10,000 hours of practice – unpicked

Nice pop explanation at Salon of the need for quality, spaced practice, not just massed practice. This is one of my favourite, non-intuitive and robust psychological phenomena, first demonstrated in the late 19th century (by Ebbinghaus) and replicated in multiple studies subsequently.

[via Katja Battarbee]

Lent calendars

Looking at Christian Aid's Lent calendars for grown ups...

and for children...

... and think the kids are getting a better deal. (Clever idea, though.)

Making air safety information palatable

Virgin America's recently released air safety video is getting a bit of press at the moment. Fun on first viewing but even then, too long. Thomson's approach (as a holiday company, aimed at a different audience) is probably equally grating after too much exposure but, at least, is shorter.

I can imagine they both hold the viewers' attention longer than a flight attendant miming to a voice over, but wonder if anyone has tested information retention as a result.

Writing for the web

Some of our recent work at Centre for Information Design Research for GOV.UK has just been published and blogged. We looked at GOV.UK's internal guidelines for text preparation for the web and provided research background that either supported their guidelines or suggested different approaches to presenting information. Many government web sites are not just providing information, but explaining to people how to do things (make applications, check eligibility, provide evidence etc.) and it is this 'reading to do' that needs particular support in carefully crafted text that is comprehensive but also navigable and concise.

Employee manual from heaven...

...according to Mark Barratt. Valve's manual does, indeed, achieve an imaginative (as you might expect) balance of information, inspiration, reassurance, humour and self-deprecation (passing over the section on T-shaped people). A new benchmarking standard.

[Image from BoingBoing]

Too much information to visualise...

...so why not develop computer programmes to visualise without human input. Agrawala, Wilmot and Berthouzoz (of Berkeley Computer Science lab and Adobe Systems) have done that and describe their methods of
- analysing hand-drawn visualisations to understand the design principles behind them
- relating those principles to research in perception and cognition
- and then, using visualisation tools based on the principles, testing people's response to the visualisations they produce.
In the process they explain why people find hand drawn maps easier to use than general-purpose maps when trying to find routes (see another discussion if the principles of hand-drawn maps in an interview with Paul Stiff), and they improve on shop assembly instructions for flat-pack furniture.

I like the strong user focus of their studies:
'We find it critical to involve users early on...[their] feedback is essential for identifying problems and ensuring our design principles and the visualisations converge on effective designs.'

How to read a magazine

Lovely parody of instructional screens, by Khol Vinh, following his post on over-complex instruction overlays (most of which will never be read) for iPad and other apps. My issue is that these instructions often aren't easily found after first use i.e. at the time people start realising they're probably not using a tool efficiently and want to find out quickly what they're missing.

[via Eye magazine]

Stonehenge IKEA style

 

Here

[via John Naughton]

Integrated product information

The reverse of a Jamie serving dish. Apparently '...happy in the dishwasher, safe in the microwave, fine in the fridge and freezer'. A little arch but always there when needed.

Involving patients in checklists

Since graduation season in June I've noticed links to commencement address transcripts (e.g. Jeff Bezos's brief but heartwarming address to the Princeton Baccalaureate, synopsis: 'OK, be clever, but also be kind, have a little humility').

On a different scale (but, actually, a related topic as, I suppose, all such addresses must be), Atul Gawande's address to Stanford medicine graduates considers the knowledge demands and ethical dilemmas doctors now face. He puts the increasing complexity of current medical decision-making  into context:

When penicillin was discovered, in 1929, it suggested that treatment of disease could be simple—an injection that could miraculously cure a breathtaking range of infectious diseases. Maybe there’d be an injection for cancer and another one for heart disease. It made us believe that discovery was the only hard part. Execution would be easy.

To emphasise the difficulty of execution he cites examples of a medical procedure being overlooked in complex cases (administration of antibacterial vaccines after splenectomy), with dire consequences for patients. These are cases (and he alludes to others) where patients have complex conditions that are handled across different medical teams. So I suppose it is likely that the checklist approach that appears to reduce error in decision-making would be difficult to apply here. But, actually, Gawande has also written positively (in 2007) about the potential of checklists, for which he interviewed Peter Pronovost, who initiated their use in medical settings. Pronovost's comments reflect Gawande's train of thought at Stanford:

The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine. That’s a mistake, a huge mistake. And from a taxpayer’s perspective it’s outrageous.

There's another resource here, too, the neglect of which might also be described as outrageous: the patient (if capable) or their family, the people who know the patient best and care about them most as a whole person, rather than a collection of medical problems. I'm not saying doctors don't care, and don't consult families but that families are not drawn on as a support to reduce medical error. There are shining examples of patient and family involvement in medical care, especially in non-acute settings such as childbirth, treatment of chronic illnesses etc. But if they had the right kind of empowerment and information, patients and their families, could also prevent omissions and error in acute settings.Medical dramas frequently portray interfering families who have to be rebuffed by inspired physicians who must make critical decisions that, in the end, win the day. That stereotype comes from somewhere.
 

My own limited experience, for example, has been that it's worthwhile checking a radiographer knows which side of your body they should be x-raying (there are worse stories, real, not apocryphal, of surgery carried out on the wrong side), that doctors are looking at your x-ray and not that of someone who shares your name, that doctors really have checked through any contra-indications of any drugs they might prescribe. I'm sure many people have similar errors or near-errors to report. In the power relations, even of a non-critical medical context, these can still be difficult things for a patient to feel comfortable about checking (although there's some encouragement to do so here). How much more pressure there is to assume (and, indeed, hope) the doctors haven't missed any details when things get critical: these are clinical procedures, the experts' exclusive domain...

...unless checklists become an open tool for communicating beyond the professional team and (back to Bezos) there's humility enough to embrace them.

[Bezos address via John Naughton]

Wahaca customer experience: nice after-taste

Thought these match books presented with the bill at Wahaca (sic) were a bit retro.


But they're not matches. They're packs of chilli seeds ready to plant.

You cannot not read the instructions

Well done, Orange, for packaging their 'first steps' instructions so that it's near impossible to extract a new phone without reading them (you can see I almost ripped the box trying to get to the phone).

But, oh dear, so great is their enthusiasm for you to start your Orange experience that their initial instructions could result in you losing the contacts on your old SIM.

No, don't register your SIM card first. Wait until you've transferred your contacts over from your old SIM, as they mention on the next page.

Hope that's not too late for some customers...

Ticket machines - still a problem

I noticed this sign at Slough railway station today, the scratches round the coin slot testimony to users' frustration with a temperamental coin travel. Fortunately the width of the machine (I suspect dictated by the space required for the coin travel) meant there was space for First Great Western to ask customers to be patient and listen to each coin drop before inserting the next. Not new technology. You'd hope it could have been sorted by now.

The touch screen interface is also pretty awful for the first time user, and there were long queues on my outward (rush hour) journey, as people struggled through their transactions. By the time I returned and took this photo, the machine had given up (too full of pesky coins? run out of tickets?) and was 'Not in service'.

Cables 101

The nerd in me loves this. From the NY Times Personal Tech pages: a basic guide to all the cables you will need for most media set ups. Each cable is named and its purpose described. There is a sleek slide show to accompany it.

[via PopGadget]

Building coordinates

A new university hall of residence is being assembled close to my house (hopefully it will look better than this when finished):


Walking past, I've notice small yellow tickets attached to each pre-fabricated unit of the building:


I wondered whether they were job numbers, delivery addresses for the unit, return to sender labels or, as it turns out, coordinates to assist in the assembly of the building:

Some years ago, when I moved house, I used the same technique (Post-its) to label the elements of a storage unit that I had to disassemble then reassemble after the move. Somehow I'd expect something more sophisticated in the world of construction.

Errors in intensive care

BBC reports an international study, published in BMJ, showing that 4 out of 5 ITUs studied in a 24 hour period made errors in administering injected drugs, the most frequent being wrong timings or missed doses, but sometimes also incorrect doses or use of the wrong drug. Staff cited working under pressure and being over-tired as factors contributing to their errors, but changes in drug names, poor communication between staff and non-adherence to protocols also contributed. A suitable case for treatment by design of both products and systems.

The power of checklists

According to an Ian Wylie in the FT, implementation of the co-pilot's checklist for emergency landings may have contributed to the recent safe landing of a US Airways flight on the Hudson River. Wylie describes how checklists have also reduced the incidence of post-operative wound infections by focusing surgeons on basic procedures that might be missed due to time pressure and distractions. Checklists are now being applied to financial management - maybe a little too late.

The article gives a checklist for compiling checklists from Peter Pronovost, who has introduced checklist culture into many organisations. They sound so obvious but it's easy to understand how this kind of simplification may initially appear difficult to implement in many work contexts:

- Seek out relevant guidelines or an evidence summary - if one does not exist, tap into the "wisdom of crowds" by canvassing views from diverse sources.
- Compile a list of potential actions.
- Select those with the strongest impact and the lowest barriers to use.
- Translate each action into an explicit, concise and unambiguous behaviour.
- Use simple, direct and unambiguous language.
- Insert a "challenge and response" if a second person needs to verify that each item has been completed.
- Keep it short - if necessary, separate the process into substeps and create a checklist for each one.
- Review it often - checklists must be dynamic and evolve in light of new evidence.

Improving on CAPTCHA

As CAPTCHA proves susceptible to spammers (OCR-based software can crack CAPTCHAs) better ways of keeping out bots are being researched, for example replacing the CAPTCHA task with graphic or image-based tasks, such as drawing round the outline of a specific image or giving a group name to a set of pictures. According to this Computer World review a key difficulty is finding tasks and task descriptions that enable users to understand rapidly what is required of them. To quote: 'These tests do have their shortcomings. For starters, what is clear to the designers may not be clear to users.'

Via Mindhacks

Satnavs and human behaviour

This weekends' FT Magazine includes an article on the impact of satnav devices (apparently in the UK 35% of vehicles have either built in or portable satnavs, more than anywhere else in Europe, more even than the 33% in Japan). The article includes some incredible (literally) reports of peoples' dogged adherence to their satnav's instructions, even when it leads them on to a level crossing or through an impassable ford.

The FT asks why people ignore external cues (signs saying a ford is too deep, the look and feel of a level crossing gate) to follow their satnav's instructions (especially when drivers are so ready to dispute navigators' instructions). Tom Stewart of Systems Concepts comments that people become fixed in a pattern of behaviour, following the satnav's instructions to extremes; he makes a parallel with people's use of calculators for simple sums. There may be something in this but I also think there is an element of drivers over-estimating their safety once cocooned in their cars, similar to the (not undisputed) effect wearing seatbelts has on the safety of drivers' behaviour.

Amazon frustration-free packaging

It's good to see Amazon's (mainly .com, more than .co.uk) initiative on user- and eco-considerate packaging, aimed at alleviating 'wrap rage.' The steel-wire ties pictured in their third illustration (tiny pic here) here are my bugbear: designed to thwart that moment of instant gratification when a child's birthday present is opened. I also seethe at blister packaging that cannot be opened without tearing the instruction card at the same time. Amazon have started in exactly the right place, in a collaboration with companies including Fischer-Price and Mattel. More at their 'Gallery of Wrap Rage.'