How can design help us make better decisions?

…for the level above it.

Terence Eden on API design:

One hackathon I went to a few weeks ago had a Developer Relations employee stand up and say:

Who wants to use our API? It uses SOAP – sorry. If you want documentation – come see me because it’s not on the website. Oh, and it’s read only. Let me know as soon as possible because it takes 6 hours to approve your API key.

This is madness. Developers are human too! They need some HCI love between them and their APIs.

My favorite API: facial expressions and body language.

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Just found this little single purpose service called Ask Me Every. SMSes you a question of your choosing, then graphs the result. Neat!

I’ll probably be using it to support some personal behavior change, but it could be super useful for research, too.

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Ars Technica’s Kate Shaw reports on research pitting chimpanzees, capuchins and kids against a puzzle box to study what variables explain our success as a species. One of those is teaching and imitation:

Only in the human groups did the researchers witness teaching behavior, either through language (“push that button”) or gesturing. Furthermore, the children who received the most instruction were more likely to make it to the third stage. The researchers also found that “matching”—when an individual who picks up the box imitates what the last individual using it did—had a great impact on progress.

Fascinating how the building blocks of intelligence are dumb imitation. I wonder if we can design smarter communities around games/apps just by creating mechanisms for teaching and copying.

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Japanese cafeteria offers diners in-depth advice on health and nutrition:

Regular Springwise readers may remember ThinDish, the website offering diners information on restaurants with healthy eating options. Now, in Tokyo, Tanita Shokudo offers a way to bring nutritional advice directly to consumers’ tables.

The brainchild of Japanese health device manufacturer Tanita Corp, Tanita Shokudo provides expert culinary information about all items on the menu, aiming to help those wanting to eat out without compromising their diet plans. Each table is fitted with a weighing scale to ensure healthy portions can be measured out, while a timer tells the diner when the optimum duration of 20 minutes for completing their lunch is over. Professional dieticians are also on hand to provide free advice on eating regimes in a special counselling room.

This is a smart play for a maker known mainly for their body fat scales. Without these kinds of experiences, you’re just dumping people into the nutrition optimization game without a tutorial.

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New PwC report on the worldwide mHealth market:

PwC estimates that mobile-enabled monitoring services, like those offered for chronic disease management, will make up 65 per cent of the worldwide mHealth market and account for $15 billion in revenues by 2017. The second largest segment will be diagnostic services, which will generate $3.4 billion in revenues worldwide, and make up 15 per cent of the global mHealth market. (PwC notes that mobile telemedicine and health call centers are included in that segment.) The third largest market opportunity is in what PwC calls “treatment services,” which include medication and treatment adherence devices (like Vitality’s GlowCap) and services. These will make up 10 percent of the overall market or about $2.3 billion.

Would love to know the split between monitoring, diagnostic and treatment in the current brick & mortar health system. That 65% of the mHealth market is monitoring is another sign of how underserved that need must be right now.

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Hugh Pickens quoted by Slashdot on the surprising effectiveness of interval training:

Researchers have developed a version of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) that involves one minute of strenuous effort, at about 90 percent of a person’s maximum heart rate (which most of us can estimate, very roughly, by subtracting our age from 220), followed by one minute of easy recovery. The effort and recovery are repeated 10 times, for a total of 20 minutes and the interval training is performed twice a week. Despite the small time commitment of this modified HIIT program, after several weeks of practicing it, both the unfit volunteers and the cardiac patients showed significant improvements in their health and fitness.

We seem to experience the quality of an experience not as an average, but almost entirely by how it was at its peak and its end (peak-end rule, first suggested by Daniel Kahneman).

Perhaps our bodies use a similar heuristic to determine how much energy to invest in making our bodies fitter. Time for some Tabatas.

(Via science.slashdot.org)

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Intel’s Eric Dishman talking about virtual care coordination:

Developing countries don’t need to “copy the Western model,” as Dishman later told me. A lot of places that never had landline telephones now are blanketed with cellular coverage. Dishman reported that he’s heard about villages in Mozambique that don’t have constant, reliable electricity but do have broadband Internet service thanks to WiMAX technology.

Broadband, of course, can support all kinds of nonacute healthcare services for a lot less money than it costs to put up a hospital or a modern outpatient clinic. “It’s not clear that we need hospitals at all,” Dishman said in an interview. “You’ve got to leverage those scarce resources very preciously.”

This was an option that a lot of the ministers in attendance had not even considered. “It was just kind of a wake-up call,” Dishman reported.

[…]

If undeveloped societies follow the example set by the West, they could end up with the same kind of inefficient, high-cost, error-prone infrastructure that we have here in America. Or they could try an entirely new approach, since they essentially have blank slates in so many ways.

Hospitals are after all just a path of least resistance for assembling the expertise and equipment needed to care for people. They may still be the only way to perform complicated procedures that require specialized (and expensive) equipment, but less acute care can increasingly be delivered online using consumer grade technology.

Not that an analogy is necessary, but this reminds me of the move from arcades to home entertainment. A several thousand dollar pinball or arcade machine could only be amortized with several thousand people’s quarters, and you would only be playing with others if you were physically with them. Wonder if that means we’re on track to ‘hospital districts’, Akihabara style clusters of cutting edge medical technology.

(Via mobihealthnews)

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On Bret Victor’s explosively inspiring talk at CUSEC 2012.

Bret Victor has designed some amazing interfaces to follow a principle of immediate connection between creations and the tools used to make them. That’s the first half of this talk, and will make you hate whatever text editor/IDE you’re using right now.

But the point of his talk is that if he doesn’t design these interfaces, fragile ideas will die, and that’s not just a pity; it’s wrong.

When I see a violation of this principle I don’t think of that as an opportunity. When I see creators constrained by their tools, their ideas compromised, I don’t say “Oh good! An opportunity to create a product. Or an opportunity to start a business. Or an opportunity to do some research or contribute to a field. I’m not excited by finding a problem to solve. I’m not in this for the joy of making things.

Ideas are very precious to me. When I see ideas dying, it hurts. I see a tragedy.

To me it feels like a moral wrong, it feels like an injustice, and if I think there’s anything I can do about it, I feels it’s my responsibility to do something about it.

Not opportunity, responsibility.

That’s his principle, and he says technologists should seek out principles of their own as lens on the world, so we immediately feel that short, sharp pain whenever those principles are violated.

Responsibility, moral wrong, these’s aren’t the words we normally hear in a technical field. We do hear these words in association with social causes – censorship, gender discrimination environmental destruction. We all recognize these things as moral wrongs.

Most of us wouldn’t witness a civil rights violation and think “Oh good, an opportunity.” I hope not.

Instead, we’ve been very fortunate to have had people throughout history who recognized these social wrongs, and saw it as their responsibility to address them. So there’s this activist lifestyle where a person dedicates themselves to fighting for a cause that they believe in.

The purpose of this talk is to tell you that this activist lifestyle is not just for social activism. As a technologist, you can recognize a wrong in the world. You can have a vision for what a better world should be, and you can dedicate yourself to fighting for a principle.

Social activists typically fight by organizing, but you can fight by inventing.

He explains that we are mostly just presented with a choice of career: the way of the craftsman (“I am a front end designer. I will craft front ends!”), or the way of problem solver (“Everyone agrees that cancer is a problem. I will solve it”). The way of the principle is a third way.

What strikes me is Bret’s analysis of what makes a good principle.

So a thought – Bret uses giants of social and technological causes to illustrate his point. The principle becomes The Principle capitalized, Taj Mahal sized and kinda intimidating.

But it doesn’t have to be. Finding The Principle may be a life’s work (using it even more so), but finding principles is a game we can play in even the smallest ways. If I look closer, I can try to find little principles in the way I cook, commute, take notes, clean my apartment, choose a restaurant, etc…

It reminds me of how Daniel Kahneman describes research with his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky:

Our research was a conversation, in which we invented questions and jointly examined our intuitive answers. Each question was a small experiment, and we carried out many experiments in a single day. We were not seriously looking for the correct answer answer to the statistical questions we posed. Our aim was to identify and analyze the intuitive answer, the first one that came to mind, the one we were tempted to make even when we knew it to be wrong. (from Thinking Fast & Slow)

Playful experiments force you to explore. There’s an improv game where at any point in the scene, a person picked from the audience can call “Rewind!”, and the improvisers have to take the last thing they did… and do it differently. You end up trying what you wouldn’t normally, and you can learn from it by reflecting on what you just did.

I think this approach to life happens to also be a helpful search algorithm to uncover the guiding principle. We use heuristics in everything we do without even being aware of them. The singular moment when we find that guiding Principle is when we achieve self-awareness of enough of those heuristics that we can connect them together under a larger one.

Thanks for this talk, Bret, it really helped.

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Oh cool, I giant trove of community created horror stories about… things… that need be locked away to protect humanity, but are either too fascinating or too difficult to destroy.

Stumbled upon through Indiegames because someone made a game out of SCP-087, a tale about arguably the world’s worst stairwell.

So here’s a question: why was this more suitable for a game than the others?

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