Alex and I got accepted at Web 2.0 Expo, and in that fit of excitement, we came up with an idea for a SXSW talk.

We’re calling it: “People are Stupid, and How to Fix Them.”

Our over-dry description of the discussion:
There is nothing more certain than our ability to mess things up. We repeatedly make irrational, ignorant and naive decisions, fumbling through life with a broken compass.

Strangely, technology isn’t helping much. In interactions with people and things through a digital layer, our ineptitude is reaching a zenith. (And we mean more than Fail Blog.) Misplaced passwords, scammyness, broken check-in systems and lost trust are just some of the digital disasters affecting our success as a species.

We will present findings from in-depth interviews, site analytics from major online platforms, digital/real life ethnographic studies, and scholarly works to show how systems continually break under the weight of the human error.

These findings include remedial strategies and design recommendations – from button locations to business structures – to account for the digital dunces of the world.

Who it’s for:
This session will be perfect for anyone who designs things at any level (from user interfaces to user experiences), or considers design an important part of their business. Small business owners, entrepreneurs, media folks, and other strategists will also love the session.

Questions answered:

1. What are some common errors that occur within digital experiences?
2. What is the state of digital aptitude and how can we design for varying levels of ability?
3. How can we take 15 minutes off an airline passenger’s waiting/queueing time with digital?
4. What’s wrong with my website visitors and why aren’t they using my site correctly?
5. Why is Farmville so popular?

So when the Panel Picker comes out, vote for us!

May I offer another post?

• May 14, 2010 — Friday Make a Chart Day v.7! (4)
• April 12, 2010 — Size Does Matter (7)
• March 16, 2009 — Half Acre Beer Suprise. #goodbeer. Also, UXUP. (1)

New project! Falernum.

Falernum is a sweet, multi-layered essential syrup for tiki drinks, combining the flavors of allspice, clove, nutmeg, ginger, almond, and lime into one delicious fluid. And you can make it at home!

Based on a recipe from Kaiser Penguin, I’m combining a handful of allspice, 50 or so cloves, two nutmegs (all toasted in a pan) and the zest of 8 limes (ginger and almond soon to come). We’ll see how it turns out.

A pile of lime zest is one of the prettiest (and most pleasantly aromatic) things in the food world. Word of caution: do not underestimate the sharpness of a new microplane.

And the infusion in overproof rum. I’ll wait a day, add ginger, and then after another day blend in almond-sugar syrup. It’ll be awesome.

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• No Related Post

Whoa. This blog is four years old.

I can say now, looking back, that starting this blog was the best decision I’ve ever made in my career. The day I started it, I was an Account Executive at a 5-person advertising agency in the West Loop of Chicago. I had very little idea what I was doing, and I wanted to be a planner…mostly because I couldn’t easily become a “creative”.

Four years, 460 posts and 1,937 comments later, I’m in New York working with an incredibly smart and creative group of people, doing work I had always wanted to do.

And I have this blog – and importantly, the people who were so kind to have read it over these years – to thank for it.

So, thanks.

May I offer another post?

• January 18, 2009 — A new logo design (4)
• April 12, 2010 — Size Does Matter (7)
• April 10, 2010 — Report Up @ Canvas8 (1)

I coulda sworn I wrote about this video a while back, but it seems that I was mistaken.

Cordyceps is by far the coolest fungus genus I’ve ever seen. It’s also perhaps the most disgusting.

Some highlights from the video:

• Cordyceps is a genus of parasitic fungi that tend to infect insects; the spores of the fungus, once inhaled, take control of the infected insect’s mind
• The infected insect crawls up a branch to a prescribed height, and latches on to said branch with its teeth just before death
• The fungus then replaces the tissue inside the host, and eventually bursts through the insect’s exoskeleton
• The fruiting body of the fungus then distributes the spores onto the forest floor
• The Cordyceps genus contains thousands of species, each of which is designed to attack a single host species
• All of this is simultaneously awesome and disgusting

So…

Design for one particular host? I can dig that.

Design some thing that creates behavior change in the host, such that it is compelled to spread the…um…contagion in the most effective possible way? I’m still on board. Look at Farmville: as repulsive as it may be, the game is designed to reward people who share the most. For a happier case study of this kind of design, have a look at Dropbox, AKA my favorite web service EVER (sorry, Flickr).

Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned

In particular, check out slides 28-30. After a failed attempt to get users via search – and spending upwards of $200 per acquisition – they incentivized digital word-of-mouth by offering two-sided referral bonuses. If a new user shares a link to the Dropbox signup form, and their friends sign up via that form, BOTH players get extra storage. And Dropbox wins because it gets a new customer for the cost of (potentially) a couple gigs of storage space. Win.

And that’s that.

May I offer another post?

• March 7, 2010 — Microsoft Courier Interface: Awesome (2)
• May 26, 2009 — Ask Focus on Energy (7)
• August 21, 2008 — A night off (0)

Woo woo! We’re going on two months! If you don’t know how it works… you better ask somebody.

Or just send me your charts via Twitpic, yFrog, Flickr, email, whatever.

Bud drops some knowledge.

Mike talks etiquette.

Sam Chotiner, our newest Undercurrenter, describes a hotly debated topic from last night’s beer-ing session.

Mark explains how to make a million dollars. I imagine this is the same way most business plans are made.

Simon’s illustration of his productivity over time.

Rye’s iPad-drawn chart about charts.

Nate’s mutually exclusive/comprehensively exhaustive look at society and twitter.

Tim gets the award for first photographic chart of the week, as well as the first to introduce toilet humor (there’s always at least one every week).

Emily’s comparison of platforms and happiness.

Two more from Mark.

Christy, as always, nice work.

Colin’s distractions.

Undercurrenters can attest to the veracity of Sarah’s chart.

Nice one, Uberblond.

Ian is now a future-caster.

SUSHIMEAT, via Len.

This is perfect, John.

Nice design here, Hazel.

A lulzy contribution from Hank.

Nice, timely work from my favorite San Franciscan creative director, Guthrie.

Whoa. Eric took his honest pills today.

The results of a lunchtime taxonomy discussion.

From David.

The Pocket CMO relaxes on Fridays.

Sad, Dave.

May I offer another post?

• July 9, 2010 — SXSW: People are Stupid, and How to Fix Them. (0)
• April 21, 2010 — Innovation, Money-Making, and Public Services (2)
• April 16, 2010 — Stupid Movie Quote Infographic (0)

Far Out (Collage). 24” x 24” on a wood panel.

Untitled (Collage). Cut and glued comic books. 24” x 24” on a wood panel.

I like my cousin’s work.

May I offer another post?

• June 2, 2009 — Adam’s Letters: Opens June 23 (2)
• April 8, 2008 — Piece of Me, Piece of You (13)
• November 19, 2008 — Longing for Something Real (13)

Yesterday we were talking about the state of patent and copyright law, and whether it helps or hinders innovation.

Generally, the thinking was that “creator’s rights” encourage people to make things – if your invention is protected, you’re more likely to profit from it – but that after a certain point, competition-eliminating or world-changing innovations ought to be in the public domain. My brand-new colleague Joe pointed out that Jonas Salk famously did not patent the vaccine he created for Polio: “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” (Wikipedia)

I tend to agree with that statement.

May I offer another post?

• April 16, 2010 — Barrier-Utility Cheater’s Hypothesis (2)
• May 14, 2010 — Friday Make a Chart Day v.7! (4)
• April 16, 2010 — Stupid Movie Quote Infographic (0)

A while back, I got pretty interested in something called “Player Efficiency Rating” (PER). Being a fan of the NBA – and in particular the Lakers – I’m interested in the recent shift across some clubs to a more stats-based approach. It turns out that the teams that use “advanced statistics” to make personnel decisions and to inform their players before each game do significantly better than those that do not. “Advanced Statistics” are things like PER that use an algorithm to bring together multiple individual metrics into a single number. There are plenty of criticisms to this approach, many of which focus on the way the algorithm is built.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I looked at teams that have stats people integrated into the decision process. (Boston, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Oklahoma City, Portland and I may have included Orlando — I’m not certain what they do exactly.) It was seven or eight teams. They had won 60% of their games, and that’s counting Houston, which has only won half their games because they’re missing Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady wasn’t playing.

The teams that don’t have quants won 40-some percent. And it was pretty linear … the more or less they had someone integrated into their decision making, the more or less they were at the extremes of winning and losing. [Emphasis mine]
TrueHoop – The State of Basketball Analysis

I’ll reiterate the main point for emphasis: NBA teams that use a stats-based approach win 60% of their games, while those that don’t win 40%.

But I guess *my* point is not that stats-based approaches are always the way to go, but rather that if you’re going to take a stats-based approach, it’s important to really think hard about how (and why) you’re using data.

Which leads me to a quick dissection of the state of nerdery in basketball today:

That, friends, is the formula for PER. It takes all the valuable individual metrics for a player (which have been recorded since around 1950) and rolls them up into one number that represents the total contribution of a single player per minute of each game. There are plenty of other ways to judge players using advanced metrics, including Adjusted +/- (how the team does when a player is on the floor versus off), Rebound Rate (just what it sounds like) and Wins Added (also what it sounds like).

And while I won’t bore you with an explanation of every portion of the algorithm, you can see that it takes into account good things (points scored and how they’re scored, blocks, steals, rebounds, assists) and bad things (turnovers, shots missed, fouls), and includes the team’s pace-of-play in comparison to the overall league. Each of the “contributions” is weighted to essentially create an index where the “average” player in the NBA has a PER of 15.

When you anecdotally compare players’ performances to their PER numbers, things start to make sense:

Only 14 times has a player posted a season efficiency rating over 30.0. All of them are between 30.23 and 31.84. Michael Jordan leads with four 30+ seasons, with Shaquille O’Neal and Wilt Chamberlain having accomplished three each, and LeBron James, David Robinson, Dwyane Wade and Tracy McGrady having accomplished one each. The 2008-2009 season was unique in that it was the only season in which more than one player (LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, with Chris Paul just missing the cut with a PER of 29.96) posted efficiency ratings of over 30.0.
Wikipedia – PER

I bring this up now because there’s a lot of talk lately of the value of a “fan” on Facebook (or rather, the value of a “liker”), and the analysis seems pretty shallow. Compare PER (judging the value of an NBA player per minute of play) to the formula proposed by Vitrue and Edelman for the value of a “fan”/”liker”:

Don’t get me wrong: there is absolutely value in a fan relationship that can be measured by looking at the free impressions that relationship creates. And while it’s nice to have a low-level algorithm to determine that component of a fan’s “value”, I think we can do a whole heck of a lot better.

To me, judging fan value by how many free impressions they can create seems like judging an NBA player only by their free-throw shooting ability. Or even by how fast they can run end-to-end on a court. Or in a pretty good case by their PER. In all cases, there’s a much bigger picture to take into account.

Take into account this bit from a fascinating article in the Times Magazine from last year, about analyzing the performance of players like Shane Battier, the “No Stats All-Star”:

There are other things Morey has noticed too, but declines to discuss as there is right now in pro basketball real value to new information, and the Rockets feel they have some. What he will say, however, is that the big challenge on any basketball court is to measure the right things. The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team’s elements. To get at this they need something that basketball hasn’t historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. (“Someone created the box score,” Morey says, “and he should be shot.”) How many points a player scores, for example, is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. Another example: if you want to know a player’s value as a rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player’s zone. [Emphasis mine]
Times Magazine – The No-Stats All-Star

I’m not arguing that the creators of the “Fan Value” metric should be shot, but none of us should feel good with an impressions-based valuation of fan relationships. Instead, I’d argue that each business needs to figure out (as basketball nerds already have):

• What constitutes a “win”
• Who/what contributes to those wins
• How those contributions are made
• and Who else competes for those contributions

Only then can you figure out the value of a fan.

Or not. Thanks to Mike and Alex for looking at this pre-post.

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I stole the very good idea and even better design from FlowingData’s Data Underload section to create this “info” graphic about some of my favorite movie lines, from some of the stupidest (and awesomest) movies of all time.

I hope you enjoy it. I enjoyed making it. It was a long, tiring, good week, and doing a bit of design just now was quite enjoyable. Now I’m off to the Foursquare Day party. Hope to see you there.

May I offer another post?

• January 27, 2010 — FEED’s Irresponsible Infographics (9)
• May 14, 2010 — Friday Make a Chart Day v.7! (4)
• April 21, 2010 — Innovation, Money-Making, and Public Services (2)

In theory, people maximize their lives by weighing costs and perceived utility for goods and services. What this chart presupposes is…maybe they do the same when it comes to (a) Sex and (b) Digital Things?

This isn’t groundbreaking stuff, but it was worth a quick discussion yesterday at work and (as usual) a quick whiteboard diagram. So if you’re faced with a scenario where you have the opportunity to cheat (on your wife or on your favorite digital service), use these handy charts.

High barrier, low utility? Don’t cheat. This is why VIRB never became a serious part of my life, and Facebook continues to be my leading lady. It would take too much effort to recreate all my connections elsewhere, so it’s very hard to tempt me with beautiful design and cool features. Sorry, VIRB. You’re hot, but not hot enough. However, it’s my position that creating artificially high barriers to cheating is actually a bad thing when it comes to digital experience.

Barrier-Utility Equilibrium is the likely source of many marital problems. In the case of Tiger, the barrier should have been high: gorgeous wife, child, potential multi-billion-dollar losses due to a tarnished image, etc. But his perceived utility was able to overcome any mental barrier, and the rest is history. This equilibrium, I imagine, occurs mostly with new services, where both the barrier and utility is low. Why not try Gowalla AND Foursquare, if the winner in location-based services is unclear?

High utility, low barrier? Definitely cheat. If it were easy for me to move everything to a brand-new and clearly better system – including connections, photos, permalinks, etc. – that would be pretty attractive, right?

Interestingly, Wordpress and the 37signals services encourage cheating: they allow users to easily take their data and migrate it to new platforms. But as far as I can tell, they don’t suffer much churn because the alternative services don’t provide enough utility. It’s also my belief that the creation of a barrier-less platform actually reduces the perceived utility of other services.

But perhaps I’m not thinking straight. Happy Friday!

May I offer another post?

• April 21, 2010 — Innovation, Money-Making, and Public Services (2)
• April 9, 2010 — Friday Make A Chart Day (v2) (4)
• May 14, 2010 — Friday Make a Chart Day v.7! (4)