Archive
June, 2008 Monthly archive

Getting someone to do things in a particular order (Part 4)

By: Dan
16-06-2008
Design, Design with Intent, DwI Method, Environmental, Interaction design, PhD, Product design, Software, Techniques of persuasion, Technology, Usability, User Psychology

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 (coming soon)

Continued from part 3

This series is looking at what design techniques/mechanisms are applicable to guiding a user to follow a process or path, performing actions in a specified sequence. The techniques that seem to apply with this ‘target behaviour’ fall roughly into three ‘approaches’, which if anything describe the mindset a designer might have in approaching the ‘problem’: i.e., the techniques suggested may well apply more than one at a time to many designed solutions, but each reflects a particular way of looking at the problem. In this post, I’m going to examine what I’ve called the Persuasive Interface approach, which draws heavily from the work of BJ Fogg, though applied specifically to this particularly target behaviour.

As noted before, a lot of this may seem obvious – and it is obvious: we encounter these kinds of design techniques in products and systems every day, but that’s part of the point of this bit of the research: understanding what’s out there already.

Persuasive Interface approach

The design of the interface (however loosely defined) of a product or system can be an important factor encouraging users to follow a process or path in a specified sequence. Interfaces can use a number of psychological persuasion mechanisms (outlined by B J Fogg) – a ‘human factors’ approach – in conjunction with the technical capabilities of the interface itself. Some mechanisms applicable to this behaviour, then, are – as well as the Interface capabilities themselves – Tunnelling, Suggestion (kairos), Self-monitoring and Operant conditioning.

Interface capabilities
What I mean by this – there is probably a better term for it waiting to be coined – is the choice of degree/type/format of information or feedback that an interface can provide a user. Clearly, an interface with few capabilities for actually providing the user with feedback, or worse, inappropriate feedback capabilities (e.g. a car speedometer only telling you your mean speed for the journey, rather than the instantaneous velocity), has a different (probably much worse) chance for affecting users’ behaviour. (Which is why having the electricity meter in a cupboard, and looking at it four times a year, is not very persuasive in energy-saving terms.)

Careful selection of what information, feedback and control capabilities are designed into a system, from a technical point of view, can have a major effect on user behaviour. To some extent, the addition of an interface to a system which did not previously have one may drive behaviour change in itself. Technical decisions about the types of interaction possible between an interface and the underlying system or product, and between the user and the interface – the capabilities of the interface – determine how the user experience will work: if a system is not designed with a function for monitoring progress through a sequence of operations, for example, then the possibility of indicating this via an interface is not possible, or far more difficult. Providing the infrastructure for a meaningful and useful interface for a system is a design decision which can shape or even determine the system’s use characteristics.

Self-monitoring
Self-monitoring, as defined by BJ Fogg, is an interface design mechanism which explicitly links feedback of information to the user’s actions: the user can monitor his or her behaviour and the effect that this has on the system’s state. As applied to helping a user follow a process or path in sequence, it makes sense for the self-monitoring to involve real-time feedback – so that the ‘correct’ next step can immediately be taken if the feedback indicates that this is what should happen – but in other contexts, ‘summary’ monitoring may also be useful, such as giving the user a report of his or her behaviour and its efficacy over a certain period.

Even giving a user the ability to self-monitor where previously there was none can help change behaviour: for example, providing a home electricity meter in an immediately visible position is likely to be more persuasive at inspiring energy saving – by increasing awareness of consumption – than having the meter hidden away.

LinkedIn: Self-monitoringExample: LinkedIn‘s ‘Profile Completeness’ indicator allows users to monitor their ‘progress’, driving them to follow a specified sequence of actions

Tunnelling
Tunnelling is a ‘guided persuasion’ mechanism outlined by Fogg, in which a user ‘agrees’ to be routed through a sequence of pre-specified actions or events:

When you enter a tunnel, you give up a certain level of self-determination. By entering the tunnel, you are exposed to information and activities you may not have seen or engaged in otherwise. Both of these provide opportunities for persuasion.

Applying this mechanism involves treating the user as a captive audience: presenting only the ‘correct’ sequence of actions, step by step, with any user choices being limited, and the commitment to following the process being a motivator to accept the advice or opinions presented. Fogg uses the example of people voluntarily hiring personal trainers to guide them through fitness programmes. Some software wizards provide an interface analogy, where the intention is not merely to simplify a process, but additionally to shape the user’s choices.

Wizard: tunnellingExample: This software wizard helps the user ‘tunnel’ through a file conversion process in the right order.

Suggestion (kairos)
Suggestion (kairos) involves suggesting a behaviour to a user at the ‘opportune’ moment, i.e. when that behaviour would be the most efficient or otherwise most desirable step to take (either from the user’s point of view, or that of another entity). In the context of helping a user follow a process or path in a specified sequence, this is very easily implemented: the system can simply ‘cue’ the desired next step in the sequence by alerting or reminding the user, whether that comes through indicators on the interface itself, or some other kind of alert.

Suggestions can also help steer users away from incorrect behaviour next time they use the system, even if it’s too late this time; when presented at the point where a mistake or incorrect step is obvious, advice on what to do next time may be more easily recalled. The key to this mechanism is that the suggestion is timed or triggered at the right point in the sequence, so that its effect is most persuasive. This may imply a system which monitors the user’s behaviour and responds accordingly via the interface, or it might be realised by an interface designed so that, by helping the user keep track of where he or she is in a sequence of operations, the suggestions only appear or are visible at the right point.

Volvo gearchange light
Example: This Gearchange Indicator light, fitted to certain Volvo models, suggests the most efficient moment to change gear, based on measurement of engine RPM and throttle position. Thanks to Mac MacFarlane for the image.

Operant conditioning
Controversial, certainly, but reinforcing target behaviours through rewards or punishment may be applicable where we want the user to perform a (perhaps complex) behavioural sequence repeatedly, so that it becomes habit, or successive iterations approximate the intended sequence. But it is unlikely to be effective in encouraging users to follow one-off sequences, where actual direction (e.g. suggestion, tunnelling) is far more useful. In general, punishing users for mistakes is an undesirable way of designing.

In part 5, we’ll review the approaches we’ve looked at, and see how one might actually go about choosing among them to design a new product or system with this particular target behaviour.

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Sarah Burwood: Tumble Sums

By: Dan
14-06-2008
Analog hole, Brunel, Children, Design, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Digital rights, Education, Embedding code, Engineering design, Good design, Interaction design, Product design, Technology, User Psychology

Tumble Sums by Sarah BurwoodWe’ve covered teaching machines and programmed learning textbooks a few times on the blog, and I’ll admit to a general fascination with analogue computing and similar ideas, ever since reading John Crank‘s Mathematics and Industry as a teenager, after finding it in a skip (dumpster) along with a lot of other very interesting books*. It was the idea that you could build an analogue electrical circuit, with resistors, capacitors and inductors, to model many physical phenomena (gravitational fields, etc), which really intrigued me, brought up in a world where computation was presented as entirely digital.

But I digress. A lot of the fascination comes from seeing a different way to explain a concept to someone else: a structured, alternative form of learning or understanding a problem, which is, somehow, immensely satisfying. There’s always the glint of a possibility that if we could find different ways to explain difficult or complex subjects, more people might be able to understand and appreciate them.

Sarah Burwood, a graduating Industrial Design student showing her work at Made in Brunel this week, has created Tumble Sums, a ‘Child’s Mechanical Visual Calculator’:

Tumble Sums by Sarah Burwood

Helping children understand fundamental mathematical principles, Tumble Sums is a calculating tool which visually shows a child how an answer is being reached. Calculations are solved in a physical way, based solely on mechanical operations. Tumble Sums focuses on an understanding of the way children think, their mathematical understanding and the psychology behind these aspects.

It looks to be beautifully machined from acrylic sections, and that height alone makes it extremely imposing. Imagine one of these at the back of every primary-school classroom!

This concept of making hidden processes visible in order to aid the construction of the user’s mental models is something that will, I think, be an important component of lots of more advanced interfaces in the years ahead, particularly in areas where, fundamentally, we’re bad at understanding the consequences of our actions (environment, health, finances). It’s maybe allied to constructionism, though by no means the same idea.

*Incidentally, the morning I first turned up at Brunel again as a PhD student, I sat in the wonderful garden John Crank had created, reading Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers, waiting for the doors to the building to be unlocked.

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Exploiting the desire for order

By: Dan
13-06-2008
Defaults, Design, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Designers, Embedding code, Engineering design, Entropy, Environmental, Gadgets, Good design, Hidden persuaders, Interaction design, Product design, Sustainability, Techniques of persuasion, Technology, User Psychology

I met a lot of remarkable people in Finland, and some of them – they know who they are – have given me a lot to think about, in a good way, about lots of aspects of life, psychology and its relation to design. Thanks to everyone involved for a fantastic time: I was kind-of aware of the idea of Csíkszentmihályi’s flow before, but something about the combination of week-long permanent sunlight, very little sleep, great hospitality and a hell of a lot of interesting, clever people, brought home to me the reality of the phenomenon, or one quite like it.

A couple of the people it was great to meet were Loove Broms and Magnus Bång of the Interactive Institute in Stockholm, who have worked (among other things) on innovative ways to provide users with feedback on their energy use, beyond ‘traditional’ interfaces. We’ve seen a few of the Institute’s STATIC! projects before on the blog before, but it was very interesting to be introduced to some more recent concepts from the AWARE project. They’re all well worth a look, but one in particular intrigues me, primarily because of how simple the idea is:

Puzzle Switch, AWARE project, TII
The Puzzle Switch – designed by Loove Broms and Karin Ehrnberger. One type is shown above; below, a different design in ‘On’ (left) and ‘Off’ (right) positions.Puzzle Switch, AWARE project, TII   Puzzle Switch, AWARE project, TII

The AWARE Puzzle Switch – lower part of this page – really is as simple as a a series of light switches where it is very obvious when they are switched on, and which “encourage people to switch off their light, by playing with people’s built-in desire for order.”

Where else can we use this idea? The Puzzle Switch does it safely, in a way that, for example, having a lever hanging off the wall at a crazy angle (which would equally suggest to people that they ‘put it right’) would not. Is the key somehow to make it clearer to users that high-energy usage states are not ‘defaults’ in any way? That accompanying any energy use, there needs to be some kind of visible disorder (as with the irritating flashing standby lights) to cause users to notice and consciously to assess what’s going on?

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Lights reminding you to turn things off

By: Dan
12-06-2008
Design, Design engineering, Design with Intent, Engineering design, Entropy, Environmental, Gadgets, Good design, Hidden persuaders, Interaction design, Intrusive technology, Mistake-proofing, Pervasive computing, Poka-yoke, Product design, Sustainability, Techniques of persuasion, Technology, Usability, User Psychology

Standby indicators - Duncan DrennanStandby indicators - Duncan Drennan

Duncan Drennan, who writes the very thoughtful Art of Engineering blog, notes something extremely interesting: standby lights, if they’re annoying/visible enough, can actually motivate users to switch the device off properly:

Our DVD player has (to me) the most irritating standby light that I have ever seen on any device. When on, the light is constantly illuminated, but when in standby the light flashes continuously (at a slow rate). This drives me mad, but results in an interesting action – it causes me to turn it off at the plug when I am not using it (which is most of the time). Suddenly one little flashing light has resulted in more energy saving than having no light.

As he notes, designing a system with an indicator which actually draws power to inform you of… ‘nothing’ … actually may not be as inefficient as a from-first-principles efficiency design process would suggest, because of that human reaction. Similarly to the Static! project’s Power-Aware Cord, you may need to use a little extra energy to make people realise how much they’re using without thinking. Although:

There is one problem with this, it only works on people who care. If I did not care about saving energy, then I would just leave the laptop plugged in and the DVD player on. That means that you have to consider how your users will handle this kind of subtle feedback and determine whether turning the light off, or encouraging unplugging, results in more energy savings.

Sometimes the most obvious design decisions may not be the ones which result in the greatest energy saving.

This is a very astute observation indeed.

Are there any other examples where this sort of effect can be usefully employed? How similar is this to the ‘useful landmine’ concept where you deliberately force/provoke/annoy yourself into taking actions you otherwise wouldn’t bother/would forget to do?

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links for 2008-06-12

By: Dan
12-06-2008
Design with Intent
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Nudges and the power of choice architecture

By: Dan
10-06-2008
Blogosphere, Book reviews, Choice Architecture, Consumer rights, Defaults, Design attitudes, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Designers, Do artifacts have politics?, Embedding code, Good design, Hidden persuaders, Liberty, Philosophy of control, Political design, Social engineering, Techniques of persuasion, User Psychology

Nudge book cover
An ‘advance uncorrected page proof’ of Nudge I managed to get off Abebooks. Thanks to Hien Nguyen for the photo.

Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, is a publishing sensation of the moment, no doubt helped by Thaler’s work advising Barack Obama (many thanks to Johan Strandell for originally pointing me in Thaler and Sunstein’s direction). I’ve been reading the book in some detail over the last month or so, and while a full section-by-section review of its implications/applicability to ‘Design with Intent’ is in the works, this morning I saw that the Nudge blog’s John Balz had linked here with a post about the Oxford benches, so it seemed apposite to talk about it briefly.

Behavioural economics has/ought to have a lot of parallels with design psychology and usability research: it is effectively looking at how people’s cognitive biases actually cause them to understand, interpret and use economic systems, not necessarily in line with the intentions of the systems’ designers, and not necessarily in accordance with rational man theory. It’s clear there’s a lot in common with examining how people actually understand and use technology and designed elements of the world around them, and there would seem to be a continual bottom-up and top-down iteration of understanding as the field develops: what users actually do is studied, then inferences are made about the thought processes that lead to that behaviour, then the experiment/system/whatever is refined to take into account those thought processes, and what users actually do is then tested again, and so on. This is very much the way that many conscientious user-focused design consultancies work, in fact, often using ethnography and in-context user observation to determine what’s really going on in users’ heads and their interactions with technology.

Dan Ariely‘s Predictably Irrational is an excellent recent book which lays bare many of the cognitive biases and heuristics guiding everyday human decision-making, and he does take the step of suggesting a number of extremely interesting ‘improvements’ to systems which would enable them to match the way people really make decisions – which are, effectively, examples of Design with Intent as I’d define it.

But Thaler and Sunstein go further: Nudge is pretty much an elaborated series of applying techniques derived from understanding these biases to various social and economic ‘problems’, and discussion of how guiding (nudging) people towards ‘better’ choices could have a great impact overall without restricting individual freedom to make different choices. They call it libertarian paternalism and in itself the idea is not without controversy, at least when presented politically, even if it seems intuitively to be very much a part of everyday life already: when we ask someone, anyone, for advice, we are asking to have our decision guided. BJ Fogg might call it as tunnelling; Seth Godin might express it in terms of permission marketing.

Choice architecture

For Thaler and Sunstein, choice architecture is the key: the way that sets of choices are designed, and the way that they are presented to people(/users) is the basis of shaping decisions. (There’s a massive parallel here with designing affordances and perceived affordances into systems, which isn’t difficult to draw.) The establishment of ‘choice architects’, as Thaler and Sunstein describe them, within companies and governments – people with specialised domain knowledge, but also understanding of biases, heuristics and how they affect their customers’ decisions, and how to frame the choices in the ‘right’ way – is an intriguing suggestion.

Clearly, any system which intentionally presents a limited number of choices is in danger of creating false dichotomies and decoy effects – either accidentally or deliberately (e.g. this [PDF, 300 kB]). Manipulation of defaults raises similar questions (Rajiv Shah is doing some great work in this area). But, depending on the degree of ‘paternalism’ (or coercion) intended, it may be that intentionally misleading choice architecture might be considered ‘ethical’ under some circumstances. Who knows?

We’ll look at Nudge in more detail in a future post, but suffice to say: it is a very interesting book – my copy’s annotated with over a hundred torn-up bits of Post-It note at present – and it seems to be placing designers, of various kinds, at the centre of taking these ideas further for social benefit.

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