The other day I popped into my local branch of Lloyds TSB and saw this next to the ATM:

Taking a closer look:

A heatmap shows the busiest times for that particular branch, with a bit of analysis above to help people make sense of it and explain, for example, the grey block on wednesday morning (staff training day).

Short interview with the guys who put it up

This is very interesting – a bank visualising its data to change customer behaviour. Rebecca Reeves, the branch manager, was kind enough to answer a few questions about it:

Raphael D’Amico: Thanks for agreeing to explain this display a little bit. So, why did this start?

Rebecca Reeves: We noticed that we had both business and personal account holders coming in the lunchtime rush hour, even though business customers can generally choose to come at any time of the day. The idea behind this was to try to get our business customers to come by when the branch was quieter.

RD: How does it work?

RR: It uses the transactions done in the branch. We record the data and a team at the head office feeds back these heatmaps.

RD: Is it just this branch?

RR: No, it is done across the country.

RD: Has it worked?

RR: It has actually. We started recording data about a year ago, and put the first heatmap on the wall six months ago. When we analysed the data again quite recently we saw that customer transactions were more spread out across the day.

In particular, it didn’t make that much of a difference to personal customers – they still came mostly at lunchtimes – but business customers did start coming more often at other times.

RD: How did you measure the improvement? Did you measure queue lengths, for example?

RR: Just by sight – the only formal measurement was the transaction data, which tells us the time and type of customer, for example.

RD: Thanks for your time.

Neat, but what could it do better?

This idea is clearly a good one and has worked, but there is as always room for iteration. Here are a few suggestions:

• Make it bigger and move it slightly further from the cashpoint. Putting it next to a cashpoint is a good idea and gives it exposure, but the size and positioning means you have to be close to the wall to see it. This leads to two less than ideal situations:
  1) You look at it while taking cash out, which slows you down and makes people behind you wait.
  2) You take a proper look afterwards, which means you have to stand directly next to and very close to the next person taking money out, which tends to make both you and them uncomfortable. It is almost a social taboo to do this, and probably keeps a a fair few people away.
  A larger, more legible display would solve this.
• Put it near to other queues in the branch, not just the ATM. The queue for the bank teller is longer than the one for the ATM, which would make customers even more receptive to this kind of display.
• Measure how long you are actually taking to serve customers. While the transaction data is a good proxy, Lloyds should spot check exactly how long it takes them to serve each customer (how do they promise four minutes?). This may also allow them to segment their customers better – perhaps there are some transactions that are more time consuming and could be addressed in the heatmap display.
• Show customers the changes. Showing people that this display has already changed behaviour may make it even more effective through social proof.
• Share data. Comparing customer patterns across branches might reveal some good techniques they can learn from each other. I didn’t ask about this, so it could be that the branches already do this – I imagine the data analysis is centralised for this purpose.

It’s really great to see a large organisation using this kind of technique (particularly a bank, right now!).

Are there other companies feeding the behaviour of their customers back to them?

Human centered design teaches you to optimise like crazy for the user of your product, but is there a situation where this leads to a design which puts off the person paying the bill?

I spotted this review of one of Dyson’s high tech and rather stylish hoovers. Is this user happy that some of his/her clients have paid a considerable amount more to acquire one?

“I´m out in the field, hoovering for my disabled clients in their own homes, amongst other duties a carer has to do. Everytime I know there is whatever type of Dyson in the household, I simply bring my own hoover along. I mean, a 12GBP one from Tesco, made in China. Oh yeah, you don´t need a NASA training to use such a thing. It´s got two buttons. The ON/OFF one and the other that coils the cord in a flick of a second (unheard of, Mr.Dyson?). I mean, not cutting and “eating” it by the front. And guess what? I can lift the whole thing with my little finger, put it inside a small backpack and catch a crowded bus with it, if I wanted to. See, hoovering itself is annoying enough so I don´t really see the point in battling a StarTrek ship to make it easier on you! Or is using Dyson suppose to be Fun? Well, it CERTAINLY is not the quality of the job it leaves behind, that would make me buy it. In fact, I have never came accross a less effective hoover. So the only reason for Mr. Dyson still not going out of bussiness I can think of is that people buy his products because ITS SAID TO BE GOOD and all other marketing and status tricks, but in the end it´s their au-pairs, cleaning ladies and people like myself that have to put up with about 8times as much of job then SIMPLE HOOVERING.”

From PocketLint

This review raises a very important question: should you compromise your design if doing so will get it into the hands of more users?

Who are you designing for?

One of my favourite applications by far is Tableau. I use it every day and am stunned by how simple it is to create clear visualisations of large datasets. It’s blazingly fast to use and defaults to an elegant visual style which puts the data first – check out the nicely put together product tour here. It makes it easy to create dashboards like this:

Its main competitor is Crystal Excelsius, which sadly makes it easy to create awful dashboards like this:

This is not a post about data visualisation, but in a nutshell the problem with Crystal Xcelsius is that it focuses far too much on the cosmetic aspects which add nothing (and often detract from) the data behind the dashboard. I will let Jorge Cameos and Stephen Few explain its problems in more detail (both of these blogs are mandatory reading for anyone dealing with large amounts of data, incidentally).

The question is this: how many of Tableau’s sales have been taken by Crystal Xcelsius because of its fancy effects?

Another example in the same area is the difference between Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 charting.  Check here, here and here for some closer looks at the problems; here’s one simple illustration.

This is Excel 2003:

Excel 2007. Notice how some of the most important options have been moved from radio buttons (1 click) to dropdowns (2 clicks) and how its most important sections (e.g. scale and patterns) have been partially lumped together to leave more room for irrelevant 3D and formatting effects.

Who is Microsoft trying to appeal to?

There is a clear disconnect between the needs of the user, who would likely benefit from simpler chart creation and the buyer, who may be swayed by the additional features (“What harm could they do?”). On top of this, the user of the software is not the ultimate user; that place goes to the person trying to make sense of the final chart.

A few thoughts:

• How can you make sure you are designing for the right person? Sometimes the ultimate user is not who you think they are.
• This conflict between user and buyer does not necessarily mean two people or departments. It is within us all.
• Can you tell whether you are selling to the user or the buyer? Perhaps you can show different aspects of your design to each.

What other examples of this are there?

A few years ago I read a massively important book called “A Theory of Fun” by Raph Koster, master designer of massively multiplayer online worlds and responsible for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

Buy the book. Seriously. But before you go any further spend five minutes reading the presentation that inspired it, which you can get here on his blog.

Its main thesis still blows my mind with its simplicity:

“Games are puzzles – they are about cognition and learning to analyze patterns. When you’re playing a game, you’ll only play it until you master the pattern. Once you’ve mastered it the game becomes boring”

To keep the game fun the game designer has to delay this point for as long as possible, but if the game is too hard nobody will play it. A perfect balance between the ability of the player and the game’s difficulty must be reached.

Get that balance absolutely right and you get flow, possibly the most important feeling designers should try to induce in their users.

Not just for games!

From Raph again:

“Flow doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it feels pretty darn wonderful. The problem is that precisely matching challenges to capability is incredibly hard. For one thing, the brain is churning away and might make a cognitive leap at any moment, rendering the rest of the challenge trivial. For another, whatever is presenting the challenges doesn’t necessarily have any sense of the level of understanding posessed by the player.”

“As we succeed in mastering new patterns thrown at us, the brain gives us little jolts of pleasure. But if the flow of new patterns slows, then we won’t get the jolts and we’ll start to feel boredom. If the flow of new patterns increases beyond our ability to resolve them, we won’t get the jolts either because we’re not making progress.”

Flow is so important that designers should consider it in everything they work on, whether it is as simple as a folding chair or as complex as an operating system. But it’s hard, very hard to implement, particularly as you move away from games towards less intrinsically entertaining tasks.

Why is it so hard?

There’s plenty of factors. Here are two.

• The designer’s control over the system. In a closed system where the designer has full control over the rules, he can tune the level of challenge to better match the skills of the user.
• Users. Even the most cleverly designed closed system will find it harder to match challenge to skill when more than one person is involved. The obvious reason is that the two players will have different levels of skill. More subtly, when you inject more people into even the simplest system you also inject their foibles and psychology, drastically increasing the complexity and making it harder to reliably create flow.

This should give a clue to what a designer needs to be aware of when designing for flow.

If the world is yours.

Gaming (1 user). “On the rails” games such as the astonishingly successful Guitar Hero, House of the Dead and to a lesser extent Mirror’s Edge are perfect examples of designed flow.

The gameworld and challenge is completely under the control of the designer, and the player can generally adapt the difficulty to better match their skills, with progressively harder content unlocked as they improve.

Dancing (2 users). A perfect example of this from outside gaming is dancing, particularly ballroom dancing. In this case the “design” is the type of music, which usually fits within a set rythm and tempo, and the dance, which consists of a set of rules and moves.

The additional complexity someone designing a dance would have to take into account is the interaction between the two dancers; flow is achieved by creating a common language through the music and the rules of the dance.

Driving (Many users). The driving environment may seem complex but its elements are relatively fixed: the road, the traffic signals, the highway code.

Within these constraints, billions of people with different destinations, priorities and frames of mind drive safely every day.

What if you can’t control the challenges?

This is where the most difficult problems still lie. In all these cases, the designers have only control over a limited part of the environment and must hope that they can exert enough influence to improve the whole.

Productivity software (1 user). Operating systems and productivity software are both tools which help their users achieve some end, whether writing a paper, analysing financial performance or… designing something. The problem is, Microsoft can perfect Word, for example, until it is a masterpiece of writing and page layout, but if the writer is uninspired they will still be blocked.

What can it do to help (Clippy, go away!)? Once it has the basic usability and is out of your way, what patterns can the software introduce to kickstart the user’s thought process and get them back into flow?

Dating (2 users). Stepping away from software for a second. Imagine you are designing a restaurant which in which two people will have the perfect date.

Obviously you cannot control the biggest element of all: the chemistry between them, but you can control enough elements of the environment to smooth things along. What food to serve? What lighting? What cutlery? What furniture? What music?

Civilisation (Many users). Here the problems for designers become monumental. How do you design tools which can help teams of tens, hundreds, thousands of people to effortlessly work and build something together.

How do you design a city so that it’s inhabitants experience flow?

And most colossaly of all: how do you design a society so that its members can experience flow? How do you direct them to flow in tasks which built the next layer of civilisation?

Apart from being associated with fun and satisfaction, if flow is the perfect match between challenge and abillity it is the quickest way to achievement.

How can we flow more?

PS: Never thought i’d write the sentence: “Civilisation (Many users)”

How do we remember? How much of our memory is linked to places, times and people?

Dominic O’Brien was the first World Memory Champion, and holds is in the Guinness Book of Records for memorising and recalling 54 shuffled packs of playing cards. Who better to explain one of the more common mnemonic techniques of placing the elements to be remembered along a journey and then to imagine yourself physically walking it. In his own words (about a shopping list):

“To remember the list, “place” each item of shopping at individual stages along a familiar journey – it may be around your house, down to the shops, or a bus route.

For these singularly boring items to become memorable, you are going to have to exxagerate them, creating bizarre mental images at each stage of the journey. Imagine an enormous, gulping fish flapping around your bedroom, or for example, covering the duvet with its slimy scales. Or picture a bath full of margarine, every time you turn on the taps, more warm margarine comes oozing out!

Later on, when you need to remember the list, you are going to “walk” around the journey, moving from stage to stage and recalling each object as you go. The journey provides order, linking items together. Your imagination makes each one memorable.”

From his book, How to Develop Perfect Memory (read it on Scribd).

Even better is this video.

The making of memory

This kind of technique is not recent. Steven Rose is a leader in the study of memory, and in his book the Making of Memory tells a story about how the opportunity to train it (mnemnotechnics) was first recognised:

“Within western culture, there is a clear history of this mnemotechnic tradition, running back to Greek times, though the written record of the method is not Greek but Roman, and first appears in De Oratore, a famous text on the art of rhetoric – that is, of argument and debate – by the Roman politician and writer Cicero. In it, Cicero attributes the discovery of the rules of memory to a poet, Simonides, who seems to have been active around 477BCE.

The Simonides story appears and reappears throughout Roman, medieval and Renaissance texts. In its basic form it tells how, at a banquet given by a Thessalonian nobleman, Scopas, Simonides was commissioned to chant a lyric poem in honour of his host. When he performed it, however, he also included praise of the twin gods Castor and Pollux. Scopas told the poet he would only pay him half the sum agreed for the performance and that he should claim the rest from the gods. A little later Simonides received a message that two young men were waiting outside to see him. During his absence the roof of the banqueting hall fell in, crushing Scopas and his guests and so mangling the corpses that their relatives could not identify them for burial. The two young men were the gods Castor and Pollux, and they had thus rewarded Simonides by saving his life, and Scopas apparently got his comeuppance for meanness. But – and this is the crucial bit of the story – by remembering the sequence of the places at which they had been sitting at the table, Simonides was able to identify the bodies at the banquet for the relatives.

This experience, as Cicero tells the story, suggested to Simonides the principles of the art of memory of which he was said to be the inventor, for he noted that it was through remembering the places at which the guests had been sitting that he had been able to identify the bodies. The key to a good memory is thus the orderly arrangement of the objects to be remembered.”

From The Making of Memory.

He goes on to describe how this culminated in the Renaissance with the popularisation of “memory theatres” – literally theatres in which you would imagine yourself on stage with the elements you were trying to remember in the audience.

“By the time of the Renaissance, the memory theatre was turned from a symbolic device, a piece of mental furniture, into an actual construct. In the sixteenth century, and to the disapproval of more rationalist philosophers such as Erasmus, the Venetian Giulio Camillo actually built a wooden theatre crowded with statues which he offered to kings and potentates as a marvellous, almost magical, device for memorizing. “

It’s well worth reading the the entire chapter, which I managed to find excerpted here. As often, Wikipedia also has some useful insights.

The breaking of memory

So why mention all this?

If there is one thing these techniques all rely on it is giving a context to the thing being remembered.

And that is exactly what is lacking from one of the big leaps of the web: tagging. The danger of tagging as a way of remembering is that it breaks all our thoughts into tiny snippets which are devoid of context. Normally, we make sense of the world by constantly updating our inner mental map of the people, places and things around us. We also surround ourselves with our crutches, of which the humble notebook is a perfect example. It stores information on a chronology, which we are good at quickly running through. On top of that, it somehow captures a surprising amount that can later jog our memory: the pen we were using, the messyness of the writing (were we at a desk or out and about?) or simply the random doodles in the margin. The main aspect of these crutches: they have a structure we can envision and navigate.

The problem comes when we throw information into something with an unstable, emergent structure like del.icio.us. I use and love del.icio.us but am keenly aware that I sometimes prefer to dump links into a note, draft blog post or e-mail it to myself because I know that whilst del.icio.us aggregates it won’t necessarily help me to get it in order.

A challenge to designers

As we move our lives on to the web, our tools will need to help us efortlessly capture the context of each file, photo, message and thought that we upload. The aim: to make our online tools as flexible and fast as possible while still giving them the ability to help us organise our thoughts.

To do this we will have to use every trick in the book, but here are four main themes (with the way we store photos as an example):

1. Using technology to capture the context (some digital cameras now have built in GPS, even for consumers)
2. Using the wisdom of the crowds to help us annotate (in the same way that Photosynth matches pictures by their contents to find where they were taken)
3. Giving the user intuitive, fast tools to mold and organise what he enters (www.stixy.com is not perfect, but has some elements of this fluidity)

The winners will balance the structure we impose with the structure that emerges from the context of the elements we upload.

I can’t wait to use what they make!

Recommended reading:

• The Making of Memory (Steven Rose)
• Metaphors of Memor (Douwe Draaisma) – first chapter here

ps – It’s not all black and white, of course.

Why do we throw good money after bad? Why do we hoard junk? Why do we keep the gym membership even though we don’t go?

The answer is loss aversion, a term introduced in 1979 by two Yale economists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The essence of their finding: losing £100 affects your level of happiness much more than winning £100. In other words, you feel losses more deeply than a gain of the same value. We hate losing what we have (or think that we have).

The concept won Daniel Kahneman a Nobel prize (which Tversky would have shared had he been alive) – but how can it be used? Mainly by tuning how aware you and your users are  of your potential losses.

The Seinfeld Method

This trick captured the imagination of a lot of people after it was featured on Lifehacker. This is what Jerry Seinfeld told an aspiring comic when asked how he kept up the motivation to write.

“He told  me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.

“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.”

This is a great example of loss aversion: the benefit of writing another joke seems small, but as you build up the chain you give yourself something to lose – and god do we hate to lose.

This has been applied all over: even as a way of tracking open source contributions http://calendaraboutnothing.com/.

Feel the pain

StickK uses another tool to even the balance: making you put your money where your mouth is.

“After signing up with stickK, you will be able to create a contract obliging you to achieve a specific goal within a particular time-frame. By creating a contract to meet one of your goals, you´re actually testing yourself and saying, “Hey, I can do this”. Not only are you challenging yourself, you´re also putting your reputation at stake. “

This is how it works: say you want to quit smoking, practice the guitar, etc… You go to www.stickk.com and set up a “Commitment Contract” setting out exactly what you will do, and set out a stake – it could be $10, $1000 or whatever you want. If you fail, the money is paid out to the charity of your choice. Simple.

The mechanics get quite neat. To stop StickK from giving away your hard earned cash you must report on your progress on the deadlines you’ve set up (e.g. I didn’t smoke this week). To stop you cheating, the report is then sent to a referee that you can nominate.

The site even has a special section for corporate accounts.

In its coverage of this, the Freakanomics blog linked to another nice little gadget in this line of thought – an alarm clock called SnuzNLuz that donates to your most hated charity (“Are you a butcher? Set your SnuzNLuz to donate to PETA”).

This is textbook loss aversion (the founders, Dean Karlan and Ian Ayres, are both Yale economists and researchers in this area). By getting you to focus on the potential losses they help you to do the right thing. More good coverage here.

Get others to feel it too

These two examples both show how you can use an awareness of loss aversion as a personal productivity aid, but it is much more fundamental than that. Anyone designing a business product or service should keep it in mind when trying to win over customers and give them something useful. More generally, creating a system or environment which minimizes loss aversion will make for better outcomes all around.

How can you make people treat losses with less emotion?

• One of the biggest examples of loss aversion is people failing to sell an investment when it’s worth less than they paid (“It’ll go back up I hope”). How can you design a system that makes it easier for people to get rid of the laggards in their portfolio (i.e. make it easier to set up and stick to stop losses)?
• Building a piece of software? You don’t have to keep every feature. How can you create an environment where a team chances removing unfocused or poorly-executed features at the risk of pissing off a small portion of users, rather than taking the certainty of leaving a mediocrity in.
• Turns out that people don’t go to the doctor because their worries about the seriousness of their illness outweighs the perceived benefit of treatment. How can you change this perception so the ill seek treatment? (from the blog of Nudge, a book by two more behavioural economists, one of whom, Thaler, contributed significantly to the discovery of loss aversion)

How can you make the threat of losses loom larger?

• The classic example of the gym membership. StickK puts a cash price on not going, but how can you make people internalise the damage to their health from not going? Same for smoking.

Tune what your users feel they already have and you will control what they have to lose. What have you got to lose?