A long time ago I attended a workshop with Alan Dix that applied this principle to leverage ancient (failed) wisdom for design inspiration: how to produce a good idea out of a bad idea. How does it work? You can have a look at the example Tomaso, Ting, Maria, Valentina and I worked on.

Objective:

To create a good idea starting from a bad idea; by analyzing the bad idea’s positive and negative aspects, identifying the forcings behind them, and using these forcings in a context in which they constitute positive aspects of a good idea.

The process:

We started by brainstorming for bad ideas. From these ideas we chose one, and traded the rest with other teams, receiving in turn two borrowed bad ideas. Then, we considered their positive, negative and neutral aspects, what causes the systems to behave in these ways, and how the context within the system affects our valuation (positive, neutral or negative) of these aspects.

The bad ideas:

1. Dinner payment chain: A payment system in a restaurant in which a customer pays the bill of the previous customer and cannot leave until he/she have found someone that pays his/hers.

• Pay-it-backward. As opposed to pay-it-forward, which usually requires honesty and proactivity on the part of the participant, pay-it-backward ensures that the chain will be maintained (positive). However, in this case it does not add any benefit compared to the mainstream alternative, in which each customer pays their own bill (neutral).
• Captivity within the chain. On the other hand, in this case, pay-it-backward is inconvenient for the customers who have to stay until someone pays their bill because they may have to spend time and effort looking for the next link in the chain (negative).
• Blindness about cost. Customers are also blind as to how much their meal will cost, because instead of paying the items they ordered, they will be paying another customer’s. This can cause fear to end up losing (negative).
• Snowball effect. Customers will consume a lot because they do not want to end up losing money, and for this they need to consume more than the customer for whom they are paying. In general terms, this means that as people feel they have already paid for something, they will make full use of it to feel they got their money’s worth. This is a positive for the restaurant owner that will see the business grow but a negative for the customers that will end up paying increasing amounts with each iteration.

2. Managing system for football fans (borrowed idea): A system which allows supporters to decide opponent’s team formation through voting.

• Public involvement. People participate in the decision making. They feel more engaged because the results they see are the consequence of their involvement (positive).
• People act on a narrow vision and inadvertently modify the system. People seek to satisfy immediate and individualistic goals, so they choose the worst players for the opposing team and as a result the quality of the whole league degrades (negative).

3. Beeper for restaurant kitchens (borrowed idea): A communication system for a kitchen in which all natural language communication is replaced with messages coded in “beeps”.

• More structured system. In a carefully engineered system it is easier to predict what others will do and cooperation becomes more smooth (positive), on the other hand people may feel trapped or unable to improvise (negative).
• Simplicity, limited communication and behavior. What can be said through beeps is much more limited than what can be said through natural language. This limits people’s freedom to communicate, and in turn it limits their freedom to act when they are working in a team and have to coordinate their actions (negative).
• Overly oriented to goals (avoiding socializing). This does not foster a very agreeable work environment (negative).
• Cognitive effort to remember codes. People have to learn a new language, which requires effort and raises the entry barrier (negative).
• Beeps are annoying (negative).

After the analysis, we combined some of the aspects mentioned above to develop a good idea. Below, we present the idea, and list the aspects of the bad ideas it includes. In the context of this idea, these aspects are all positive.

The good idea: A pay-it-backward vaccination campaign

Background: Vaccines do not work on all the individuals in a population. To be sure that a disease does not spread and all individuals (even those in whom the vaccine does not work) are safe, a population has to achieve herd immunity. This occurs when vaccination is widespread enough so that if one person becomes sick with an infectious disease the likelihood that he/she will be able to pass it on to another person is very low because virtually all the people around this person will be immune to the disease. This means that for an individual to be safe from infectious disease, his/her own behavior is not enough, he/she needs the collaborative behavior of the community.

The idea: We though of a system in which person-A gets vaccinated and pays for the vaccine. In turn, if person-A refers person-B to go and get the vaccine, person-A will get a refund for the cost of the vaccine. Each person wants to get a refund, what works to create a chain reaction that results in most people getting vaccinated and the population achieving herd immunity.

Below, we explain how the aspects of the bad ideas are integrated into this good idea.

• Pay-it-backward. The motivation to get a refund for something that has already been paid ensures that the chain will be maintained.
• Captivity within the chain. People have to spend time and effort looking for the next link in the chain, but this is compensated by the fact that they are sure to earn something in return (the refund).
• Blindness about cost. People pay for their vaccine and finally get a refund, so they perceive that the vaccine has a cost but that they get it for free. This has the double effect of attributing value to the vaccine and making the person feel they have drawn a benefit by not paying the cost. In reality, because all people entitled to a refund and finally the State (through a tax-funded program) ends up paying for all the vaccines, there is an unknown cost (the cost of the vaccine) paid indirectly by each person. But in this case, blindness about the real cost could be used by the people engineering the vaccination campaign to set an arbitrary “price” to the vaccine, maximizing the vaccine’s value perception and people’s motivation to get the refund.
• Public involvement. People can see in the whole of society good results that are the consequence of their involvement, this makes people feel empowered and predisposes them better to new initiatives.
• People act on a narrow vision and inadvertently modify the system. People have an immediate individual incentive (to get a refund) and the acting in pursuit of this immediate individual incentive creates a much larger collective effect: herd immunity. This occurs in this case because the individual and collective goals are aligned.
• More structured system. By creating a system in which individual and collective goals are aligned, the system can be expected to reach the desired equilibrium state without a huge external investment. The system just needs to be started and then each actor will perform its part until the whole system changes state. In this case, for example, although the State would pay for the vaccines (which we assume it would have done anyway) it would save the costs of public health campaigns, advertising, education, etc. to persuade the people to get vaccinated because each individual can be trusted to have an incentive to pass the message along for free.

I worked on this project, some time ago, with Wenzhu, Valentina, Paulo. When I was told we had to design a remote control for elderly people, I googled it, and then sighed. Usually I try to avoid the “yet another…” projects but this time it was not up to us, so I set to work thinking at least that socially it was quite a relevant project. Actually I learned that most developed countries have around 10% 65+ people (I knew it was a lot, but 10% is mind blowing) and that they watch TV an average of 3,5 hours a day, so it makes sense to want to adapt remote controls for their especial use.

What I didn’t know, or had never thought about, is that remote controls have been around since the 50s (commercially) and have been popular since the 70s. So these people actually lived pretty much their whole lives with remote controls, it’s different than with computers, it’s just that:

1. Remote controls have radically changed
2. Their bodies have radically changed

So we focused on this.

As a first step, we created a user profile using literature and previous studies of  remote controls for the elderly. This is it:

• Age: 60+
• Health:
  - Cognitive: Tasks that use well-practiced skills or familiar information are generally not affected by age. However, complex tasks that require taking in new information and analyzing it may become more difficult. Many researchers attribute this to deficits that occur in attention, speed of processing, and memory. Many older adults have increasing difficulty distinguishing between information that is relevant and information that is irrelevant to a particular task (attention problems). In general, memory tasks that are complex and require manipulating a lot of new information quickly become more difficult with age. Well-practiced skills and abilities remain intact.
  - Sensorial: Weak vision, more light needed to see clearly. Decreased ability to hear high frequencies and sounds in general. Low sensitivity to touch.
  - Motor: Diminished dexterity and coordination compromise fine motor skills and strength diminishes. Limited finger reach distance when gripping. Weak hand grip, slow reaction, poor accuracy.
• Gender: male/female (more female than men).
• Experience: Unfamiliar with technology in general, for most of their lifetime electronics didn’t exist or were very simple. However, they have experience of using a TV remote control. Someone who is 60, was in their 20s when the remote control was popularized, however this kind of remote controls were a lot simpler than modern remote controls.
• Goals: Change channels, adjust volume, turn on/off the TV.
• Needs:
  - Social and emotional needs: independence, a way to occupy their time / entertainment, self-confidence, inclusion.

After identifying the goals, we did a task analysis. In this case, it’s interesting because as the users have cognitive, sensorial and motor impairments the task analysis looks quite different than you’re used to. Really simple stuff can be an issue so everything has to be included, all the trivial steps being present. For example, to turn on/off the TV:

Although interpreting feedback as to whether the TV has been effectively turned on or off may not in general be a problem with the average user, it can be for elderly people. Changing channels (without zapping) is even harder:

So we did this for every goal and identified the problematic stages through an heuristic evaluation based on our users’ cognitive, sensorial and motor health. Some difficulties we identified in current remote controls are:

• The decreasing size of remote controls means small keys and small labels that people with visual disabilities find inaccessible. Some people are unable to distinguish between certain color combinations used on keypads.
• Hearing impaired users cannot identify commands or controls that require hearing, so visual or tactile feedback when keys are pressed would be recommended.
• Some current remote controls have a huge number of keys for various functions. Those with cognitive impairments may have particular difficulty in learning the function of so many keys.
• Due to reduced mobility and manual dexterity lifting and carrying a remote control or pressing small keys may prove difficult for those with physical impairments.
• The existing remote control is too large and uncomfortable for holding.
• Most elderly people often make mistakes of operation, pressing the wrong button.
• Layout of menu selection: elderly people need to memorize and navigate through the location of buttons since there are approximately 19 – 30 buttons.
• Most elderly people do not know what the outcome of their actions is, feedback is not appropriate.

And then we made some design choices. It’s strange, because if you look at our report on the design (and I’ve seen this in many reports and presentations) the fact that we made these choices and why we made them is not explicitely stated there at all. The likely reason, I think, is that many of these design choices are only supported in some obscure place in the back of our brains by anecdotal data that managed to make an impression on us. The problem is that on the way to become a UX designer we’re told a hundred times to run user tests/studies and not to trust anecdotal evidence, so we just ignore these choices, never write about them and the result is that most people don’t even realize that these were choices at all (meaning that there actually was another way to do it). However, UX design isn’t and shouldn’t be (else no innovative interfaces would ever be created) a purely scientific discipline. Let’s say that your design should always be exclusively and logically derived from user study results, well there wouldn’t be a lot of variety then. Intuition, power of observation and willingness to take some risks are as essential to UX designers as whatever knowledge about how to run a within subjects summative study and do some t-testing afterwards. Actually, IMO, anyone can read a couple of books and learn how to carry out a user test, it’s the ability to use intuition and derive successful results from it (and the ability to recall some curiosity you observed in the subway, at the right time, and use it well) that makes the good UX designer (and separates him/her from the self-proclaimed-UX-designer developers). This can only happen if you have trained you brain to think as a UX designer, then he’ll do the work for you recalling and bringing up the right idea at the right time. But you know what they say (UI developers, I’m looking at you), Rome wasn’t built in a day ;)

We didn’t have time to run a user study before going on to design the first iteration. So, a considerable number of our most important choices were based on facts like: my grandmother and Valentina’s hold the remote control in the palm on one hand and press the buttons with the index of their other hands. Just like this guy:

So we thought, wouldn’t it be nice to afford this? Most remote controls for the elderly are simplified versions of the regular ones, with bigger buttons. But the buttons are distributed all over the surface and this makes this kind of gripping very uncomfortable.

Most remote controls for the elderly have only “arrow up” and “arrow down” zapping buttons. This simplifies the interfase but makes it annoying to change from channels that are far apart. At the same time, most of the elderly we know only watch a small range of channels. So why not try some favorite buttons?

So this is what we made:

And these are its features, explained:

• Functions: favorite buttons (the green ones with varied shapes, featuring shortcuts to a set of favorite channels, based on the fact that it is likely that elderly people most usually watch a restricted set of channels repeatedly), zapping buttons, volume buttons, on/off button, sound on/off button, back button (undo one step button, that takes the user to the previous state of the system in the event of an error given that operation errors are one of our users concerns), mute button. The remote control was stripped of all other possible buttons to keep it simple and just address the primary needs of our users.
• Feedback: feedback for battery level in the back, just like the led lines in a MacBook (some elderly people have trouble changing the batteries, so it could be helpful for them to have a battery level indicator and ask relatives or caregivers to change their remote control’s batteries if they are about to be empty when they have the chance). Also, some buttons (on/off, volume, channel, back) are backlit for a small time window when pressed to indicate a change in state (this allows users to feel more in control of their actions, having better knowledge of their outcome). Some other buttons (favorite buttons and mute) stay backlit when pressed to indicate current system state.
• Shape of the remote control: Thin and narrow to be suitable to hold in the users’ palm. Anti-slipping surface for better grip. Light in weight. Wide infrared pointer that extends towards the back of the remote control (the elderly sometimes have tremors or their accuracy is diminished, so having a big pointing surface helps them to aim at the TV more easily. Also, it can be useful to people who have vision problems to be able to hold the remote towards them to better see the buttons while still pointing). A hand strap is provided to secure the remote to the hand of the user.
• Physical characteristics of the buttons: Buttons are big and well spaced to avoid operation mistakes and facilitate their recognition. They are also grouped according to functions and the layout matches usage patterns, having buttons that have to be pressed repeatedly (zapping and volume) in the most accessible positions. A concave shape for the buttons gives tactile feedback indicating the user that his/her finger is in the right position without the need of visual feedback. Haptic feedback when the buttons are pressed allows users to feel more in control of their actions, eliminating uncertainty towards the completion of an action. Buttons are soft and not much pressure is needed to press them (a decrease in hand strength is one of the signs of aging, also accuracy increases when force diminishes, so this is expected to reduce the number of operation mistakes).
• Other features: A caller is embedded in the remote, so that the user can attach a sticker button to the TV and press it to have the remote control light the buttons and beep a sound for findability (this is expected to particularly help users with memory problems to locate their remote control if they forget where they have left it).

We went to a retirement home and tested our remote control with our users (the test was controlled replicating the tasks with an ordinary remote control). The test was quite messy, because it’s not every day that some new people arrive at a retirement home and ask for help testing some piece of gadgetry ;) but our participants were super helpful and the results were quite nice :) Here they are:

1. They liked the shape of our remote control very much. They emphasized that the shape was a perfect fit for the way in which they hold the remote.
2. They thought the size of our remote control was good. Their hands were able to grab it tightly.
3. Finder function: this function was not implemented in the prototype but the idea was explained and the feedback was positive.
4. Favorite channel button. The participants’ favorite channels amount to not more than 4 in all cases so the number of favorite channel buttons implemented is enough for their requirements. The different shapes of favorite channel buttons did not confuse the users, but helped them memorize them. Feedback was positive for different shaped buttons.
5. The users did not understand the function of back button. One mentioned reason was that the text (“back”) on the button is in English. Another reason is that they confused the back button with the backwards arrow in the zapping buttons. Using “undo”, they mentioned, would be better than “back”.
6. Wider infrared pointer feature was not tested.
7. Battery level indicator: one of the users pointed out that she asked other people to change the battery for her every time. None of the users gave the feedback on whether the battery level indicator was useful for them or not.
8. Sound and light feedback on the buttons. This feature was not implemented in the remote control prototype either. The concept was explained to the users. However, it was difficult for them to understand it. In the design, once a button is pushed, this button will be backlit for 5 seconds; however, the users’ assumed that once a button is pushed, the TV screen or TV would be highlighted. Maybe with a working prototype we could be luckier :)
9. The hand strap was not implemented in our prototype. After listening to an explanation, the users thought this feature was not necessary without stating any reason.
10. The users gave the positive feedback about the buttons being big and the layout being simple. Even though there are 11 buttons only, they include all the functions the users used daily. They suggested labels would be a good addition, because they would be able to know the functions of buttons more clearly.

So, not only was the feedback positive but also our users’ preferred features were those that came up seemingly out of nowhere and that no other remote control for the elderly we surveyed had: the weird shape and the favorite buttons. And I think this is a nice morale to this story about how it’s never the case that everything has been said about something, no matter how many commercial versions are there, and not to be afraid to add some deliberate serendipity to the design process sometimes :)

Link to full report here.

• The book, or part I: The Design of Everyday Things
• The clock, part II: an intro to device parsing, and the parsing of a clock as example
• The toaster, part III: our redesign of the toaster, using a different combination of sensors and actuators, following Norman’s principles

(I’ll leave talking especifically about sensors/actuators for some other day, I have a rather ambicious project on them, but it’ll have to wait until I finish with the emoticons and the pagination :)

So, today: the book.

The Design of Everyday Things is a book, written by Don Norman in 1988, about how some designers are bad designers and create things that give some people trouble when they have to use them. Some models and principles are also presented in the book. I guess that you can read as many positive as negative reviews, its current relevance is also praised as well as disputed. I didn’t generally like the book and I wonder how scientific the main models presented in the book are. Even Norman admits that his 7 Stages of Action model is not validated and that the study of how people act is an “unexplored area”. The book seems to be based mainly on the cherry picking of anecdotes, some folk wisdom about how people act, a rather large bibliography list that is never cited in the book  and lots of hope that you’ll identify with some of the episodes described there in which people are frustrated and/or embarrased by their inability to make some device work and you’ll find designers guilty by association. Although just a reshuffle of common sense and other people’s papers, the book is kind of successful in bringing some concepts together, it would actually be useful if it weren’t so long and obfuscated. I don’t know, this is just my opinion. In any case, I summarized the concepts in the book, scraping off Norman’s rants, the pseudoscientific explanations and the stuff which is too old to matter, and I got the summary that follows, which is reasonably ok as very basic advice for  a designer.

First there is the 7 stages of action this is the model suggested by Norman on how people act (chapter 2). If you then look back into the principles of chapter 1 and combine them into it and then add the contents of chapters 3,4 and 5, you get something like this (download as PDF here):

Some other concepts are described in the book, but frankly most of them are obvious or redundant: i.e. what people can do after physical and cultural constraints are taken into account is called by Norman an affordance, like in glass affords seeing through. Or, the notion that tasks described by wide and deep decision trees are complex vs. tasks with shallow or narrow trees, which are the simple ones…

The chapter on errors is kind of weird, the explanation about why and how people tend to overregularize the commonplace and at the same time overemphasize the discrepant is lacking, especially regarding the part about the discrepant stuff. However, I think that his categorization of the nature of slips (mishaps, or errors arising from acting incorrectly when one has the correct intention) may be useful as a checklist I may like to use to test my designs for possible causes for this kind of errors:

• Capture errors: a frequently done activity replaces a more infrequent one if the early steps for both are similar (i.e. I start to dial the dentist’s number and end up calling my friend because the first 4 digits in both phone numbers coincided).
• Description errors: the intended action is incompletely described in the user’s formulation of his/her goal, so it gets replaced by another one that also fulfills the incomplete description (i.e. put the lid of the sugar bowl onto the coffee cup, in this case the goal description would have been something like “put the lid on”).
• Data driven errors: sensory data of a similar nature replaces data that originally was involved in the action (i.e. you try to call a person but you see someone else and you call the latter’s name instead of the former’s).
• Associative activation errors: same as data driven but the “wrong data” comes from the person’s own associations instead of from the external world, the Freudian slip.
• Loss of activation errors: forgetting the goal, as a consequence the sequence of actions is truncated because the next step is unknown (i.e. I walk to the kitchen but once I get there I can’t remember why I went there or what I wanted to do there).
• Mode errors: a device has more than one mode and the user performs an action as if the device were in one mode when it is on another (i.e. trying to write text in the command mode of Vim)

And finally, after a chapter 6 that is absolutely not worth reading, in chapter 7 Norman gives his definition of User Centered Design, which consists of adhering to 7 principles (some of the ones presented in chapter 1 are there, some are missing, the others are new):

1. Use knowledge in the world (cues, labels, etc.) and in the head (user’s mental models, associations and memory).
2. Simplify the structure of the tasks (provide mental aids, improve visibility and feedback, automate parts of the task, replace the task by a simpler one)
3. Make things visible (bridge the gulfs of execution and evaluation)
4. Get the mappings right
5. Exploit the power of constraints, both physical and cultural
6. Design for error (minimize causes of error, make actions reversible, make it easy to discover that an error ocurred, take errors as an approximation through which the user gets to the goal by an alternative course of action)
7. When all else fails standardize (so arbitrary things have to be learn only once).

What can I say about these 7 principles..? For sure that reading through them was puzzling. Why didn’t he include some of the advice that he mentions on the rest of the book? Where are conceptual models and where is feedback? They looked good enough to be included as principles in chapter 1, and surely they are part of User Centered Design: providing a good conceptual model through which your user can undertand the capabilities and functionality of your design. Somehow, some things got left out and others just appeared out of the blue: when reading chapter 2 I had the impression that constraints were part of the knowledge in the world, they are in fact a subsection of that chapter, why are they being mentioned here as a separate entity? At best, chapter 7 looks sloppy. It reinforces the impression that there is no structure behind the book; which, together with the fact that in my edition (Basic Books, 2002) you can’t even tell the hyerarchy of subtitles, makes me wonder if Norman wouldn’t have forgotten to include the part about providing a good conceptual model for your users if he had paid a little bit more attention to it…

In any case, would I advice myself to read it if I ever go back in time? The answer is, unfortunately, no. Not completely useless, but I have better things to do with the time it takes to read 235 pages that can be summarized into one A4 sheet.