The Psychology of Waiting in Lines

I was poking around the Experientia blog, they had an interesting reference to Don Norman's forthcoming book. One of the chapters on "They Psychology of Waiting Lines" is available for preview - it's awesome (albeit poorly edited). Ironically, coming back from Ottawa a few weekends ago with my family, I was furious about the "line design" and actually said out loud "this would be interesting to study" (they were using a multi-line, multi-cashier model - it was awful).

Here's the Cole's notes: Eight Design Principles for (Designing) Waiting Lines:

1. Emotions Dominate - People believe "Attractive Things Work Better"
   
2. Eliminate Confusion: Provide a Conceptual Model, Feedback and Explanation - Ever wait in a long line, just to find out it's the wrong one?
   
3. The Wait Must Be Appropriate - People accept waits, but it needs to be perceived as appropriate. Tell your workers that customers take priority over counter cleaning!
   
4. Set Expectations, Then Meet or Exceed Them - Tell people how long the line is.
   
5. Keep People Occupied: Filled Time Passes More Quickly Than Unfilled Time - The idea of a "double buffer" for lines: have a staging area to entertain people before they wait in line.
   
6. Be Fair - The optimal "fairness" line is a single line, with multiple cashiers. Interesting note re: multi-line, multi-cashier scenarios: people tend to notice when their lines move slower more than they notice when it's moving faster.
   
7. End Strong, Start Strong - People will even perceive longer lines "better" than shorter ones if the longer line has a "positive" period.
   
8. Memory of an Event Is More Important Than the Experience - Eg. Giving pictures after a roller-coaster.
   

Many of these "waiting line" design principles apply to "designing experiences in general", but specifically to mobile (for the first 4 anyway):

1. Emotions Dominate - Think iPhone, Apple Store experience.
   
2. Eliminate Confusion: Tivo and Ikea have awesome "out of box experiences" with fold out maps.
   
3. The Wait Must Be Appropriate - People expect some work to get their phone up and running, just make it match their expectations.
   
4. Set Expectations, Then Meet or Exceed Them - Apple's getting hammered due to their over-promise of 3G network speeds.
   

Mobile Needs to Learn What Fashion Has Always Known

First blog in months - quite a bit has changed. I'll spare you the details, but I've moved back to Canada, I'm living in Toronto, and I've taken a new role at a Waterloo-based mobile handset and services company. I'm just getting settled and so haven't had a lot of time to think about blogging, but I do have an hour and 15 minute commute both ways everyday to pontificate on the world's events.


Branding's Migration from Product Quality Expectations to Personal "Quality" Persona

Everyday during my commute, I pass a factory-turned-luxury loft called "Tip Top Lofts". Bear with me here, but this is an interesting example of the commercialization of personal space. Why would people pay a million dollars for a condo to be branded 'Tip Top Tailors'? Home-owners don't do this, so why is this ok for high-end condo owners?

Having grown up near Buffalo, NY, home-owners actually do "brand" their homes; the classic Buffalo-area example, is the xmas-time Buffalo Bills animated lawn ornament.

If one considers the historical purpose of the brand, it was to consistently represent a product or company, thereby imparting a certain consistent consumer expectation for the quality of a product. For example, you had an expectation, before buying Quaker Oats, of the quality of Quaker Oaks based on past purchases of that brand. The Buffalo Bills example is a departure from this it seems to indicate something in the evolution of brand use from the perspective of the consumer:

Branding is no longer used solely by companies to reflect the quality of a product for MY consumption, it's used by ME to reflect MY "quality" to others.

Put another way, brands have been co-opted by consumers to reflect the persona they wish others to see in them. What I'm saying here isn't new: the hip-hoppers with their baggy Fubu pants certainly know a skater when they see someone wearing Dickie's pants.


An Aside: Social Proof
Not to get too academic, but the concept of "personal branding" seems to make sense in a society with information overload. Human beings are naturally programmed to generalize the environment around us to facilitate processing of information.

I've mentioned social proof previously, but for review, according to wikipedia, social proof is:

"...a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior. Making the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, they will deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed."

In other words,

We're using the brands we wear to fast-track the decision-making process other's use to judge us.

The Cellphone as a "Personal Device" is Exactly Wrong
I hear it often that the mobile phone is the most personal of consumer electronics - it seems rationale but consider this:

• The mobile phone is probably the most public piece of consumer electronics we own - we have it with us, and use it in front of everyone, all the time.
  
• The #1 way people "share" camera phone pictures is by physically showing people the pictures on their phone.

Do we think that "personalization features" such as ring tones and wallpapers are for the owner of the device because they get some intrinsic maternal-like satisfaction from customizing their phone?

Personalization features are the tools people use to extend the brand of "self".

The iPhone is a "Me Brand"
As technologists, we look at the incredible success Apple has had in gaining mind share of the iPhone and we jump straight to features: touch screen, big screen, multimedia, gigabytes, apple store. The iPhone, however, isn't particularly impressive technologically - most smart phones compare from a retail collateral "checkbox" perspective.

I suspect that Apple has transcended the technology argument by making the iPhone a fashion accessory to accompany Fubu or Dickie's demin. It's a beautifully aesthetically designed, well-positioned and marketed, device that allows it's trendy owners to fast-track the decision-making process other's use to judge them.

Will other handset vendors follow Apple with features, follow Apple's "brand", or embrace a differentiated "handset as a brand" strategy? The smart phone market, with it's still low penetration, can certainly accommodate other personas. My question: is Nokia Fubu or Dickie's?

The (Mobile) "Atomization of Conversation"

Half.com founder Alexand First Round Capital VC Josh Kopelman wrote an interesting post about the "Atomization of Conversation". Essentially, he's referring to the trend that "geek tools" such as Facebook, Twitter, Dopplr have replaced synchronous "conversations" historically serviced by tools such as email, IM, voice (or, imagine, in person).

I find this personally interesting because of my past life at RIM where we were obsessed with "push" (Corey, what *is* push?! -- sorry, inside joke). "Push" meant that you send me an email, and it's essentially delivered immediately *and* I'm notified as soon as it arrives. We prioritized push above anything -- synchronization of deletes and message status. The rationale is best explained by Alex, a designer friend of mine (to paraphrase):

BlackBerry is basically the human equivalent of Pavlov's dogs. The email arrives, you get notified, and the "treat" you receive is the information.

It's worth noting that employees, competitors and partners of RIM still don't really understand why "push" is so compelling, and so they create standalone apps like Gmail and Yahoo!Go that are really just a pseudo-browser experience.

The real question is, how do these tools like Twitter, Dopplr, Facebook make the migration to mobile in a compelling way? Sure, they're browser-based apps to begin with but, then again, so was email in many cases.

Maybe I'm not geeky enough, but I've been using Digsby for the last few weeks and have my Facebook and Twitter accounts set up. It's tedious and disruptive getting all of the alerts from these services. We'll need to come up with some way of making these alerts valuable and relevant - the future of these tools certainly necessitates a xobni-equivalent.

Why Product Managers Need to be Involved in Implementation

Ok, it needs to be said - every Product Manager that has ever said to a developer "hey, I'm just the marketing guy." or "hey, I'm not responsible for the implementation." (which, btw, are my 2 favorite lines to say to a developer) is not doing their job.

I can show you why...

TD Bank has my money in Canada, but I'm wondering if I should trust them when they have UX design like this:
Why does their search look like the cockpit of a plane?

Are they purposefully making it difficult to find them to hedge against a bank run?

Are bank addresses more difficult to find than restaurant addresses?

Why are Yelp and Google Maps able to have search boxes like this? (just enter what you're "near")


I suspect, that doing a query across all these fields, or the "join" was deemed "too expensive" by TD's development team.

That's it - I'm taking my lifesavings and buying Google stock.

Ignoring the Buyer Purchase Decision Process Online

It has been an incredibly busy time over the last couple of weeks: SXSW, the post-SXSW SARS, board meetings, hiring, massive system failure on my Lenovo laptop. Despite all this, one of the talks at SXSW, "Peas in a Pod: Advertising, Monetization and Social Media" continues to bounce around in my head. The talk featured Kent Nichols (Ask a Ninja) and Tim Kendall (Facebook), Ellen McGirt (Fast Company) and Seth Goldstein (Socialmedia Networks). The talk was timely because Livemocha is thinking a lot about monetization these days, and advertising is certainly a candidate.

The premise of the talk was to address the well-publicized disappointment of social advertising. Essentially, advertisers are disappointed with the click through rates they've seen in advertisements surfacing on social networks. I actually experimented very briefly with Facebook ads, and I can verify that the performance wasn't nearly as good as what we're seeing on Google.

Depending on what you're selling, how you sell it is highly contextual.

The talk contained what seemed to be 2 un-spoken themes:
1. The success of your advertising is dictated by your goals (and your goals are dictated by where you're playing in the user's purchase decision-making process).

Anyone that has taken marketing 101 knows the purchase decision process, but in tech we're obsessed with advertising as a means of moving a user from evaluation of alternative->purchase. As a social advertiser, if purchase is your criteria for success, you'll be disappointed. The pop culture's current wisdom says, CTRs on Google are much better than social advertising because when I'm searching, I'm looking to buy. When I'm on a social networking site, my focus is on interacting with my friends.

The point is, sometimes advertisers aren't looking to sell something RIGHT NOW, their goal may be to stay top-of-mind, or be perceived as a premium brand.

Kent Nichols (ask a ninja) made a good point: Tech people's obsessions with automation and scale have made them myopic about advertising. Unless it's measurable, and repeatable tasks can be done in an automated way, we tend to shy away. Ask a ninja has been successful in acquiring sponsorships because he worked the old-fashioned-way: "networking/ having dinner with people who sweat" (those were his words). In other words, he recognized that his "Phoenix University" ads weren't performing well, so he sought sponsorship partners (Yes, there are more advertising options out there than just banner ads) who were looking for creative ways to promote their products further back in the decision making process.

2. There are 2 types of brands: aspirational and functional (or, NO I don't want to play a video game about soap)

With the launch of the Facebook Platform, we heard a lot about how Facebook Apps are a great way for brands to engage their users. Further, Facebook Pages allow me to express my support for a specific brand so my friends know I love Mac computers or Nike shoes, or whatever the case may be. The idea here is to extend the school yard "cool kid" influencer to the online world - my friend Andy is cool, and he likes Nike shoes, so I should get a pair too.

The problem is: not all brands lend themselves to aspiration. Maybe I think my Mac computer says something about me, but I don't personally identify with my soap, and certainly my friends don't care. The table here provides a break down of advertising options based on the advertiser's context.

I can understand the appeal of online games by clueless big brands, with stats like these being thrown around:

Predictions for the size of the market for in-game advertising by 2010 range from $1.5bn, according to Citigroup, up to $1.8bn, according to Forrester. With the videogame industry being worth some $25bn in 2005, according to analysts PwC, it's clear that there is enormous scope for advertisers to work with the gaming industry.

But seriously, what was aquafresh thinking?

When Metrics are Distracting

I was thinking about my post yesterday because I'm spending a lot of time thinking about metrics, KPIs, analytics in general these days. In fact, I'm spending a disproportionate amount of my time thinking about metrics. Related to this is A-B and multivariate testing: relentlessly tweaking copy, imagery, and click paths to eek out a percent here and there. I hear stories "you won't believe how big a difference just changing one word makes!", but at the stage we're in, is this really the best use of our resources?

When I say "resources", I'm referring to the 10's of thousands of dollars on an analytics package, management's time scouring reports, my time taking the derivative of reports for management, the developers time parsing log files to get me the data and "tweaking" a word or image here or there. I'll be the first to admit these numbers, and this analysis is valuable, but if I were to represent it like this.

A Hypothetical Retention Graph:

Where I spend my time between week 1 and week 8 making tweaks. Of course, I can paint this hypothetical scenario in a way to prove my point, but what if each variant costs me and the rest of the team 10 units of effort per week? Then. between weeks 1 and 8, I spent 70 units of effort.

Now, what if the reason my hypothetical retention is low isn't because my copy is bad, or my hero image sucks, but because I have a core product issue?

Not to pick on Dogster (from my last post), but their issue wasn't copy, it was that their feature mix wasn't right. It took looking at their metrics to uncover the issue, but they didn't use their metrics to SOLVE the issue.

If you assume the effort to re-architect the site between weeks 8 and 9 also cost me 10 units, then there's a clear ROI given the results (my retention # significantly improved). But, even if the re-architecture cost me 100 units, I would argue it's the right thing to do:

• If you have a core product issue, then the product isn't healthy, and probably isn't a sustainable/ viable/ optimized business in it's current state. You'll need to take the plunge eventually.
  
• There's an opportunity cost to delaying the "hard decision" for 8 weeks. In those 8 weeks, retained users could be adding content, buying subscriptions, and clicking on ads!
  

When Sociality Takes a Back Seat

At SXSW last week, one of the best panels was "Start Up Metrics for Pirates": Dave McClure - 500 Hats (moderator), Ted Rheingold - Dogster, Todd Vernon - Lijit Hiten Shah - CrazyEgg Lance Tokuda - RockYou. I'd seen Dave McClure's presentation previously at Ignite Seattle, but having the other folks on the panel to provide applied examples of the metrics made the topic more relevant.

Ted Rheingold from Dogster provided his account of Dogster's loyalty issues. To quickly summarize:

• They were spending a tonne of money on Google Adwords
• The drove a tonne of traffic, and they were pumped.
  
• When they later looked at the loyalty numbers (the number of newly registered users that were returning) they were disturbed to find that most weren't returning.
• They did an audit of their Google Adwords keywords, and they noticed that the highest converting keywords were informational NOT social in nature. (no real surprise, people were searching for "boston terrier breed information" not "dog friends").
  
• Dogster redesigned their site to accommodate the information searcher. They de-emphasized their social networking component, and emphasized breed and animal ailment information.
  
• The result: they stopped spending money on Google Adwords and were driving traffic because the site was SEO-friendly (relevant-information-dense).
  

What Dogster and Livemocha have in common:

• Niche Social Networks: That is, unlike Facebook and Myspace which address a non-specific target audience, Dogster is a social network for dogs (and their humans), and Livemocha is a social network for language learning.
  
• Social Graph Comprised of Common Interests, not "Real World" Relationships: To put another way, just because I'm learning French, doesn't mean my friends are AND just because I have a boston terrier, doesn't mean my friends do.
  

Are common interests sufficient to drive strong online social ties? Clearly in the case of Dogster, it wasn't. It dawned on me during the talk that this was a perfect example of Josh Porter's Del.icio.us Lesson: Personal Value Precedes Network Value.

At Livemocha, we dodged this bullet because we built the social network as a feature to support our underlying value proposition. We looked at our goal (to help people to become communicative in a new language) in terms of a "language acquisition curve" that started with self-study (not particularly social) lessons, but gradually worked the user into the community as it benefits them.

... and, yes, in case you're wondering, here's Sousa's profile.

Livemocha Mention in New York Times

Can't ask for better press than this. The print edition goes out tomorrow.

From an academic perspective, this is an interesting case study in the effectiveness of online vs offline promotion AND mainstream vs "long tail of the blog-o-sphere" promotion because this press is so isolated (ie we don't currently have any other promotion happening right now other than this NYTimes article). Using analytics, I'll be able to see the # of visitors that have been referred from the NYTimes.com site, as well, I can see the increase in visitors (increase from to our typical visitor count independent of the NYTimes.com). So, Increase in visitors - Increase in visitors being referred by the NYTimes.com = Increase in visitors associated to NYTimes print edition. I wonder how online vs offline conversions will differ?

Also, this could help us make future ROI-based decisions wrt PR investment. Purely for example, if our current Google Advertising conversions cost $2.00, and we get 10k conversions as part of this press, then we break even if our firm costs us $20k.

That said, our "free" blog-press has resulted in almost 1300 blogs. It's hard to beat free.

Silicon Valley North(West)

For my entire academic and most of my professional career, I grew up in Canada's Tech Triangle, bordered by Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge; an area dominated by RIM and the University of Waterloo. This area didn't receive the label "Silicon Valley North" which was given to Ottawa; dominated by Nortel, Alcatel, Corel back in the day. Seattle, which has always been known as a "tech-ish center" thanks to MSFT and Boeing, got props from NYT's John Markoff today: Seattle Taps Its Inner Silicon Valley.

When I lived here to work for RIM, I didn't see much of the entrepreneur culture. At Livemocha, I've really enjoyed participating/ attending/ witnessing the action:

• Ignite Seattle: This is great. Put on my O'Reilly, a dozen folks get 5 minutes to hammer through a presentation on something geeky. I liked Dave McClure's Product Marketing Metrics for StartUps and Shawn Murphy's Hacking Chocolate.
• Refresh Seattle: Typically a speaker on something design related, then drinks in Ballard. I saw CommonCraft Lee Lefever give this talk on Community is Like Hosting a Party.
• StartPad: Pretty cool concept - basically it's an organization that offers shared space allowing startups to share costs and collaborate. They put on a session on OpenSocial a while back - no we're not building an app... yet.
  
• StartUp Weekend: I'm not this hardcore, but I like the idea. Teams of 8 compete over the course of a weekend to kick off their start up.

On related news, the Seattle 2.0 list came out today - Livemocha is #35!

Google's Elephant Named "Privacy"

I attended a talk on privacy at Google's Kirkland office on Thursday. It wasn't nearly as attended as I had expected, maybe 30 people, but that's probably because they scared people off by saying you could only attend one of the 3 sessions they have scheduled.

Wendy Seltzer, of Northeastern U, was the speaker and did a good job of providing a sort of "history of privacy" crash course. To summarize:

• Katz vs the US - basically, a man is charged because the FBI was snooping on a call from a public phone. The FBI position, "there was not physical intrusion" and his position, "yeah, but I (and society) have an expectation of privacy" in that context. The supreme court ultimately sided with Katz, but Seltzer raised the question, "How does the 'expectation of privacy' apply when we're posting all of our information on Facebook?"
• Netflix had a $1M contest asking someone to come up with an improved movie recommendation algorithm. Here's the scary question: can your movie recommendations be traced back to you? Does it matter? The answer is 'yes' (researchers reverse-engineered it) and 'yes' (because this teacher didn't get her teaching certificate due to the contents of her MySpace page).
  
• AOL's mishap over a year ago reads like a dark comedy. The example that Selzer gave was the discovering of the identity of a 62 year old woman "No. 4417749" that searched for : “numb fingers”, “60 single men”, “dog that urinates on everything.” I thought this was 'funny':

User 311045, possibly a Florida resident, is preoccupied with another topic as well:
how to change brake pads on scion xb
2005 us open cup florida state champions
how to get revenge on a ex
how to get revenge on a ex girlfriend
how to get revenge on a friend who fucked you over
replacement bumper for scion xb
florida department of law enforcement
crime stoppers florida

The net of it, according to Seltzer, was that future legislation needs to take into account the "context" of privacy violations. In other words, if I post a drunk picture of myself on Facebook, that's not intended for employers or the electorate, but for my friends only.

I'm not sure I agree.

• Ubiquity makes information "contextless": The availability of the information makes the "context" of this information indeterminable. It would be like painting my social security number on the side of a building and trying to claim that it's intended only for my wife.
• Legislation shouldn't replace personal responsibility: If I post my social security number publicly in Facebook, I'm sorry, it's my fault if my identity is stolen. This also assumes adequate public education, which may not be a fair assumption at this point. It never occurred to me that my searches and netflix activities paint such a clear picture of my identity.
  
• Legislation should protect from consolidation and broken promises: If two companies (say Google and Blogger) merge, both of whom I've consented to having my information, that doesn't mean I consent to my data being merged. If a company promises a level of privacy protection, and fails to do so, I should have recourse. Though, this just seems like standard contract law.
• Existing notions of privacy are antiquated: Society should fundamentally rethink personal privacy instead of trying to find technology and legislation to maintain our current notions. The genie's out of the bottle.
  

The silver lining in all this may be more transparent and authentic society where we accept that people get drunk on the weekend and not consider this a negative reflection of individual professionalism. :)

Choosing a Web Design Agency, Choosing Blue Flavor

When I started at Livemocha back in April, we knew from the get-go that we weren't going to even try to design the UI design ourselves. We're a talented group, that's for sure, but sexy and usable graphic design isn't one of those talents. Our original design was ripped from Facebook and comprised of pages and pages of dense copy and functional elements, and Blue Flavor did an amazing job, albeit not without frustration, mostly on their part with us (me, the messenger), at distilling our imprecise and evolving requirements into something that we're proud of.

I spent over 2 weeks "interviewing" potential freelancers and agencies. A couple observations that came out of this exercise:

1. Freelancers are good graphic designers, and good web designers, but it's hard to find a freelancer with good application-type information architecture experience; particularly when you're developing a social app.
   
2. Big agencies such as Zaaz (do a lot of cool work with Converse) and Happy Cog (legendary Jeffrey Zeldman is founder) want you to spend a lot of money up front on "planning" (target customer analysis, branding guidelines), "optimization" (keyword optimized content for SEO), "validation" (user experience and usability testing).

So, what you end up with are freelancer proposals that seem like a lot of money given their experience (they ARE artists after all), and big-agency proposals that will literally take 10x as long as you have and will cost 10x the size of your budget.

The Blue Flavor team were great to work with; though their frustration with us was apparent (and justified, I should emphasize). I had to laugh when Matt (one of the Livemocha devs) forwarded me a Joel on Software blog post that echo'd a similar experience.

Agency to Joel: "but wait, look here, it's right in Basecamp, you said that this design was 'excellent work' and you were 'elated' to have the 'best web design ever in the history of the universe.'"

Joel's post made me feel a lot better since I wasn't the only idiot client in the history of web agency relationships - actually, sounds like I'm a stereotype. Though, I wasn't the only one playing a part: Blue Flavor also uses Basecamp, their offices are across the street from Adobe and the walls are covered with silk-screened music and "web 2.0" posters, and their boardroom table is a ping pong table (an idea which we shamelessly stole for our own office).

Anyway, these guys are rock stars and they were definitely a perfect fit for us. I'm sure we'll use them again once we outgrow our current design. Check out their case study on us - I have some pretty sweet quotes in there (and yes, I'm being sincere and the figures are true).