• Jesus Malverde – Mexican “patron saint” of drug dealers
  His image, which is thought to offer protection from the law, can be found on T-shirts and household cleaners. The poor also pray to him for money and safe passage across the border into the U.S.

Don’t forget, my upcoming Design Research Methods class is in 3 weeks. If you’re planning on signing up, you might want to do so sooner, rather than later, as registration is steadily filling up.

Hope to see you there!

Another culture-revealing promotion: a hearing aid that looks like a bluetooth earpiece (or “cell phone ear adapter”).

If a conventional hearing aid sounds like an embarrassment to you, try the Stealth Secret Sound Amplifier. It looks just like a cell phone ear adapter and works as a sound enhancer so you can join conversations and even hear soft voices from 50 feet away. Now you can enjoy the best of both worlds: a more youthful appearance and better hearing.

As we’ve written before, one strategy to lower barriers to adoption is to disguise one behavior to look like another one that is more normal. It’s interesting that the Bluetooth earpiece is presented as normal enough to be desirable over the hearing aid. I guess it’s better to be a young douche than an old fart?

Previously: The Ultimate Tech Accessory

Thanks, Amy!

• Designing What’s Right for Consumers – an awesome rant by David Pogue (free NYT reg req’d)
  “Maybe this guy is rightness challenged. maybe he meant that getting things right takes time, money & effort, which is true. But it sounds like he’s saying that it’s hard to know what’s right in product design, and he’ll never convince me of that.”

According to the Chinese Zodiac, this is the year of the Rat. The Japanese use the Chinese Zodiac symbols (but a different calendar) and so they launched their Year of the Rat in January, 2008. Here are some samples of rat imagery from that period:

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

I walked down to the local fire station early yesterday morning to vote. It’s always a small thrill to start seeing the orange VOTE signs start to appear like Halloween pumpkins.

New at the polls this year: the “Secrecy Sleeve,” a paper folder with an oddly alarming name. The Secrecy Sleeve keeps your ballot away from prying eyes during the long journey from the voting booth to the scanner that swallows it up when you’re done voting.

And when you’re done, a sticker to show that you voted. A practice reminiscent of the colored star stickers we used to receive for finishing a piece of work in elementary school. Funny how pleasing it still is to get a sticker for doing something.

Walking home, I was thinking about how badly the special pen for marking the ballot worked, and how so often very basic elements of complex systems get overlooked. When it occurred to me that I wasn’t getting rocks thrown at me, and there were no security forces with automatic weapons standing guard. So I figured I should cut them some slack about the pen.

• eBay to eliminate negative feedback from sellers
  Recommendation systems are imperfect and arbitrary. Users game them, system makers change them. Like Churchill said about democracy as a form of government, it’s the world’s worst, except for all the rest.

When Netflix movies arrive, the barcode on the DVD envelope peeks through a window on the back of the outer envelope. When I put the DVD back in and seal it up before returning it, should I make sure the barcode is still lined up? There’s no indication this is necessary, nor is it very easy to do since there are eight different ways (four edges and front/back) to orient the DVD).

At this point in Netflix’s history there has been a lot written about their sorting process and envelope design; the whole Netflix experience smacks of optimization (plenty of feedback by email or RSS, consistently rapid shipping in either direction, and of course, the throttling scandal). So it makes some sort of sense that they are scanning incoming packages and those that are scannable will be returned (and the next movie sent out) fastest.

According to general consensus and the official word, this is false. It makes no difference; it’s only scanned when it’s sent out, not when it comes back in.

This gap between perception and reality can create real challenges for companies that deliver technology solutions, hoping that the user’s mental model matches to the engineers or designer’s mental model. We worked with a software vendor who had a loyal customer base using a time-intensive transactional system. We heard many stories from these customers about how the system “really” worked. Some had conducted experiments to document their beliefs. Even as our client brought in increasingly senior technologists to explain the way their product worked, people found ways to justify their own model. The technology decisions in the product were arbitrary (some thresholds for the number of milliseconds, or the number of transactions, etc. were refined to some point over time, from 25 to 15 to 10). The fact that the system was being tweaked created mistrust and lent credence to the customer’s theories about what was really going on behind the scenes. Transparency isn’t sufficient; there were other business decisions our client was making that were not seen as being in the best interest of their customers and so that really colored how they viewed the partial information about the technological workings.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Put another way, we often develop complex and irrational mental models about technology. The joke that “a clean car goes faster” demonstrates how we attach emotional attributes to some product or system, despite an intellectual awareness that it isn’t true.

I just sealed up my Netflix envelope; it took some will power to not fiddle with the barcode. Sure, there’s the written word that says it won’t make a difference. But, it just might, maybe, right?

• Influx Interview: Steve Portigal, Design Thinker
  Thanks to Ed Cotton from Influx Insights/BSSP for the honor/opportunity.

Theresa, my wife, just bought us both these wonderful lunch carriers made by the Japanese company Zojirushi. Besides being a simple, functional, aesthetically pleasing and complete solution to the problem of moving food around, my new lunch carrier gave me a cool cross-cultural experience today as I opened it up for lunch at work for the first time.

Last night, Theresa packed us both food for today. As I pulled the three separate, sealed containers out of the metal tube they sit in, wondering what would be in each one, I felt a deep sense of the shared enterprise that is my home life, and the caring that my containers filled with homemade food represented.

Reflecting back on the time I spent living in Japan, I thought about how this unpacking of a homemade lunch is an experience that many Japanese men (gender roles being what they are in Japan) have every day.

For the first time, I really felt how much that ritual-preparing, packing, unpacking, eating lunch-can express the emotional facet of shared lives.

Itedakimasu: I will receive.