Psychologists talk about two kinds of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is what drives you to do something regardless of whether you will receive a reward. Why do you spend an hour cleaning the inside of your stove? Nobody looks in there. Your intrinsic motivation compels you to do a thorough job. We all have it — in fact, most people start out with the desire to excel at whatever they do. Extrinsic motivation is the drive to do something precisely because you expect to receive compensation, and it’s the weaker of the two.
The interesting thing, according to psychologists, is that extrinsic motivation has a way of displacing intrinsic motivation. The very act of rewarding workers for a job well done tends to make them think they are doing it solely for the reward; if the reward stops, the good work stops. And if the reward is too low, workers might think, Gosh, this is not worth it. They will forget their innate, intrinsic desire to do good work.
January 14, 2009
Why Work
January 9, 2009
Biometrics
Summary of an article by Bruce Schneier for The Guardian,
Biometrics can vastly improve security, especially when paired with another form of authentication such as passwords. But it’s important to understand their limitations as well as their strengths. On the strength side, biometrics are hard to forge. It’s hard to affix a fake fingerprint to your finger or make your retina look like someone else’s. Some people can mimic voices, and make-up artists can change people’s faces, but these are specialized skills.
On the other hand, biometrics are easy to steal. You leave your fingerprints everywhere you touch, your retinal scan everywhere you look. Regularly, hackers have copied the prints of officials from objects they’ve touched, and posted them on the Internet. …
Biometrics are unique identifiers, but they’re not secrets.
… biometrics work best if the system can verify that the biometric came from the person at the time of verification. The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there’s a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system.
One more problem with biometrics: they don’t fail well. Passwords can be changed, but if someone copies your thumbprint, you’re out of luck: you can’t update your thumb. Passwords can be backed up, but if you alter your thumbprint in an accident, you’re stuck. The failures don’t have to be this spectacular: a voice print reader might not recognize someone with a sore throat…
In Why Identity and Authentication Must Remain Distinct, Steve Riley cautions,
Proper biometrics are identity only and will be accompanied, like all good identifiers, by a secret of some kind — a PIN, a private key on a smart card, or, yes, even a password.
January 4, 2009
Conway’s Law
Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.
As Wikipedia points out, “Conway’s law was not intended as a joke .. but as a valid sociological observation. It is a consequence of the fact that two software modules A and B cannot interface correctly with each other unless the people who made A communicate with the people who made B. Thus the interface structure of a software system necessarily will show a congruence with the social structure of the organization that produced it.”
December 4, 2008
Optimize People’s Time Not The Machine’s Time
People cost a lot more money than machines, and while it might appear that increasing machine productivity must result in increasing human productivity, the opposite is often true. In judging the efficiency of a system, look beyond just the efficiency of the machine.
For example, which of the following takes less time? Heating water in a microwave for one minute and ten seconds or heating it for one minute and eleven seconds?
From the standpoint of the microwave, one minute and ten seconds is the obviously correct answer. From the standpoint of the user of the microwave, one minute and eleven seconds is faster. Why? Because in the first case, the user must press the one key twice, then visually locate the zero key, move the finger into place over it, and press it once. In the second case, the user just presses the same key–the one key–three times. It typically takes more than one second to acquire the zero key. Hence, the water is heated faster when it is “cooked” longer.
Other factors beyond speed make the 111 solution more efficient. Seeking out a different key not only takes time, it requires a fairly high level of cognitive processing. While the processing is underway, the main task the user was involved with–cooking their meal–must be set aside. The longer it is set aside, the longer it will take to reacquire it.
You also need to consider actual performance vr perceived performance, when optimizing a user’s time.
September 29, 2008
Lovable Software
Money can’t buy you love, but love can bring you money. In software the only sustainable way to earn money is by first creating love, and then hoping that some folks want to demonstrate that love with their dollars.
…. Everything should be shareware to be tried and tested until its value is proven and the love-meter swings open the wallet. If I were to pass on some music or a piece of code I become a vector of word of mouth viral marketing, the best kind, the kind that money can’t buy.
September 27, 2008
Apple Has Learned The Importance of Play. We Should Too
…joyful playful exploration is critical to learning. Rote learning and memorization is less effective.
…
I believe that a big part of the reason that Apple has been successful is that they figured out long ago that their products had to have the elements of joyful exploration that are the hallmarks of great toys
The short article is worth reading.
September 17, 2008
The Price of Cool
For those who might doubt such a high value of cool, consider the self-winding Rolex, which sports 1/10th the accuracy of a Timex at 1000 times the price. With Rolex, the technology is grossly inferior, and still people will pay thousands to own it.
September 6, 2008
The Term “Sprint” is Very Wrong for Software Projects
My employer is big on Scrum-flavored Agile Software Development. This is not a critique of “Agile” practices (if you want one Steve Yegge won’t let you down). I just don’t have enough experience organizing software projects to judge if this whole “Agile” thing is working well or not. But I do think the choice of the word “Sprint” to denote a unit of work is harmful.
A sprint is unsustainable. Fully recovering from a true-sprint takes a long time. To be ready to sprint again, you must rest for far longer then the sprint lasted. And you’re pretty useless (at least running-wise) while you rest. These are simple things that we learned as kids on the playground. This is what “sprint” means to people.
Calling repeated multi-week units of sustainable and quality work a “sprint” makes no sense whatsoever. Worse, it subtly encourages over-exertion and behaviors that are detrimental to a project.
It might be argued that in the context of Scrummy-Agileness, “Sprint” is a technical term, divorced from the common parlance. Whatever. Words don’t change meaning overnight, and they are almost never their own antonyms. Word-choice is known to influence people.
Sure, word-choice alone isn’t enough to derail a project, or sink a methodology. That’s why this isn’t a criticism of “Scrum”, which will ultimately stand or fall for other reasons. But there are plenty of much better terms to describe a chunk of work, that will help long-term productivity. Wouldn’t you rather work for a company that evaluated how effective a “Play” was?
September 2, 2008
You Can Fool Some of the People
Preconceptions are a powerful thing.
In one recent test, psychologists asked 32 volunteers to sample strawberry yogurt. To make sure the testers made their judgments purely on the basis of taste, the researchers said, they needed to turn out the lights. Then they gave their subjects chocolate yogurt. Nineteen of the 32 praised the strawberry flavor. One said that strawberry was her favorite flavor and she planned to switch to this new brand.
August 12, 2008
Aesthetics Matter
.. aesthetics (are) important in UI. If you begin to look at something and want to avert your eyes, the site has failed.
I highly recommend the book Emotional Design