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.
   

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.