy, Dictatorship, experiment, Feedback, HCI, human factors, Human-Computer Interaction, politics, programming, UX

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My degrees are in psychology. I have also been fascinated by computers. One main reason I went into HCI/UX/Human Factors was that I saw computers as devices that would amplify collective human intelligence. Thereby, with a mixture of people and computers, we would be able to solve such complex problems as world hunger, overpopulation, disease, global climate change, wars, and so on. I definitely saw myself as most interested in the people side though I thought comparing and contrasting computers and people shed new light on the people side. If you only have one type of computational mechanism; viz., us, then it’s hard to know how much of what happens in trying to solve a problem is because of our common human heritage and hardware and how much is intrinsic to the problem.

This interest in the novel light that computing could shine on human intellect was what initially drew me to computers, but I later saw them as fascinating in their own right as well as being extremely important tools for a psychologist. For example, I used a PDP-8 to run experiments on the psychology of aging and to analyze the data. Only when I joined IBM did I begin to change my focus from how computers could be useful tools for psychologists, but how psychology could be useful tools for improving computers (or at least the actual performance of the computer in doing useful work when used by a person).

Although I took a number of programming courses, I only ever became an amateur programmer. My main method for programming some task was to think about how I would do it and then step by step, make the computer do it. This process has many limitations, a few of which are obvious even to me. For example, when doing my dissertation work, I had the computer register the time whenever any one of five subjects made a response. While sitting in the computer room (while the subjects were in their booths), I was sitting and reading something while the disk kept buzzing next to me: Bz-b-bz-bz. Bz-b-bz-bz. Bz-b-bz-bz.

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I had used my “What would John do?” method of programming. If I saw a long number and had to go write it down, I would want to do it immediately, and then be ready for the next number. But this was insane for the computer! The computer could “remember” hundreds of these numbers and then write them out to the disk en masse. Anyone who had gone through even an introductory programming course would approach the problem differently than I had — at least until the computer used its disk buzzing to wake me up to its modus operandi which are really quite different from mine.

Like every other human, I make mistakes all the time in every sort of endeavor. For example, I like to play tennis and I like to hit a serve that’s hard to return. So, I am typically trying to serve to a particular spot. I’m not dead on accurate. I might miss long or wide by a couple inches or hit the net. But I will not (or at least haven’t yet) turned around and sailed the ball out of the court behind me. Nor have I ever yet struck the ball straight down at my feet. Nor, have I tossed the ball sideways into the screen and then swung anyway (!), and accidentally let go and flung the racquet across the net. But if you have ever programmed a computer, you know any of these behaviors might be possible based on the slightest error you can imagine.

It is ironic because most people think people are unreliable while computer are reliable. Well, it’s not that simple. Most people are pretty reliable most of the time and especially when they are acting within their bailiwick. Yes, they slip up and make mistakes but they are usually (not always) both understandable and fixable. A computer can do anything. The hardware is typically reliable but can still fail. Much more likely is that there are differences between what the programmer thought she or he was telling the computer and what the programmer actually told it to do. But wait! There’s more! Even more likely is that the intent of the programmer solves only a small part of the overall problem, solves the wrong problem, or actually makes the situation worse. That is not — or at least not solely — the fault of the programmer (more likely, the fault of an entire bureaucratic process).

This kind of weird and catastrophic error appeared in the program that ran my dissertation experiment at Michigan. Worse, it was a different weird and catastrophic error that appeared every time I ran the program! Often, the program would run correctly for five minutes or fifty minutes and then – BANG – unrecoverable error.

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The program was in FORTRAN 2. Someone had added some useful macro functions for doing experiments. For instance, there were a number of initializations for the displays. We had five displays so these functions all had the form FUNCTION1(2) which applied the function1 to the second display. To make it even more convenient, if you wanted to do the same thing to all five displays (which was always the case for me), you could simply pass it the argument (7) and the macro code would apply it to all five displays. So, I had a list of about 5-6 commands of that form: Function1(7), Function2(7), Function3(7) etc. Having initialized the displays, the next thing on my agenda was to initialize the array that held the timing information. Since I wanted to do this for all five of the arrays, it seemed as easy as rolling off a cliff to use the (7) convention and thereby apply it to all five reaction time arrays. In more modern version of FORTRAN, they won’t allow you to do that (you will get a compile time error). But back when Joy to the World by Three Dog Night topped the charts, there was no error message at compile time. Secretly, of course, you just know that compiler was snickering as it thought: “Oh, you want to write some time stamp into the seventh element of a five element array? Fine. The customer is always right. Be my guest. Good luck with that.” This is the computer trying to “serve” and instead smashing the ball directly into the ground.

Yet, keep in mind that there are some (not all) very rich and powerful people out there who sincerely wish that “people” could just be more like computers and do precisely as they’re told, always, and without question. And, when I say there are “people” they want to control like a computer, I mean you. That is exactly what they want. For you to do what they insist you do. They are about to get away with it – and if they do, there will be no Joy to the World – not for a very long time. Because if someone else lays out all the choices for you, you are not living your life at all. You are a tool in their life.

It isn’t even really a good system for them. Willing collaborations yield insights and creativity and productivity. It is precisely what has taken us from buggy whips to fingertips in an astoundingly short time. Society and technology and learning progressed at a snail’s pace in Medieval times. I don’t mean those really speedy thoroughbred racing snails either; I’m referring to the garden variety garden snail. A politician who has competition will want to show some sort of real progress. But a dictator? Maybe if they are particularly partial to scientific advancement or the fine arts, they might throw a few dollars that way. And some have. But many have not. What they typically put time, energy and thought into is war and the weapons of war.

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Now, instead of, or at least in addition to, having computers help provide a coordinating infrastructure of knowledge so that human beings can collaborate and solve more interesting problems as I had initially hoped a half century ago, computers and social media are being used to trick people into denying the validity of their own experience and existence. How do we debug this situation before it’s too late? I sometimes think that part of the problem is that we have tried to jam seven elements of serious social and technological change into an array that can only hold five elements. But maybe that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that people are at their best when they are free to be people and at their worst when they are made to pretend that they are machines.

Study Slain by Swamp Monster!

19 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

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Business, Design, experiment, HCI, human factors, innovation, politics, science, Study, usability, UX

Study Slain by Swamp Monster!

I’m trying a new format for blog posts.

For those of you in a hurry, to get to the “bottom line” of this post, you can skip the story and go right to the bold-faced “lesson” at the end. I’d really you rather read the whole thing of course, but I know some readers are harried and hurried. So, if that describes you right now, feel free.

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In the early 1980’s, researchers at the IBM Watson Research Center invented a new kind of system. Originally, this was called the “Speech Filing System.” It was initially designed to allow so-called “office principals” (sales people, managers, executives, engineers, etc.) to dictate letters and memos which could then be typed up by the pool of typists. Instead of requiring each “office principal” to have (or borrow) a dedicated piece of dictation equipment, they could accomplish this dictation from any touch tone phone. While this offered some savings in cost and convenience in the office, it was even more wonderful on the road. People did not have to take their dictation equipment with them on their travels. They could use any touch-tone phone.

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The system was invented largely by tech-savvy psychologists (including Stephen Boies, John Gould, John Richards, & Jim Schoonard). When they observed people actually using the system, they discovered that the trial users more often used the ancillary messaging facility than they did the “real” dictation features. So, the system was redesigned and repurposed and then renamed, “The Audio Distribution System.” In some ways, using the “Audio Distribution System” was much like leaving a message on an answering machine. However, there were some crucial differences. Typically, a person calling someone and encountering, instead of a human being, a message asking them to leave another message was somewhat taken aback. Many messages on answering machines went something like this: “Hi. Stephen? Oh, you’re not there. OK. This is John. I was hoping … well, I thought you’d be in. Uh. Let’s see. You know what? Call me back. We need to talk.” And, when Stephen discovered that he had a message, he might listen to it and call back John. “Hi, John. Stephen here… I … oh. OK. A message. Sorry. You just called me. Well, um. I’m not sure what you wanted to talk about so. Call me back when you get a chance.”

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By contrast, when someone called the “Audio Distribution System” they knew ahead of time they’d be interacting with a machine. So, they could compose a reasonable message before calling the system. Hence, the messages tended to be more coherent and useful; e.g., “Hi, Stephen. This is John. If it’s okay with you, I’m taking off this Friday for a long weekend. If you have any issues with that, let me know.” See? Easy and efficient.

A second critical difference was that you could listen to your message and edit it. People didn’t do this so often as you might think, but it was comforting to know that you could in case you really messed up. (For instance, a person might say, “You are fired!” when all along they meant to say, “You are NOT fired.”).

Introducing any new system will have consequences, both intended and unintended. I wanted to see what some of these consequences might be. Corporations, IBM included, like it when they sell lots of product and make lots of money. A related question then was – what is the value of this product to the customer? Why should they want to buy it?

One hypothesis I wanted to test out was that such a system would increase people’s perceived Peace of Mind. After you leave a meaningful message for someone, you can “cross off” that little item off your mental (or written) “to do” list. By using the Audio Distribution System, I thought one of the user benefits would be increased “Peace of Mind” because they would be able to leave a message any time and any place they had access to a touch tone phone. They could save their working memory capacity for “higher level” activities such as design, problem solving, and decision making. We were going to roll out a beta test of the Audio Distribution System at the divisional headquarters for the IBM Office Products Division (OPD), in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. Not coincidentally, OPD would be the division selling the Audio Distribution System (just as they were now selling dictation equipment). Before the trial commenced, I developed a questionnaire designed to get at how much people felt harried, too busy, coping, etc. The hope was that I could compare the “Peace of Mind” scores of people who did and did not get the Audio Distribution System and perhaps show that those with the system felt more at peace than those without. I could also compare “before and after” for those internal beta customers who had the system.

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Before I was to roll-out and administer the “Peace of Mind” questionnaire to a sample of people at the OPD Franklin Lakes location, guess what happen just two days before the beta roll-out? OPD was re-organized out of existence! The people who worked there would now be looking for another job elsewhere in IBM (or, failing that, just elsewhere period). The beta trial was cancelled. In any case, even if it hadn’t been cancelled, the impact of the re-organization would have completely swamped (in my estimation) the impact of this new tool. Moreover, it struck me as insensitive and slightly even unethical to ask people to fill out a questionnaire about how hassled they were feeling just days after finding out their entire division had been blown up. How would you react if some psychologist from the Research Center showed up asking you to fill out a questionnaire two days after finding out you no longer had a job?

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What is the lesson learned here? You have to understand what is going on in the lives of your users over and above the functions and features directly related to your product or service. Of course, there is always a fairly good chance that some of your users will have overwhelming things going on in their lives that will impact their reactions to your product. Generally you won’t know about divorces, deaths in the family, toothaches, etc. But if something is impacting all your users, you’d best be aware of it and act accordingly.

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Speech Filing System

Audio Distribution System – NY Times

Longer explanation of Audio Distribution System

Video of Audio Distribution System’s cousin: “The Olympic Message System”

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petersironwood

~ Finding, formulating and solving life's frustrations.

Tag Archives: human factors

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

Getting Into (the “right”) Shape

Cars that Lock too Much

Symmetry

Fraught Framing: The Presumed Being-ness of State-ness

Imagination

Metaphors We Live and Die By: Part 2

Buggy Whips to Fingertips

Study Slain by Swamp Monster!