Author: schloss

Being in jury duty is like forcing twelve people to order a three topping, extra-large pizza where the three toppings must be different and everyone has to agree on all three toppings before you can order.

Sometime during the course of the proceedings, I realized that the drama in front of me was the manifestation of everything I knew about cognitive science and social psychology. The lawyers are scientists and the courtroom is a laboratory. The lawyers use witnesses and evidence to mix up a verdict through persuasion, rhetoric, and storytelling.

I decided to put on my ethnographer’s hat and record my observations — the action in the courtroom, the drama in the deliberation room, and everything else relevant to life as a juror. Below is a scattershot list of my interpretations.

It’s long and poorly organized, and I’m not apologizing for it. And I’m being intentionally vague about gender and case details.

Backseat lawyers

As a jury, we were extremely dissatisfied with the lawyers for how they argued the case. Following a particularly awful exchange by one lawyer, a juror said he/she wanted to jump out of the jury box and yell at that lawyer for being such an idiot. (That’s almost a direct quote.)

As we went forward in our deliberations, we uncovered essential evidence that both lawyers missed. We often complained that the lawyers could have made a more compelling case by asking questions about X or grilling witness Y.

During one complaining session of that sort, I wanted to get the jury back on track. I said, “let’s hold off on the backseat lawyering.” Someone quipped in response, “Monday morning lawyer.” Exactly.

On a side note, I think a courtroom drama with an MST3K-style commentary track has the potential for extreme humor.

Humor

In case my previous attempts at jokes weren’t funny, we tried hard to maintain our sanity through humor during the deliberation process. This often came out as jokes about the witnesses, lawyers, the court personnel, or even ourselves.

Yes, we were a bit disgusted with ourselves given the seriousness of the courtroom events. I think it was necessary to crack a joke every so often; for me, it kept me from taking the deliberations too seriously — avoid making it personal.

One time while we were commenting on the courtroom antics, I said, “this would make a great screenplay — all twelve of us deliberating in the room. Co-starring the bailiff as our comic relief. And with special guest stars the judge and court clerk.” It was much funnier in the deliberation room; you just had to be there.

Someone said that jury deliberations would make a great reality TV show. “You could film a different jury deliberating every week.” I definitely agree.

I finally understand how someone got a cell phone in my name

About a decade ago, someone fraudulently opened a cell phone account in my name with a major wireless provider. That person racked up hundreds of dollars in calls, then the phone was shut off for non-payment. This showed up on my credit report when I went to get my own cell phone, resulting in countless hours lost as I tried to ressurrect my good credit.

Thanks to the expert witness testimony of a cell phone company employee at this trial, I now know why it’s so easy to do that. Unlike banks or credit card companies, cell phone companies do not extend credit to individuals; you’re bound by a contract to pay for the service every month. Because they don’t extend credit, those companies are not required to check the ID or verify any of the information (like address) that a person provides when getting a cell phone contract.

In St. Louis, a Sprint store employee gave a cell phone to someone who used my name and SSN along with a fake address (“Wadaba St” — seriously, that alone should be a red flag) when I was living a thousand miles away. And Sprint is under no obligation to verify that it was really me (or in this case, not me) who did it. And due to some arcane laws, I would have to go to St. Louis in person to press charges.

Words cannot express my outrage.

Technology (or lack thereof)

Our courts are technologically inept. Most of the evidence could have been trivially scanned and made available to the jury digitally if they had wanted.

Instead, we got 100 pages of phone call records, 50 records a page. (Oh, how we would have loved to build a pivot table.) We had to request special equipment to view a DVD. Every photo had to be passed around to each member of the jury, wasting countless hours. Testimony had to be printed (for some witnesses, hundreds of pages long) or, if the written transcripts weren’t ready, read aloud by the court reporter.

We opined about how much faster we could get through the information if we could get everything digitally. Instead, the prosecution lawyer pushed a cart full of boxes and binders, each full of pages and pages of paper, to court every day. Those poor trees…

The pool

The jury selection process is awful. It starts with 24 jurors being selected randomly from a pool of over 100. Then the judge and lawyers begin asking a series of questions that you’re expected to remember whether or not you were selected. Some jurors are booted, then a new set are called up to fill in the empty seats. More questions are asked, and the process repeats until both lawyers decide to keep the 12 jurors in the box.

It was the most boring three days of my life. Sure, there was the occasional interesting character or curious story. I spent my time devising ways that the courts could accelerate the process and get a suitable jury faster and make it more fun.

But no — the boring ways produce a fair jury of the defendant’s peers. I think the (long, boring) pooling process is the primary reason why people hate jury duty.

The negative opinion of jury duty

Here are some reasons why people dislike jury duty:

• You spend three days in a jury pool but never get picked to be on the case — total waste of time
• You end up on a trial and have to put your life on hold or have to work 20 hour days (8-9 hrs at court + your real job)
• Sitting in the courtroom is boring. Everything moves as slow as possible
• Deliberations take a long time and are very mentally taxing
• You get paid almost nothing ($15 a day plus $2.50 for transportation in SF)

But I think the main reason why people dislike jury duty is this:

• They’ve never been on a jury before

When I told people that I was on jury duty, most people said, “aw, that’s too bad,” or something like that. The only people who said good things were ones who had been on a jury before.

It’s really not that bad. Give it a try sometime.

It’s no [your courtroom/police drama of choice]

It’s no CSI. It’s no Law and Order. In the courtroom, a real trial is much more boring than you think. Lots of questions and answers. No magic technology to reassemble events of the incident. No outbursts by witnesses. No need to restrain the defendant.

I guess courts shouldn’t be exciting or dramatic, given the gravity of events that occur there. On the other hand, they shouldn’t be boring either, given the gravity of events that occur there. I’ll think about ways to improve that.

What the witnesses saw or didn’t see

Because the events in this trial occurred over a year ago, lots of witnesses had trouble remembering the events of the incident. In several cases, the lawyers had to remind the witnesses about statements they made to police on the night of the event; at court, the witnesses often misremembered or didn’t recall details.

Even more interesting — the key eyewitnesses (the defendant and a victim) recalled completely different versions of the incriminating event. It’s a form of motivated recall — that is, you’re motivated to remember events that portray yourself in a positive way or in a way that makes you seem better. In this case, the victim wanted a conviction, and the defendant wanted to be released; they testified as such.

As a jury, we were left with the tough decision to decide, individually, whether or not we believed the witnesses in part or in whole.

Everyone needs something a little bit different

As we were deliberating, we discussed the points that brought us to a reasonable doubt or brought us to believe the defendant was guilty. While it was good to air our thoughts, it did little to convince people one way or the other.

The reason why that doesn’t work is because of projection bias — that quirky cognitive bias that leads you to believe (incorrectly) that others share your beliefs or thoughts. The evidence that convinces you of your verdict probably won’t convince another juror of your verdict; in fact, more than once during our deliberations, someone would bring up evidence that obviously pointed to guilt while another juror would use that exact same evidence to point to innocence.

Every juror needed something a little bit different to get to a conclusion — a timeline of events, a read-back of certain testimony, an alternate explanation for a witness’s observation. If there’s any lesson from the trial that I’ll apply to my life, this is it — it may be perfect to you, but it does nothing for others (whatever “it” is — evidence, love, designs, hamburgers, Charlie Sheen movies).

The hardest part of the deliberations, by far, was finding that “little bit different” for each juror. How do you convince people of your opinion? I still don’t know the answer to that. All I know is that we deliberated for 7 days and didn’t agree on all the charges.

(Speaking of projection bias, in deliberations a few jurors said, “I would have…” or “If I was there…” If the witness did something that you wouldn’t do, the witness must be lying, right? Don’t assume others think or behave the same as you.)

The sounds and the smells

The Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant is smelly because it’s the home of the San Francisco parole and probation offices. Every day there would be interesting odors while waiting in line for the security check, going up the elevator, or, most interesting of all, in the stairwell.

The odors included pot, crack, alcohol, and smelly homelessness. Often I would see the security guards put on rubber gloves when dealing with homeless people. The security guards also kept a wooden walking cane near the x-ray machines to be used when a homeless person’s bags got stuck in the x-ray machine.  (They would use their hands on others’ belongings.)

And about the stairwell… it reeked of pot. Every day, without fail. My only wish is that the parole and probation officers have noses, because I bet lots of the people who show up are breaking their terms of probation — as determined solely by the odor.

The grammar

Having been through this trial, I’m much more grateful for my education. I’ve now heard the phrase “I seen” more times than I ever want to in a lifetime.

Court lingo

You learn lots of new terminology while in court. Words you thought you knew like “robbery,” “murder,” and “intent” have specific definitions while you’re there. Here are some favorites:

• Dixied: to steal. See also: boosted
• 6 pack: a photo lineup used by police to identify suspects
• Green vegetable matter: marijuana, when entered into evidence and not yet identified as weed
• Stipulate: an agreement between the prosecution and defense about the facts of the case
• Intent: I’m still not sure what that means

Reinventing the wheel

Even though jury trials take place all over the country, most jurors are inexperienced and perform jury duty infrequently (less than once a year). That means juries are reinventing the process for deliberating over and over all the time. In my jury, nobody knew the right way to run the deliberations, so we made it up as we went along.

Said differently, everyone is a beginner in a jury. My user experience instincts tell me that you need plenty of hand-holding as a beginner in a complex process that you go through infrequently. Courts should help juries as much as possible to get through the deliberation process. Instructions would be great.

Instead, we were left with “1) deliberate. 2) vote. 3) if unanimous, tell the judge. else goto 1.” If we had some rules or advice for how to deliberate, I think our task would have been completed much faster. A different presiding juror (foreman) might have shortened (or lengthened) our deliberations by a day; I want to know what process juries can use to shorten deliberations by days.

The instructions

At the end of the closing statements, the judge gives the jury instructions for how to decide the case. For example, “robbery” has a very specific meaning including dispossessing someone of an item, using force or fear to deprive the person of the object, and intending to keep it permanently.

In our case, the instructions were over 50 pages of the dry, difficult legal jargon. As non-lawyer people, we could only decide among ourselves or ask the judge what they mean. And because it’s over 50 pages worth of dense stuff, there’s no way to keep all that in mind when deliberating.

The definition of “robbery” included a 5 step process with special rules and exceptions, and it refers to other definitions that have their own steps and processes. The criteria for believing or not believing witnesses was 5 pages by itself. Circular references were common. One juror joked that the instructions should be in a wiki.

The output is only as good as the input; simpler instructions would help juries come to better decisions faster.

The missing pages

Even though you’re not supposed to assume or concoct ideas, you can’t help but do that, especially when you find the witnesses’ testimony to be dubious. We tried to reconstruct what really happened, sometimes taking liberties with the evidence we were given.

In a more amusing moment, someone suggested that a victim inflicted his wounds on himself.  I said, “you mean this is like Fight Club?” It got a laugh.

As humans, we have an innate drive to finish stories — a drive for completion. Trying to reassemble the real story of a court case is like reading a novel with every other page torn out or watching a movie in a language you don’t understand. You invent your own story; you have to.

Small potatoes

During our casual chats, we often talked about how the case was impacting our lives. Several people reported that they had trouble sleeping, including one who thought a person was standing in his/her bedroom (it was a shadow). A couple of folks said they started noticing suspicious characters in their neighborhood. A couple of people were at the trial during the day then left to work a full time job at night.

As the trial went on, the impact started getting more severe. One person said his/her manager was getting annoyed about when that juror would get back to work, including veiled threats about his/her employment status. Someone had a family member undergo surgery during the trial. Another had a close friend with a death in the family. Another a dying relative.

Someone suggested we ask the judge for a day off to tend to our lives. One of the jurors put it into perspective. “Whatever issues we have in our lives that are affected by this trial, it’s small potatoes compared to what the defendant, the defendant’s family and friends, and the victims’ families and friends have gone through. As much as we have a duty to our lives, we also have a duty to see this case to its end for those people.”  Small potatoes indeed.

Reinterpreting everyday life

Someone said they noticed a strange car driving by his/her house and got suspicious. Another juror said that he/she was being more argumentative in everyday conversations. Someone else mentioned that he/she is trying to be more observant during activities in case that moment ever became the subject of a trial.

Another juror said that the process had made him/her more thankful for life and the privileges therein. I definitely agree; many countries don’t have jury trials or the disposition of innocence that we have in the USA.

I think we were all transformed by this process, and I think my comments above only scratch the surface of the impact it had on our lives.

Closing Statement

It wasn’t easy being a juror, but I do feel satisfied with the process, the quality of my fellow jurors, and the results of our effort.

I feel like I need a mental vacation to recharge myself.

And I have tons of other observations about the trial that I haven’t even gotten to yet.

I might need another blog post to tie this one off…

Here are some tips for how to use time to your advantage when working on projects.

Time is often the enemy of a project, but I believe that’s because most people do a poor job managing their time and effort.  The lessons below are ones I’ve learned by approaching time management through the lens of cognitive science.  Use them to help you make the most of your time, no matter how big or small the task.

Uninterrupted

To maximize your productivity, you need to avoid all interruptions to your work.  Interruptions cost the time it takes to handle the interruption plus much more.

When you start working on something, it takes a good fifteen minutes to become fully absorbed in that task.  Once you’re in that flow, any kind of interruption — such as talking to someone or checking your email  — takes you out of that zone.  After you handle the interruption, you lose another good fifteen minutes re-absorbing yourself back into your work.

That’s why it’s essential to make your work environment as interrupt-free as possible.  Close your email, your IM clients, and your web browsers.  Put on your headphones.  Move into a conference room.  Do whatever it takes to get away — far away — from the interruptions and impediments keeping you from concentrating on the work at hand.

Evenly spaced deadlines

The best way to use deadlines is to spread them evenly over time because it maximizes the quality of your effort and likelihood that you’ll finish on time.  Committing to any deadline improves your chances of getting a task done on time and done right;  to improve those odds further, give your self several deadlines with regular intervals.

This observation comes from science.  A 2002 study researched the effectiveness of deadlines.  Three groups were asked to complete a task using one of three strategies: use a single end deadline, use three evenly spaced deadlines, or set your own deadlines.  Of the three groups, the evenly spaced deadline group had the fewest delays in completing the task and also submitted the best quality work.

If your project only has a single deadline, break it up into shorter deadlines for yourself.  And if your project is large enough to have several deadlines, spread them out as evenly as possible.  That way you’re maximizing your chances to create quality work and hit your deadline.

Impossibly short timeframe

If you want to try something a little bit different, reel in your deadline to a timeframe that you feel is unrealistically short.  The brevity of the timeframe keeps you focused on the essential parts of your work.

Plenty of great works have been created in amazingly short periods of time.  For example, Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue in less than one month.*  Check out the awesomeness of Beck’s Record Club; each album is recorded within 24 hours.  Similarly, a friend of mine wrote a 50,000 word novel in 30 days for National Novel Writing Month.

When you work with strict constraints like this, don’t expect your effort to be fully polished.  Gershwin finished writing Rhapsody after its first performance; he improvised the piano solo at the premiere.  Beck’s recordings are really rough, yet it’s the roughness that makes them fun.  Also, my friend’s novel needs some editing work 🙂  You can create great things in a short time; time becomes a healthy constraint on your effort, making you focus on the parts that matter.

In short

Give these a try sometime, especially that last one. Find a task that you can’t quite get off the ground, then give yourself an unrealistic deadline for finishing a rough version of it.  Or if you’re more of the planner type, set up a project plan with several deadlines along the way.  And always, always remove any distractions that might get in your way.  I bet you’ll be amazed at the quality of your output.

*Rhapsody usually takes about fifteen minutes to perform.  My favorite recording of the piece, made in 1927 with Gershwin at the piano, was stripped down to nine minutes so it would fit on a single record (the longest recording medium of the time).  IMO, it sounds much more joyful and lively than the best modern recordings.

If someone ever cites the “magic number seven” rule at you, most likely they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

You’ve probably heard the rule before.  If you give people a list of items to memorize, most people will recall between 5 and 9 items, hence it’s often called the “7 +/- 2” rule or “magic number seven” after the academic paper where the finding was published.

Lots of people, designers and non-designers alike, cite this in web design as the maximum number of categories you can have at the top level of a website.  I’m sure it’s used in other places too.

Unfortunately, those are bullshit applications of the rule.  The rule refers to only one thing: memorizing the exact sequence of digits like a phone number.  Most people can remember seven numbers in order before running out of short term memory.

But when you’re memorizing words instead of numbers, recall goes down to 5 plus-or-minus 2 (or less for long words).  And again, this is a very limited application of short term memory — exact, ordered recall.

Thankfully, web pages are different than phone numbers, and other researchers have done experiments that test the limits of memory. Let’s try this one; I hand you a list and give you a minute to memorize it:

trombone	grammar	spatula	sparks	heart	look	lab
quill	radar	aardvark	antenna	lamp	share	spare
wink	noodle	spout	tan	overt	wall	value
wild	greet	draft	energy	video	statement	contact

Then I ask you to recreate the list as best as you can.  You might get half of them right; you’d definitely get more than 5 +/- 2.  In fact, you would probably remember a clump of words at the beginning and a clump at the end, with some others scattered in between.

This is due to how our short term memory works.  We remember the first items we encounter (“primacy”) and the most recent items we encounter (“recency”) better than the middle crap.

Let’s try a slightly different experiment.  Instead of asking you to recreate the list, I ask you to recall where specific items showed up.  “Where did ‘trombone’ appear in the list?”  You would remember even more than the previous test.

I’d say this kind of prompted recall is the closest to how people use web pages — “where is that logout button? “I think I saw ‘checkout’ over here.” “The search bar was somewhere at the top of the page.” If that’s the case, then “7 +/- 2” is total BS as a design rule because people are capable of memorizing much, much more with the right help.

Put memory to work for you

This leads to an interesting question.  What can you do to improve experiences by taking advantage of how memory works?  Here are a few good tips.

Awesome beginnings and endings

Because we remember the first and last items we’ve encountered better than other stuff, you should put your best effort into creating awesome beginnings and endings.  Your audience will remember the beginning and end long after they’ve forgotten all that crap in the middle.

Prompting

When you need someone to remember something, like a specific series of steps to accomplish a goal, use prompts to nudge them along.  A little prompt (i.e. “Where is ‘trombone’ in the list?”, “Step 1… Step 2…”) can invoke a chain of memories that people would have otherwise forgotten.

Repetition

I bet you can recall all the lyrics to your favorite songs you listened to over and over again as a teen. People recall items better after they’ve been repeatedly exposed to them.  As time goes on, those items migrate to your long term memory. After a while, you’ll have the lyrics to “Mexican Radio” embedded in your brain for life.

Chunking

Memorize this list:

lions

tigers

bears

cowboys

redskins

eagles

packers

I bet you could easily do it.  Our brains “chunk” similar kinds information together.  We can memorize chunks that we already know, like movie lines or NFL teams, faster and better than others.

If you remember anything from this post…

By now, I’m sure you’re wondering what to tell your boss when he insists that you need to cut your website’s categories down to “seven plus or minus two.” I’d say the limit is based on how many you can lay out without overwhelming the user. Try something, test it, try something else, then test it again. Repeat until all people – users and bosses alike – are satisfied.

If all else fails, just do what Amazon does. (They have 12 top level categories.) And if that doesn’t work, show that person the hundreds of other interactive items on your website. People remember how to use the site just fine despite the fact that “hundreds” vastly exceeds our short term memory limit of “seven plus-or-minus two.”

Have any memory tips appropriate for design? Please add them to the comments on this post.  In the mean time, don’t be afraid to tell someone that they have no fucking idea what they’re talking about if they spew that magic number seven crap at ya.

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One of the lynchpins of my office is leaving.  After hearing the news, a coworker asked me if I knew why.

I said, “there’s an intangible force that runs through every person in every company.  I call it ‘The Love.’

“The Love comes from two places.  There’s Intrinsic Love — that’s the love of what you do.  When you wake up in the morning, excited to get in the office and do the thing you were hired to do — that’s Intrinsic Love bubbling over.

“It also comes from Extrinsic Love — that’s the love other people give to you for doing the thing you do in the office.  They give it to you in the form of thanks and accolades.

“The Love is a finite thing, and you use it up little by little.  You have to refill it, and that refill comes from Intrinsic Love or Extrinsic Love or both.  If your work or your rewards can keep refilling The Love, then you’ve got a great thing.

“But if you’re not getting enough of The Love for your effort, then The Love runs out.  Maybe it’s because you don’t like what you do.  Maybe it’s because others don’t appreciate what you do.  Regardless of the reason, the effect is the same.

“His Love ran out.  That’s why he’s leaving.”

“I see,” my coworker said.  “It’s like a relationship.  Sometimes they go great.  But sometimes she’s a cranky bitch and the bitch wears you out little by little until you don’t ever want to see her bitch face again.”

“You got it.”

“Where are you going?”

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

And that’s the story of The Love.

If solving a problem is like throwing a punch, then owning a problem is like going jujitsu on its ass.

Once in the past, I was lucky enough to see a competitor’s “kill sheet”* for a product that I was involved with.  It was full of lies — blatant, demonstrably false lies.  We dealt with it internally, but that didn’t make me happy.

What would have made me happy?  Posting the document on our website and tearing their arguments to shreds.  At worst, we would address the complaints and FUD about our app.  At best, the competitor would send us a takedown notice, thereby proving they wrote that crap.

I call this philosophy “owning your problems.”  Anytime someone complains about you or does something to piss you off, turn it to your advantage.  In my case, we solved the problem but we never owned the problem.

Another example is the Palm Pre vs. Apple iTunes battle.  Palm hacked their Pre cell phone so it would sync with iTunes.  In response, Apple modified iTunes to stop syncing with the Pre.  Next, Palm updated the Pre to sync with iTunes again.  It went back and forth for a bit until Palm gave in to Apple.

If I was Apple, not only would I allow the Pre to sync with iTunes, I would let any phone sync with iTunes.  Palm’s attempt to leverage iTunes is a concession that iTunes is superior to any sync application Palm can make.  Apple may feel good about their solution, but they missed the opportunity to own the problem.

At its core, this is an issue of control.  Are you going to let your competitors control the conversation?  Or can you make the conversation your own?  There’s money in it too; Get Satisfaction and Brands in Public built businesses where you have to pay them to own your problems.

The next time you’re facing a problem caused by some external entity, ask yourself if you’re solving the problem or owning the problem.  Are you fixing it or turning it to your advantage?  Chances are you’re missing an opportunity to leap a mile instead of crawling an inch.

One last example.  A Jets player twittered about his lack of play time.  The coach responded by benching the player for a week.  Problem solved.

If I was the coach, how would I own this problem?  I would have twittered back:

@davidclowney work harder and you’ll get more play time. Now put your phone down and get back to practice.

That’s owning your problem, and with 34 characters to spare.

*A “kill sheet” is a list of points you can use to eliminate a competitor during a sales process.

I signed up for Google Voice.  Mostly I wanted to see how it works.  I paired it with my cell phone, but I haven’t used it since.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine replaced his cell number with his Google Voice account.  I sent him a text from my cell phone to his Google Voice number a few days ago.

And the text showed up in MY Google Voice account too.

I tried it again to make sure.  Screenshot is below (phone number is obscured to protect my friend):

Why is the message I sent from my phone to my friend’s Google Voice account appearing in my account?  That means Google decided that messages received by and sent from his account should appear in mine too.

To be clear, I didn’t use my Google Voice account when sending or receiving the message.  Google looked at the phone number, matched it up with my account, then stuck it in my inbox.  To date, the only messages in my Google Voice inbox are the welcome message and the texts to that person.

This is a ridiculous security and privacy hole.  If you swiped someone else’s phone for just a minute, you could attach it to a Google Voice account then receive all texts between that person and any Google Voice user.

I’ve been a big fan of Google’s past products, but this is the first time I’ve ever been freaked out by something they’ve done.  I hope Google realizes the flaw here and fixes it quickly.

Once again,  the porn industry is one step ahead of everyone in adapting to changing technology.

Not long ago, the New York Times covered recent changes in the porn industry.  The LA Times also covered similar changes for the west coast porn industry.  I’ll save you the trouble of reading the articles; here are the two main lessons.

Lesson 1: The internet has forever changed distribution.

But you knew that already.  For the porn industry, peak DVD revenue occurred in 2006.  Since 2007, industry revenue has declined between 30% and 50%.  The impact of the internet here is obvious.

Lesson 2: The internet has forever changed production.

The main vehicle for porn used to be the movie — VHS or DVD.  Porn was produced in movie-sized chunks.  This requires scrips, a couple of hours of content, editing, packaging, etc.

Today, people consume porn on the internet by the sex scene.  Why bother with scripts, DVD packaging, or filler content?  Instead, just film the fucking and throw it online one scene at a time.

Porn is now produced in the same format that it’s consumed.

And this has forever changed the industry.  Porn stars don’t need to read scripts or learn their lines; they just go straight into the action.

This is the newest lesson from the porn industry.  They’ve learned to change their production to match the distribution. And the porn stars, as the articles discuss, are now having to cope with less work, cheaper pay, and more competition.

From what I can tell, most industries have not come to this realization.  In fact, the music industry is working on a format for “digital albums” — a sure sign that they’re in denial about the changing nature of music production.

Meanwhile, Radiohead has figured it out.  They’ve released their last two tracks individually on the net — one free via bittorrent, the other for pay to a charitable cause.  This is a band that understands the new reality of music production.

This new production goes beyond music.  Open source software embodies this by gathering the contributions of many distributed programmers into a single project, making the “newest” product available to anyone at any time.  Compare that to businesses who throw all their coders into a room and release new versions whenever they feel like.

Similarly, this is the difference between waterfall and agile project management.  The waterfall method is great if you’re going to put software on CDs, stick them in boxes, and ship them out on trucks; waterfall emphasizes getting everything done one year after you started.

Agile development is great if you want your customers to get the newest version as fast as you can code. It emphasizes keeping the product ready to ship at any moment (and being able to ship it out at a moment’s notice).

All this is a long way of saying that our means of production haven’t caught up to our means of distribution. If you’re trying to think about the next new thing, think about how you can use technology and the internet to improve production of anything — arts, goods, ideas, bananas.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep my eye on the porn industry in case I stumble upon any new… um… revelations.

This is about sandwiches. Yep, sandwiches.

A good sandwich is a work of art — where the meat is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe. Any place that makes a good sandwich is worthy of a repeat visit, especially if I can make it there and back during lunch.

When I go to a sandwich shop for the first time, I check the menu.  What kind of sandwiches do they offer?  What kind of toppings?

What kind of bread?

“We have sourdough roll, multi-grain roll, and dutch crunch.”

Unless they make their own bread, all the sandwich shops in the bay area serve the same breads.  All of them.  And they all answer that question in the exact same order: sourdough, multi-grain, and dutch crunch.

What can you learn from this?  First, be a bread maker; it’s a good business to be in.  In San Francisco, if you’re eating a sandwich, you’re probably eating Wedemeyer Bakery bread.  And remember — there’s room for more than one breadmaker in a town.

Second, if you’re not a skilled breadmaker, make a better sandwich.  Mr. Pickles is good for the speed and cost, but Bonne Sante‘s chicken and prosciutto is a sandwich that I would drive for miles to get.

And there ya go. Make bread or make a better sandwich.

It’s amazing what sandwiches have to teach us.

Did you hear the one about the Google designer who didn’t want to improve his designs with data?

The New York Times covered the story of the Google designer who defected to Twitter because Google was hellbent on testing designs to pick the best one.

Deciding which design is “best” depends on what school of design you come from. Here’s a cheat sheet for the big three — their philosophy, criteria for good design, and a phrase you might hear such a designer say.

Data-centered design

Philosophy	Test everything and let the numbers be your guide.
“Best” criteria	Crunch the numbers and find the best combinations.
Key quote	We’ve got web tracking. What do the metrics tell us?

Design driven

Philosophy	Designers know best; follow your heart and best practices.
“Best” criteria	It just feels right.
Key quote	That’s doesn’t work for me. Can we try it one more time?

User-centered design

Philosophy	You gotta find the problem before you can build the solution.
“Best” criteria	It solves their problems, and they love it.
Key quote	You can’t read their minds. Can we talk to them?

But these design philosophies don’t live in separate silos. They can easily coexist.

For example, a data-driven designer should be very interested to know why the numbers ended up as they did. To find out, you can turn to your underlying design principles (design-driven) or ask people (user-centered).

Similarly, a design-driven person should make sure the designs resound with real people (user-centered) and that the results pan out when launched (data-driven).

And a user-centered designer should look at statistics to see where problems are occurring (data-driven) and trust gut feelings when translating user feedback into feature ideas (design-driven).

There’s room for everyone in the design world. How narrow-minded do you have to be to ruthlessly test everything? Or not to trust your design instinct? Or not talk to people about their problems?

One way of coping with the reality of design is to leave your company because you couldn’t find a way to balance your design sensibilities with the company goals. *cough* doesn’t play well with others *cough*

But I think there’s no such thing as the “right” way of approaching design problems. You should always look to expand your design horizons, even if you have to venture into new disciplines or combat your own opinions.

Design is as much about your opinion (design-driven) as it is your audience’s (user-centered) and your employer’s (data-driven). The best designs come from a healthy acceptance of all three.

By the way, does anyone know which line size — 3px, 4px, or 5px — worked best? I’d love to know.

in flagrante delicto — caught in the act

Here’s a quick lesson on the importance of watching people while they use your products in the context where the products are used.

Some time ago, I was leaving the movie theater in the mall when I passed by some people using the touch screen information kiosk.  There were three or four of them huddled around the screen — talking, pointing, touching — trying to find something.

Two of them in particular were the primary drivers of the touch screen.  Frequently, they would both touch the screen at the same time in different places, leading to random results; the next page that displayed was different than what either person had touched.

Unfortunately, this screen was built to operate on a single touch.  If two people touch it at the same time in different places, it records a touch at the midpoint of those touches.  The two people at the screen that day didn’t know it but their information retrieval goal was subverted by the screen’s designers.

More recently, I was using a Coke touch screen vending machine when my nephew came over and started playing with it at the same time.  The same thing happened; the screen didn’t handle multiple touches, and the result was neither my nephew or I got what we expected.

Two lessons here.  First, single-touch screens are obsolete.  If you’re building a touch-screen device, multi-touch is the only way to go.

Second, always watch people use your products in real situations.  Unless you sat and watched that kiosk all day, you would never know that single-touch was causing so many problems.

No usability test or lab setting can reproduce the infinite variety of reality.