Persuasion & the Dark Side of design

By understanding how people make decisions, we can design to influence their behavior. Check out this article by Smashing Magazine about designing with cognitive bias in mind. Also, make sure to read Dan Ariely’s fascinating (& fun) book Predictably Irrational if you haven’t already.

Persuasive design can certainly be a good thing. Since interaction design often helps users to make decisions that lead to accomplishing their goals, a persuasive nudge can be both helpful and welcome.

But as any design superhero knows, “with great power comes great responsibility.” What happens when you consciously choose to not do right by your users? To trick, mislead, or take advantage of them?

Harry Brignull gave a presentation about Dark Patterns, which are design patterns that take advantage of people in a less-than-positive way. See the Dark Patterns Wiki for a list of malicious design patterns. Unfortunately, they are far too familiar. A few examples: asking trick questions, creating friend spam, and (I love the name of this one) privacy Zuckering.

When you realize that psychology & design enable you to influence people, what will you choose to do with that power?

Chroma-Hash Demo

A clever mashup of security & dataviz. Try making up a username, then type something in the “password” field and watch the chromahash bloom.

Read the creator’s blog to learn more about how this could be useful. I love the idea of turning this into an anti-phishing mechanism:

Let’s say you go to a site that you think is PayPal. If you start to type your password and you’re getting unfamiliar colors (or no colors show up at all, for that matter), you’ll know something’s fishy.

BookPig - Netflix for Kids Books

What a great idea! Kids can go online to select which books they want to read, then receive them in the mail.

This is convenient for parents because they don’t have to fit library trips into their busy schedules, worry about overdue fines, or figure out what to do with outgrown books.

It’s also great for kids because they can read and reread books at their leisure, while continuing to discover new favorites. Maybe it will even get more kids excited about reading. Can you imagine the joy of getting a fresh batch of books in the mail? Turning books into presents– now that is a great idea.

I worry about libraries becoming a thing of the past, but hopefully BookPig can keep a love for reading alive.

Business Phone shortcuts

I usually hate calling customer service because I can never figure out which buttons to press or what to say to get a human on the line.

GetHuman solves that problem by listing the shortcuts for many different customer service help phone lines. I just tried it out for United Airlines (after getting fed up with the help website & the phone menu) and it absolutely worked! The secret: keep dialing 0 at each of the prompts. I was immediately connected with a customer service rep and had my problem solved in <1 minute.

Facebook | Introducing Deals

I was wondering how long it would take Facebook to start offering something like Deals. They already have a history of taking winning concepts from other startups, repackaging for FB, then getting people who aren’t traditionally “early adopters” to start using them.

Twitter > FB Status Updates

Youtube > FB Videos

Quora > FB Questions

Foursquare > FB Locations

Foursquare/Groupon > FB Deals

It’s a clever strategy for Facebook– they already know what people like/don’t like about the concept without having to take the risks on their own. Also, they don’t have to worry about the sparse user problem. And they know that early adopters have been looking for a way to get their more conservative friends to join them in this “cool endeavor”.

Well played, Facebook. But social startup, what’s your plan for when FB sees you as competition?

Intuit Online Payroll app launched

My team’s iPhone app was released on the App Store yesterday!

Working on this project has been a fantastic experience. We packed an incredible amount of user research, design, iteration, development, and QA into just a few months. It’s exciting to finally get something in front of users– we’re itching to hear & respond to their feedback! We’re also working on several enhancements and new features that will be added over the coming months.

The app allows users to run payroll, view their last payroll run, and look up employee information. Note: you must have an Intuit Online Payroll or Intuit QuickBooks Payroll for Mac account to use it.

Men and Women Entrepreneurs: Not That Different

Male & female entrepreneurs are pretty similar:

Both groups had an equally strong desire to build wealth; wanted to capitalize on business ideas; were attracted to the culture of startups; had long-standing desire to own their own company; and were tired of working for others…

Their average ages when founding their first companies were the same. Likewise, successful men and women entrepreneurs founded their first companies when they had similar numbers of children living at home, though men were more likely than women to be married.

That being said,

Only one percent of high-tech startups have a woman CEO; there are almost no women in the ranks of chief technology officers.

Only one percent. Wow. I knew the ratio of women in technology was pretty low, but not this low.

For more research/news on women in tech, check out the Anita Borg Institute.

Also, see Women2.0, an organization whose mission is to “increase the number of female founders of technology startups”.

Logo design for Frankendeal. A long-overdue update on my Women2.0 Labs experience: three weeks ago, I teamed up with a group of 3 other entrepreneurs. We rallied around the idea of creating a platform for audio-guided walking tours. Many interviews,…

Logo design for Frankendeal.

A long-overdue update on my Women2.0 Labs experience: three weeks ago, I teamed up with a group of 3 other entrepreneurs. We rallied around the idea of creating a platform for audio-guided walking tours. Many interviews, surveys, brainstorms, concept tests, mentoring sessions, and nights at HackerDojo later, we find that our idea has changed quite a bit.

Now we’re hard at work tackling a new problem: how to improve the customer experience of waiting in lines. Our goal is to make it so enjoyable to wait in lines that customers actually look forward to it! We’re exploring the possibility of using location-based mini games to entertain users while providing real-world rewards, such as coupons. Project code name: Frankendeal.

There are still a lot of questions that we need to answer, and problems we’ll need to solve. In the spirit of quick-and-dirty user research, we hung out at a local coffee shop last week, observing & engaging with people as they waited in line. We learned a lot about how people deal with lines– what they do, how they feel, how it affects their overall experience. We also got a lot of great feedback on our idea!

This week, we’re developing a very rough prototype that we can get into users’ hands to gauge actual interest and usage. Our first iteration is very simple and focuses on the following game elements that resonated with users:

  • short duration
  • potential for real-world reward
  • game is somewhat challenging, rather than being “mindless”
  • tied to location (using the foursquare API)

I’ll keep you posted as lightning strikes and brings Frankendeal to life!

Thanks again to all who have helped out by participating in interviews, surveys, usability, and more. You are truly wonderful.

The Average Teenager Sends 3,339 Texts Per Month Also interesting: Texting is also supplanting voice calls — 22% say SMS is easier than a phone call and another 20% say it’s faster. Voice usage has decreased by 14% among teens and is decreasing …

The Average Teenager Sends 3,339 Texts Per Month

Also interesting:

Texting is also supplanting voice calls — 22% say SMS is easier than a phone call and another 20% say it’s faster. Voice usage has decreased by 14% among teens and is decreasing in all age groups under 55. Eighteen- to 24-year-olds use the most minutes, but every age group between 18 and 55 talks on the phone more than the average teenager.