Kumar and Herger put together history and background of gamification among a broad spectrum of ventures and included a quick guide for how to apply some of the ideas and key concepts to the design of corporate dynamics for your company!

Here are a few gems from the book:

Figure 2.1: Player Centered Design Process. Courtesy of Janaki Kumar and Mario Herger. Copyright: CC-Att-ND (Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported).

Figure 3.3: Bartle Player Types. Courtesy of Janaki Kumar and Mario Herger. Copyright: CC-Att-ND (Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported).

If you think of these as user-types, then Kumar and Herger provide a set of ideas of how to design to meet the needs of these different player groups. They provide a great Player Persona Template. In Chapter 4, they explain how to gather the data for a particular company and develop user personas based on actual ethnographic information.

Chapter 5 explores the motivational drivers and even touch up on flow (those who took my class know how that is linked with background knowledge and attention controls). Here’s a nice diagram:

Figure 5.1: Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Courtesy of Janaki Kumar and Mario Herger. Copyright: CC-Att-ND (Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported).

Those who are familiar with Behavioral Economics and Daniel Kahneman’s work will enjoy this visual summary:

Figure 6.16: Game Economy. Courtesy of Janaki Kumar and Mario Herger. Copyright: CC-Att-ND (Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported).

Chapter 7 provides a list of tips for successful implementation of Kumar’s and Herger’s ideas into the corporate setting. Chapter 8 points out legal and ethical concerns when gamification is used for manipulation.

All together this is a quick and concise work for those interested in but new to gamification, behavioral economics, and conceptual design for social group interactions. Very readable, well illustrated, and fun.

For those who are familiar with my classes and this blog, here are two TED talks on game theory and application. Enjoy!

Tom Chatfield: 7 Ways Games Reward the Brain

Tom Chatfield how to keep players engaged in the product/game through the reward schedule:

1. Experience bars measuring progress
2. Multiple long and short-term aims
3. Rewards for effort (don’t punish failure)
4. Rapid, frequent, and clear feedback
5. An element of uncertainty (see cognitive science behind gambling)
6. Windows of enhanced attention—moments when people are more likely to learn based on context & environmental conditions
7. Other people: people want to do things with other people—social component

Seth Priebatsch: The Game Layer on Top of the World

Seth Priebatsch talks about game dynamics and how they can be used to create successful products:

1. Appointment Dynamic—to succeed gamers have to do something by a certain time (e.g. happy hour)
2. Influence and Status (e.g. levels and badges to distinguish members and membership levels)
3. Progression Dynamics (e.g. progress bar and % of completeness toward some reward—think of LinkedIn progress bar on profile completion)
4. Communal Discovery—leverage network to solve problem (e.g. get members to source the best news or best stores)

The whole point of citizen science initiative is to break down the barriers to entry — we are ALL scientists! Being a scientist is not measured by the number of years in school or diplomas on the wall. It is the willingness to do science that is key. Thus we can all be scientists. With that said, what follows is the discussion on group dynamics — how do people work in groups and how we can support productive scientific endeavors through good design and social engineering.

Think Different Collective

Groups of people are not made up of homogeneous people — we are all idiosyncratically individual. And in science in particular, we want to celebrate those differences. These differences are not only important in the genetic data collection, but in the differences of thought. Think Different! — this is the call of inventors and problem solvers. So while we would need to teach the scientific method, we want to support the freedom of thought. We want to encourage novel technology development and quirky experiments, because this is the strength of thousands of citizen scientists.

Different people have different motives for participation in a group activity. Some do it because it is the IN thing to do or because they want to be a member of a community. Some have more personal inspiration — close friends and/or family members that suffer from conditions that could only find treatment through crowd-sourcing the data, technology, funding, or experimentation and treatment development. But different motives don’t change the fact that all these individuals are engaged in doing science. Collecting data (genotype and phenotype, for example) is as much part of doing science as running bio lab experiment. Science done on the cheap is no less “scientific” than science requiring millions of dollars of investment. We are looking for good science, and that can be done by anyone.

So once we have established that everyone is potentially an equal contributor when it comes to citizen science, we can move on to a more complicated topic of roles and governance in social groups.

The Differences in Roles and Group Dynamics In Large and Small Teams

We are social animals and we a lot of intuitive understanding of social dynamics, especially in small groups. That’s because we have a lot of first-hand experience with small groups. Starting with the nuclear family, followed by circles of friends, classmates and yard-mates, sports and activity teams, youth orchestras, and, moving forward, work teams and work place dynamics. Each of these groups have a specific set of social rules of behavior that is learned through repeated exposure and indoctrination; and each have differences attributable to size of membership and duration of exposure (and familiarity). And finally, some differences are driven from goal alignment — sometimes goals for a group are clearly articulated and shared by all members; and sometimes there are hidden agendas and loosely identified shared objectives.

In general, there’s a trend for higher and more objectified set of rules that govern behavior in larger groups. Thus countries have legal codes that are not only enforced but taught to the general population as part of their civic education. One of the sources of confusion and disorientation that visitors/tourists feel in a foreign country is this basic lack of understanding of the background set of rules and norms that support the social structure of unfamiliar society. This lack of comprehension leads to numerous misunderstandings and miscommunications that can sometimes lead to serious consequences. The more different the basic set of legal assumptions, the more confusing and frastrating the interaction between the in group and the outsiders. This is one of the reasons that expats tend to gather together and why we have China Towns and Little Italys and Jewish Ghettoes and so on — people like to be surrounded by the familiar, not only food and such, but the familiar social interactions.

If we plot a graph (see below) of Group Size versus Governance, we get an uneven distribution. The larger the group, the more laws and rules and socially acceptable norms. The smaller the group, the less governance it requires. Part of the reason is that in small group, every member knows every other member. Laws that are required by large societies to keep people from being taken advantage of by strangers are not necessary in small peer groups. Apes (and other mammals and birds) have a well-evoloved sense of fairness and cheaters are recognized and punished.

In particular, groups (large and medium-sized) that have a well-defined social stratification with roles and permissions based on hierarchical structures — a member’s place in a hierarchy specifies what they can or can’t do. Large corporation play the hierarchy game to the point of posting the management charts everywhere. Government bureaucracies love this game too, sometimes making accomplishing the goals of the groups almost impossible due rule limitations. The new trend in “flattening” the corporate structures is largely aimed at this disfunction.

Obviously the military revel in the rigid social rules set, as well as large organized religions.

Unfortunately, many universities and school districts employ the hierarchical governance strategy. Again, many times, this leads to direct conflict with the stated goals of these organizations.

Factories and sports teams have well-defined roles for their group members. And the role the individual has defines what they can and can’t so within the group.

As we move lower on the scale of group size, there are some interesting examples of roles and governance. Families have members with a well-defined roles, although overtime these roles change. Small working teams, where all members know each other, allow for more interchangeable roles and more fluid governance. Groups of friends behave similarly, allowing different members to take a lead depending on the situation or activity.

Notice that some parts of the graph are not really populated. There are no obvious groups that are large and live in anarchy — this is just not sustainable for long. The same is true for small but rigid law-binding groups — hard to enforce rules continuously among a few individuals.

Citizen Scientists

Citizen scientists is a potentially a very large group of individuals who might share a passion and curiosity for certain subjects, but who will only have loose ties among themselves. If properly supported, members who are interested in doing or working on particular projects will be allowed to find each other and cooperate on a project. It’s important to note that cooperation and collaboration, while used interchangeably, do not mean the same thing. In a cooperative environment, members share the same goals but work on different aspects of the project to advance them. In a collaborative environment, members don’t only share their goals for the project but work on all aspects of the project together. Most projects are cooperative in nature. [Werby, O. (2007). “Examination of Student Motivation and Group Dynamics in Internet-based Learning Experiences,” AACE ED-MEDIA 2007 World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia, & Telecommunications, Vancouver, British Columbia]

So in addition to a repository of medical data, it would be great is NIH could create a community-building platform like LinkedIn. In this Citizen Science Collective:

• anyone can join and set (and change) permissions on their personal data;
• members can have a “public” profile that is searchable;
• individuals can join groups based on interest and which support closer cooperations;
• members can form close ties by “linking” to each other and forming personal (overlapping) communities;
• members can communicate with each other;
• individuals can post and share ideas, articles, and research;
• members and groups can create easy-to-participate-in polls or calls to action;
• group leaders can distribute information;
• members can get notifications of events, products, and just get a digest of their groups’ activities;
• all citizen scientists can freely join any part of the program or participate in any capacity; the notion of being labeled as “patient” would become irrelevant;
• any member of this vast community can initiate a project, start a discussion, share information, or work of raising funds for experiments;
• members are given opportunities to learn;
• leaders’ batons can be freely passed as necessity arose…

Such a community would require time and money and a lot of support — this would be a large undertaking. But there might be significant rewards as well. Trust is not something that is given fast. When we ask individuals to give up their personal data, we are asking for a lot. Creating a community of citizen science practitioners might be a way of establishing trust (over time) and developing a foundation for scientific exploration for years to come.

End Notes

This is my 6th and last post on the NIH Citizen Science Engagement Think Tank meeting in Washington D.C. last month. For those interested in a larger version of the diagram(s), please contact me directly. Below is a list of all the posts I’ve written for the meeting:

1. 2013 Think Tank Presentation on Socio-Technical System Design
2. Long-term Strategy versus Fast Success
3. Intended and Unintended Consequences of Social Design
4. Build It and They Will Come…NOT!
5. The WHY Question

The value of any question asked during the design process is in how the answer to that question helps advance the project; or help the design group bond; or reveal a significant insight into the problem that the group is trying to solve; or help clarify the use scenario; etc. All such questions are about moving the project forward. But it is easy to get sidetracked here, and I saw just that at the NIH biomedical research design brainstorming meeting.

Before I proceed, let me describe a bit of background research and give a concrete example when the wrong answer to the Why question jeopardizes the design solution.

About ten years ago now, we were asked to design a set education materials for the San Francisco Zoo. The problem was lack of structure for school visits. San Francisco public schools allow all elementary school children to visit the city zoo once a year. That’s a lot of school children…and a lot of visits per kid. But do these students learn anything during these visits? And do they manage to learn something different each year? The answer seemed to be no.

Part of the problem was the changing mission of the zoos in general — from a strictly entertaining ventures that they were at the turn of the last century, zoos evolved their missions to focus on conservation. Somehow, having all those animals behind bars for visitor enjoyment seemed more palatable if wrapped in a coating of saving the species. The Why question for the zoos’ existence have radically changed (at least in the Western World). So how can this message of conservation be driven home to school children?

The issue with the “Why do these animals need saving?” question is that the answer leaves many helpless to affect change. There’s been research done on this (here’s one example) — we now know that when visitors to zoos are told of habitat destruction, of species extinction, and of animal suffering but given only the option of donating a few dollars, they turn off. It’s very discouraging to feel bad and helpless when faced with what is presented as an intractable problem. “But what can I do? Not much…”

When faced with a problem, we want to be able to find a solution and act on it. People — all people — hate feeling helpless (or too out of control). We get fatigued when continuously assaulted by negativity.

Why questions tend to focus on emotion. And emotion is a strong motivator — it helps focus the goals; it spurs interest and focuses attention; it helps bind individuals into action groups; and it prepares the body for physical response.

Why questions can focus on positive or negative emotions. If the focus is on negative emotion, designers have to develop cognitive scaffolding to direct that negative emotion into positive actions which ultimately make individuals feel good about themselves.

So in the case of zoos, we created materials (educational training and scripts as well as messaging) that gave visitors options of what they could do to drive change. Students at each age level were given “conservation tools” that the could use: recycling strategies, energy conservation ideas, food choices that protect the environment, etc. In short, things/actions that would empower them to change the world, even if on a very small scale.

Why We Should Promote Citizen Science

Getting back to the NIH citizen science discussions, there was a point in discussion when the Why question was asked. But the answer left (most if not all) people uncomfortable and unable to challenge it without generating negative emotions (guilt). The answer given to “Why are we doing this?” was a picture of a girl who died of cancer — “we are doing this to stop this from ever happening again.” On some level that’s true, but it is not a productive answer. Little girls will continue to die from cancer and other horrible diseases for many many years to come. We all know this. What’s more, when little girls born in the West stop dying from cancer, girls born else where will continue to do so for a long time afterward. Medical miracles are not evenly distributed…

But there are productive answers to the Why question of citizen science led biomedical research and the free sharing of personal genotype, phenotype, and other medical information. And here are just a few:

• Make a Difference Argument: We want for everyone to feel that they can make a positive difference in someone’s life.
• Have Fun Argument: We want for everyone to know that science is a lot of fun.
• Permission Giving Argument: We want to empower individuals to do science, to participate in research, and to engage with biomedical community.
• Be a Part of the Community Argument: We want people to feel like they are members of a community working to do good in the world.
• We are All in It Together Argument: We want to remove the “us versus them” paradigm in medicine, in research, and in science. We are all productive and contributing members of the biomedical community.
• Break the Barriers Argument: We want to remove fear barriers to participation.
• Give Back Argument: We want to give individuals an opportunity to contribute.
• Education Argument: We want to encourage scientific literacy.
• Empowerment Argument: We want to give individuals power to do something even in personally medically difficult circumstances.
• Membership Argument: We want to make sure that people don’t feel isolated or alone.

None of these arguments are based on emotion of guilt. Citizen science is important not because people die, but because this is the root of science. Before science became a profession, every person could contribute. The “us versus them” distinction between scientists and regular people is very new. Scientists are regular people and regular people can do science. With all of the new technology that helps collect data and provides easy access to training, the barriers to entry are mostly psychological. NIH can help empower individual to do science.

So as the French say: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité — freedom to participate in citizen science; equality of all contributors (professional and amateur scientists alike); and membership in a scientific community.

NEXT

We all remember NEXT, right? If not, let me jug your memory…

After leaving (or being forced out of Apple), Steve Jobs started NEXT — a computer hardware company to rival Apple.

Even with Jobs’ charisma, talent, deep financial resources, access to the best minds in the business… he couldn’t make this work. Some say that NEXT is now part of Mac DNA, but it still stands that as a company is was a failure… Steve built it, and no one ever came…

PlayNet

I don’t know how many of you have even heard of PlayNet, but in it’s day it had a market evaluation close to a billion dollars (and that without having a shipping product!). They had spectacular offices at One Embarcadero, with views of the Bay Bridge. Hundreds of people worked there: engineers (hardware and software), designers, artists, writers, copywriters, and many many lawyers… And yet today, there’s hardly a mention of this company even on Wikipedia!

The logo you see and the product shot were not easily available on the net (until today!).

The company and product were the inventions of Nolan Bushnell — the same genius that brought us Chuck-e-Cheese and Pong.

The main idea was to bring the then unavailable Internet access to people in bars — pay a few coins and get access to your stock accounts, weather information, and most importantly gamble on your favorite sports teams (some Southern States requested models with supersized cash boxes for all that money that people would bet on their home teams). Aside from bars, these devices were meant to populate airports and other public venues.

PlayNet had it all — money, media exposure, people, a famous person at the helm — and yet no one came…

Thetrix

If you have children of a certain age and if you are from the Bay Area perhaps you might have heard of Theatrix Interactive — an amazingly innovative children educational software development company from the East Bay. Their titles were unique and by far margin superior to other educational titles available at the time. They were beloved by kids, parents, and teachers.

And yet it too is gone, almost without a trace.

I had a privileged view on these companies — I know some of the inside stories — but these are all examples of strong companies that built interesting products that only few ultimately used.

It’s not enough to build a great product. It is not enough to have a strong financial support. It is not enough to have visionary at the helm. In my tenure as product designer, I saw many companies and products fail. Some were very painful experiences… Some deserved to go…

I hope that as NIH is thinking about building products to encourage citizen science movement, it keeps in mind that “gamification” is just a word, not a solution. All we hope to do is build great, compelling products that people want to use. But even that is sometimes just not enough.

Here’s a famous-in-my-classroom example of nudging:

Opt-in versus Opt-out Consent Solutions

There are many examples of such social engineering. During our breakout groups at the NIH think tank on the future of citizen participation in biomedical research, I raised the difference between opt-in versus opt-out option results for organ donation. In some countries in Europe, citizens have to opt-out from donating their organs in a case of a tragic accident — they have to do something to NOT donate their organs. As the result in Austria — which has an opt-out system — the donation rate is 99.98%! While in Germany — which has an opt-in system — only 12% will their organs for transplants. This is a huge difference in consent between very similar populations of people.

Unintended Consequences of Social Design

Not all social engineering efforts go as well as opt-in/opt-out organ donation systems. To reduce pollution for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, the Chinese government established the even/odd license plate law: cars with even license plate numbers alternated with cars with odd license plate numbers for days they were allowed on roads. It seemed a simple and ingenious solution to too many cars… But ingenuity is not a sole purview of government agencies. As quickly as the law was established, people found a way around it — just get two cars, one with even and one with odd license plates. Thus instead of reducing the number of cars, the law actually spurred the purchase of more cars, and it didn’t even really reduce the number of cars on the road.

Changing How People Think About Problems

Getting individuals to donate their medical records together with their genetic information is a difficult task, one that will require some careful social engineering. But it is not an impossible task. We change our minds all the time. What is culturally and socially acceptable one moment in history is completely insane at some other.

Parents have believed that fresh air is an important component of health for young children for some time now (although, this was NOT the case always). When there was a large migration into cities and back yards were no longer a norm of childhood, parents invented other ways of giving their sunshines a little sun shine.

The photo above would flood the police hot lines now, but back in 1937 when it was taken, it was just a great solution to city-living problem.

I think that once the health insurance barriers are gone, the moral imperative of driving the biomedical research to save lives will overcome the resistance people have about their data privacy. The privacy argument is great for organizations that want to sell data to others (e.g. Google), but it is not a great civics argument. To change people’s minds, though, there will need to be a concerted educational campaign that explains the issue. And each person needs to feel like they are participating in a project that is meaningful; that is important; with each contribution being valuable; etc. Each person needs to feel like they are part of IT (and not outside of IT, the way it works now). When each person is seen as a citizen scientist by all, then the data is for everyone to share.

This is a cultural shift — a shift in a power structure of research. This is an empowerment movement. We shouldn’t think of “giving up privacy” but of “gaining the power” over our data.

Opt-out consent might be a good nudge in this direction, for both the research organizations and for private citizens.

Low Hanging Fruit

There is a strong temptation in any project to achieve success early (and often). The expression Low Hanging Fruit refers to relatively easy to accomplish tasks. But in the desire to get things done, it is easy to lose track of the overarching strategy — the main purpose of the enterprise. By chasing the Low Hanging Fruit, it is easy to get distracted and end up on the wrong path.

Two Different Roads

We’ve discussed two visions for the future: more of the same and a radical cultural shift. We visualized the first path as “turning the knob to 11″ (aka Spinal Tap). More of the same (but with higher intensity) has many tempting low hanging fruits — facilitate closer relationships between companies that already collect the genotype and phenotype data and NIH researchers (23andMe and others); create bridges between various silos of data; encourage more researchers to share their data; etc.

But fundamentally, more of the same strategy just supports the current attitudes for sharing data and doesn’t really allow citizen researchers full access to their own data to conduct research. I hope this is not the way NIH decides to go. The promise of Citizen Science is that we all are equal. We might not all have degrees in biology but those who are passionate about doing science have a lot to contribute and not only by way of making their genetic information available.

So I hope NIH takes the harder road — the road of radical cultural shift, where they will discard prejudices as to who and who can not do science. The low hanging fruits on this road are different — give grants only to those researchers that find ways at the start to open their data to the world; create badges for good data citizenship; award micro attribution credits to citizen scientists who are willing to collect data and share it openly; remove barriers to sharing data (e.g. health insurance penalties, work prejudices, social stigma); run an educational campaign that explains the value of doing things differently; create support strictures that lower the bar to citizen science participation, etc.

Cultural shifts are harder to orchestrate, but the results are worth it.

In the next blog post, I will talk about Nudging.

I’m about to leave for Washington D.C. for a Think Tank on Citizen Engagement in Biomedical Research. I have only five minutes to talk during the introductory speed geeking event, where all of us get to know about each other and each other’s projects.

I’m going there to talk about our lessons learned from designing complex socio-technical systems that required intense participation from their users. I’ve been working on designing such systems for many years now. Some projects were/are very successful, some not so much. I’m not sure I will be able to give a full account of what we’ve learned, so I’m putting up a long(ish) version of my presentation here — if I had 15 minutes, this is what I would say to our very interesting group of participants.

I chose these four complex socio-technical systems because all of them were in some measure educational ventures and all required outside users to contribute large amounts of data.

I will start with Ushahidi. Ushahidi was born during the 2007 Kenyan election. That election was bloody and the violence, in many cases perpetrated by the government, was not being reported. Ushahidi was a grass-roots effort to tell their countrymen and the world what was going on by plotting eye-witness accounts on the map with time-stamp. Ushahidi is a Swahili word for Witness. And this open-source geo-temporal tagging platform gave voice to a generation of human rights activists.

I’ve learned of Ushahidi during the aftermath of Haiti disaster. For those interested in this story, please read about it here: ICT & Community. Someday, this amazing story will be made into a movie!

My initial engagement with Ushahidi led to my sons’ project: Cost of Chicken. Cost of Chicken is a food anthropology project which asked kids (and adults) around the world to contribute data about the price, quality, and origin of food that was available to them where they lived. Ushahidi was the perfect platform to collect the data — a kid-run food CrowdMap was born! I hope you will contribute some data points!

Ushahidi platform is the TECH part of the Socio-Technical System. The Food Anthropology CrowdMap run by kids was the SOCIO component. Both are necessary to have a successful project. This CrowdMap succeeded because there were eager high school kids who were interested in getting this information. They collected photographs and data on food where they lived, and they connected with students from other parts of the world and encouraged them to do the same. There was a sense of membership and purpose. Young CrowdMappers felt good about their participation. Without this core team of people who cared about this project, there would be no success.

Ushahidi team recognizes the power of community. It runs a community site and all projects are encouraged to register on the World-Wide map of Ushahidi-run CrowdMaps. While not every project does so, many do. And there are over 6,000 crowdmaps listed! I wanted to see what some of these other projects were about. Since I had very little time for this presentation, I promised myself to take two random points on the map and see what mysteries they bring. (I also did a systematic study of crowdmaps, but I will save that discussion for another post.)

I felt like an explorer…

Unfortunately, this crowdmap was dead…

I tried for a spot in United States…

This map did come up, but it was empty. For both of these projects something went wrong. And more likely than not, it was the social component…

If you feel adventurous, please click on the points of the map to learn of cool crowdmap projects around the world.

Heather Leson is Ushahidi’s Director of Community Engagement — a fantastic human being! She said that Ushahidi team recognizes the need for the social support for each crowdmap project. She described the 5 T’s of success: team, training, trust, time, and tenacity.

I will come back to Ushahidi at the end of my presentation.

The Company Therapist project was one of the first online entertainments on the Web — a soap opera written by its audience. You can still read the archived version, but you can no longer participate as an author.

As an entertainment, The Company Therapist won every award there was to be had in the mid 1990s. Christopher, my partner, and I spoke on TV and radio; we did many magazine interviews. The site had wide coverage by both online and traditional medias. As an entertainment it enjoyed a very large audience and was clearly a success.

But The Company Therapist was much more than mere entertainment — it was an educational venture. For a VERY small percentage of its audience, what started as readership turned into a creative writing venture.

People from all over the world spend hundreds of hours writing stories for The Company Therapist. And they did so because they felt they were part of something good. They were members of an elite community which was being recognized as creative and prolific and fun. All these writers shared in the awards and fame of the site and were committed to “putting their characters through therapy!”

Thus there were really two SOCIAL components to The Company Therapist socio-technical system: the entertainment and the educational components — the readers and the writers. And both of these were carefully and deliberately designed and both were great successes.

The Company Therapist ran for a few years, but taught us a lot about how to think and design for complex socio-technical systems. In 2009, we started work on the next one: Human Rights & International Criminal Law ICCforum.com

This venture is a partnership between International Criminal Court Office of the Prosecutor and the UCLA School of Law Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project. We wanted to develop something more than just a legal journal for the International Criminal Court. We wanted a system that allowed citizens of the world to participate and engage with the ICC Prosecutor. Before this project, there was no opportunity for a two sided dialogue with ICC. ICCforum.com changed that. For a very narrow audience — only those who are interested in International Criminal Law and the work done by ICC — and for a very narrow set of topics — all discussions focus on the questions raised by the Prosecutor — this socio-techical system is a great success.

Last November, ICCforum.com won the HiiL Innovating Justice Award — the project was named one of the top 3 innovations in 2012. This year, the project received the Computerworld Award.

The last Socio-Technical project I would like to talk about is Medical Memory. This project was born of a personal necessity — we needed a system that would help us track a complicated medical problem. With many specialists and tests, critical information was being lost! Doctors and labs didn’t seem to communicate well with each other or able to form a coherent story from a mountain of data that was being generated. We wanted to be able to take charge of our own patient information and give the doctors a report that they could quickly scan to remind them of the current problems. (“What? You don’t have a uterus?”)

For a while, this worked well — the doctors all loved to have this handy and complete story of the medical problem to date. But medical profession is known for hoarding information: Isn’t it dangerous to give patients data? They might not know how to interpret it. They might want to call us and ask questions! Labs and doctors were quick to start hiding reports, and as the data become incomplete, the Medical Memory reports became more and more useless. Even as we designed the system to work for us, we lost our enthusiasm and motivation to keep up — it was too hard to get the data from the doctors! (well, some doctors and most labs)

The result was a failure — the technical system worked well enough; but the socio component required cooperation and buy-in from ALL the members of the patient community. And we just couldn’t get that.

So what what we learned was that without motivation, no amount of technical slickness and savvy could save the project from the discard pile. Getting EVERYONE on board and continuously supporting motivation of ALL participants was key to success of ANY socio-technical system.

Harvard Professor Kator gives 4 components of sustained motivation: feeling of mastery, membership in a community, meaningful experience, and (a distant forth) monetary compensation. Please read her Harvard Business Review article: “The Happiest People Pursue the Most Difficult Problems.”

We have our own list of lessons learned: Make It Relevant! Make It Easy!

So how do we make things relevant to the socio-technical system’s participants? We can start by asking what do different people and side have to contribute to the project as a whole.

Participants in the socio-technical projects — regardless of whether they run the project or volunteer, do research or provide data — have three main contribution to make: their time, their expertise, and their dedication to the project. And everyone has a different amount of these — some have more time but less expertise; some are very enthusiastic but lack time; and some don’t really have the interest while being flash with time and relevant experience. When we design the socio-technical system, we want to think how everyone can fit into the project to the best of their ability, availability, and desire.

In an ideal situation, the time required by the project matches exactly the participants’ availability. The expertise necessary match the experience and educational levels of the users. And the dedication required to participate is in total agreement with the interest in the project. But that is rare…

Fortunately, extra time and enthusiasm for the project can compensate for lack of expertise. But the project needs to be willing to invest in educational support for those members.

Similarly, expertise and dedication can compensate for lack of time. But the project needs to create expert interaction mode to reduce the time necessary to contribute to the project — standardized inputs, error checks, structured data, etc. all contribute to time load reduction.

In a large project with many members, we have to be careful to consider the needs of all involved. And to the best of our ability, to support the differences of our participants.

We can also ask what does the project give to its members? Why would people want to participate?

And our answer echos Heather Leson’s and Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s — we need to support motivation. And we can do that by facilitating connection between members of our project; by providing group support when things get hard and giving recognition when it is deserved; by creating a sense of belonging among the members; by building trust; by giving meaning and purpose to the work; and by sharing the sense of accomplishment in all of group’s successes.

I said that I would return to Ushahidi.

Ushahidi just launched a new socio-technical system — Uchaguzi, Swahili word for “choose”. This is an election monitoring platform built on the Ushahidi crowdmap engine. With this project, Ushahidi went full circle and returned to its roots — Uchaguzi was used to monitor 2013 Kenyan elections.

But the team of Ushahidi learned many lessons from its crowdmapping experience. Mainly, with Uchaguzi, it focused on the SOCIAL aspect of socio-technical system. Uchaguzi is surrounded with carefully-designed support structures and that help each election monitoring team to succeed.

So my main message is Design for Motivation.

Gardol is sodium lauroyl sarcosinate — not a very harmonious sounding chemical. I’m guessing Gardol was a clever marketing trick of combining the words “Guard” and “All”, relying on the phonetic combination to drive home the idea of protective quality of this chemical compound. In our society, chemicals don’t sell — we have an aversion to chemicals, we only want natural products! The common Western p-prim (or folksy wisdom) is that chemical are bad for us, and products created from natural ingredients are good for us … never mind arsenic!

Gardol might have disappeared from the drug store ads, but the chemical sodium lauroyl sarcosinate didn’t — today it goes by the name “Advance White” and is part of a very well respected for its natural and health-consious products, Arm & Hammer toothpaste!

Oh, and we don’t like the word “dental cream” — it’s toothpaste now…

Slide below is from a Russian contractor Power Point deck explaining the user demographic breakdown for different forms of payment awareness among the 18 to 45 year-olds.

The logo of the company which made this slide is blurred…

But for those of you who don’t speak Russian, let me walk you through the slide.

Horizontal variables are: Knowledge of the type of payment and Usage.

The columns are: Credit Card Payments; eMoney; Internet Banking; non-Internet Currency (aka cash); and payments via SMS.

79% of the population of Russian cities with population of over 800,000 people (really?) know about SMS payment systems and 22% use them. While only 93% heard of “offline” cash!

It has been known for a long time that politeness of error messages and civility of customer service play a strong roll in how the experience with the product is remembered.

Above a small portion of the Google Image Search results for “error messages”. The internet is full of these because people get so irked by such messages that they want to share their bad experiences with others. The results are just as illuminating for “bad customer service stories”. Again, a good bad story has legs!

But interestingly enough, there are some situations where a bad story is remembered as a good one. There have been numerous studies showing that given the same number of errors/crushes per application, users who get polite and apologetic error messages remember their encounters in a more positive light (than those who get the standard: “okay to reboot your computer without saving?”). And similarly, customer service that tries to be understanding and supportive gets higher marks even if they couldn’t really solve the problem. Why is that?

Well, Daniel Kahneman has the answer! He describes two different “selves” as part of our psyche: the remembering self and the experiencing self. Dr. Kahneman conducted experiments showing the clear distinction between these two concepts.

One such experiment focused on pain: subjects were asked to submerge their hands in cold water (not so cold as to be torturous, but quite unpleasant nonetheless). One group of subjects held their hand in cold water for about two minutes and then was asked to rate their experience. The other group held their hand in cold water of the same temperature for two minutes and then an additional minute while the water was slowly (and unknowingly) warmed up. The second group — the one who had their hand submerged for much longer, and thus was kept uncomfortable for that much longer — rated the experience as less unpleasant then the first! How can we explain this? Dr. Kahneman explains this by postulating that it is the remembrance of the experience that we really care about and not the experience itself.

Dr. Kahneman managed to show this result over and over again. And one of the questions he asked the audience was: “Would you spend the same amount of money on vacation if you knew that you would loose all memory of it the minute you get home?” Just think about it — would you? Most say it’s not worth it! Thus our experiential selves are less important (or not at all) to us as our remembering selves.

This is behavioral economic is all its glory…

So next time you are setting up a customer service department guidelines or developing text for your error messages, think what really counts — how the story of interaction will be remembered!

And here’s Dr. Kahneman himself at a TED event:

Gul Meena, 17, left her abusive husband in Pakistan for another man. Meena’s brother hacked her friend to death with an ax, before turning on her.

Skinny Jeans Made in Pakistan

Selling Cheese in Amsterdam

This is a farmers’ market stall in the middle of Amsterdam, selling home-made cheese. The woman in the photo is the actual cheese maker. Note the hand-lettered signs, the simple wooden boxes, the plain presentation — the overall effect is home made goods, care in production, quality product, even made with love. Fancy production values would just be off putting in this context, and probably result in lower sales of cheese.

This NOT a museum, but rather a neighborhood cheese store in Amsterdam. (It is located next door to the flower museum…). What is the name — since it is in English, it affects our perception of tone — and the presentation say about this store? Do we think home made? Do we think funny? Would we pay more for the cheese from this store as opposed to the farmers’ market cheese? The interface has a strong impact on what we will be willing to pay and sets our exceptions to quality and price. Note that all of the lettering is printed and uniform, but there’s a strong tongue-and-cheeck component to the presentation.

Selling Shoes

Would you expect to pay a lot for these shoes? If so, why? As you probably guessed, this is a VERY expensive store…

Selling Fish and Other Strange Artifacts

This is a fish store in a small alley in Amsterdam, just off the farmers’ market. Do you think the quality of their product is high? Why? Think about the attention to detail: the little bits of lettuce leaves are green and not a bit wilted — a clear indication of freshness (a halo effect for fish); the decorations are authentic (real shells and artifacts) — the owner trying to give a sense of place, a connection to the sea; care is given to way each piece of fish is presented, including slices of some of the filets placed on top to display quality and color.

What is this store selling? Food? Clothing? Gifts? How did you guess? What tone does the window try to project? What expectations are set for the type of goods found and sold by this establishment? How quickly did you know?

And what about this store? Are the goods different from the one shown above? More or less expensive?

The projected tone via an interface is a powerful tool: it can set user expectations; project business goals of the owner; trigger a “hunt for treasure” extinct; and set apart one product from another.

Below are examples that I’ve been collecting from email forwards over the last few years. The general groups are toy packaging, store signs, logos, religious strangeness (especially with cultural shifts in time), product labels, and in particular strange dentists’ ads… Enjoy!

Thank you all who contributed to this post!

It is difficult to easily show the differences in thought process that language makes in this short blog. But here’s a bit on difference in thoughts that culture and background knowledge makes — these are analogies taken from high school students’ writing. Notice the strong anchor of time and place. Enjoy!

• Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
• His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
• He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a
  guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
• She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
• She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
• Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
• He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
• The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.
• The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
• McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
• From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, unreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
• Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
• The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
• Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
• They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
• John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
• He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.
• Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
• Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
• The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
• The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
• He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
• The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
• It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
• He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
• Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

PS: I’ve been collecting these types of analogies for years. Unfortunately, I no longer have the reference for the one above.

Information with Expiration Date

Somehow, I don’t imagine that getting “an image that got away” of oneself would be a source of continuous pleasure. One might want to forget the whole thing… And it is not just images — although having images with expiration dates would be very valuable — there are loads of information that should be forgotten by design.

When my generation was growing up, the silly and stupid things we did didn’t end up as data for public consumption for the rest of our lives. No one is able to search our “records” as teenagers to find badly considered plans or ideas that went badly. No one is able to find our embarrassing moments during a junior prom on Facebook. Our pain, embarrassment, and incredible stupidity faded back gracefully into history (for the most part). People of my generation got a second chance to reinvent themselves.

To forgive and move on, we need to be able to forget. But the Internet as conceived now makes this very difficult to do. Every stupid prank is right there for sharing with the world forever. How will this affect future relationships? Or job prospect? Or even credit? And god forbid if a kid ever has a run-in with the law — that black mark will forever stain the reputation, no matter how saintly before or after…

We have to start thinking about designing data and content to be forgotten after a certain period of time. And we can’t rely on some services (like Facebook) to do that for us. The expiration date needs to be built into the data itself.

Social systems can arise spontaneously or be build by design. Spontaneous social systems tend to rise out of necessity, are governed by group dynamics, and evolve over time carrying forward the historical set of traditions and cultural attitudes. Social systems that are purposely designed also have to abide by the laws of group dynamics, but here system rules can encourage desired behavior and limit distractive activity. A clear example of a designed social system is a game system.

Most real world social system have a bit of both — they might start out as spontaneous systems and then require a set of rules to help governed member behavior and improve outcomes. A simple example is an alumni association. There’s also a possibility of a designed system evolving into a more free-form organization. Real world scenarios require a careful consideration of the cultural norms and historical roots of the social system.

A socio-technical system is a social system with a technology component. Paraphrasing a bit from Whitworth and Ahmad own words from their chapter on Socio-Technical System Design in “The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.”:
Socio-technology is about technology and people. Technology is any device. IT system is then a combination of software AND device(s). Human computer interaction (HCI) is a person plus an IT system. Introduction of “person” brings physical, informational and psychological levels into the combined system. And finally, socio-technical system (STS) is merger of community and HCI(s). (Whitworth & Ahmad, 2013)

The technology component is there to solve the needs and problems of the social system. When we discuss online education, we are discussing an education-focused social system based on the Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). Technology is supposed to make certain goals easier to accomplish or make particular behaviors easier to evoke. Technology can also expand the reach of the social system to include previously underserved audiences: students from inconvenient to support geographical locations, individuals with learning differences, or families with socio-economic barriers to education. But with the introduction of technology, we introduce complexity.

And we have to work within the boundaries of what’s possible given the history of the social system, the constraints of technology, the limitations of budgets, and cultural limits of the society wich endevers to implement the socio-technical system.

Bibliography:

Whitworth, B., Ahmad, A. (2013): Socio-Technical System Design. In: Soegaard, Mads and Dam, Rikke Friis (eds.). “The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.”. Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design Foundation. Visited on February 8, 2013: http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/socio-technical_system_design.html

Werby, O. (2012) “Special Preview: Socio-Technical System Design.” http://www.interfaces.com/blog/2012/06/special-preview-socio-technical-system-design/

Schubarth, C. (2013). “Disruption guru Christensen: Why Apple, Tesla, VCs, academia may die.” Silicon Valley Business Journal. Visited on Feburary 8, 2013: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/02/07/disruption-guru-christensen-why.html

This baby is only two months old. And the people about to dip him into the freezing waters of St. Petersburg’s lake are his parents. I’ve been to this lake. I saw my own dad do the dip. He was a grown man at the time, and I still thought it was crazy. In Russia, the folksy wisdom is that such dips are good for you. But here, in U.S., the parents would be arrested, their son taken away by child protective services… It’s all relative!

And here’s a few examples: http://www.interfaces.com/blog/2011/01/cultural-differences-or-child-abuse/

Imagine you are stopped by a traffic cop for a violation. You would rather not get a ticket, and consider offering the cop a bribe. You have options: no bribe and definitely get the ticket; try a bribe and hopefully the cop will accept and let you go free this time. But what if the cop is an honest cop and doesn’t accept bribes? Then you just bought yourself a trip to jail for bribing an officer! That’s the worst possible outcome — a traffic ticket is better than a trip to jail AND a traffic ticket. But what if you just “sort of” offer the officer a bribe? Wave a wad of cash without actually offering it to the officer? A dishonest cop might take you up on the offer and let you go without a ticket. An honest cop could ignore the whole cash waving and write a ticket; or he could ask for clarification: “Are you trying to bribe me?” “On, no, officer. Of course not!” And you are left with a traffic ticket but no jail time.

Such ambiguity is built-in to all human languages and allows for nuanced approaches to difficult human interactions. See the logic graph below:

The “no bribe” scenario leads to a traffic ticket no matter what kind of cop you are dealing with. The “explicit bribe” scenario could result in you going scott free, but you also risk jail — very bad outcome. The “implied bribe” scenario is the best of both worlds — if you’re lucky, you might just get away without a ticket; but worse come to worse, you get a deserved traffic ticket. The ambiguity of interaction leads to the best possible set of outcomes.

Such finesse of human interactions and langue is important — it lowers friction; it allows for graceful exists from sticky situations; it enable large groups with different social norms to co-exist peacefully. What it is bad at is human-computer interaction and natural language interface processing — computers don’t do ambiguity well: “Do as I ask, not as I say.”

Watching my parents struggle with computer interfaces and Google searches shows just how painful strict constraints on language required for computer interaction are for novice users. It also shows how difficult is the solution to this problem. Siri will frustrate novice users for years to come; expert users will just adapt to Siri-speak!

The foundation’s keystone project is Interaction-Design.org, a website that publishes free and open educational materials for students, industry leaders and individual tech designers. The present centerpiece of the IDF is the ever-expanding Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction written by 100+ leading designers, Ivy League professors, CEOs, futurists and bestselling authors from across the high-tech universe. Currently, the encyclopedia numbers 35 short textbooks or chapters which students, professors and professionals can assemble in any way they want in order to make their own individualized compendium.

Don Norman has also contributed to a chapter. Three other contributing authors are Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor praised as “brilliant” by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as Steve Mann, known as the father of wearable computing and the inspiration for Google’s high-profile “Project Glass”, and Stu Card, a senior research fellow at Xerox PARC and leading pioneer in human-computer interaction. Other contributing authors are from MIT, Stanford University, Google, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Cambridge University, Stockholm University, Yahoo, Carnegie Mellon University, and many more companies and universities.

The website also includes a TV station with educational videos and interviews filmed around the world by the team behind Interaction-Design.org.

The goal is nothing less than making technology more user-friendly by giving designers free educational material at the highest quality. For everyone, everywhere. From New York or New Delhi. Rich and poor.

“We’re leading a battle against frustrating and time-consuming technology — poor designs that drain our productivity, our dignity and sometimes our sanity,” says Mads Soegaard, the Founder of IDF. “Too many PCs, mobile devices, household appliances and software applications are designed with engineers in mind, not consumers. In fact, study after study shows that computers are the leading cause of lost productivity. One survey revealed that crashes, printer jams and network problems cost the average UK employee 48 minutes per day. That’s one reason why we’re reaching out to the next generation of tech designers with free, world-class educational materials.”

About Some of the Interaction-Design.org Board Members

Don Norman has been called a peerless critic in his quest to expose the flaws of ill-designed machines. He is a cognitive scientist who worked for Apple, has written half a dozen books on technology and design, and taught at UC San Diego and Northwestern University. His book, The Design of Everyday Things, published in 1986 and reissued in 2002, became a best-seller and, according to Harold Thimbleby of Middlesex University, “defined the field of human computer interaction.” He is a co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting and research firm specializing in user interfaces.

Bill Buxton, a Toronto-based computer scientist, designer, writer and lecturer, has spent 30 years studying the human aspects of technology. He is a principal researcher for Microsoft and taught at several universities worldwide. He pioneered multi-touch interfaces and music composition tools in the 1970s and in 2010 BusinessWeek named him among the World’s Most Influential Designers. He is the author of the 2007 book, Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies).

A sketch by Bill Buxton inspired the computer touch-screen’s touch. An early copy of Don Norman’s Living with Complexity, a 2010 book about how well-designed devices can tame a complex world, made its way to Al Gore’s cluttered desk.