…the peak end rule. When thinking about a total experience, people tend to place too much weight on the last part of the experience. In one experiment, people had to hold their hands under cold water for one minute. Then, they had to hold their hands under cold water for one minute again, then keep their hands in the water for an additional 30 seconds while the temperature was gradually raised. When asked about it afterwards, most people preferred the second option to the first, even though the second had more total discomfort. (An intrusive medical device was redesigned along these lines, resulting in a longer period of discomfort but a relatively comfortable final few seconds. People liked it a lot better.)
June 19, 2009
All’s Well That Ends Well
June 17, 2009
June 4, 2009
links for 2009-06-04
This was an experiment, in doing more with my delicious bookmarks. I was hoping that I could get more feedback and discussion on things I found interesting enough to bookmark by automatically posting links to them here. Many sites that I enjoy reading do something similar. But it hasn’t felt like a good fit for me.
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The $39 ones are very affordable, and got a nod from Scott Stevenson.
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Pay $5, get (only!) 50 people to vote on a yes/no question. Sounds like a lot of money compared to mturk. As always, I'm skeptical that any internet poll can be a usably-random sample.
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Author Nicholas Carr coined the phrase digital sharecroppers to describe those of us who create content on community Web 2.0 sites….He says we are like sharecroppers after the Civil War — tilling land that we don’t own, barely eking out a living, while someone else who owns the land, benefits.
But clearly facebook gives us something of value, even if it’s fun, not money. (That said, I’ve got adds blocked though CSS).
However, I think Digital Sharecroppers is an appropriate term for contributers to restrictive open source projects. The real wealth of a programming project is the code, not the final product. And licenses like the GPL don’t let contributers share in that wealth by using it in their own proprietary projects.
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The future of advertising needs to be selling – that is, enabling – relevance instead of selling scarce space, time, or eyeballs. The future needs to be about adding value – relevance – rather than selling scarcity (extracting what the market will bear). I’m not sure whether Digg’s system is a step in that direction; Batey’s right that there could be unintended consequences. But it’s worth watching. I hope Digg shares data and experience in its fascinating experiment.
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google + tag cloud for your search
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The idea is to remap Caps Lock so that while holding it, J-I-L-K work like the arrow keys to move the cursor. Since we have more clear arrow keys, I don't think that's the best use for caps lock, but ideas for using it are always interesting.
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Nielson argues that qualitative analysis is dangerously narrow.
It's a dangerous mistake to believe that statistical research is somehow more scientific or credible than insight-based observational research. In fact, most statistical research is less credible than qualitative studies. Design research is not like medical science: ethnography is its closest analogy in traditional fields of science. User interfaces and usability are highly contextual, and their effectiveness depends on a broad understanding of human behavior
The problem with qualatative "research" however is that it's not clear how to make it objective and verifiable.
Nielson makes a good point that 95% confidence ⇒ 1/20 results are wrong. But that's why scientists reproduce experiments, and why it’s so necessary to be able to do that.
May 26, 2009
Secret Questions Are a Bad Idea
Secret questions are an easier way for someone to hack your account. I don’t see that they offer much over asking people to pick an insecurely convenient password.
Here’s some data on how insecure secret questions are,
Acquaintance with whom participants reported being unwilling to share their webmail passwords were able to guess 17% of their answers (to “secret” questions). Participants forgot 20% of their own answers within six months. What’s more, 13% of answers could be guessed within five attempts by guessing the most popular answers of other participants, though this weakness is partially attributable to the geographic homogeneity of our participant pool.
(Via Bruce Schneier)
It’s important to note that people often forget answers to their own secret questions. Anecdotally, I’ve had to call my bank twice because I forgot exactly how I typed in my answers.
Forgetting the answer to a secret question can be embarrassing, unlike forgetting a password. I once got my mother’s maiden name wrong repeatedly. It was pretty awkward. (A credit card was also in my mother’s name, so when they asked “for my mother’s maiden name” they really meant her mother’s maiden name.)
I don’t know of any statistics on how often accounts are compromised by secret questions. But there have been high-profile cases, like Sarah Palin’s email,
…the Palin hack didn’t require any real skill. Instead, the hacker simply reset Palin’s password using her birthdate, ZIP code and information about where she met her spouse — the security question on her Yahoo account, which was answered (Wasilla High) by a simple Google search.
Bruce Schneier says, “Passwords have reached the end of their useful life. Today, they only work for low-security applications. The secret question is just one manifestation of that fact.” If you must use password authentication, then don’t weaken it further with a questionable back door.
May 9, 2009
Words Lie More Than Statistics
Increasingly it seems, people throw up their hands, “graphs and statistics are all lies anyway!” and never deeply examine quantitative information. And that’s part of the reason why I can’t recommend The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
For many people the first word that comes to mind when they think about statistical charts is “lie.” No doubt some graphics do distort the underlying data, making it hard for the viewer to learn the truth. But data graphics are no different from words in this regard, for any means of communication can be used to deceive. There is no reason to believe that graphics are especially vulnerable to exploitation by liars; in fact, most of us have pretty good graphical lie detectors that help us see right through frauds.
Much of twentieth-century thinking about statistical graphics has been preoccupied with the question of how some amateurish chart might fool a naive viewer. Other important issues, such as the use of graphics for serious data analysis, were largely ignored. At the core of the preoccupation with deceptive graphics was the assumption that data graphics were mainly devices for showing the obvious to the ignorant. It is hard to imagine any doctrine more likely to stifle intellectual progress in a field…
–Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
You will be lied to more often, and more subtly, with words than with figures. But unlike empty words, the data behind a chart is verifiable, and can be objectively redrawn. As I see it, quantitative analysis is our best chance to reason truthfully and without ego. Sometimes infographics are a better tool than words, especially for summarizing large datasets objectively. If anything, we should be scared when there aren’t graphs and statistics.
May 6, 2009
No Common Name
The problem with insects is their sheer number. There are millions of species. How many million we can’t say, and our guesses even as to the appropriate order of magnitude are tentative.* Certainly, there are too many for any language to absorb into common parlance. Most pass their lives entirely unnoticed by humans, and any specialists who happen to work on them are content with the scientific names. This is to say, most insects have no common name at all.
*for more on the diversity of life, see Rob Dunn’s book Every Living Thing.
May 3, 2009
Confounding Circles
Consider a technique used by the legendary pickpocket Apollo Robbins…. When the researchers asked him about his devious methods—how he could steal the wallet of a man who knew he was going to have his pocket picked—they learned something surprising: Robbins said the trick worked only when he moved his free hand in an arc instead of a straight line. According to the thief, these arcs distract the eyes of his victims for a matter of milliseconds, just enough time for his other hand to pilfer their belongings.
At first, the scientists couldn’t explain this phenomenon. Why would arcs keep us from looking at the right place? But then they began to think about saccades, movements of the eye that can precede conscious decisions about where to turn one’s gaze. Saccades are among the fastest movements produced by the human body, which is why a pickpocket has to trick them: The eyes are in fact quicker than the hands. “This is an idea scientists had never contemplated before,” Macknik says. “It turns out, though, that the pickpocket was onto something.” When we see a hand moving in a straight line, we automatically look toward the end point—this is called the pursuit system. A hand moving in a semicircle, however, seems to short-circuit our saccades. The arc doesn’t tell our eyes where the hand is going, so we fixate on the hand itself—and fail to notice the other hand reaching into our pocket. “The pickpocket has found a weakness in the way we perceive motion,” Macknik says. “Show the eyes an arc and they move differently.”
April 30, 2009
Acceptable Delays
This is a collection of sources on what constitutes an acceptable delay. It’s very much a work in progress, and will be updated when I stumble into new information. I’m very interested in any insights, experience, or sources you may have.
Based on some experiments I did back at IBM, delays of 1/10th of a second are roughly when people start to notice that an editor is slow. If you can respond is less than 1/10th of a second, people don’t perceive a troublesome delay.
One second … is the required response time for hypertext navigation. Users do not keep their attention on the page if downloading exceeds 10 seconds.
In A/B tests (at Amazon.com), we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue. (eg 20% drop in traffic when moving from 0.4 to 0.9 second load time for search results).
—Greg Linden covering results disclosed by Google VP Marissa Mayer
If a user operates a control and nothing appears on the display for more than approximately 250 msec, she is likely to become uneasy, to try again, or to begin to wonder whether the system is failing.
— Jeff Raskin, The Humane Interface
David Eagleman’s blog post Will you perceive the event that kills you? is an engaging look at how slow human perception is, compared to mechanical response time. For example, in a car crash that takes 70ms from impact until airbags begin deflating, the occupants are not aware of the collision until 150-300 milliseconds (possibly as long as 500 milliseconds) after impact.
April 21, 2009
A Scalpel Not a Swiss Army Knife
Steven Frank summarizing feedback on the direction future of computer interfaces,
The other common theme was a desire to see applications become less general purpose and more specific. A good example was finding out train or bus schedules. One way to do this is to start up your all-purpose web browser, and visit a transit web site that offers a downloadable PDF of the bus schedule pamphlet. Another way is to use an iPhone application that has been built-to-task to interface with a particular city’s transit system. It’s no contest which is the better experience.
…In 2009, it’s still a chore to find out from the internet what time the grocery store down the street closes — we’ve got some work to do.
I would like to see a nice pithy term replace “very specific task-driven apps”. Perhaps “Specialty Applications” or “Focused Programs”. But I’m not enamored with ether. Whatever the term, it should emphasize excelling at something, not being limited. What are your thoughts for a name?
April 15, 2009
Beyond Two Page Programs
And one of the things that is disturbingly true about most novices on computers is that about 2 pages of program is the maximum they can handle. They like to spread it out, use their visual field as an extension of their short term memory
–Alan Kay From Doing With Images Makes Symbols
A few thoughts on this phenomenon.
A denser, more concise, less “English like” programming language would counter-intuitivly be easier for novices to use, if it let them keep their project below the 2-page limit.
Does this limit increase with more and bigger displays?
Do graphical programming language change anything? It seems like they might “scale” better on a very large display. But in my (albeit limited) experience they are much less compact then textual source code. And it’s not clear to me they support abstraction as well.