When we make decisions we think we’re in control, making rational choices. But are we? Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, has some interesting examples of irrational decision making.
We are always looking at the things around us in relation to others. We don’t just compare things but we actually compare things that are more easily comparable. If given the following options for a honeymoon – Paris (with free breakfast), Rome (with free breakfast), and Rome (no breakfast included), most people would choose Rome with the free breakfast. The rationale is that it is easier to compare the two options for Rome than it is to compare Paris and Rome. Ariely also explains the role of the decoy effect in the decision process. The decoy effect is the phenomenon whereby consumers will tend to have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option that is asymmetrically dominated. This effect is the secret agent in more decisions than we can imagine. Back to the example with the honeymoon options, Rome without free breakfast is the decoy. It makes Paris look inferior when compared to Rome with the free breakfast.
In another example from the economist.com you have the following three subscription options :
When Ariely did a little test with this ad, these where the results:
As you can see, most people would choose the ‘combo’ deal. And nobody would choose the inferior option. But when we remove the second options the results were quite different:
Thanks to the useless option in the middle the combo deal looked like a fantastic deal and most people choosed it. But in fact it wasn’t the option we really wanted. The general idea is that we don’t know our preferences that well. And because we don’t know our prefereces that well we are easily manipulated by external forces.
Filed under: Marketing, Psychology | 2 Comments
How we created a Twitter viral
A few weeks ago Boy van Amstel and I had funny idea for a twitter mash-up. We would basically measure your twitter popularity in the form of a giant penis. Better know as the e-Penis. Funny enough? Well in order to see if we really created something to talk about we registered a URL: www.epenis.nl and we uploaded the e-Penis app with a few ’share-this’ buttons. The first button was to post it on Twitter, and the second one was to Digg it. Would people share this site with their friends? How fast would it spread? All question a marketer would like to know when creating a viral marketing campaign right?
In our first day we managed to reach about 100 of our own friends on twitter. But for it to be really successful we needed to reach some people on twitter with a huge following base. We used our own share this button a number of times on all sorts of people. And after a few tries @michielveenstra, 2500 followers, picked up our message and reposted our website on his own twitter stream on a friday night. Overnight we reached 1500 hits. But as it turned out our biggest traffic came from a porn-blog! Apperently a webmaster from this well know porn-blog picked up our site after seeing it in the stream from @michielveenstra. In the weekend we managed to get around 8000 hits from this porn site. But on monday morning it really took off. Hordes of time wasting desk workers measured their body part. From that point on it really became a trend on twitter. Our ‘twitter this’ button was used a few times every few minutes now. Because people often measured the popularity off well known people they eventually couldn’t help but brag about it too (Cough @stephenfry, 336.599 followers). This caused Great Great Brittian to swarm our website and spread it even more. At this point North and South-America just woke up.
Btw the website was at this moment stll being hosted on Boy van Amstel’s server, placed at his parents’ home. Utilizing almost all of the “massive” 1Mbit bandwith. Thank god his little brother didn’t complain. The reason this was even possible is that epenis.nl has no server-side scripts. It’s all jQuery, HTML, CSS and (small) images. We actually reduced the size of the website by half, by grabbing jquery.js from google.com.
At monday around 4 pm, CET, we finally managed to get the word Penis into the Twitter trending topics. A huge success because now people twittered about why the word penis was even in this list. Generating even more traffic to our site when they found out we were causing it.
Some people saw a connection between Spring Break, which probaly helped accepting the fact the word penis was a part of the list. Twitter however didn’t agree with that. After a few hours we saw some messages from people who were complaining about their posts disappearing, not much later penis wasn’t trending anymore. Did Twitter screw with us here? We can’t be sure. But the damage already had been done, we had already spread to the American continent. A couple of big American Twitter users like @MrsKutchers, thats Demi Moore (257,150 followers) posted it later in the evening, that really generated lots of traffic and added a large amount of females to our users.
The next morning we had almost 40k hits. At this point we called our viral a success, we expected it to die out rather soon. But we were wrong! To our suprise it kept on going steadily. Around 14:00 there suddenly was a huge spike in our traffic. As it appeared, @Guykawaski (92,399 followers) was giving a keynote during SES New York about ‘Twitter As A Tool For Social Media’. Lots of people posted live messages during his talk and as it turns out also about our little project…
‘@Searchcowboys: Guykawasaki shows epenis.nl and says it’s more powerfull then twittercounter 
#sesny’
Some other stuff made us laugh too:
‘@PaulIAm: Darwin just backed the car up to his grave, connected a hose to the tailpipe and took a deep breath…http://www.epenis.nl/’
‘@Retecool: There’s lots of stuff out there that figures out your Twitter ranking, value, mojo, etc. But let’s cut the crap it’s all about who’s has the big swinging dick, right?’
‘@Vatikan: Scheiße, @satan ’s ePenis ist länger als meiner http://www.epenis.nl/’
At this moment we’re still trying to figure out what the hell we’re are going to with it. To conclude, here is a list of the things we learned:
- Use Sneezers, find Twitter users with respect and high amounts of followers. (Seth Godin’s Purple Cow)
- Post your viral at the right time. We had Spring Break, the SESNY Keynote by Guykawasaki and the usual monday morning boredom going for us.
- Maximize sharability. Our ‘Post on Twitter” button was used extremly well.
- Make it simple. There are no lists, links, pages. It does only one thing verry well. (KISS: Keep it Simple Stupid)
- Sex Sells
Thanks for reading,
Barry Borsboom & Boy van Amstel
Filed under: Design, Interaction, Marketing | 17 Comments
Apparently, the ‘close doors’ button on most lifts does not actually work. It is there mostly to give passengers the illusion of control. We press it but the lift control mechanisms decide when the doors should actually shut according to their pre-programmed cycles.
Human brains are finely tuned belief engines. Millions of years of evolution have honed our grey stuff to spot causation in the world and form beliefs about what causes what. It helps us survive when we notice that certain events always follow other events. Such knowledge helps us reliably find food, mates and shelter. But our brains are taking efficient shortcuts. We filter out and ignore failures and remember and reinforce successes. And most of the time this works. But beliefs formed in this way can lead to mistakes. My pressing the lift button may well be a false conclusion drawn from my experience because I have failed to spot hidden causes and alternatives to the obvious. Maybe it really is just the lift closing the door without my intervention.
This all is related to the illusion of control psychological effect studied by Ellen Langer and others, where people are shown to believe they have some control over things they clearly don’t: in most cases, a button does afford us control, and we would rationally expect it to, and if we’re used to it not doing anything, we either no longer bother pressing it, or we still press it every time “on the off-chance that one of these days it’ll work”.
By now you should be wondering why the hell lift makers should install the close door button in their lifts if it doesn’t work appropriately.
There are a few options:
- The button really does work, it’s just set on time delay.
Suppose the elevator is set so that the doors close automatically after five seconds. The close-door button can be set to close the doors after two or three seconds. The button may be operating properly when you push it, but because there’s still a delay, you don’t realize it. - The button is broken. Since a broken close-door button will not render the elevator inoperable and thus does not necessitate an emergency service call, it may remain unrepaired for weeks.
- The button has been disconnected, usually because the building owner received too many complaints from passengers who had somebody slam the doors on them.
- The button was never wired up in the first place.
But thinking about this more generally: how often are deceptive buttons/controls/options – deliberate false affordances – used strategically in interaction design? Are there any examples of products (other than, say, children’s toys) deliberately designed with fake controls to make the user feel in charge even though he/she isn’t?
Filed under: Design, Interaction, Psychology | 19 Comments
My favorite logos from 2008
I’m a sucker for simple but intelligent logo’s. Logo’s that can communicate their name in simple way are often the most powerful. Take a look at the following examples. All masterpieces in my opinion.
Wiesinger Music
Zip
KingFish
FoodWriters
Objectified
Climate group
Curious
Schizophrenic
Health & Rehabilitation
Filed under: Design | 2 Comments
The Design of Airport Signage
While traveling through Schiphol Airport a month ago I couldn’t stop but notice how clear all the signage was. I remembered having an college about a few years ago. Mijksenaar has been responsible for signage at Schiphol Airport since 1990.
When designing signage for a Airport or a other public building you have to take a good notice of the visual surroundings the signage will be placed in. The backgound colors of walls and windows, the amount daylight let in the building, the lighting and more environmental elements are important when designing signage for a aiport. In a visual crowed environment it is important that signage design stands out to its background, for a maximum effect. Use a color system with not to many variations and be consistant with the color usage. Think about using illumnated signs to enhanche the readability of the signage.
Colors are coupled to certain types of information. Yellow signs provide information on arrivals and departures, for example, while blue signs refer to shopping and restaurant-café facilities, anthracite to waiting areas, and green to escape routes.
Mijksenaar used the following Principles for designing the signage:
- Good contrast of bright yellow and green colored signs in a neutral environment
- The use of circular black arrows in a white circle, which contrast with a colored background
- Illuminated lightboxes placed throughout the area
- Consistency of highly visible suspended signs viewable from a great distance
- Signs located in the center of the flow and not to the side
- Signs perpendicular, rather than parallel, to the flow
Mijksenaar stressed that font, color coding and pictograms should be considered only after research has been completed, and the system has been mapped out in the most efficient, sensible way possible. He suggests the following for effective use of design elements:
- Color coding: Color should make sense and clearly communicate an information category.
- Terminology: Assume that visitors know nothing about the facility and use terminology that is easily understandable to everyone.
- Fonts: Don’t use more than one font, and stick to such sans-serif typefaces as Frutiger, Clearview, Gill or Meta.
- Pictograms: Don’t rely too much on pictograms; supplement with text, especially with less familiar functions.
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The Psychology of Waiting
In a recent paper by Donald Norman about the psychology of waiting lines Norman discusses the experience people have while waiting in line. How can designers make this experience better?
The paper made me think of this classic story about a building where tenants were complaining about long elevator waiting times.
In a multistoried office building in New York occupants began complaining about the poor elevator service provided in the building. Waiting times for elevators at peak hours, they said, were excessively long. Several of the tenants threatened to break their leases and move out of the building because of this…
Management authorized a study to determine what would be the best solution. The study revealed that because of the age of the building no engineering solution could be justified economically. The engineers said that management would just have to live with the problem permanently.
The desperate manager called a meeting of his staff, which included a young recently hired graduate in personnel psychology…The young man had not focused on elevator performance but on the fact that people complained about waiting only a few minutes. Why, he asked himself, were they complaining about waiting for only a very short time? He concluded that the complaints were a consequence of boredom. Therefore, he took the problem to be one of giving those waiting something to occupy their time pleasantly. He suggested installing mirrors in the elevator boarding areas so that those waiting could look at each other or themselves without appearing to do so. The manager took up his suggestion. The installation of mirrors was made quickly and at a relatively low cost. The complaints about waiting stopped.
Today, mirrors in elevator lobbies and even on elevators in tall buildings are commonplace.
Donald Norman gives eight design principles for waiting lines:
- 1. Emotions Dominate
- 2. Eliminate Confusion: Provide a Conceptual Model, Feedback and Explanation
- 3. The Wait Must Be Appropriate
- 4. Set Expectations, Then Meet or Exceed Them
- 5. Keep People Occupied: Filled Time Passes More Quickly Than Unfilled Time
- 6. Be Fair
- 7. End Strong, Start Strong
- 8. The memory of an event is more important than the experience itself.
The story about the elevator used rule number 5. Keep people occupied. Some other lessons can be learned from theme parks. Theme parks regularly make the line turn corners, so that at any point, the line looks only as long as the distance to the next corner. Deceitful? Yes, but still helpful. Disney theme parks provide entertainers to engage the people in line, ensuring they are enjoying themselves.
It helps if lines move quickly, so a long, fast-moving line can be preferred to a short, slow-moving one, even if the actual waiting times are the same in both cases.
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The Art of Propaganda Posters
Intrigued by the graphic style in Obama’s Posters I couldn’t help it but think that this poster was somewhat similar to some old war propaganda posters from Russia, Germany and The United States. Although the colors are different, the simplistic style is certainly comparable to these old posters.
The simple word ‘Progress’ is also characterizing for a propaganda poster.
Take a look at some amazingly cool propaganda posters below Obama’s poster.
Filed under: Design | 5 Comments
Tactile wine packaging
When thinking about wine, smell and taste are probaly the first things to come in mind but packaging is starting to play a bigger rol these days. Madrid-based branding agency Baud made a braille-printed label of Baud’s “Lazarus Wine” wich are not merely meant for the blind;
The primary objective of the design was to achieve a wine of the highest quality elaborated by sensorial methods.
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Isometric Infographic Video’s
The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries recently released an impressive isometric infographic video. In this sim-like virtual landscape they illustrate a host of food-related challenges facing Japan. Amazing video! This started my quest for some more isometric infographic video’s, watch them below!
Ensuring the Future of Food
Nuclear energy technology
Royksopp – “Remind Me”
via: infosthetics
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Designing Banknotes
Yesterday I found a old 5 guilder banknote in my closet. An fantastic looking banknote from 1973. And as everyone seems to be talking about money these days, why not post something on the design of money.
The banknote triggered my curiosity and I wanted to learn more about this designer. In my opinion these banknotes designed by R.D.E. Oxenaar are some of the best designed banknotes in history.
They each have their own distinctive color and identity. The use of Helvetica is simple but so effective and the illustrations are just great. But it’s much more interesting when the designer himself talks about his own work. The following text is an excerpt from a lecture held in 1987 by R.D.E. Oxenaar.
Banknotes are very fascinating. They represent a microcosm, a microworld but, on the other hand, they are issued in incredible numbers, you know. Once a design gets accepted for a banknote like a 10 guilder note, then it is printed and reprinted over and over again for twenty years. The number of banknotes issued is enormous. And that means extra should have exactly the same quality as the first.
I realised that the other side to this vast issue of banknotes was that everyone has this thing in their pocket and has to operate with it every day. So, it is just an everyday design product. It is an industrial design in fact. Everybody has to use it. I made it as clear as possible, as individual as possible, so that you could easily see, even as a foreigner, what the currency is that you have in your hand. Is it a five or is it a ten or does it have another value?
I came to the conclusion that things like the dollar were not very clear. It is politics. You can of course say, it is important that you see what you have in your hand in order to be able to check whether it has been forged or not. That is a way of justifying the production of notes which all look alike. But I don’t think it’s nice to the public, you know. I have chosen to adopt another approach, in the belief that what you must make clear is the value of the individual notes.
The only money I had seen which was as clear as I wanted money to be was Monopoly money, the pretend money. That was nice money in my eyes, so I hope that my own work looks a little bit like that because it only real example of clear money. Clear for children, clear for grown-ups.
You can see the differences between the things I had to make in the first series. I had got a commission for five banknotes; 5 guilders, 10 guilders, 25 guilders, 100 guilders and 1000 guilders. The Bank of the Netherlands made it very clear to me what they wanted. The bank, by the way is not the government, it’s an autonomous Dutch bank. It is also of course not private but it makes its own decisions. They specified that the notes had to have portraits on them of famous historical figures which would not create any political problems. And I accepted that but at the same time made the suggestion that it was not necessary to be so careful. I didn’t believe that anybody knew who the people were who
were represented on the banknotes. That turned out to be true. After we conducted some polls, it was clear that nobody knew who these people were.I chose very elementary colours because it was a small series of only five values. So I went for the easy options, in fact. What I tried was to be as white as possible in the background and by contrast as clear and brilliant of colour as was technically possible. The objective was to use very clear typography, so that when you folded up the note you could see what the value of the banknote was at least four times.
I also did things for the blind. I was really amazed that this sort of thing was being done for the first time in the world. I didn’t realize that at the time. We did a lot of research into what it was possible to do for blind and near-sighted people and we hit upon these small things on the left-hand side, little balls that you can feel.
I think it is necessary that a good design is good to use every day but on the other hand I think it is very valuable if there is something personal in it. That you can see it is made by an individual.
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