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testing, testing....

In November the leaves change and the minds of irrational designers turns to tool testing. Our initial iterations have led us to a set of tools to:

1. distill and make irrational behaviors easily understandable

2. flesh out relationships between different biases

3. provide examples and case studies for grounded learning

4. understand where users perception of an offering's and its intended value proposition are different and to generate solutions that better align these

5. highlight specific "irrational situations" and indicate what researchers should look for and how designers might compensate

6. help designers develop solutions that strategically counter or build off of user perceptions

7. delineate perceived losses and gains over time so designers can use strategy templates to improve the value proposition for users.

We'll be testing and refining these tools over the next couple weeks before integrating them in both book and workshop form. While everything will still be a work in progress at the end of the semester (and beyond), we're optimistic that this can give early inroads towards using these concepts for better user hypotheses going into research and more successful offerings in the market.

Discovering How Designers Understand These Concepts

What do you do when you've clustered a group of 28 Behavioral Economic (BEcon) concepts so many times that your head begins to spin? Plan a workshop and invite a group of eager peers and faculty members to help you discover even more variations!

On Wednesday (10/14), our team held a 9-person discovery workshop where we asked participants to cluster a selected group of 28 BEcon concepts any way that made sense to them. Our goal was to better understand how a multidisciplinary group of designers understood and organized them.

To begin, we handed out 28 cards -- with definitions and case studies -- to each participant a couple days before the workshop. Encouraging them to write any thoughts and/or notes onto the cards, we wanted each participant to understand the content so they could easily work through the exercises. The first began with an individual sort using the cards given on Monday. After sorting, the entire group discussed the various methods used, patterns discovered and difficulties encountered.

For the second exercise, participants worked in groups of three and parameters for sorting were again left open. At the end, the groups presented their clusters and discussed their organizational approaches.

So what did we learn? Well, we’re still analyzing the data, but the fruitful discussions with our participants helped confirm some previous hypotheses and inspire some exciting new ideas. Thanks to the discoveries from this workshop, we have some important questions to answer as we move forward. How can we make these concepts easier to understand and more immediately recognizable for designers? Are some concepts more important than others at different stages of the design process? What useful metaphors can we draw upon to create a flexible tool that guides, instead of prescribes? What significant points can be found and analyzed within a user’s decision cycle? How can we account for different entry points into the decision-making process? What are the overlying contexts we can identify in order to create for versatility? Can identifying a person’s mindset help when determining which concepts to follow?

We’ll be sure to keep you updated as we answer these questions.

turning friends into cash?

I was reading this article in the October Fast Company on how to monetize social networks. Towards the end of the article, the author posits an monetizing method for social networking sites where users would share in the financial reward of doing advertiser- friendly things (e.g. posting a movie clip that your friends look at). The author has a tool Viral Loop up on Facebook (and others) that gives you an approximation of what the financial value of your network would be.

Really interesting article, but reading this my Cognitive Trap siren went off in by brain. People treat things with monetary value very differently than things that are free. There is a whole chapter in Dan Ariely's, Predictably Irrational that looks at why we resent doing things when paid that we happily did for free. In one example, AARP asked lawyers to offer discounted ($30/hour) services to needy retiree. Lawyers said no. AARP then asked if they would offer free services. Lawyers said yes. How we Decide, by Jonah Lehrer takes this one step deeper and shows that altruism shows different neural activation than doing things for a small fee.

While I admit it seems like a stretch to think my status updates constitute altruistic behavior, I would hypothesize that turning users into business partners would radically alter the perception and assumptions of the members and could be toxic to the existing ethos of the sites. What do other people think?

Design Research Conference 2009

Our team would like to thank everyone who came to our presentation at the Design Research Conference last week. We'd especially like to thank all the participants of our roundtable discussions who gave us great feedback and insights for our project. Our group had two tables at the lunch discussions. We were happy to see that both tables were completely filled and also excited to hear a lot of enthusiasm about our topic, Irrationality and Design: Influencing the decisions that real people make.



We had an international group of participants including professionals and students from multiple disciplines. We were interested in how designers and researchers could help people make better decisions by understanding irrational behaviors. How might they incorporate some of these principles when going out into the field and doing ethnographic research? What might they do differently if they knew that people tend to anchor to a familiar or previously introduced piece of information when making decisions? If they were aware of people's biases, how could they design for this? These were just a few of the questions we posed at the table.


We selected 10 tendencies to focus on for our roundtables to help facilitate discussion. From a list of over 80 tendencies we had ranked these in terms of relevance and importance to the design process and how easily they could be understood, and these were the ten we chose for our first prototype: 1)Anchoring 2)Availability Heuristic 3)Decoupling 4)Framing 5)Intertemporal choice 6)Loss aversion 7)Choice Bracketing 8)Status quo bias 9)Attention Collapse 10)Optimism Bias


Each card had a definition of a bias on the front and an example that illustrated the bias on the inside. We wanted to present this set of tendencies to learn how designers and researchers might incorporate them into their design process. In addition to having lively discussions about cognitive biases, we got a lot of helpful feedback on the cards themselves. For example, people liked the anecdotes on the inside of each card and felt they really helped clarify the concepts. Several participants felt that many of the concepts could be clustered into higher-level groups or further coded in some way. In terms of the discussion setup, people liked having artifacts at the table to help guide and focus the discussion.


The card deck really helped generate ideas, but were they a successful tool? These cards were just the first iteration of many possible design tools and there were a lot of great insights to take away from the discussion tables. We'll be referring to them as we revise the card deck and as we continue to develop new prototypes in the coming weeks. Hopefully, as we develop other prototypes we will be able to evaluate the usefulness of the deck of cards a bit better. Currently we have been working on pulling some insights from these discussions to continue to develop tools that might help researchers and designers address irrational behaviors.

Come and see us!

For anyone at the Design Research Conference next Friday, we'll be giving a five-minute presentation before lunch about our project. Or if you're more motivated by food, come join our discussion table over lunch as we talk about how to take the tendencies identified in behavioral economics and apply this understanding to the design process. 

Organizing and Experimenting

This week, we forged into more designerly territory. After a month of ramping up on principles of behavioral economics (which we acknowledge is massively insufficient to be experts on the subject), we have begun to prototype tools to help designers access experimentally-identified human tendencies.

As part of our divide-and-conquer plan, half of our group is looking at designing tools for the research and analysis stages, and the other half at the synthesis stage.

problem statements we're addressing

Forming these subgroups has allowed us to cover more ground in our search while increasing our focus. Our hope is that our investigations will inform each other and that we'll ultimately be able to integrate our findings.

Research & Analysis & Behavioral Tendencies

The research and analysis team has been looking at ways of helping designers know what to look for when they're in the field. We've looked at ways of linking identified biases and tendencies to existing frameworks and methods:

Can tendencies be tied into human factors and

create deeper understanding in these fields?

Can a field tool direct attention to factors in irrational

decision making? Could this be sufficient (do people need to

know they're seeing "status quo bias", or can they just

observe that everyone picks the default?)

This team has also been looking at creating decision archetypes to understand the factors that contribute to user biases. We have taken an initial stab at what these factors are and are testing this through a decision-log for users and a corresponding scoring of our list of identified tendencies. We hope that this information will not only provide us components of an archetypical decision, but also give an insight into how tendencies relate and concur.

Logs of user decisions to help us develop archetypes

Creating solutions that account for behavioral tendencies (aka synthesis)

The synthesis team has been looking at how to organized the biases and tendencies. To accelerate the testing time, they evaluated our list of tendencies to select 30 that give broad coverage, speak to high likelihood situations, and apply to the synthesis phase. With these in hand, the team is developing a tool that can communicate what the tendencies are and a navigation system to help designers know which tendencies to design for.

team working on refining the tendency list

We're excited to be making things and to start getting a better sense of some of the questions that have concerned us since we began this project (how much education is needed? how much additional work can this be?) Looking forward to posting what we learn!