WalMart’s milk jug: great design or flop design?

The New York Times is reporting that WalMart’s new fangled milk jug is getting mixed reviews.

What’s not to like? Plenty, as it turns out.

The jugs have no real spout, and their unorthodox shape makes consumers feel like novices at the simple task of pouring a glass of milk.

The design of the milk jug is so bad that WalMart has taken to doing in-store demonstrations of “how to pour” with this new jug.

This jug is a design flop! Right?

Well not so fast. It seems that the designers of the milk jug created it for a specific purpose: to save money. The new jugs are stackable, saving shipping costs and space. The company saves up to 70% of labour costs using these new jugs. The milk arrives at the store fresher, sometimes even the same day. This jug is a great design! Right?

The truth is somewhere in the middle. If business requirements trump user needs, this product is a winner! It saves time, energy, and most of all, money. It’s easier to ship, easier to manage, and much more efficient.

But if user needs trump business requirements, then this jug is a total flop. No  one knows how to use it. They spill it. Their children can’t pour it themselves, forcing parents to spend more time to use the jug. They feel stupid when they can’t pour it correctly.  Talk about crying over spilled milk! WalMart’s new milk jug off-loads all its design failings onto its users, keeping all the benefits of the new design for itself.

WalMart is famous for putting its business needs ahead of its workers and its communities. Off-loading the negative effects of this milk jug onto its consumers? That’s another in a long line of WalMart putting itself and its shareholders first.

Great design aligns business and user. There are trade-offs in every phase of product design. But not knowing what your users before making a design change makes it impossible to do this. The verdict? Not a total flop, but clearly a business-driven design. Truly great design balances the user’s needs with the business’s needs.

The Myth of The “Average”

We bandy about the word “average” all the time. What exactly IS an average, and how does it help design research?

Use the average to quickly summarize something that is already a number: minutes, ages, heights, visits, etc. Don’t use the average to explain something that needs more detail. And keep in mind, the average gets “dragged up” or “dragged down” by extreme values. Sometimes it doesn’t tell you much of anything.

An example design research project might be about how people use their stoves in their kitchens. How can we use “the average” to help us design a new stove?

The average, in statistical language, is actually called “the mean,” which is a measure of “central tendency.” Researchers use central tendency to describe all their results quickly. Other measures of central tendency include the mode (the most common response) or the median (50% of responses are higher than this; 50% are lower).The mean describes the “typical” or average result.

But here’s the big myth: there is no such thing as “the average” in your data. If you ask 500 people to rate your new stove design on a scale of 1 to 10, and the average is 4, there is no guarantee that any single person actually said 4! In fact, the majority of responses could be higher than 7, but some 1s or 2s could “drag down the average.”

Worse, it makes no sense to use the “average” or “typical” in qualitative research. If you do interviews or observations, there is no way to calculate “the average.” So when you say, “the typical person has a four-element stove,” you’re actually doing a calculation. This may be actually quite false. What you may mean to say is “most people in our study have a four-element stove” (which is the mode).

Qualitative research does not accept the “typical.” It actually looks at each case individually and in enough detail to allow for exceptions or outliers. There is no “typical” case in qualitative research because you do not do calculations. You do not summarize your data in that reductionist way.

That said, how could you use “the average” in your kitchen stove study?  You can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation to summarize your data. The “average age” of your respondents, for example, will tell you about how old people are. The “average number of minutes spent cooking” will give you a snapshot of how long people spend in their kitchens. The “average purchase price of a stove” will also give you a quick snapshot. Using “the average” is to quickly summarize something that is already a number.

But the “average use of the stove”? That doesn’t make sense. Nor does the “typical grocery shopping process,” or the “average complaint of stove use.” These cannot be summarized in “the average.”

What product designers don’t get about gender

Newsflash from the Obvious File: The New York Times tells us that apparently, women like smart phones! This simplistic understanding of gendered experiences with technology is what makes poor technology. The journalist cites a marketer from AT&T, a supposed “expert” on gender-based design:

David Christopher, the marketing chief of AT&T’s wireless division, said women were less likely to be wowed by fancy gadgets. Instead, as smartphones have become sleeker, smaller and cheaper, they have become more appealing to them.

“Now they are small enough to be in your purse or pocket,” Mr. Christopher said. “Design does matter.”

Thank goodness Mr. Christopher is involved in product design! What might happen if my smart phone did not fit in my purse? Why, I may have to choose between lipstick and my smart phone! Quel horreur! This kind of simplistic approach to gender continues with a representative from RIM:

“We picked a shade of pink that fit in all kinds of settings — not too flashy,” said Mark Guibert, vice president for corporate marketing at RIM. “It was the only color that was purely driven by the female audience. Years ago the market was much more focused solely on function. Now there is more focus on lifestyle.”

Well at least Mr. Guibert is standing on guard for my right to have the right shade of pink. Does anyone else see what’s wrong with this picture? No? Allow me to enumerate the ways.

1. Gender-based features reinforce steretoypes: Product designers tend to reinforce systemic patterns when they create “women focused” features that speak only to the wife or mother role. Case in point is the notion that “juggling children’s schedules” is a women’s feature in smart phone design. It is more accurately known as a parent’s feature, but when it is only portrayed as one that suits mothers, we actually create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Women’s features become parent’s features.
2. Gender-based design is about recognizing systemic patterns and alleviating the burden of them: Women may indeed be more responsible for “juggling children’s schedules.” But instead of foisting this “women’s feature” in smart phone design, instead make it possible to literally share “children’s schedules” among all smart phones. This would allow parents to better share the burden of child rearing, without painting it as a “women’s feature.”
3. Not all women like pink: This seems pretty obvious, but it’s not. Some women do like pink, that is true. I personally don’t like my technology to look “girly” (or really anything else for that matter), nor do many of my female friends. To create a “women’s colour” of smart phone is to imply that that every other colour is a “men’s colour.” I can’t have red if I’m a woman? Is that what your product is telling me? How off-putting.
4. Gender is fluid and constructed: Let us not forget what Simone de Beauvoir told us: “One is not born a woman but becomes one.” By this, she means that we are taught what it means to be feminine. Likewise, we are taught what it means to be a man, to be gay, to be Black, to be an immigrant. Product designers must remember that not all women will accept what they have been taught. Moreover, product designers must also recognize their role in constructing and reconstructing gender.

Product designers who take their cue from the tenor of the NY Times’ piece will design staid, gender-constricting products that alternatively confine women to status quo roles, or alienate women who openly reject them.

The promise (and failure) of Brandtags.net

I loved it when I first saw it. Brandtags.net invites users to look at a logo and type in the first thing that enters their minds. I found it fascinating — until I realized it’s yet another example of poor research perpetuating negative stereotypes of women.

Type in “Oprah” and see what happens. The top three most entered words? Fat. Black. Bitch. Yes, that’s right, Oprah, the maven of women’s media landscape is nothing more than a fat black bitch. How valid a representation of Oprah is this?

Oprah’s media universe is worth a fortune. She earned $260 million in 2007 and is worth $2.5 billion. Her daily talk show alone gets 7.3 million viewers (that’s compared to 2.9 million viewers for Grey’s Anatomy).

So I got to thinking. How is Brand Tags so wrong? So nasty? So racist? (Type in NBA or Citibank and you’ll see what I mean). Researchers are Harvard have shown how stereotypes work. We know that people rely on implicit stereotypes when they make snap judgments. This is the downside of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.

We live is a complex social world. We try to make sense out of it by looking for patterns. Theorists Berger and Luckman call these “typifications” or roles that we take for granted. Typifications help us because they allow us to know what to do in social situations without really thinking about it, or, as Berger and Luckman explain it, they alleviate us from making “all those decisions.”

All Brand Tags really does is tell us what those typifications are for the people who visit their site. Who is visiting their site? We don’t really know. The first rule of sampling is to ask yourself, are the people who participate systematically different from the people who don’t?

People who participate in Brand Tags are obviously Web savvy. Someone forwarded them a link and they filled it out. Perhaps they read business media because Brand Tags has gotten some press. They have the time to enter text. They are also anonymous.

Is this what you would consider a “representative sample”?

Brand Tags has promise (I myself have used it to gain insight about a few things). But it mostly has the worst of our stereotypes. Is that insight? Perhaps. But it’s not insight about Oprah — it tells us a lot about the people who are talking ABOUT Oprah.

What is design anthropology?

Dori Tunstall has written a fantastic post that details how a simple card sort can become a deeper exercise in analysis. Dr. Tunstall is a PhD anthropologist and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She explains how anthropology takes design research to a deeper level in card sorting, a common technique for information architecture:

“In addition to the information architecture, I delivered statements about the continued meaning of gender classifications. In the course of conducting the card sort, I learned that men and women continued to classify domestic products based on stereotypical gendered spaces of male equals outside/garage, and female equals inside.”

Dr. Tunstall clearly lays out some of the deeper implications of design anthropology later in the post. This is a must read for anyone looking to deepen their design or research practice.

Why music on mobile phones is not music

The music industry is in a pickle. CD sales are falling, big-name artists are signing with touring companies. Independent artists are having a go on their own. The solution, the industry thinks, is to sell its music through mobile phones.

They are dead wrong. Here’s why.

Mobile phone users don’t use music in the same way that music listeners do. Music listeners — whether at home or on the go with their iPod — are listening to what the artist has created. Even “digital” forms of the music are still relatively analogue because the listener cannot slice and dice the music into a new mashup. The best she can do is skip a track (which she has done since the times of vinyl).

Music on mobile phones has both “listening” and impression management behaviors. Mobile phone users use music more often to present a version of themselves to the public world than they do to actually “listen.”

Music on mobile phones has truly become what Nicholas Negroponte calls “co-mingling bits.” Mobile phone operators have already sliced and diced the music into snippets for its users to use in various ways. The ringtone is one version. The “ringback,” which a caller hears when he’s waiting for his friend to answer her phone, is another version.

Now mobile phone users can download all sorts of “co-mingling bits” off the Web. Some of these bits happen to be musical. Some of them are unrecognizable from what the artist originally intended.

This kind of behavior is not listening to music; it is impression management. What is the effect, for example, when your friend hears Paranoid while he waits for you to pick up the phone? What is the effect if it were I Can Hear You Breathe?

Music companies think  this new form of music consumption can save the industry. They hope that album sales will be replaced with mobile phone downloads of full tracks. They are wrong.

Consider the following numbers from eMarketer.

Full track downloads as percentage of ringback and ringtone downloads:
2006: 23%
2007: 33%
2008: 47%

While the share is growing, it is certainly not replacing album sales. Artists should recognize that mobile phone music is not “music” but the public adornment of their art. And music companies should recognize that mobile phones will not save a bloated and dying industry.

What Designers Can Learn From Facebook’s Beacon: the collision of “fronts”

The blogosphere (and even the regular old newspaper-sphere) is alight with stories of Facebook’s online advertising flop, Beacon. What can designers learn from this flop? It’s not about privacy; it’s about the presentation of self. People have different “selves” for different places — virtual or otherwise — and designs must be consistent with these variety of selves.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow posted an interesting story on InformationWeek that predicted the decline of Facebook because of its own success. He predicts that the more people that are one Facebook, the more confusing it is. Your “creepy coworkers,” your boss, and your friends you met at Burning Man are all in the same “place,” making it confusing, embarrassing and difficult for everyone.

What Doctorow is really describing is sociologist Erving Goffman’s notion of “the front.” Using the theatre as a metaphor Goffman argued that we actually “perform” multiple selves. Each place we go has a “front” that we learn to incorporate. A front has a wardrobe, a setting, a decor, make-up, a script and stage direction. We have a “front stage self” that we perform for everyone to see, a “back stage self” for only our closest intimates to see, and a “core self,” which is deeply private.

A doctor, for example, has a front that includes an office, a lab coat, a stethoscope and medical jargon. This is her “front stage” self. But when she’s talking to her best friend, she may use a “back stage self,” being less formal, not wearing a lab coat, or using less formal language. Her “core” self is secretly wishing she were a full-time marathoner, but she tells no one that.

Facebook’s Beacon didn’t work because it forces people to use multiple fronts AT THE SAME TIME. If I tag a recipe from Epicurious.com, but I broadcast that fact to friends that perceive me to be a party girl, I have a collision of fronts. If my boss demands to be my friend, I have a collision of fronts. If I rent The Notebook on Netflix, and my friends think I am a Goth, I have a collision of fronts.

Facebook’s Beacon forces its users to combine multiple selves. Goffman considers the collision of fronts to be a source of embarrassment or shame. Take, for example, the hilarious “Meeting in a Swimming Pool” gag on Just for Laughs. Swimmers have their swimming front (including a bathing suit, casual demeanour) and forced into a meeting, with its serious demeanour and fully clothed attendants. This is embarrassing.

Facebook has done the same thing by forcing its users to expose their selves to different fronts simultaneously. It is embarrassing, even shameful.

What Designers Can Learn From Facebook’s Beacon

• Discover your users’ fronts: If you are designing a product or a virtual place, ask your potential users what they consider the character of this “place” to be. Is is a formal place? Is it a casual atmosphere? What kinds of “props” are expected here? What would be an embarrassing topic of conversation or incident?
• Design using the theatre metaphor: Make the product consistent with that place, as if you were writing a play. Ensure that what you design is part of a script that users understand or expect.
• Pay attention to embarrassment: If your users mention shame or embarrassment in any way, gently press them about it. Discover the character of the “collision of fronts” that is the source of that embarrassment, and, above all, avoid forcing users to feel embarrassment.

Update: The New York Times is reporting that Facebook’s lawyers have not succeeded in having documents about its founder Zuckerman removed from an online magazine. These documents are “embarrassing.”

Update (12/19/07): Mashable is reporting that FB is now allowing people to “group” their friends, but they haven’t quite mastered the collision of fronts problem.

Why customer satisfaction surveys are useless

Many readers seem to enjoy my qualitative versus quantitative research post. I take this to mean that designers are hungry insight that beyond the requisite (and useless) customer satisfaction survey.

I’m not a huge fan of customer satisfaction surveys because they are usually 100% reliable but 0% valid; they tell you nothing (but consistently tell you nothing). Witness, for example, the Foresee customer satisfaction survey. This survey is designed to give pop up as a user leaves a Web site. They are asked a variety of customized questions and then a variety of demographic information. Foresee tallies these results regularly and even ranks your Web site (or company in general) in comparison to your competitors.

What does a designer learn from this? Almost nothing.

Why? Several reasons.

1. Consumers have “satisfaction” fatigue: consumers are surveyed to death these days. We are all familiar with the Likert scale “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Few survey researchers actually rework their surveys for validity. It’s called “acquiescence bias” where people tend to just answer the same way repeatedly. Survey researchers who know better use reverse-scoring techniques; but most don’t. These surveys, therefore, result in a questionable assertion that they are actually valid representations of how consumers actually feel.
2. Satisfaction surveys breed incremental “metricism”: surveys tell you nothing new: designers need to innovate their products, Web sites, and images. Satisfaction surveys tell you nothing you don’t already know. What’s more, they may actually inhibit creativity because they draw attention to minute changes that may be due to chance alone. Once organizations become regular consumers of satisfaction surveys, even small improvements become cause for celebration — even if they don’t reflect real improvements (see number 1).
3. Surveys provide numbers, not detail: designers need thick description to make their designs truly evocative of lived experiences. Satisfaction surveys are simply stripped down representations of how people feel (or more accurately, how they say they feel). Designers need richer information to spark creative solutions.
4. Customer satisfaction is a poor predictor of looming competition: Imagine a company that had consistently high customer satisfaction scores. Imagine also that this company falls victim to “incremental metricism,” and fails to see a competitor’s new, better designed product on the horizon. This competitive product would never appear in customer satisfaction surveys. It’s possible for customers to be “satisfied,” only to have them lured away by an innovative, better design.

Instead of customer satisfaction surveys, I recommend designers pore over free trend-spotting data, like the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which is a comprehensive and rigorous survey of current attitudes and beliefs. It’s harder to pull out insights from data that don’t look like they’re relevant, but the return is so much better than from a tired, staid customer satisfaction survey.

Discourse analysis and design: reading “texts” for design purposes

Designers are already discourse analysts, they just don’t know it. These designers can produce more innovative ideas by adopting a more systematic approach to their intuitive discourse analysis.

Discourse analysis the practice of deciphering the meaning of “texts.” Anything can be a “text.” Television commercials, Us Weekly, a trial transcript — these are all “texts.” Famous discourse analyses include Michel Foucault’s analysis mental illness, in which he traces how we collectively think about mental illness through “texts” of it, such as “patient charts,” or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Designers intuitively analyze “texts” all the time, especially designers who work in advertising. They obsessively collect imagery and copy they find interesting. They innovate on this copy or imagery by re-tooling some of the subtle messages in them.

How to systematize discourse analysis “lite” for designers:

1. Collect more than one genre of “texts”: instead of a single medium, try collecting several media of the same theme. If you’re designing a new toy, for example, gather a TV commercial, a print ad, and a fan’s tribute Web site. These differing “texts” may tell you what is missing in toys, or what toys are unintentionally doing to the parents who buy them.
2. Look for the “silences” in texts: If you’re designing an online advertising campaign, compare texts on a single theme and ask yourself, “What is not being said?” For example, if you’re targeting women with small children, maybe you’ll find that these women are never painted as actually having personal preferences only “mother preferences.” This is a silence that you can speak to.
3. The obvious meaning is the tip of the iceberg: If you want to know what an object means in culture, you must look more deeply than the obvious. Most designers understand this intuitively, but sometimes you must make a concerted effort. When you see the famous “Diamonds are forever” ads by De Beers, the obvious meaning is one of romance, but what is the subtle meaning? Romance is fleeting but diamonds? Diamonds are forever. The ad’s brilliance lies in its ability to leverage the symbolism of the world’s hardest substance (the diamond) with the most coveted but ephemeral experience (romantic love).

The other day I was tutoring an adult learner (a highly educated one) about discourse analysis. She complained to me that she well understood quantitative methods, variables, and counting. But she saw discourse analysis as “mumbo jumbo.”

On the surface, discourse analysis looks like mumbo jumbo. But in practice, it is a tool to see both culture and the “reality” we have constructed.

Designers as playwrights: scripting design outcomes

Designers don’t really see themselves as playwrights but in reality, designers are writing scripts – complete with stage directions – for every user. And like all actors, what users really want to do is direct.

The French government learned this the hard way. In a fit of charity, the government decided Africa needed electric light. Noting that African countries often lacked centralized electricity systems, French engineers designed battery-powered lights and sent them to Africa. The lights were designed to be robust systems that could withstand the rugged African countryside. It was envisioned that many owners of these lights would proudly use them for decades. Instead, the engineers delivered lights that were difficult to install, very quickly burned out, and proved almost impossible to repair. Quite a few African homes were then decorated with useless battery packs.

What as the problem? French engineers – despite their noble intent – designed lights that were only useful to docile users. The play they wrote was in three acts:

Act 1: turn on light.
Act 2: burn out light.
Act 3: do nothing with the light ever again.

When I made toast this morning in my kitchen, the script writers for the toaster did not consider the “set” of my kitchen, nor did they consider the supporting actor, my husband.

Their script went something like this:

Act 1: User takes two pieces of toast and places them in the two slots. User pushes down the plunger. Toaster toasts the bread. User waits until bread is cool enough to handle, and places toast delicately on a plate. Curtain. Applause.

But the actual script went something like this.

Act 1: Sam pulls bread out of freezer and then pulls toaster out of the cupboard where they store it. Toaster bottom opens up (again) and spills crumbs all over the floor. Sam plugs in toaster and separates two pieces of frozen bread.

She places only one slice in a slot and presses the plunger. She begins chatting with her husband, not noticing that she chose the wrong slot for a single slice. Toast pops up, decidedly still frozen. Curtain.

Intermission: Getting orange juice

Act 2: Sam moves slice to correct slot and presses plunger again. Toast toasts and pops up. Again, while chatting with her husband, she does not realize the bread is very hot. She burns her fingers on the toast, dropping it. Curtain. Curse words.

Design scripts need to be clear, concise, and above all, consider active users. When you design a product, a print ad, or a Web site, consider the script you are writing. What are your assumptions? What is the “set” of the eventual “play”? Are there supporting characters? Consider how you want your script to end before you start writing it.