Journal tags: psychology

An Event Apart in Seattle continues. It’s the afternoon of day two and Beth Dean is here to give a talk called Unsolved Problems:

Technology products are being adapted faster than ever. We’ve spent a lot of time adopting new technology, but not as much time considering the social impact of doing so. This talk looks at large scale system design in the offline world, and takes lessons from them to our online work. You’ll learn how to expand your design approach from self-contained products, to considering the broader systems in which they exist.

Fun fact: An Event Apart was the first conference that Beth attended over ten years ago.

Who recognises this guy on screen? It’s Robert Stack, the creepy host of Unsolved Mysteries. It was kind of like the X-Files. The X-Files taught Beth to be a sceptic. Imagine Beth’s surprise when her job at Facebook led her to actual conspiracies. It’s been a hard year, what with Cambridge Analytica and all.

Beth’s team is focused on how people experience ads, while the whole rest of the company is focused on ads from the opposite end. She’s the Fox Mulder of the company.

Technology today has incredible reach. In recent years, we’ve seen 1:1 harm. That’s when a product negatively effects someone directly. In their book, Eric and Sara point out that Facebook is often the first company to solve these problems.

1:many harm is another use of technology. Designing in isolation isn’t new to tech. We’ve seen 1:many harm in urban planning. Brasilia is a beautiful city that nobody wants to live in. You need messy, mixed-use spaces, not a space designed for cars. Niemeier planned for efficiency, not reality.

Eichler buildings were supposed to be egalitarian. But everything that makes these single-story homes great places to live also makes them great targets for criminals. Isolation by intentional design leads to a less safe place to live.

One of Frank Gehry’s buildings turned into a deathtrap when it was covered with snow. And in summer, the reflective material makes it impossible to sit on side of it. His Facebook office building has some “interesting” restroom allocation, which was planned last.

Ohio had a deer overpopulation problem. So the solution they settled on was to introduce coyotes. Now there’s a coyote problem. When coyotes breed with stray dogs, they start to get aggressive and they hunt in packs. This is the cobra effect: when the solution to your problem makes the problem worse. The British government offered a bounty for cobras in India. So people bred snakes for the bounty. So they got rid of the bounty …and then all those snakes were released into the wild.

So-called “ride sharing” apps are about getting one person from point A to point B. They’re not about making getting around easier in general.

Google traffic directions don’t factor in the effect of Google giving everyone the same traffic directions.

AirBnB drives up rent …even though it started out as a way to help people who couldn’t make rent. Sounds like cobra farming.

Automating Inequality by Virgina Eubanks is an excellent book about being dropped by health insurance. An algorithm did it. By taking broken systems and automating them, we accelerate disenfranchisement.

Then there’s Facebook. Psychological warfare is not new. Radio and television have influenced elections long before the internet. Politicians changed their language to fit the medium of radio.

The internet has removed all friction that helps us behave cooperatively. Removing friction was once our goal, but it turns out that friction is sometimes useful. The internet has turned into an outrage machine.

Solving problems in the isolation of our own products ignores the broader context of society.

The Waze map reflects cities as they are, not the way someone wishes them to be.

—Noam Bardin, CEO of Waze

From bulletin boards to today’s web, the internet has always been toxic because human nature is toxic. Maybe that’s the bigger problem to solve.

We can look to other industries…

Ideo redesigned the hospital experience. People were introduced to their entire care staff on their first visit. Sloan Kettering took a similar approach. Artwork serves as wayfinding. Every room has its own bathroom. A Chicago hostpital included gardens because it improves recovery.

These hospital examples all:

• Designed for an intended outcome.
• Met people where they were.
• Strengthened existing support networks.

We’ve seen some bad examples from urban planning, but there are success stories too.

A person on a $30 bicycle is as important as someone in a $30,000 car, said Enrique Peñalosa.

Copenhagen once faced awful traffic congestion. Now people cycle everywhere. It’s the fastest way to get around. The city is designed for bicycles first. People rode more when it felt safer. It’s no coincidence that Copenhagen ranks as one of the most livable cities in the world.

Scandinavian prisons use a concept called restorative justice. The staff plays badminton with the inmates. They cook together. Treat people like dirt and they will act like dirt. Treat people like people and they will act like people. Recividism rates in Norway are now way low.

• Design for dignity and cooperation.
• Solve for everyone in a system.
• Policy should reflect intended outcomes.

The deHavilland Comet was made of metal. After a few blew apart at the seams, they switched from rivetted material. Airlines today develop a culture of crew resource management that encourages people to speak up.

• Plan for every point of failure.
• Empower everyone on a team to solve problems.
• Adapt.

What can we do?

• Policies affect design. We need to work more closely with policy makers.
• Question access. Are all opinions equal? Where are computers making decisions that should involve people.
• Forget neutrality. Technology is not neutral. Neutrality allows us to abdicate responsibility.
• Stay a litte bit paranoid. Think about what the worst case scenario might be.

Make people better curators. How might we allow people to assess the veracity of information for themselves? What if we gave people better tools to affect their overall experience, not just small customisations?

We can use what we know about people to bring out their best behaviours. We can empower people to take action instead of just outrage.

What if we designed for the good of the community instead of the success of individuals. Like the Vauban in Freiburg! It was squatted, and the city gave control to the squatters to create an eco neighbourhood with affordable housing.

We need to think about what kind of worlds we want to create. What if we made the web less like a mall and more like a public park?

These are hard problems. But we solve hard technology problems every day. We could be the first generation of builders to solve technology’s hard problems.

It’s day two of An Event Apart Seattle (Special Edition). Lara is here to tell us about Navigating Team Friction. These are my notes…

Lara started as a developer, and then moved into management. Now she consults with other organisations. So she’s worked with teams of all sizes, and her conclusion is that humans are amazing. She has seen teams bring a site down; she has seen teams ship amazing features; she has seen teams fall apart because they had to move desks. But it’s magical that people can come together and build something.

Bruce Tuckman carried out research into the theory of group dynamics. He published stages of group development. The four common stages are:

1. Forming. The group is coming together. There is excitement.
2. Storming. This is when we start to see some friction. This is necessary.
3. Norming. Things start to iron themselves out.
4. Performing. Now you’re in the flow state and you’re shipping.

So if your team is storming (experiencing friction), that’s absolutely normal. It might be because of disagreement about processes. But you need to move past the friction. Team friction impacts your co-workers, company, and users.

An example. Two engineers passively-aggressively commenting each other’s code reviews; they feign surprise at the other’s technology choices; one rewrites the others code; one ships to production with code review; a senior team member or manager has to step in. But it costs a surprising amount of time and energy before a manager even notices to step in.

Brains

The Hulk gets angry. This is human. We transform into different versions of ourselves when we are overcome by our emotions.

Lara has learned a lot about management by reading about how our brains work. We have a rational part of our brain, the pre-frontal cortex. It’s very different to our amygdala, a much more primal part of our brain. It categorises input into either threat or reward. If a threat is dangerous enough, the amygdala takes over. The pre-frontal cortex is too slow to handle dangerous situations. So when you have a Hulk moment, that was probably an amygdala hijack.

We have six core needs that are open to being threatened (leading to an amygdala hijacking):

1. Belonging. Community, connection; the need to belong to a tribe. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense—we are social animals.
2. Improvement/Progress. Progress towards purpose, improving the lives of others. We need to feel that we do matters, and that we are learning.
3. Choice. Flexibility, autonomy, decision-making. The power to make decisions over your own work.
4. Equality/Fairness. Access to resources and information; equal reciprocity. We have an inherent desire for fairness.
5. Predictability. Resources, time, direction future challenges. We don’t like too many surprises …but we don’t like too much routine either. We want a balance.
6. Significance. Status, visibility, recognition. We want to feel important. Being assigned to a project you think is useless feels awful.

Those core needs are B.I.C.E.P.S. Thinking back to your own Hulk moment, which of those needs was threatened?

We value those needs differently. Knowing your core needs is valuable.

Desk Moves

Lara has seen the largest displays of human emotion during something as small as moving desks. When you’re asked to move your desk, your core need of “Belonging” may be threatened. Or it may be a surprise that disrupts the core need of “Improvement/Progress.” If a desk move is dictated to you, it feels like “Choice” is threatened. The move may feel like it favours some people over others, threatening “Equality/Fairness.” The “Predictability” core need may be threatened by an unexpected desk move. If the desk move feels like a demotion, your core need of “Significance” will be threatened.

We are not mind readers, so we can’t see when someone’s amygdala takes over. But we can look out for the signs. Forms of resistance can be interpreted as data. The most common responses when a threat is detected are:

1. Doubt. People double-down on the status quo; they question the decision.
2. Avoidance. Avoiding the problem; too busy to help with the situation.
3. Fighting. People create arguments against the decision. They’ll use any logic they can. Or they simply refuse.
4. Bonding. Finding someone else who is also threatened and grouping together.
5. Escape-route. Avoiding the threat by leaving the company.

All of these signals are data. Rather than getting frustrated with these behaviours, use them as valuable data. Try not to feel threatened yourself by any of these behaviours.

Open questions are powerful tool in your toolbox. Asked from a place of genuine honesty and curiosity, open questions help people feel less threatened. Closed questions are questions that can be answered with “yes” or “no”. When you spot resistance, get some one-on-one time and try to ask open questions:

• What do you think folks are liking or disliking about this so far?
• I wanted to get your take on X. What might go wrong? What do you think might be good about it?
• What feels most upsetting about this?

You can use open questions like these to map resistance to threatened core needs. Then you can address those core needs.

This is a good time to loop in your manager. It can be very helpful to bounce your data off someone else and get their help. De-escalating resistance is a team effort.

Communication ✨

Listen with compassion, kindness, and awareness.

• Reflect on the dynamics in the room. Maybe somebody thinks a topic is very important to them. Be aware of your medium. Your body language; your tone of voice; being efficient with words could be interpreted as a threat. Consider the room’s power dynamics. Be aware of how influential your words could be. Is this person in a position to take the action I’m suggesting?
• Elevate the conversation. Meet transparency with responsibility.
• Assume best intentions. Remember the prime directive. Practice empathy. Ask yourself what else is going on for this person in their life.
• Listen to learn. Stay genuinely curious. This is really hard. Remember your goal is to understand, not make judgement. Prepare to be surprised when you walk into a room. Operate under the assumption that you don’t have the whole story. Be willing to have your mind changed …no, be excited to have your mind changed!

This tips are part of mindful communication. amy.tech has some great advice for mindful communication in code reviews.

Feedback

Mindful communication won’t solve all your problems. There are times when you’ll have to give actionable feedback. The problem is that humans are bad at giving feedback, and we’re really bad at receiving feedback. We actively avoid feedback. Sometimes we try to give constructive feedback in a compliment sandwich—don’t do that.

We can get better at giving and receiving feedback.

Ever had someone say, “Hey, you’re doing a great job!” It feels good for a few minutes, but what we crave is feedback that addresses our core needs.

	General	Specific and Actionable
Positive Feedback	♥	♦
Negative Feedback	♣	♠

The feedback equation starts with an observation (“You’re emails are often short”)—it’s not how you feel about the behaviour. Next, describe the impact of the behaviour (“The terseness of your emails makes me confused”). Then pose a question or request (“Can you explain why you write your emails that way?”).

observation + impact + question/request

Ask people about their preferred feedback medium. Some people prefer to receive feedback right away. Others prefer to digest it. Ask people if it’s a good time to give them feedback. Pro tip: when you give feedback, ask people how they’d like to receive feedback in the future.

Prepare your brain to receive feedback. It takes six seconds for your amygdala to chill out. Take six seconds before responding. If you can’t de-escalate your amygdala, ask the person giving feedback to come back later.

Think about one piece of feedback you’ll ask for back at work. Write it down. When your back at work, ask about it.

You’ll start to notice when your amygdala or pre-frontal cortex is taking over.

Prevention

Talking one-on-one is the best way to avoid team friction.

Retrospectives are a great way of normalising of talking about Hard Things and team friction.

It can be helpful to have a living document that states team processes and expectations (how code reviews are done; how much time is expected for mentoring). Having it written down makes it a North star you can reference.

Mapping out roles and responsibilities is helpful. There will be overlaps in that Venn diagram. The edges will be fuzzy.

What if you disagree with what management says? The absence of trust is at the centre of most friction.

	Disgree	Agree
Commit	Mature and Transparent	Easiest
Don’t Commit	Acceptable but Tough	Bad Things

Practice finding other ways to address B.I.C.E.P.S. You might not to be able to fix the problem directly—the desk move still has to happen.

But no matter how empathic or mindful you are, sometimes it will be necessary to bring in leadership or HR. Loop them in. Restate the observation + impact. State what’s been tried, and what you think could help now. Throughout this process, take care of yourself.

Remember, storming is natural. You are now well-equipped to weather that storm.

See also:

• Torre’s notes on this talk
• Luke’s note on this talk

Josh is at An Event Apart in Boston to talk about Designing with Psychology in Mind.

He begin’s with Kurt Lewin’s equation:

Behaviour is a function of a person and their environment.

That’s quite a modern view that clashed with the prevailing wisdom of the time. Lewin’s equation is applicable to design because although we can’t change the person we can influence behaviour by altering the environment on the web. We create the environment. We create a universe for our users. In a way, we are playing God.

One of the most infamous experiments that demonstrates how much environment and behaviour can influence people is the Stanford prison experiment.

This change in behaviour was described as The Lucifer Effect. We often assign actions to the nature of the person but we ignore the external influences. This is the fundamental attribution error.

On the web, we often try to change people’s behaviour. Amazon is trying to change people from offline buyers to online buyers. On his own blog, Josh is trying to change people’s behaviour from casual readers to subscribers. Web designers change behaviour. Well, that’s what psychology is. So now we have another hat to wear, that of psychologist.

Behaviour first, design second. What behaviour are you supporting with your design?

We can use the egocentric worldview. We can’t help but see ourselves as the centre of the world. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is useful. Personal value precedes network value (for users). Josh wrote about this as the Del.icio.us lesson. Even if the social value didn’t exist, Del.icio.us would still provide real, personal value. Hunch is making good use of this principle. You provide Hunch with tons of useful information but you do it for your benefit. It turns out that most people represent themselves truthfully online even though, famously, on the internet, no-one knows you’re a dog.

Now for a test …an awareness test.

Humans have a single locus of attention. We can actively think about only one thing at a time. Jef Raskin talks about The Humane Interface. We are often interrupted from our locus of attention. The iPhone is successful even though it doesn’t have a large screen. That doesn’t matter because it’s so task-focused. There’s only ever one activity on the screen. In almost every iPhone app, there is only one thing to do. People love these applications. People don’t want to do other things at the same time. Compare the “regular” Amazon site with the iPhone version; the iPhone version is much more focused. Don’t distract people. Apple pitch their fullscreen view as work without distractions. Just like Writeroom.

Social proof: show signs of life. Yelp feels vibrant and in use. So does Amazon. According to Dunacn Watts, network effects can lead to a feedback cycle of popularity. So social proof can literally control what becomes successful. Avatars are a great way of showing social proof. Porter’s Law:

Avatars increase in size and realism over time.

Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment and penalty are all behavioural influencers.

The behaviour you’re seeing is the behaviour you’ve designed for.

People are reacting to what you have designed. Tumblr has some great positive reinforcement in its sign-up process that’s carried through to your first couple of posts. Positive reinforcement works but it doesn’t work over the long term. Know when to stop giving positive reinforcement and switch over to passionate engagement. Design to get people into the flow. There’s a lot to learn from gaming:

One cannot enjoy doing the same thing at the same level for very long.

People get bored by social networks because they are not being challenged. The only task is to answer connection invitations. Keep adding things to keep challenging users. It’s a Red Queen arm’s race. This is what Kathy Sierra talks about; creating passionate users.

Wait. Isn’t this all a bit …evil?

So, when and how do we turn on the light to let the dogs drool?

Isn’t this manipulation? Facebook’s original Beacon interface was definitely manipulative, possibly even evil, enabled through the design. They redesigned to give users more power and knowledge …although it took a few iterations.

We must determine what success is. If people are using something, why are they using it? Are you making people happier with your product?

It’s time for my second Gavin of the day at XTech. Gavin Bell asks Data portability for whom?

To start with, we’ve got a bunch of great technologies like OpenID and OAuth that we’re using to build an infrastructure of openness and portability but right now, these technologies don’t interoperate very cleanly. Getting a show of hands, everyone here knows of OpenID and OAuth and almost everyone here has an OpenID and uses it every week.

But we’re the alpha geeks. We forget how ahead of the curve we are. Think of RSS. We imagine it’s a widely-accepted technology but most people don’t know what it is. That doesn’t matter though as long as they are using RSS readers and subscribing to content; people don’t need to know what the underlying technology is.

Clay Shirky talked about cognitive surplus recently. We should try to tap into that cognitive surplus as Wikipedia has done. Time for some psychology.

Cognitive psychology as a field is about the same age as the study of artificial intelligence. A core tool is something called a schema, a model of understanding of the world. For example, we have a schema for a restaurant. They tend to have tables, chairs, cutlery, waiters, menus. But there is room for variation. Chinese restaurants have chopsticks instead of knives and forks, for example. We have a schema for the Web involving documents that reside at URLs. Schema congruence is the degree to which our model of the world matches the ideal model of the world.

Schemas change and adapt. Our idea of what a mobile phone is, or is capable of, has changed in the last few years. Schemas teach us that gradual change is better than big bang changes. We need a certain level of stability. When you’re pushing the envelope and changing the mental model of how something can work, you still need to support the old mental model. A good example of mental model extension is the graceful way that Flickr added video support. However, because the change was quite sudden, a portion of people got very upset. Gradual change is less scary.

Cognitive dissonance, a phrase that is often misused, is the unfortunate tension that can result from holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time. On the web, the cognitive dissonance of seeing content outside its originating point is dissipating.

J.J. Gibson came up with the idea of affordances. Chairs afford sitting on. Cups afford liquid to be poured into them. When we’re using affordances, it’s important to stick to common convention. If, on a website, you use a plus sign to allow someone to add something to a cart, you shouldn’t use the same symbol later on to allow an image to be enlarged.

Flow is the immensely enjoyable state of being fully immersed in what you’re doing. This is like the WWILFing experience on Wikipedia. You get it on Flickr too. Now we’re getting flow with multiple sites as we move between del.icio.us and Dopplr and Twitter, etc. Previously we would have experienced cognitive dissonance. Now we’re pivoting.

B.F. Skinner did a lot of research into reinforcement. We are sometimes like rats and pigeons on the Web as we click the buttons in an expectation of change (refreshing RSS, email, etc.).

Experience vs. features …don’t be feature led. A single website is just one part of people’s interaction with one another. Here’s the obligatory iPod reference: they split the features up so that the bare minimum were on the device and the rest were put into the iTunes software.

We’ve all lost count of the number of social networks we’ve signed up to. That’s not true of — excuse me, Brian — regular people. Regular people won’t upgrade their browser for your website. Regular people won’t install a plug-in for their browser. We shouldn’t be trying to sell technologies like OpenID, we should be making the technology invisible.

Gavin uses Leslie’s design of the Satisfaction sign-up process as an example. She never mentions hCard. Nobody needs to know that.

We’re trying lots of different patterns and we often get it wrong. The evil password antipattern signup page on the Spokeo website is the classic example of getting it wrong.

We must remember the hinternet. Here’s a trite but true example: Gavin’s mum …she doesn’t have her own email address. She shares it with Gavin’s dad. According to most social network sites, they are one person. And be careful of exposing stuff publicly that people don’t expect. Also, are we being elitist with things like OpenID delegation that is only for people who have their own web page and can edit it?

Our data might be portable but what about the context? If I can move a picture from Flickr but I can’t move the associated comments then what’s the point?

We’re getting very domain-centric. It would be great if everyone was issued with their own domain name. Most people don’t even think about buying a domain name. They might have a MySpace page or Facebook profile but that’s different.

Some things are getting better. People have stopped mentioning the http:// prefix. But many people don’t even see or care about your lovely URL structure. Anyway, with portable data, when you move something (like a blog post), you lose the lovely URL path.

Larry Tesler came up with the law of the conversation of complexity. There is a certain basic level of complexity. We are starting to build this basic foundation with OpenID and OAuth — they could be like copy and paste on the desktop.

We built a Web for us, geeks, but we built it in a social way. We are discoverable. We live online. This lends itself well to smaller, narrower, tailored services like Dopplr for travel, Fire Eagle for location, AMEE for carbon emissions. But everything should integrate even better. Why can’t clicking “done” in Basecamp generate an invoice in Blinksale, for example? If they were desktop applications, we’d script something. Simon interjects that if they were open source, we would modify them. That’s what Gavin is agitating for. The boundaries are blurring. We have lots of applications both on and off the Web but they are all connected by the internet. People don’t care that much these days about what application they are currently using or who built it; it’s the experience that’s important.

Here’s something Gavin wants somebody to make: identity brokerage. This builds on his id6 idea from last year. That was about contact portability. Now he wants something to deal with all the invitations he gets from social networks. Now that we’ve got OpenID, why can’t we automate the acceptance or rejection of friend requests?

We are heading towards a distributed future. DiSo points the way. But let’s learn from RSS and make the technology invisible. We need to make sense of the Web for the people coming after us. That may sound elitist but Gavin doesn’t mean it to be.

Kellan asks if we can just change the schema. Gavin says we can but we should change it gradually.

Step-by-step reassurance is important. Get the details right. Magnolia is starting to get this right with its sign-in form which lists the services you can sign in through, rather than the technology (OpenID).

We are sharing content, not making friends. Dopplr gets this right by never using the word friend. Instead it lists people with whom you share your trips. The Pownce approach of creating sub-groups from a master list is close to how people really work.

Scaffolding and gradual change are important. As a child, we are told two apples plus three apples is five apples. Later we learn that two plus three equals five; the scaffolding is removed. We must first build the scaffolding but we can remove it later.

Gavin wraps up and even though the time is up, the discussion kicks off. Points and counterpoints are flying thick and fast. The main thrust of the discussion is whether we need to teach the people of the hinternet about they way things work or to hide all that stuff from them. There’s a feast of food for thought here.