Category Archives: sxswi

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#bigbrotherinyourbrain
#sxswi

  • Neuroscience – Dr. Danielle Stolzenberg
    • emotion is necessary for cognition
    • story about road trip, got drowsy, and pulled over at road stop. got a feeling to lock the doors, and she says to her friend to lock the door. later, a truck driver tried to get into the car.
      • this was actually a subconcious emotional reponse: some piece of sensory input was processed by the brain, to create an emotion, which inspired the decision to lock the door
    • descartes’ error, by antonio damasio
      • story of experiment with decks of cards, some more positive than others
      • subjects would subconsciously respond to the deck, would sweat more when pulling from a negative deck.
      • but they had no conscious strategy.
    • mesolimbic dopamine system… controls how the brain processes sensory input and how much the sensory input is paid attention to
  • Kogelschatz – background is marketing
    • the science of google
      • “the database of intentions, a living artifact of immense power” – john battelle, federated media publishing
      • google will eventually pass the turing test
      • google uses eye tracking to see how customers 
  • Gary Koepke — marketing
    • how does the creative process use neuroscience?
  • Pradeep Pho – showed cool video of neuroscience rap song.
    • talk about networks processing sensory input. activation levels of networks is the basic architecture
  • Dooley – Marketing
    • study of marketing campaigns
      • 20% had very positive impact -> 100% increase
      • 20% had moderate positive impact -> 50% increase
      • 20% had small positive impact (20% increase), 20% had no impact, 20% had small negative impact (20% decrease)
    • no “super ads” likely that would turn people into a bunch of zombies
  • Does sex sell, how about humor?
    • Some people react positively, and some react negatively.
    • Did an ad for cadillac, put a woman in a sexy situation. 39% sales increase. not overt, not objectifying.
    • humor can work.
    • some of it can be able creating discomfort. old spice ad…. sexy, humor, discomfort. making fun of marketing. irreverence. 
    • an easy laugh isn’t always the best way to go, nor is overt sexuality.
  • Big brother in your brain?
    • Roger Dooley
      • What is the extent to which people can influence our decision process?
        • Choice Architecture. 
          • People were asked to choose from among tents on Amazon.com. Experimenters changed the order for each test. the one in the first position sold at 2.5x the rate of any others, regardless of qualities of the product.
        • Decoy Marketing
          • If you have an existing expensive product, you can make a second product which is inferior, but almost as expensive as the expensive product, and this will cause the expensive product to sell more.
        • Putting a pretty girl on a flyer caused home mortgage customers to choose a significantly higher interest rate mortgage.
  • AK Pradeep
    • The brain hates straight lines and jagged lines. Apple products have almost none of either. The brain likes 3-5 things. A web page with more than 3-5 image groups confuses the reader.
    • We pay the most attention to faces that are hard to decipher. Faces reveal emotion, emotion reveals intent. The primative creative inside me wonders if the person next to me is going to attack me. If a person is smiling, I can ignore them. If the person has an undecipherable expression, it is computationally too difficult to figure it out. The brain spends more time dwelling on it. Supermodels walking down the runway always look a little pissed. An expression that is hard to decipher makes them memorable. Great artists figured this out. The Mona Lisa would not be the Mona Lisa if she was smiling.
  • Questions
    • What are the 3 big things we can learn from neurscience, that we couldn’t just learn from behavior studies?
      • If you ask people what part of a 30 second commercial they liked, it is very hard to do.
      • If you asked people which part of a piece of music, which part is emotionally provocative. We don’t have the language to express it. But with neuroscience, we can figure it out, so we can recreate it.
      • neuroscience does not necessarily discover new principles, but it allows you to narrow in and focus on what is the most provocative.
        • the moment between moments is most provocative for the brain. the brain goes nuts.
        • the most provocative moment when eating chips and salsa, it turns out to be  the moment of lifting the salsa covered chip to your mouth with the expectation that it will momentarily be in your mouth. the chip needs to have a curve to hold the salsa, the salsa had to have a certain thickness and chunkiness. this can be discovered with neuroscience. and this attention to detail is what steve jobs does with every aspect of apple products.
    • what is the right number of products to offer to achieve highest conversion?
      • what is more important than number or order is context and primacy.
      • primacy can be the connection to what has been before. 
      • 1, 2, 3 is important.
      • in the old days, if you were in the jungle, if there was a herd of animals, you had to evaluate if you had found dinner or you were going to be dinner. so we can quickly evaluate 3 to 5 or less, or “a lot”. 
        • computer analogy: the computation/analysis happens in hardware for 3 to 5, and in software for more than that.
    • Is there a way to innoculate ourselves or children against marketing messages?
      • AK Pradeep: father of five kids. very much against marketing to kids.
        • common thing for parent to tell children to do their homework, have dinner, watch tv, go to sleep.
        • should flip the order: watch tv, then dinner, then homework.
        • because during the REM cycle, the brain processes input, and it processes what it did last… so if they watch TV before bed, they process the TV. if they do homework before bed, they process homework.
        • would like to see us marketing science to kids
        • (will: it seems to me that this could be true of adults as well. do something educational right before bed…)
    • AK Pradeep has book coming out: The Buying Brain: http://bit.ly/c4uNtb

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I’ve attended SXSW Interactive both as a presenter and ordinary attendee several times, and I thought I would share a few tips for making the most of your experience.

  1. Be in the moment: Don’t go to a session and then check out and read email, surf the web, or do work. SXSW is precious. Make the most of your time by being totally immersed in what is going on. 
  2. Power is scarce: It’s hard to find outlets to plugin and recharge all your gadgets. You can usually find outlets around the perimeter of the room. It helps to bring a travel outlet strip, so that if all outlets are taken, you can plug in your power strip, and make more outlets. It’s also good to recharge over lunch, so when you head for a restaurant, don’t forget to look for outlets there.
  3. Conserve power: If you are taking notes on your computer or blogging the sessions, you may want to turn off wifi on your laptop to save power (and to keep your focus on the session, so you don’t start random web surfing.) I usually use my smartphone to follow twitter and email so I’m still connected.
  4. Follow the #SXSWi tag on twitter: You want to follow #SXSWi so that if another session is excellent and your session kind of sucks, then you can make the switch quickly. (or conversely find out if a room is already packed and can’t fit any more.)
  5. Follow the twitter tag for whatever session you are in: There will be a back channel of conversation about the session you are in that is almost as valuable as the primary speakers. SXSW is full of experts, both presenting and in the crowd, and you want to tap into all of that wisdom. This doesn’t violate tip #1, because you are not being distracted by something different, but rather tapping into more of what you are already there for.
  6. Better talks are usually in bigger rooms: If you are trying to decide between two talks, and one is in a bigger room, go with the one in the bigger. Higher quality and well known presenters get bigger rooms, and usually deliver better talks. If there is a highly focused niche topic in a small room, by all means go to it, if you value that particular topic. But if it is choice between several general topics, go with the bigger room.
  7. Talk to the people around you: SXSWi is a social place. The people around you are likely to be very experienced, smart, interesting people. Start up conversations, and make dinner plans with strangers, and keep going until 2am. The wisdom of the crowd is not just an abstract thing at SXSW – it is manifest in the people all around you. Talk to them.

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OK, so I had previously found a summary of Kathy Sierra’s 2007 SXSW talk, and was excited to see that she spoke about ensuring the humanness of our help documents, FAQ, and other support stuff.

But after a little more digging, I found some great stuff that she wrote earlier that includes primary research citations. (This is the kind of stuff that’s good to have when you have to defend these ideas inside a big corporation.)
In 2005 Kathy wrote Conversational writing kicks formal writing’s ass. Some highlights from that include:

A study from the Journal of Educational Psychology, issue 93 (from 2000), looked at the difference in effectiveness between formal vs. informal style in learning. In their studies, the researchers (Roxana Moreno and Richard Mayer) looked at computer-based education on botany and lightning formation and “compared versions in which the words were in formal style with versions in which the words were in conversational style.”
Their conclusion was:
“In five out of five studies, students who learned with personalized text performed better on subsequent transfer tests than students who learned with formal text. Overall, participants in the personalized group produced between 20 to 46 percent more solutions to transfer problems than the formal group.”
They mention other related, complimentary studies including:
“… people read a story differently and remember different elements when the author writes in the first person (from the “I/we” point of view) than when the author writes in the third person (he, she, it, or they). (Graesser, Bowers, Olde, and Pomeroy, 1999). Research summarized by Reeves and Nass (1996) shows that, under the right circumstances, people “treat computers like real people.”
So one of the theories on why speaking directly to the user is more effective than a more formal lecture tone is that the user’s brain thinks it’s in a conversation, and therefore has to pay more attention to hold up its end! Sure, your brain intellectually knows it isn’t having a face-to-face conversation, but at some level, your brain wakes up when its being talked with as opposed to talked at. And the word “you” can sometimes make all the difference.

And then in 2007 she wrote Your user’s brain wants a conversation. An excerpt from that post:

Which would you prefer to listen to–a dry formal lecture or a stimulating dinner party conversation?
Which would you prefer to read–a formal academic text book or an engaging novel?
When I pose this question to authors or instructors, I usually hear, “You think the obvious answer is the dinner party and the novel, but it isn’t that simple.”
Followed by, “It all depends on the context. I’d much rather hear a dry formal lecture on something I’m deeply interested in than listen to inane dinner party conversation about Ashlee’s lip-syncing blunder.”
But here’s what’s weird–your brain wants to pay more attention to the party conversation than the formal lecture regardless of your personal interest in the topic.
Because it’s a conversation.
And when your brain thinks it’s part of a conversation, it thinks it has to pay attention… to hold up its end. You’ve felt this, of course. How many times have you sat in a lecture you really needed and wanted to pay attention to, but still found it hard to stay focused? Or how about the book you can’t seem to stay awake for… finding yourself reading the same paragraph over and over because you keep tuning out–despite your best effort to stay with it?
But here’s the coolest (and for me, the most fascinating) part of all this:
When you lecture or write using conversational language, your user’s brain thinks it’s in a REAL conversation!

This is some very cool stuff! Anyone have any success stories to share in making the change to conversational language in technical support content?

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Here are some key takeaways from the SXSWi presentation on Building Strong Online Communities.

Ken Fisher: Ars Technica
Alexis Ohanian: Mgr of Awesome, reddit.com
Drew Curtis: Fark.com
Erin Kotecki Vest: BlogHer Inc
  • Reddit: put up a wiki and told users to document their own rules of etiquette. Has worked really well, and different communities can develop their own standards.
  • BlogHer: If comments are inappropriate, they are immediately deleted. The poster is notified, and they have the opportunity to modify and report.
  • Reddit: This isn’t capital punishment we’re talking about, this is just deleting comments.
  • Ars Technica: Have a strict policy of keeping all content, not modifying or deleting. Their users feel that any deleting is censorship.
  • BlogHer: it is so rare that we delete content, it really isn’t an issue.
  • BlogHer: We had Michelle Obama blogging, Carly Fianora blogging, and there were tons of posts of people arguing their points back and forth – but in a very civilized way. It was the community guidelines that made this happen.
  • What are some of the things you’ve seen gone wrong
    • BlogHer: Not informing and involving the community in making changes to community
    • Fark: When you make changes, 20% of the users will complain loudly, and you have to discount that somewhat.
    • Reddit: The vast majority of users are the silent users, who don’t post anything, but account for the vast majority of page views. You can do surveys to talk to these people, but somewhat you have to trust your gut.
    • Ars Technica: Surveys are very useful, especially at helping to balance out the vocal minority.
  • Anonymous comments versus registered users:
    • Fark: No anonymous comments, if you can’t say something with your name attached, you shouldn’t get to post at all.
    • Reddit: Registered users increased the signal to noise ratio. It’s better to have two quality comments from registered users, than 14 comments from anonymous coward.
  • What’s next?
    • BlogHer: more social networking features.
    • Reddit: More involved in impactful change. Told story of the internet voting on whale name change – internet voted for “Mr. Splashy Pants”. Ended up stopping a whale hunting campaign from the amount of media attention.
  • What do you do with the passionate users?
    • BlogHer: “Hire them”: pay them to be your moderator (inward focused) or evangalist (outreaching)
    • Ars Technica: Give them special titles on the site. Give them some special capabilities.
    • Reddit: Talk to them. Send them an email and have a discussion about where everyone wants to go.
  • What do you think about moderating for quality?
    • Reddit: We have a really good commenting system so that the crap falls to the bottom. Just download our source code.
  • Reminding the community:
    • BlogHer: every once in a while we have the community manager go and remind the community of not only the rules, but why the rules benefit the community
  • What about big corporations: should they have forums?
    • Ars Technica: Absolutely they should, and they should be thick skinned, expect the criticism, don’t be afraid of it.
    • BlogHer: And they should also go to the existing community, then you can engage in it honestly, not as some PR flak.

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A friend passed along these notes from the panel discussion on quitting your perfectly good job to do your own thing. Some useful tips and takeaways in there.

  • Bryan Mason
    • Left Adaptive Path in August
    • Put on full day conference on quitting your job
    • Worked for Twitter for a while, when their payment check cleared, he went to work on his own stuff.
  • Ryan Freitas
    • Worked for Adaptive Path
    • Quit and went to work for Plinkey
    • Quit and started his own company
  • Chris Sacca
    • Worked for Google, head of special projects initiative
    • Quit and went to work for lowercase capital
  • Laura Mayes
    • PR
    • Two years ago founded Kirsty (digg for chicks)
  • Unemployment at 10% in california, 8% in NY
  • Things to do to quit
    • You have to resign – you have to write a letter, and sign it.
      • Otherwise, you can’t do stuff like cobra.
    • Get copies of all your agreements
      • Invention Assignment (your company owns everything you did)
      • No Poach
      • Non-compete
      • Confidentiality
      • Equity Agreements
    • Finishing Strong
      • People only remember the last few things you did. So for good references, make sure you are doing well before you leave.
      • Leave on a good note, good vibes. They may be giving you business later, you may need the relationships later.
    • Define your own happiness. Don’t let other people define it with their expectations of you. For Chris Sacca, everyone else thought he had the best job in America. And he listened to them, and let their expectations cause him to stay in a job he didn’t like.
    • Setting a price: you need to define what you need. Is it a year’s salary? Do you have a backup plan? Do you have a backup for your backup for your backup?
  • Do you own your own ideas? Code? Design?
    • If you did it on your own equipment, own email, own time, you should be OK. (This is not legal advice.)
  • What is your definition of success? What do you want to achieve?
  • Do you need a full business plan or do I just jump in?
    • Sometimes people do a full business plan, and it all goes out the window as soon as they launch.
    • Sometimes people get to a year, and it’s not really going anywhere, and then it is time to reevaluation where you get to.
  • People spend little time on thinking about vision up front and too much time on thinking about tactics.
  • People talk, talk, talk, and they need to just do, do, do. There is such a cost of inaction. Don’t write a document, just write the code. You can have an idea on Friday, and build a prototype over the weekend.
  • Lowering your personal burn as low as possible. It gives you more choices. “The best thing I ever did was move from a house to a loft. In a loft all your shit is visible, and you think oh shit, how did I get all this shit.” sell your car, don’t buy shit, and you will have more choices. You need to plan more when you are financially constrained and don’t have as many choices.
  • Sometimes main job and side job are complementary, and sometimes totally separate, and both have pros and cons. Neither one is always better.
  • You need to have play time. If you are working at home, maybe you make the difference by changing your clothes.
  • “Your inbox is a todo list in which anyone else can add an item and steal your time” –> stop living out of your inbox, and live out of your todo list.
  • Starting With Others
    • Write everything down
    • Plan for a) Failure, b) Success, c)Mediocrity
    • Have a clear exit plan if one o fyou wants to leave
    • Find a lawyer, a CPA, an advisor (who knows stuff you don’t), and a bank. (Chris Sacca says put all this out of your mind. Good products get built when you can focus on a good product. Figure this out later.)
      • If you are looking for a small amount of capital, the people you talk to, whose interests will probably closely align with your own, will happily introduce you to their network of providers.
  • If you need money, ask for advice. If you need advice, ask for money. If you need a job, ask for coffee.
  • When do you need some kind of entity…
    • Having a company adds legitimacy. Instead of being judged based on one individual and their resume, it is taking more seriously.
    • But you can just do a doing business as (DBA), you don’t need to form a corporation…if it is just one person. But can have value when there are multiple people.

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This session was Guy Kawasaki interviewing Chris Anderson, Wired Editor and author of The Long Tail, on the economics of FREE!, Anderson’s new book.
It was Chris Anderson’s first book, The Long Tail, that got me started down the path of how to tackle providing customer technical support using Web 2.0 principles, and I have no doubt that FREE! will be similarly influence. (I also had the privledge of interviewing Chris Anderson in 2007 on how The Long Tail relates to the printing industry.)
Pardon the raw notes format. I needed to get these notes online before my next trip.
  • Two big questions: How would Twitter create a business model? How would Chris fix the NY Times?
  • Twitter
    • The old way was: advertising, raising more money, exit strategy
    • The new way is to make money now
    • Is it going to be consumers who pay for Twitter, or advertisers who pay?
    • Pay for visibility…
    • Twitter has decided to be open, and let other companies create value added clients, which means those other companies are monetizing Twitter, but twitter doesn’t.
    • Free and premium product?
      • You don’t want to cripple the free product too much
      • You don’t want to charge too much for premium
      • 5% will become premium users
      • How do you create that premium version of the product without crippling the free one?
      • It’s hard to do this free/premium when there are lots of competitors: Facebook would love to steal microblogging away from Twitter.
  • If you could redo anything about Wired, how would you do it over?
    • Wired was launched in 1993
    • The question at the time was “if you are so wired, why is this magazine on paper”
    • Paper can sometimes add value. For long form, well design formats, the print medium adds value. There is an online version for instant access.
    • Books have value
    • Guy: Are you going to have a free version of your book FREE?
    • So many versions…web version of book, ebook, audio book (unabridged and abridged), the paper book (hardcover and softcover). Stuff with no marginal cost should be free: the digital versions. The stuff with marginal cost, costs something.
      • So you give away the digital stuff for free, to increase your reach.
      • Some percentage of the people who love the free one will buy the paper one, because the paper one adds value.
    • Chris’s publisher is Hyperion, who is a subsidery of Disney. They are allowing him to publish some stuff for free.
  • Which is harder: to achieve popularity or to monetize popularity?
    • To monetize
    • Each one of us has to figure out our own way to monetize popularity.
    • If you are a speaker, you may want a speaking gig. If you are a professor, maybe you want tenure. If you are an engineer, you want to establish reputation so you can get a job.
    • The music industry is thriving in all regards except the publishing part: the selling of disks. The problem is a misalignment of what the artist and publisher needs. The artist is agnostic about where they make money.
    • Publishers want to sell books, and authors want to sell themselves. The publisher needs to be aligned with what the author needs. Could you do a 360 for book? Could the publisher represent you as a speaker, take an equity stake in any spinoffs.
  • 20th century free was the razor and the blades, the
    • The products have real cost, and you need to find a way to cover that cost
    • This is essentially a marketing gimmick
  • 21st century free is digital bits
    • There is no marginal cost. It is truly free.
    • When they introduce radio, they tried to figure out how to pay for it.
      • The British had a tax on radios to pay for the stations.
      • The U.S. ended up with advertising
    • The media advertising model is what has been extended to most of the internet: it’s google adsense.
    • Freemium is the new model: you give away 90, 95, 99% of your product, and charge for only the most premium features.
    • If you can convert 5% of your users to paid, then you can make a profit. If you get to 10%, you’re making a lot.
    • 37signals talked a lot about the benefits of charging your customer. Read what they have written. They have free products, and they have premium products. You need to start up with these two different things, not start only with the free model. If you do that, and introduce a paid version two years later, then you violate a social contract with your users.
  • What can we learn from China on capitalism. They have no intellectual property.
    • We can learn a lot from china.
    • If you do not make your product free, then piracy will.
    • Competitive markets will drive price down to marginal cost.
    • The chinese pop star will release a CD, with the expectation that it will be pirated. Piracy creates distribution and celebrity, and celebrity allows the pop star to get singing gigs, advertising gigs, etc.
    • Wall’s Drug gives away free ice water. People would go out of the way to get the free ice water.  Starbucks could potentially give away free coffee – if they could get the right conversion rate.
  • Why is free so much more powerful than one penny or 25 cents?
    • “The penny gap”
    • When we see a price, then we go through a cognitive “is it worth it?” flag. The transaction cost of the evaluation is what becomes the blocking thing. When something is free, then we don’t go through the valuation process at all.
    • In the physical world, you don’t want to waste physical resources like food or hospital beds, so you do want to charge a nickel to stop the waste. In the digital world, waste is fine, so free is good.
  • Upcoming generation…
    • A 5 year old will internalize neutonian physics when they learn how to catch a baseball.  When a 10 year old goes online, they quickly internalize the free economics: of course it is free.
  • Does anyone think less of something because it is free?
    • No one thinks less of Twitter or Facebook. They evaluate based on utility, not price.
    • But comparing Office versus Google Docs: utility comes first, and Office can do a lot that Google Docs can’t. the decision is primarily a utility one, and not a price one.
  • Are people more motivated by loosing something they have or not getting something they want?
    • People are more motived by negative things on general.
    • But what you want will loom large.
    • Marketing is all about getting you to want something, but before you can try it, you have to buy it.
    • For free, the marketing is that you’ll probably like it, so why not give it a try, and if you love it, then maybe later you can buy. And you’ll be happy paying.
  • Questions
    • We have an online survey product, it is a freemium model, and all of our competitors have freemium models. We did a survey of customers, and when they come to the site, they have a negative connotation: it is fishy that it is free.
      • You are too similar to something that people are using to paying for. So people have an expectation, and cognitive dissonance.
    • We have an economic crisis here. Do you have any suggestions for our country?
      • From a consumer perspective, when you have no money, free is a very good price.
      • It’s broken the advertising model, because CPM have dropped off. It is driving more companies toward freemium model.
      • In Latin America, they are used to companies vanishing, banks failing, governments toppling, but it isn’t threatening to them. You focus on your family, you have a house, and food, and it’s all good.
    • Luxury brands…
      • You can get Guy Kawasaki for free on Twitter, or you can pay $50,000 to get the custom talk.
        • You can’t get the high premium without the mass popularity
      • China is the largest market for pirated luxury items, and the largest market for true luxury items.
    • How can you compete with free?
      • It depends on user expectation: if they expect to pay $5,000, then free will not meet their expectations.
      • Microsoft has been competing with free for 30 years.
        • They had to convince people to pay for software in the first place.
        • They had to compete with unix, with linux, with open source.
        • They are not selling a product, they are selling support, and security, and confidence.

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For years, when asking people what they print from the web, they often say travel related items: itinerary, hotel receipt, boarding passes, maps, lists of restaurants and attractions. They might bring other pre-printed artifacts, like business cards, travel guides, and large maps. At a conference, a schedule guide might be needed.

At SXSW Interactive this year, I used none of these. 
  • I used Google Maps on my blackberry to locate businesses and restaurants, get directions, and view maps. 
  • I used the SXSW online schedule of events from my phone to plan my days at the conference and add desired events to my Google calendar. 
  • When I met someone I want to talk to in the future, I followed them on Twitter (again via my phone), and can look up their contact information later, or simply Google their name. 

Even though I had made a small travel packet before I left home, I never used anything in that travel packet except the initial boarding pass I printed.

If I am already carrying my phone, I don’t want to carry paper. Especially when the digital equivalents (like twitter, online schedules, and maps) offer so much more value in digital form.

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Derek Powazek spoke on Designing for Wisdom of the Crowds at SXSW Interactive 2009. He graciously posted the full slides. It also turns out that Derek works for HP’s MagCloud, a magazine publishing site. Here are my takeaways from his talk.

Wisdom of the Crowds began with Francis Galton. He observed a contest in which people had to guess the weight of a cow. Their individual guesses were off, but the average guess was 1209 pounds, and the actual weight was 1198, less than 1% off.
The question is how to apply wisdom of the crowds to create better community online. When you see web forums, you see lots of stupidity. But when you looked at the most emailed stories on a news site, what the crowd is telling you are the most interesting stories, the crowd is doing an effective job picking stories.
Elements of wise crowds are:
  • Diversity
  • Independence (avoid group think)
  • Decentralization
  • Aggregation
Elements of bringing Wisdom of Crowds online are:
  • Small simple tasks
  • Large Diverse Group
  • Design for Selfishness
  • Result Aggregation
Small simple tasks:
  • One way that things can fall apart is by making it too complicated. A black comment form invites chaos. What you want is something with a specific output value, like a rating from 1 to 10, or a thumbs up/thumbs down. 
  • Good examples of this include the T-shirt design site Threadless, and HotOrNot. (don’t visit the latter link from work.) 
  • But a bad example of this is the initial launch of Wired Magazine’s Assignment Zero. They asked people to write news stories. People were interested in the idea, but when it came time to write an article, they were like “woah, this is a lot of work”. So they changed the process mid-stream by smallying the tasks: First, ask the users who we should interview. Second, ask the users who would sign up to interview those people? Third, who would sign up to take the interview notes and write articles? Fourth, they hired editors to turn raw articles into magazine quality articles.
Large Diverse Groups
  • Bad example #1: Groupthink at NASA led to a conclusion that it was safe to launch because everyone else thought it was safe to launch. It was inconceivable to think that it wasn’t safe to launch.
  • Bad example #2: Chevy Tahoe solicited input for advertisements. The only people motivated enough to contribute were environmentalists who submitted counter-advertising. Actual Tahoe fans were motived enough.
  • Want to encourage diverse groups to participate.
Design for Selfishness
  • Large groups of people aren’t going to contribute if they get nothing out of it. Is it worth my time? What do I get out of it?
  • Threadless: get $2,500 if you submit a winning design.
  • Google PageRank: people create web site links for their own reasons, not to help Google to build a billion dollar business, but Google Pagerank is ultimately dependent on those links.
  • Flickr Tags: people don’t tag photos to help flickr, they tag to organize photos. Flickr builds on top of that so that not only can they serve up photos by tags, but they can divide into clusters that so the tag of “apple” can be identified as meaning either computers, fruit, or NYC.
Result Aggregation
  • Favrd: gets favorited tweets from twitter, aggregates them so you can see what the most favorite tweets of the previous day is.
Heisenberg Problem
  • Once we create a leaderboard,it creates a new motivation: people will try to get onto the leaderboard, regardless fo contributing in a positive way. It creates an incentive for bad behavior.
  • Example: Flickr used to show absolute ranking of interesting photos, which caused people to spam their photo into many groups. The correction was to show a random selection of interesting photos. Now there is less motivation for someone to complete/spam/game the system to get into the #1 slot, because now there is no #1 slot. (Gaming the system was a recurring discussion theme all week.)
  • Also, show results only after voting is complete. Threadless shows voting results for T-shirt designs only when the week is done and all votes are in, not at all during the week.
Popularity does not have to rule
  • Amazon.com reviews for Battlestar Galatica show most helpful favorable review and most helpful critical review. The combination of the two is more informative than just showing you the single most helpful review, because that would be unbalanced. And a histogram of reviews shows you quantitative and visually how many reviews fall into 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 stars. That gives you a good picture, again more helpful than just reading the most positive or negative or popular review.
Implicit versus Explicit Feedback
  • Explicit feedback is voting and rating. You are asking the audience to make an intentional decision. Threadless, Digg, Hot or Not, Zen, Amazon. The goal here is never to ask people to do more thinking than is necessary. If thumbs up/thumbs down will work, that’s enough. If 1 to 5 rating will work, don’t do a 1 to 10 rating.
  • Implicit feedback is pageviews, searches, velocity, interestingness, clickstream data. You can get more useful, better data when you don’t ask people a direction question.
(Personal aside: My passion is all around the implicit data…)
Design Matters: How you ask questions changes the answers you get
  • Two versions of Kvetch: the early dark version, and the latter white version.
  • The 1997 version was all dark and black. And the comments were dark, as in “I want to kill my teacher”. But the intention of the site was supposed to be funny, so what was happening?
  • The latter version of the site was white, with an open airy design. Same text. The submitted comments became funny and lighthearted.
  • Red versus blue: In a psychological test, they changed only one thing, the color of the border surrounding information. The blue group did better on tests of creative work, the red group did better on tests of recall. Not just a little better, but hugely better. We associate red with ranger and mistakes. People try to avoid mistakes. Red creates a fear response, people don’t want to mess up, so they pay attention to detail. Blue is cooler, more relaxes, and people connect to emotional content much better.
Seeing Things
  • Our brains work to create  a story in our head based on inputs. If some of those inputs are missing, the brain works twice as hard to create a story that makes sense.
  • Fighter pilots: when they undergo G-forces that starve the brain of oxygen, they undergo vivid hallucinations that comprises a tiny part of reality, but most made up.
  • In online situations, we lack most of the data we would have in the real world: facial expressions, sounds, etc, and all that is left is lines of text on the screen. So our brains work really hard to make up a story. People make up a story when they are deprived of the data.
  • They did a study: two groups of people. The “in-control” group goes into a room and answers questions and are told they are always right. The “out of control” group goes into a room and answers questions, and are told they are always wrong. Then they present a chaos picture, such as static or random clouds. When presented with the picture, the in-control group said there was nothing. The out-of-control group saw all sorts of things that weren’t there.
  • Then they did a followup. They had the out-of-control group tell them a story about their morning or something they were passionate about. Then shows the chaos pictures to those people, and the people said there was nothing there.

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A few good notes, videos, and podcasts found this morning.

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I posted about Kathy Sierra’s SXSW 2009 Keynote address in which she talked about achieving breakthroughs. In the process found some great notes from her 2007 and 2008 keynotes on Brian Fitzgeralkd’s blog.

  • In her 2007 address, Kathy spoke about humanness being essential to our software and web applications. From Brian’s notes: “Being able to look confused and having the other entity respond appropriately is crucial to human interaction.” and “Help, FAQs, and user docs might not sound sexy, but they are the key to passionate users”
  • In her 2008 keynote, Kathy spoke about how the goal of your products shouldn’t be to have users crowing about your company or your products, but about how they, the users, now kick ass by using your products.