My brother is deathly afraid of spiders, as are most people. I’ve seen him jump on a chair out of sheer fright at the site of even the smallest eight legged arachnid; a grown man scared of an insect no bigger than his pinky is comical in my eyes. Facetiously, I tell him that if it came down to a duel to the death, he could probably win. But rational arguments don’t have much effect when it comes to the visceral. So the search goes on for a new strategy in an effort to spare the little creatures.

This past weekend, we were in his garage, working on our bikes after a group ride. Washing, waxing, fiddling, admiring, you know how it goes. I spotted a big bellied spider, the kind that looks like a Black Widow taking down a woodlouse. As I admired the beauty of nature, my brother was busy trying to find a jar of sorts to trap the little creature, in an effort to evict him from the premises. I urged him to leave the spider alone; that another two would quickly take its place. He exclaimed that was acceptable, he replied. I smirked.

Eventually, he fumbled and it scurried away and hid. My brother was visibly disappointed. I used this opportunity to explain that every space has a natural ecosystem. A system that will always achieve balance. His garage was no exception. Think about it. It is a building filled with all manner of insectae. Flies, mosquitoes, woodlice, spiders, beetles, ear wigs, etc. Each of those species is a predator and most also subject to predation. The ecosystem maintains balance because each species is represented. Now, if one were to remove as many spiders as they could find, all those other insects that are kept under control would flourish. Spiders are actually quite important. So much so, that they get a free pass when it comes to pest control. In fact, professional pest removal services will never harm spiders. The ecosystem would lose balance, and they do much more good for humanity than we give them credit for.

Fine, you say, so long as you don’t see another spider. Fair enough. But that is not taking into account the big picture. Now that you’ve removed the resident spiders, the other species will multiply. If you were a vagabond spider looking for a good place to lay your web to get some grub, where would you go? If you answered the garage that is teaming with food, you answered correctly.

Now you’ve got spiders coming in droves because you’ve effectively created an arachnid smorgasbord. That means more spiders for you to fret over. Keep trying to control their numbers, and the problem will only escalate. Insects and arachnids produce far quicker than you can kill them, and therein lies the problem. The bugs that were once controlled by the spider populace are now free to multiply. It’s a war you cannot win. Spiders are plentiful and there will be no shortage coming looking for food.

Truly, the best thing to do is let them be. The garage can only support so many spiders. Once their numbers reach the limit, the competition for food will be so great that no other spider will want to join the fray. They will seek other areas that have less competition. It’s a catch-22. You are damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It’s not very intuitive, I know. You could of course try to deplete their food supply by eradicating all the bugs they feed on. But who wants to spend their entire days catching flies, mosquitoes, woodlice, or ants?

So next time you see someone reaching for that kleenex, explain to them that when they kill off that little spider, two more will come and take its place. An ecosystem is always self-correcting. That is unless you can find the keystone species and eradicate the entire ecosystem, but that is another discussion entirely.

We all love ads. I mean, what’s not to like? They’re obtrusive, compete for our attention, distract us, slow down our browsing, sometimes crash our browsers, and generally frustrate us to the point of madness. And can I get everyone to raise the roof for Flash ads? Awww yeah, baby! Adobe in the house! Mo’ crashes, mo’ crashes.

Seriously, advertising is still a scourge of the internet. Usability mogul Jakob Nielsen discovered a long time ago that people pay little, to no attention, to advertising in web pages. You actually have to trick them to look, by making the ads appear to be “a part” of the website. Still companies and budding entrepreneurs pack their website full of banner ads. But is their overzealousness myopic and ultimately fuelled by a “sledgehammer to crack a nut” mentality? I did some digging into the effects adverts have on general load times, performance, and subjective feel.

Enter www.engadget.com (my testcase for this study), a great place for any tech-junky. I subscribe to their RSS feed. Sometimes making a comment or two, but for the most part, I avoid their actual website as it is glutenous and a bear to pull up (especially on my iPhone). The wait times are killers. And apparently I’m not alone (pdf link). So I ran some tests.

First, let’s look at the general size of the home page, with and without advertising.

Less than half the size. Minimizing the number of files reduces HTTP requests. As Yahoo has discovered, browser spend most of their time negotiating requests, compared to actually downloading images and HTML. It is actually much more efficient for a browser to download one 500 KB file, than a hundred 5 KB files. Since the nature of advertising can never make use of CSS sprites (combining into a single file and then adjusting their position using Cascading Style Sheets), they will always clog up your browser.

Now let’s look at DNS lookups. The more lookups that need to be done, the slower the page load. Yahoo has some “best practices” and explain why they have a detrimental affect on page load times.

While DNS lookups spanned across 4 domains, regardless of whether advertisements were blocked, the actual number of hostnames dropped, from 17 to 10.

Finally, page load times went down. It took 8.83 seconds to load the home page, sans banners. That number went up nearly 20% when ads were visible (10.34 seconds). While most people may not see this as a drastic jump, this was done on my PC. A 2.0 GHZ Macbook Pro. Think about devices like the iPhone, or Google’s Nexus One. These machines pull in full featured websites, but don’t have 4 GBs of RAM or processors that can crunch billions of operations without breaking a sweat. Moreover, mobile phones don’t have access to WiFi all the time. Many of us have to make do with 3G service that is not nearly as fast as the DSL and Cable lines provided by our respective ISPs. Regardless, it’s about wait times.

Broadband doesn’t give web developers the right to inflate load times. And let’s not forget about the human spirit. We have this tendency to become spoiled. The faster we get content, the faster we expect it, and the less likely we are to stick around if don’t get what we want. Making load times faster ultimately makes us less willing to sacrifice those speeds. Think about a guy who went to rags from riches. I bet its much harder to lose that wealth than to have never had it!

I agree this article may not be an expansive breakdown on the issue, but there is certainly some food for thought here.

People hate ads, and while bandwidth may not be an issue in the home, it is certainly something to consider when using mobile devices. Just ask AT&T about their predicament and what they feel is the cause. Yet this is just the start. More and more phones are catching up to the iPhone and delivering online content in all its rich, glory. Soon it won’t be just the iPhone that guzzles bandwidth.

Then there is the question of stability and 3rd party plug-ins (viz., Flash). Flash drops any browser on Mac OS X to its knees. Even on Windows, it’s not all that terrific, churning out those CPU cycles to display its meagre videos. So developers that loose Flash ads are real braggarts. As if it wasn’t invasive enough to have ads plastered throughout content, they now animate and degrade system performance and stability.

So what do those banners give you in terms of income? And is it ultimately worth it? It seems I have been making an unconscious decision to steer clear of banner ridden websites. And while I may be a minority, I’m pretty sure that one some level, all visitors have the same sentiments (perhaps choosing not to act on them).

reCAPTCHA is a free service that adds a magnanimous twist to the whole, “prove to me you’re human” paradigm of anti-spam technology. It was a novel idea back in the day, I’m sure, almost taking a page from the Turing Test. I can remember the first time I used one. I thought it was a great idea—very neat way of identifying humans from spambots. Then, new ones came out. More advanced ones. Some more difficult to use than others. Some downright annoying. Some did a better job than others. And for a time, things were good.

I have alway wondered whether some of the more difficult ones were made that way because spammers figured out ways to circumvent them, or if it was just overzealousness on the programmers part—trying to make an anti-spam system that could never be beat. In any case, it looks like reCAPTCHA has really gone into overdrive.

I admit that I installed the service on my own site (and for most of my clients) primarily because it helps digitize books. I think that’s a terrific idea. I can’t tell you the wealth of information that exists in the scientific community, but most of which is still relegated to physical journal articles. I would much rather have a hardrive full of PDFs, than a closet full of boxes. The trees we save not withstanding, it also helps make knowledge dissemination much easier and fluid. A win-win in my book. I am all for the spread of knowledge, and if I can protect myself and my clients from spam and promote the distribution of information, then just show me where to sign up.

But it looks like we hit a chink in the chain. In all honesty, reCAPTCHA “challenges” have never been the easiest. Every now and again, I’d get one that was perhaps a little challenging; something that didn’t just pop out at you. Then they added “blotches” behind the words, which has inevitably made their system far less attractive. Here you can see just how difficult some can be. Now I didn’t cherry pick these in an entire afternoon. This list was taken from around 15-20 reCAPTCHA challenges. That means a considerably high number of challenges are far too difficult, while some are just downright impossible (the last one eludes me completely, I want to say the first sequence is “im”?).

For a native English speaker, most of the challenges can probably be deciphered with minimal effort, despite the new blotches. Being familiar with a language affords you the advantage of knowing what letters you are likely to expect. In fact, research into cognition and perception have illuminated researchers on how the human brain processes letters. Wchih is why rideang steneces lkie this, aern’t all taht hrad. If we see the letters B-E-A… most likely we are going to presuppose that either a T or an N or an R may likely follow. If we see something that looks like a vowel, or an H, we would be required to expend a little bit more cognitive power in deciphering the word. This is also the case when reading full sentences. We come to expect certain words, and if they don’t follow (through typos or just bad writing), it becomes difficult to read. It’s like having to stop at every house to see if it’s the correct address. Just not productive.

However, the world is a large one. The internet has been breaking down the walls between countries for some time now, and while I’m sure the vast majority of people that frequent my sites are indeed fluent in English, they may not all be. Moreover, English may not be their primary language. If that’s the case, then they may not be as comfortable or as adept at decipher English text. Sure reCAPTCHA provides access to other languages, but as far as I can tell, it has no “multicultural” setting. It’s either English or German, but not both.

If it were a simple system that identified spambots, I would have removed it, but I am still wanting to digitize those books. Yet, I also care about my visitors and those of my client’s. And what’s more, I am also a usability freak. I don’t feel the current reCAPTCHA interface provides a clear enough “refresh” button to create new challenges. Moreover, I don’t think that’s an adequate solution. Forcing visitors to continually cycle through challenges until they find one they can accurately transcode doesn’t jive with productivity. I think it also asks too much of people. Let’s face it, people want to send you an email, not decipher a Sherlock Holmes mystery. I would like to make that process as easy and as noninvasive as possible. In an ideal world, they should be able to click a button and fire that email; all this spam protection should be well behind the scenes.

With the advent of social network and the blow up of blogs, the nuisance these kinds of devices elicit has increased exponentially. Most blogs or forms require some form of human validation. Well, I for one, am getting really sick of these time consuming processes. I know I’m human. I feel like I’m in some awful universe that’s overrun with militant robots, forcing the remaining humans to constantly present their IDs wherever they go. If that’s the case, then it seems to me we have already lost the war on spam.

So let’s get back to the drawing board. Sure these types of anti-spam measures worked when the internet was a static place to visit. But it has matured. It is full of dynamic content. Moreover, it has become a real communication platform. Information is exchanged readily and drives commerce to real relationships. Let’s bring down spam, but in a sensible manner that still respects the human behind that keyboard. After all, time is exceedingly precious.

“When will I learn? The answer to life’s problems aren’t at the bottom of a bottle, they’re on TV!” —Homer Simpson

Happiness: That often elusive, no doubt illustrious, and definitely coveted human concept some spend their entire lives chasing has long been studied by the social sciences. Ironically, the sciences have looked at why people are downright miserable (clinical depression) rather than why some are obscenely happy. But before we discuss this topic further, let me introduce you to a new movement in the field of psychology: Positive Psychology (+P), a subfield almost solely responsible for the information that will be presented in this article.

Positive Psychology

Positive Psychology is a recent movement (started some 40 years ago) aimed at rigorously studying the more pro-social aspects of the human psyche. This field differs from “traditional” (or the broader field of) psychology by looking at “what’s right,” as opposed to putting express focus on the pathologies, or “what’s wrong.” Traditional psychology has a long, sorted history of looking at all the things that make you, for a lack of a better term, fucked up. Its history is overshadowed with mental pathology (depression, panic, anxiety, fear, remorse, etc.) when compared to the more positive human emotions (happiness, hope, hardiness, life satisfaction, etc.). In fact, an entire manual (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or more commonly referred to as the DSM) exists on all the psychopathologies a person may have developed. The manual is currently in it’s 4th revision and has hundreds of entries, from Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to Voyeurism (See the staggering full list of codes here). Conversely, +P looks to build a database that is in stark contrast to the DSM. For example, why some people never lose hope, have unlimited compassion, survive the most horrendous of situations with no lasting psychological problems (credited to an abundance of “hardiness”), or can shoulder intense stress without wavering—in short, what makes people great. I’d say with people’s inexplicable focus on misery, this is a welcomed attitude.

Happiness & You

A recent article has shed new light on happiness, and subsequently depression. It seems depression and happiness are very strongly negatively correlated. This means when one goes up, the other goes down. That means when you’re happy, you are less depressed, and when you are depressed, you are less happy. This makes intuitive sense, so why bring it up? Well, there are many traits that appear to be on the opposite end of the continuum, but that ultimately do not share this type of effect. This is a problem because we need clarity in science. Moreover, we also assume this relationship to hold when we think we’re studying concepts on a single continuum. Light is the opposite of dark, dry the opposite of wet, etc. If we measured light and also found an abundance of dark, no longer are we measuring a single variable, but rather two separate processes. It may also mean there’s a problem with the way we are measuring (instrument validity), but we needn’t cover that here.

Seligman (pictured), Steen, Park, and Peterson (2006) looked at ways of increasing levels of general happiness through a handful of very simple exercises (download full article). They uncovered two key ways (there were six in total; however, the two listed here had longterm effects while the other four did not yield a lasting change) to increase happiness in their participants: i) using signature strengths and ii) focusing on three, daily good things. The former (i) required participants to visit www.authentichappiness.org to identify their top key strengths. They were instructed to select from the top five and use one of their skills in a creative new way, each day. The latter (ii) required participants to write down three things that went well in their day, and in addition, they were asked to write a causal explanation for each good thing.

These two tasks were shown to elevate happiness levels even after six months, provided participants continued with the exercises of course. Not surprisingly, depression levels also saw a decrease.

The Implications

Now, the implications of such research are two fold. Firstly, they tell us that happiness is not only attainable, but comes quite readily from the within the self. In fact, there exists substantial research showing that the “good life,” where one values intrinsic qualities such as developing skills and abilities, yields more joy than the “goods life” where one values extrinsic objects, such as jewelry and money. Thus, it seems you don’t really need a bigger house, a faster car, or more money to be happier (a good thing for us struggling students). More importantly, it also shows that we have to work towards happiness. It doesn’t come from some magic potion, quick fix, or self-help book. Secondly, and this is really the most pivotal finding in my eyes: We are working towards being miserable.

Now, I am aware it a radical statement, but let’s consider what we currently know. Firstly, depression is the polar opposite of happiness—when we see a rise in one, we see a fall in the other. When people report themselves as happier, they are simultaneously found to be less depressed.

Secondly, a lasting increase to general happiness can occur, but requires work. Participants in the study above were given simple exercises to complete on a daily basis. Those that did, reported higher levels of happiness, even after 6 months. It seems using simple techniques in our day to day lives, we can lead to greater happiness.

Results from Seligman et al. (2006) show conclusively that we have to work at being happy, much as we have to work at math or to become a better tennis player. Yet, considering the relationship between happiness and depression, and the ability to raise happiness levels through cognitive effort, the finding reveals a stark finding: We are working towards being miserable.

The Argument in Standard Form

I’m a student of philosophy. Therefore, I see value in clearly representing one’s point of view, and thus we can rephrase my argument as follows:

(1) Happiness has been shown to be the direct counterpart of depression, thus when one increases, the other decreases, and vice versa.
(2) A person can permanently elevate their general level of happiness using simple exercises throughout the course of time.
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(C) A lasting increase in happiness is attainable through cognitive effort, and ultimately results in a lasting decrease in depression.

The conclusion seems clear enough: We can work towards happiness. But there is a flip side to this argument. If that is indeed the case, then it stands to reason that we are also working towards misery.

Challenging premise (2) seems to fly in the face of even anecdotal evidence. Surely we can achieve lasting happiness (regardless of the process) over time. Refuting this claim seems unlikely (or rather difficult to support) and I’m not sure anyone would want to tread on this claim. Moreover, Seligman et al. (2006) have shown conclusive evidence in support of this premise. Admittedly it is just one study, I’m convinced there is something there.

Challenging premise (1), however, carries with it some dire consequences. Namely, I think a person would have to commit to the claim that human beings are hyper-misanthropes. To put plainly, human beings are fundamentally miserable creatures, predisposed to a life of pure misery. Surely that’s not the case. In fact, there exist an abundance of research showing that people are actually happy. When asked, people the world over, report being happier than sadder. Sure outliers exist, people that are extremely depressed, but in general, people report themselves as being generally happy.

A Cyclical Process

To claim that some of us are (inadvertently or subconsciously) working towards misery is indeed a stark revelation, and one that has some serious implications on how we not only conceptualize the world around us, but generally how we live our lives. But in light of what we now know about the relationship between happiness and depression, quite plausible. So let me gloss over each process to galvanize my claims. Consider the following findings:

Depressed people focus more on the negative, and therefore have more negative memories. They also limit social interactions (who would want to invite an extremely cynical and unhappy person to a party?), which further lead them down a road of misery. We have all heard that axiom that depression is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or the nonsensical suggestion to “just cheer up” when you’re feeling blue.

Contrarily, joyous people would make more joyous memories, and also promote positive social interactions. We all know people that simply light up any room they walk into. These people tend to propagate happiness, and thus, will no doubt be happier themselves.

The processes are no doubt cyclical and the above points hopefully clarify how it can be easy to spiral out of control. Admittedly, it seems people don’t tend to spiral into complete bliss. Incidentally, most people gravitate towards misery. Rather than ascribe to the notion that people are fundamental misanthropes, I point my finger to the world around us. It’s filled with media that perpetuates and exemplifies violence and brutality. While some may see media simply feeding the underlying wants and likes of the population, I would agree that prima facie that is true. But media is so persuasive at this point, that it would be almost impossible to clearly test that claim.

Moreover, media certainly has an effect on the populace. We give our kids medicine when they’re sick not because they like the taste or even want it, but rather because it will make them feel better. Perhaps media can be a little more magnanimous, considering all things. I’m not in favour of seeing hippies hugging on Prime Time, but surely we can restrict placement, insurgence, and the overall culpability of advertisers and some marketing strategies.

What to Do?

I would love to see a more pro-social movement emerge in the media. The scrupulously placed “trash magazines” at the checkout isles, the copious reality TV shows that solely aim to cause conflict, the news reports that peddle in human misery (“if it bleeds, it leads”), and the Perez Hilton’s of the world ultimately only fuel the downward spiral of humankind. The allure of suffering to humans is something best reserved for another article, but I don’t think it’s in our nature. Look at children’s advertising. It doesn’t follow this same trend. That alone suggests that these states are learned rather than ingrained. At any rate, I would love a progressive movement that looks to suppress this type of content.

Now I think Positive Psychologists would be remiss if I ended this article on a negative note. I hope that my readers see that an increase in happiness is attainable (and from the looks of it, requires only minimal effort). Moreover, that it’s not found at bottom of a bottle of SSRIs or through some self-help infomercial (sorry, Homer), but rather in some rather simple, rudimentary exercises.

New York Times reporter Jenna Wortham recently called Apple’s iPhone “the Hummer of cellphones,” in that, they just love to guzzle up bandwidth. With the release of iPhone 3.0, Apple introduced support for MMS and tethering, both of which are still currently absent if you are an AT&T customer (although AT&T now says that September 25th is the day). And since the iPhone is exclusive to this US carrier, its citizens are, for the lack of a better word, fucked (and I imagine rightfully prickly). However, AT&T has promised major updates to their currently insufficient network, but says it will take time. A 2011 date seems far away and if it were me, considering the price of cellphone ownership, the company should have prepared for these kinds of surges. (After all, it’s not like research firms haven’t conducted data collection on mobile phone usage trends.) Excuse me if I’m not won over by AT&T’s self-promotional statements of being at the forefront of innovation and commitment to its customers. And if that is the case, then all cellphone users can shed a tear.

Now, while none of this is really earth shattering news, and the world will continue to turn (unless you are part of the Flat Earth Society) whether you can send your buddy pictures of some drunken cage dancer making a complete ass of herself, it does show just what kind of fine line AT&T (and I imagine other carriers as well) have been walking. While they’ve been busy gorging, stopping to throw you the occasional bone, you’ve been toiling away, paying high rates and suffering all their indignities. AT&T has seen healthy growth (a 50% growth in wireless revenue, and that’s up from 40% over last year) and even healthier sales. In fact, 40% of their new customers wanted the new iPhone 3GS, and why not, it’s not a phone, but a super computer that fits right into your pocket. So why again is AT&T dragging their heels to bring you full functionality? Why aren’t they sharing the love? Greed. It’s been working for them for a long time now, and they’ve grown fat off the meagre services they’ve been offering, so there’s not much incentive to give you more, especially since it would most certainly mean they would have to go on a diet. But they’d rather have you believe the process simply takes time. Erecting new cellular towers, apparently, isn’t all that easy. The process, apparently, is an exhaustive one, requiring permits and, brace yourself, software that takes months to activate the tower (puzzling, I know).

By dancing this fine line between bilking customers and giving them just enough to keep them from rioting, they’ve allowed no room for growth; however, it has certainly allowed them to live the luxurious life, while you toil away for that unappreciative and ungrateful boss. It seems the telecommunication giants have crunched the numbers and given you just precisely what they think you may need, and not a byte more. And all this because competition is non-existent. The major carriers have long gobbled up anyone who stood in their way. They own the air and there isn’t much you can do about it. They are the last game in town and you better suck it up if you want to conduct business or text your boyfriend laude messages on the way to work.

And what about the 700 MHz auction? Wasn’t that supposed to inject some blood into the frail and collapsed veins of the cellular industry? Perk them up, get them to start offering competitive prices? Well, look at your bills. Tell me if you’ve seen a decrease. (Go ahead and look, I’ll wait.) Chances are there hasn’t been any change, or maybe you’ve actually seen a reduction in service without a subsequent reduction in price? Google (and secretly thought wolf in sheep’s clothing by some) put in a sizable bid, provided networks were to be kept open for use (and not locked down as they are with the dominant carriers). Verizon and the Cellular Telephone Industries Association (which represents the wireless telecommunications companies) objected and would later sue the FCC after they begrudgingly upheld (some of) Google’s requests. It seems the telecommunication companies didn’t like the fact people wouldn’t be chained down, or rather, they felt it was unconstitutional to not be allowed to chain people down.

So where does that leave you? Still at their mercy I’m afraid. And it looks like there isn’t much you can do about it. Break the contract, and you are hit with an arbitrary and ludicrous cancellation of contract clause buried in the fine print. Sure it’s set up to recoup moneys for some heavily subsidized headsets, but I don’t recall being provided an exemption when I signed up and received a headset so cheap, it must have cost Samsung all but six whole dollars to build. I was subject to the same stipulation as my cousin who purchased an extravagant and quite costly phone. Incidentally, my unit was provided free with a contract and sold for $79.99 without, his: $199.99 with contract and $699.99 without—yet both of us were subject to the astronomical $400 charge. Seek greener pastures and you’ll quickly find that none exist. Cancel service altogether and forgo owning a cellphone and you’ll sink quicker than the titanic in this hyper connected world where nearly every person in the developed world has a mobile device. You’ll ostracize yourself and will soon fill the sweet sting of hermiticism.

So what can you do? Well, they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so tie a bunch of barrels to your car, get a hose, and prepare to break into your sons school for the mother load! Complain (intelligently and with grace) to officials and consumer agencies. Now you may think the FCC is in the pocket of big business, but then you’d be ignoring human nature. Humans are odd creatures with an affinity categorization. Even more fascinating is our need to form groups: us vs. them mentality.

Psychologists have long shown that groups can be formed on the basis of nothing. That means if we give you and a bunch of strangers pens, and other people pencils, you’ll click with your new Pen Brotherhood. Moreover, you’ll find reasons to dislike the Pencil Pushers. Really. And that goes for national organizations too. Employees at the FCC will galvanize and come to see the carriers as the enemy, as sure as the frost settles in the morning, that is what they’ll do. So harness the power of human nature and be heard. Or you can just idly by and wait to see what the FCC’s ongoing, “broad” probe of the US wireless industry turns up. It’s totally entirely your “call.”

Lukas Mathis recently wrote an article on realism in UI design. Will Shipley (of Delicious Software fame) also wrote an article on interaction design and heuristics. But both fail to cover the underpinnings of heuristics and the human mechanism—to truly get at the source of how the mind works and why design needs to be shaped in a different direction.

Understanding Heuristics

Firstly, the definition of heuristics taken from Wikipedia is less than satisfying. (A heuristic is “an adjective for experience-based techniques that help in problem solving, learning and discovery.” Is it me or is WP getting more and more difficult to read and digest? Do they even have editors?) Let us take to my second year cognition textbook (written by the most boring and lacklustre authors alive. I begrudgingly had to read this book from cover to cover, and it was nothing short of sheer agony let me tell you): “A heuristics is a strategy that is often, but not always, helpful in solving problems” (Reed., S. K. 2004. Cognition: Theory and applications, 6th Ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.)

I think this definition will better serve our purposes, and is much clearer than the one provided on Wikipedia. But let me put it in simpler terms. A heuristic is analogous to being late for work. You wake up in a rush, deciding to forgo a shower, and choosing to grab a cereal bar instead of your traditional toast and coffee before running out the door. You make it to work on time, but you realize that you forgot your phone, and to lock your front door. You succeeded, but you did it cutting corners. Provided nothing detrimental happened, and all your stuff was still there when you got home, it would have proved a success. That is essentially what a heuristic allows you to do: Achieve your goal using tried and true shortcuts. They don’t always workout, but for the most part, the time and effort they save makes up for their less than pristine track record. It’s a trade-off. A process that tries to reach an outcome with the lowest possible denominator.

Before pressing on, let’s get a better understanding of what constitutes a heuristic and how they are formed. Way back, some few million years ago, human beings began to use tools, walk upright, and mould their environment to better suit their needs (thank you opposable thumb!). After generations, certain constants helped shape not only the way human beings interacted with their surroundings, but how their perceptual systems were being structured. This is the case with all organisms, for they adapt to their environment.

A cat has fur because that organism choose that particular phenotype (an observable component expressed throughout genetics) to handle some part of their habitat. That is not saying that fur was the only option, but it was a mutation that was accessible (an elephant, for example, doesn’t have the genetic capabilities to develop wings so it’s not an option should the environment call for them), and selected for by their sexual partners. Remember that evolution is a dualistic system, in that, random mutations lead to strange new abilities, but those mutations must be a) beneficial to the organism, and b) selected for by their mates. If they don’t pass on those traits to their offspring, then the benefits die with them.

Interestingly, a recently discovered cave fish has been shown to lack the “ability” to forget. Placing this fish in an empty tank with a small cylinder in the middle, saw the fish learn to avoid the object. However, after the object was removed, the fish never swam in that spot again. Scientist feel this is likely due to the environment of the fish. A cave is stagnant—there isn’t really much going on. So rather than expend energy to handle this extensive cognitive ability, it evolved without it. This fish a testament to the sheer awesomeness of evolutionary processes. I digress.

For humans, light always came from above (i.e., the sun), so we our visual system operates best under these conditions. Even the fear of spiders and heights are deeply rooted in human history (you tend to live longer if you don’t play with poisonous bugs and keep your ass firmly close to the ground). And my personal favourite: spontaneous food aversion. You ever eat something and within a few hours, start to feel nauseous? If that nausea turns into a violent illness, how likely are you to eat that meal again? Not very. It doesn’t matter if it’s the cause of your sickness. Your brain makes the connection without your active consent, and you develop an aversion to the substance. It varies in strength from person to person, but if you ate an egg salad sandwich and in a few hours, spent the rest of the night hugging a porcelain God, then I bet dollars to donuts you won’t be ordering it the next day for lunch, or the one after that.

Now it is important to note that heuristics don’t form overnight. They take generations, and the longer the stimulus has been present (and pervasive), the stronger these “rules” will become. After all, it makes sense to trust rules that nearly always return a favourable outcome. It also makes sense to put a “bypass conscious processing” proviso on these rules too, for the sake of rapid execution under minimal exertion. In fact, the most prolific heuristics (the ones there from the dawn of humanity) are so pervasive that they often replace (or at the very least, bypass) logic and critical thinking. They may sound like a detriment, but they play a crucial role in allowing us to parallel process oodles and oodles of information. Even those massive server farms having nothing on the human brain (all readers should give their lapels a soft tug).

Heuristics & Software Design

But classic computer programming has largely failed, because it failed to copy nature. Nothing in nature works 100% of the time, but it sure works well MOST of the time – and when it fails, well, you die and get replaced.

—Will Shipley

I’m afraid Will has all but lost me here. I’m imagining a bank machine that sometimes gives me money, while other times, it takes it from my account. I’m not sure what he’s driving at, but if a button doesn’t work 100% of the time, then I’d have to say that the coder is the one who’s going to get replaced. Admittedly I’m no coder, my formal training is psychology and philosophy, so maybe he’s talking about coding dynamics that are beyond my understanding. But I’m still trying to wrap my head around a program who’s code structure sometimes does this, and sometimes does that. I’m still not sure how that might work.

At any rate, in my opinion, he’s barking up the wrong tree (ouch, sorry for the cliche). It’s not the code that needs to improve, but the way it’s being applied. Code needs to be logical and its application too, needs to be logical. The problem, repeated for the upteenth time, is the coders themselves (sorry guys, as much as you hate to hear it, it’s true). Their superior understanding of code makes them volatile, often resulting in a convoluted and irritating program that general users find unusable (or not very enjoyable to use). This is precisely why scientists shouldn’t run the world. Or plumbers. Or engineers. What truly needs to change is the way coders perceive and ultimately conceptualize the their finished programs.

Usability pundits (Donald Norman, Alan Cooper, etc.) have all fingered the root of the problem a long time ago: A lack of understanding. Not in writing code, but of the human being. And this brings me back full circle to the actual issue at hand. Coders aren’t trained in heuristics, nor are they trained in the human machine. They have no idea what heuristics humans employ, why, how, or when. Take for example human memory. The average person can remember 7 +/-2 digits. That’s why North American phone numbers are 7 digits long (area codes don’t interfere because they are usually quite static, only having a few local ones to remember). When this tidbit of information leaked to the masses, coders retooled their programs. Every drop-down menu now had no more than 7 items. Every preference box had no more than 7 buttons. The problem? People don’t need to memorize drop-down menus, they are staring them in the face. Sadly, because coders aren’t experienced in psychological research, or fully understood the findings, they were inadvertently misapplied.

Good Design Through Metaphor: Tapping Into Heuristics

The use of metaphors are common practice. They work because a single metaphor (by definition) can serve many functions, in that, it is applicable across many instances.

Graphical user interfaces are typically full of symbols. Most graphical elements you see on your screen are meant to stand for ideas or concepts. The little house on your desktop isn’t a little house, it’s «home». The eye isn’t an actual eye, it means «look at the selected element». The cog isn’t a cog, it means «click me to see available commands».

—Lukas Mathis

Heuristics offer programmers a b-line straight to the soft, chewy centre of the human brain. It taps into knowledge that is already there, waiting to be put to use. This is the key to “intuitive” design. The human brain is already hardwired for a great number of things. By tapping into this current network, programmers can access streams that already provide well established knowledge regarding the function. And as mentioned above, this is best done through the use of metaphors. Things like folders, windows, buttons, and desktops. Even icons and labels work in this way. (But bear in mind, a metaphor is not a heuristic.) Do you see a trend? Human beings are cognitive misers. We don’t like to think about every little detail. We prefer automation. The shortest route travelled.

Admittedly, the best way to develop programs (or new technology) is to employ teams that have a wide breadth of expertise—from coding abilities to varying degrees of psych experience. When you design a tool for a human, you better damn well understand the human. Having experts on both the technology and the user will guarantee an exponentially better final product.

Anyone truly interested in crafting better programs (if nothing else) needs to read these three books:

1. Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction link

2. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things link

3. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity link

And if you are looking for an excellent read on the human mind and evolution, you must read these:

1. How the Mind Works link

2. The Selfish Gene link

This is by no means recent news, but since most people don’t know the difference between lies and bullshit, I thought I’d post up some food for thought.

Recently Apple and AT&T were put under fire by the FCC in the decision to remove Google Voice from the Apple App Store (original story). Now AT&T has no official connection with the App Store and responded with the following public statement: “AT&T does not manage or approve applications for the App Store. We have received the letter and will, of course, respond to it.”

Now no one with even a half a brain thinks that Apple was alone in the decision to pull the app. After all, why should they care if Google steals airtime (and thus money) from AT&T? They are in the business of producing products, not gouging poor souls over air. But that is neither here nor there.

AT&T’s official stance struck a chord with many netizens. People cried foul. Others burned effigies. Still, others accused AT&T of outright lying to both the FCC and the public. People were right to be prickly, but the US telecom giant didn’t lie.

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt makes a clear distinction between lying and bullshit. Admittedly the carrier’s response to FCC’s query may not strictly fall into Frankfurt’s latter category (bullshit), but it also does not clearly fall into the former either (lying). At best, we may call the response: Loose bullshit.

Think about it. AT&T never lied—there is nothing factually incorrect in their statement. They truly don’t manage apps in the Apple App Store. Moreover, they also do not approve apps in the App Store. Apple ultimately retains both of those exclusive rights.

At the end of the day, I think most people’s reaction to the public statement is spot on, but it’s not because AT&T lied, but rather because they issued complete bullshit. A former professor of mine gave me a beautiful example of bullshit some years ago: You borrow the family car and come home way after curfew (and wreaking of booze) with a dented fender. Your dad, furious and visibly distraught over the damage to his car, demands to know what happened and why you’re dead drunk! You respond curtly, “Yeah, thanks dad, I’m fine. I can’t believe you care more about that stupid car than your own son’s life!”

Obviously that’s not going to prevent you from picking up your prom date on your Huffy, but it’s always worth a try. At the very least, it’ll give you time to formulate a somewhat believable story (since by now, you are most certainly scared sober), because your drunk ass couldn’t come up with something even remotely plausible on the way home.

Practically speaking, skillful bullshit won’t incriminate you. Lying most certainly will.

AT&T Officially Responds to the FCC

Now this is an example of an outright lie. Notice how they draw your attention to the Google Voice (GV) web app? That’s not happenstance. And a web app is not the same thing as a native iPhone app, and Google (along with a large chunk of the iPhone user base) knows it. Any decent developer knows that people don’t like hurdles, even seemingly simple ones (like using Safari to run Google Voice and then adding an icon to the iPhone launcher). Adding these barriers (even if AT&T thinks them to be spurious or trivial) will limit the spread of GV. I’m sure AT&T doesn’t care though. They sure sound like they couldn’t care less if people adopted GV as their primary phone number… sure. If you buy that, then I have some terrific land I’d like you to look at. Great deal. Really.

Moreover, notice the cleverly worded sentence: “AT&T does not own [...] the Apple App Store and is not typically consulted regarding the approval or rejection of applications…” So they do get consulted from time to time, except not in this case (I imagine because they feel there is no proof of such a conversation, ergo, it never happened). I’m not one to jump the gun, but based on AT&T (and every other North American carrier for that matter) business practices, I’d bet dollars to donuts they don’t have a halo over their heads on this one. I doubt much will come of this, but it would be nice to see GV become a native iPhone app. We all know that competition in the air business is very much needed.

I’ve dealt with my fair share of “difficult” clients. I’ve also seen a number of my fellow designers post up on their blogs about some of their worst and most frustrating moments. Personally, I’ve tried hard not to let them get to me. I’m not judging, but I never wanted to be at the point were I threw up an angry entry, condemning an ex-client. Sure, I’ve been frustrated. Walked away from Mail.app. Even felt downright despondent, but I’ve always pushed through, ultimately settling on the notion that my clients are paying my bills. Sure some of them have butchered my designs with rather “questionable” recommendations, but it’s their website. I’ve never had anything too extreme (nothing that made me want to take my name off of it) and can usually pick out quite accurately who is going to be hard nosed in our initial meeting. Truth be told, I tend to take contracts from clients who leave the majority of the design in my hands. But I’ve recently come across more and more clients that are really interested in the aggressive promotion of their websites.

SEO (I’m really starting to hate that acronym) now permeates much of the mainstream. I’ve even had clients without any knowledge of web design approach me on the use specific metadata. I tell them, “your site’s got it.” I design all my websites to be search engine optimized. Metadata is just but one facet. Including search engine friendly URLs, titles, tags, and the proper use of headings and content layout is just good design, at least to me. Frankly, I don’t know any serious designer that forgoes these small details. Moreover, I don’t think it’s all that 007. I’m open with my clients and always try to teach the receptive ones about my craft. I figure it’s the equivalent of a mechanic taking the time to explain the inner workings of fuel injection, or what the master cylinder does.

Bu every now and then, I get a client who wants to aggressively market their site. They think they can beat the search engines, like no one else has tried. They’ve read up on linkbacks and google rankings, and are determined to hurdle their competition. But their website is light. Information is scattered and loose. Write-ups are less than concise and generally speaking, somewhat redundant. Even the greatest web designer can do so much with poor content. At the end of the day, you can only shift around divs and paste css for so long before the visitor figures out there isn’t really much to see. To these people I strongly urge they abandon the guerilla marketing tactics and just promote conscientious and strong material.

I’d have to say that “page waterfalling” is the rookie mistake. Most new to the net think more pages are better, deciding to section out everything they can on their site. Honestly, I would rather visit a site with 3 pages if that’s all the content they have. Adding a page with a sentence just doesn’t do it for me—it never has. I socratically tell them to concentrate on tightening up their content. To really think about the message they want to send and how they want to send it.

Now I often edit text. After all, I do have a post-secondary education and have written more reports and papers than I care to remember. I’ve also paid an exorbitant amount of money for that degree on my wall, so I’m bloody well going to put my teachings to work. But sometimes, the content is just not there. It’s like writing an 8 page paper on a topic that ended on the 5th page. I never felt like I was fooling my professor and I never feel like my client is going to fool their visitors.

So rather than turn this entry into a rant (it’s not, I swear), I would just like to caution those that desire a website or wish to market their product or service online: Think about it. Write a paper. Complete with headings and sub-headings. Then turn that into your web designer. Trust me, they will be overjoyed. It will provide an invaluable template to work with and ensure that you don’t market air.

There is a strange phenomenon that grips the user when their first looking at a new piece of technology. Obviously, the first is the look of the item, taken in by those two orbs filled full of vitreous humor, called eyes. The second comes when they touch it and take it in at a closer level, and for those big on haptics, this can be quite pleasurable. This state constitutes the stage most often referred to as the “shill stage”, where the features are listed (e.g., bluetooth, EDGE, WiFi). The third state is the one that is rarely mentioned, and the one that seems to continually get it’s own focus, oddly enough apart from the first two states: The user interface.

The user interface (UI) often seems to run tight on the heels of functionality. By that, I mean a UI usually only goes as far as linking the user with the necessary hardware. You want to send an SMS? No problem, there is a program written that allows you to do just that. Trying to retrieve your mail? Got you covered with a program for that too. But for the most part, that seems to be as far as it goes. And while companies think most people will be quite happy with that, they are dead wrong. People want, nay, need stuff that works elegantly and beautifully. And why not? This doesn’t seem like an impossible feat. After all, the designers are humans themselves (or I should still hope so!).

So what can you do about it? Well, the first step is to recognize that hardware is not software. Sure we all get caught. I, myself, bought the Moto RAZR when it came out. I had to have it because, let’s face it, it was one heck of a sexy phone. But I quickly discovered how awful the interface was, and soon enough, I grew annoyed and then downright frustrated every time I used it. Hey, we all get hit sometimes. But we have to learn from our mistakes. So the next time you fall in love with that phone, or that computer, take a look at the interface. Try it. Use it. Because that should truly be your number one concern. We don’t just stare at our notebooks and mobile phones, we use them. When the software works, it usually increases the quality of our lives (Facebook is probably the exception), but when it’s poorly designed, confusing, or just plain unintuitive, life becomes a grind. So be critical. Demand usable interfaces, not just pretty hardware.

Usability and design are what jumps out at me. And I must admit, I relish using a system for the first time; be it a new ABM (automated banking machine) or a new pay parking system. These are the rare times I get to jump out of my shell and test a system without any advanced knowledge of its functionality. I get to follow the instructions and if I stumble, I have no one to turn to. I know many people in my life who don’t feel the same. A new system fills them with anxiety, tension, and the fear of failure. Not me, I love it; relish it in fact. So when I have the opportunity to beta test, I gladly accept.

I recently signed on to a few new projects to conduct preliminary usability analysis, and was shocked appalled at some of the UIs programmers wanted to put onto the general public (one program stood out as a monumental calamity). My professors (and professional ergonomists agree) have always told me the enemy of usability are the coders. The tech junkies and gurus that love a challenge, understand the integral parts of a system, and are so deeply immersed in their trade that even the largest niggle seems rudimentary to them (what, you couldn’t figure out that you needed to press the menu button three times, hold shift, and then toggle the left mouse button to pull up the context menu in the advanced options list?). And this fact I always keep in mind. Be wary of alphas and betas that have had no formal usability analysis (paper prototyping, what’s that?), or structural framework in the design phase (rapid iterative design? well we did work on the UI rather quickly!).

I love receptive customers and programmers who actually want to create a manageable and usable program. After all, it is in their benefit to drive up revenue and increase customer usage, is it not? But then you come across the dark side. The developer who insist that users will understand the arbitrarily located buttons. That the program will become intuitive over time. But this is all part of the job. It hones my skills and allows me to be flexible. To work with my clients and around the system itself. Sometimes a complete re-tooling just can’t be done (easily avoided if proper design principles are employed from day one, but let’s not go there). So I let it go and enjoy the ride. But what does burn me, and I’m not going to pull any punches, is when hard-nosed developers make glaring usability mistakes and turn around, publicizing their programs has having an “intuitive interface” that screams usable.

It seems usability has become another buzzword for the industry. Despite no true usability testing every being conducted, developers seem to feel the need to include that little, nine letter word in their program’s sales pitch. It makes me frustrated, angry, and a little sleepy. I understand that my trade is much more of an art than it is a hard science, and in that respect, I want the world to take ergonomists seriously, but if we do our job right, things are seamless. The interface is fluid. The connection between the man and the machine is effortless. So it only hurts us when poor programs are designed poorly and toted as having “usability.” These pieces of software are only as usable in that they can be run on your chosen platform and a user can interact with them. True usability is a synergy between you and the product. It requires extensive testing, change upon change, and may deviate from the developers vision in more ways that one. Sacrifices are made, much blood and sweat is put into it, but the final product is one the user never struggles with. It becomes an extension of the user. And this is much easier said than done (even for the best in the field). But you can see now why the word “usability” (if you ascribe to the above definition) is such a lucrative word to have in your sales pitch.

So please be wary as a user. If you see the term “usability” littered throughout a programs sales pitch, ask them just what they did to make it “usable.” There is more to usability than telling someone the program has it in spades.

Here’s a neat suggestion by Dr. Tidio, from the University of Brienna. He says if you want to use more than 10% of your brain—which just so happens to be the amount the average person uses throughout their day—you should bang your head against your desk till you see, what he calls, “fuzzy rain.”

In a recent article published by Timid Minds, Dr. Tidio has discovered that exhaustive head trauma can increase neurogenesis (the growth of new neurones), and lead to an overall increase in brain-wave activity. “The brain reacts to trauma by increasing [its] structural density. Patients in our studies have shown lasting improvement in their cognitive abilities after just several “wallops” to the head using a surgical two-by-four.”

Dr. Tidio and colleagues have led experts across the globe to rethink concepts such as intelligence, while some have even begun criticizing helmet laws. “They [helmet laws] were designed to save lives, but may have inadvertently made generations dumber.”

These findings follow on the heels of Dr. Ronom’s study that discovered a link between intelligence and head trauma sometime in the mid nineties. It was then argued that intelligence and humans have evolved homogeneously by one mediating variable: head injuries. “Our ancestors had to hunt for their food. In these activities, it was not uncommon to have them suffer injuries; head injuries. But they still managed to survive, and make better tools. Thus it seems that over the centuries, all those jolts to the head have made us what we are today.”

Such findings, however, are not without a barrage of criticism. Dr. Dipstu et al. argue that such findings are preliminary, and that more research needs to be conducted. “Let’s run the data on some monkeys before we get Timmy and Johnny down the street to start hitting each other over the head with their toys.”

However, such opposition is not unexpected, and Dr. Tidio believes it will only strengthen what he (and a handful of researchers around the world) already knows. “Any good theory has criticism. That is how good science works.”