It is interesting to consider how many more benign behaviours might be made possible through semantic invention. I have always thought, for instance, that the word ‘downsizing’, which is used not only as a euphemism for redundancies, but in another sense refers to the voluntary decision by ‘empty nesters’ to move to a smaller and more manageable home, is a very useful coinage. It allows older people in needlessly large homes to portray their move to a smaller house as a choice born out of preference, rather than – as it may otherwise be assumed to be – a compromise born of financial necessity. Create a name, and you’ve created a norm.*
2.6: How Colombians Re-Imagined Lionfish (With a Little Help from Ogilvy and the Church)
When Hurricane Andrew hit the south-eastern US in 1992, it was the worst hurricane in US history. It caused incalculable damage both to property and to the environment; however, its biggest environmental effect, perhaps, was not the loss of a species, but the opposite. In South Florida, the hurricane burst a large coastal aquarium tank, releasing an unwelcome species of fish into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.
The lionfish comes from the tropical waters around Indonesia. Though beautiful to look at, it is a voracious predator of other fish, and is able to eat as many as 30 in half an hour. Furthermore, one female lionfish can produce over two million eggs per year, which was a particular problem in the Caribbean, where it has no natural predators. The decimation of local species threatened the environment and the economics of Colombia, much of which depends on fishing. It was also destroying the ecology of coral reefs. This was when some colleagues of mine borrowed an idea from Frederick the Great; Ogilvy & Mather in Bogotá decided that the solution was to create a predator for the lionfish – humans. The simplest and most cost-effective way to rid Colombia’s waters of lionfish was to encourage people to eat them, which would encourage anglers to catch them. The agency recruited the top chefs in Colombia and encouraged them to create lionfish recipes for the best restaurants. As they explained, a lionfish is poisonous on the outside but delicious on the inside, so they created an advertising campaign titled ‘Terribly Delicious’. Working with the Colombian Ministry of the Environment, they generated a cultural shift by turning the invader into an everyday food. Lionfish soon appeared in supermarkets. Some 84 per cent of Colombians are Roman Catholic, so they asked the Catholic Church to recommend lionfish to their congregations on Fridays and during Lent. That additional element – recruiting the Catholic Church – was the true piece of alchemy. Today, indigenous fish species are recovering and the lionfish population is in decline.*
2.7: The Alchemy of Design
We know how to design physical objects to fit the shape of the human hand quite well. Unless you are a small child, or you are staying in a pretentious boutique hotel where everything is chosen to signal ‘Hey, we’re totally different,’* door handles are generally found at a height and in a shape that suits your frame. Good designers know to create objects which work well with our evolved physique, even if those parts of our bodies originally evolved for entirely different purposes; we did not evolve hands to hold car steering wheels, nor did we develop sticky-out ears in order to stop our spectacles falling off, but good designers know that such features can be useful for purposes other than those for which they were selected.
In general, the physical world is designed fairly well. There are some scandalous exceptions,* but for the most part we do a reasonable job, because we accept that our bodies are a funny shape and design objects to work with them. Even better, in wealthier countries we now design the environment to suit people who are less fit than the average person, or do not have full use of all their limbs. This practice has been driven by groups campaigning on behalf of disabled people, and in a few cases probably has been slightly overengineered, though it has also brought many unexpected benefits to people other than those for whom it was primarily intended – for, in reality, all of us are disabled some of the time. If you are carrying heavy luggage, staircases are almost unusable. If you are carrying a cup of coffee, you have effectively lost the use of a hand. If you wear glasses but do not have them on, you are visually impaired.
Even when you are designing for the able-bodied, it is a good principle to assume that the user is operating under constraints. This is why a door handle is better than a door knob: it allows you to open a door with your elbow – either because you do not have any hands, or because your hands are holding cups of tea. The provision of wheelchair ramps at airports may benefit the owners of rolling suitcases almost as much as wheelchair users. Subtitles meant for the ‘hard of hearing’ are likewise useful if you want to watch television in a bar or airport, or while your children are asleep.*
This sort of design can be sound business practice: some years ago, British Telecom introduced a telephone for the visually impaired, with enormous buttons. To their great surprise, this model became their bestselling product; it was a phone that able-bodied people were easily able to use while lying on their side in bed and not wearing their glasses. OXO Good Grips is a highly successful manufacturer of kitchen utensils that applies this principle to the wider world: Sam Farber started the company because his wife suffered from arthritis and had difficulty using kitchen implements – very rapidly, the ease of use and comfort of its well-designed products expanded its popularity into the able-bodied population. It’s worth remembering that products designed for people with imperfect grip also work well for people with wet hands – common in cooking.*
Eventually most physical objects, by a form of natural selection, acquire a shape and function matched to our evolved preferences and instincts. After a few decades, this principle came to extend to software interface design.* Finger gestures such as pointing, clicking, pinch-to-zoom and so forth have become the default modes of interaction with technological devices, simply because they closely resemble the instinctive movements we have been making for a few hundred thousand years or more.*
This fencing sword was designed for fencers who had lost fingers, though the handle design was eventually adopted by professional fencers with the full number of fingers.
The three principal modern forms of media consumption device, the laptop/desktop computer, the tablet and the mobile phone, are also products of the human form. Of the millions of hypothetical possibilities* there are, effectively, three comfortable modes for the human body: 1) standing up, 2) lying down and 3) sitting upright. The three devices with which we access digital content mirror these fairly well. A mobile device for when you are moving about, a tablet for laid-back use and a laptop or desktop for when you are sitting up at desk.*
But while it is accepted that physical objects are designed around the evolved human frame, it is not universally accepted that the world is shaped to work with the evolved human brain. Mainstream economics, for the purposes of mathematical neatness, assumes that the human brain works like a clockwork device. A world designed by economists would be one where chairs were designed merely to stably support the weight of the sitter, with no regard given to physical comfort or padding. This is what you might call ‘aspergic design’ – design which gives consideration to the working of every part of the system, except the biological part.* But our brains have also evolved, and also shift in shape, just like our bodies.
A knowledge of the human physique is considered essential in designing a chair, but a knowledge of human psychology is rarely considered useful, never mind a requirement, when someone is asked to design a pension scheme, a portable music player or a railway. Who is the Herman Miller of pensions, or the Steve Jobs of tax-return design? These people are starting to emerge – but it has been a painfully long wait. If there is a mystery at the heart of this book, it is why psychology has been so peculiarly uninfluential in business and in policy-making when, whether done well or badly, it makes a spectacular difference.
2.8: Psycho-Logical Design: Why Less Is Sometimes More
Economic logic suggests that more is better. Psycho-logic often
believes that less is more. Akio Morita came from a Japanese family that had been involved in the production and sale of soy and miso sauce since the mid-seventeenth century. With his business partner Masaru Ibuka he founded Sony (as the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company) in 1946. Magnetic tape recorders were the company’s first area of focus, followed by the first fully transistorised pocket radio.* But his greatest moment of genius was perhaps the creation of the Sony Walkman, the ancestor of the iPod.
To anyone born after 1975 there is nothing outlandish about people walking around or sitting on a train wearing headphones, but in the late 1970s this was a very odd behaviour indeed; comparable to the use of an early cellphone in the late 1980s, when to use one in public carried a high risk of ridicule.* In market research, the Walkman aroused very little interest and quite a lot of hostility. ‘Why would I want to walk about with music playing in my head?’ was a typical response, but Morita ignored it. The request for the Walkman had initially come from the 70-year-old Ibuka, who wanted a small device to allow him to listen to full-length operas on flights between Tokyo and the US.*
When the engineers came back, they were especially proud. Not only had they succeeded in achieving what Morita had briefed them to create – a miniature stereo cassette player – they had also managed to include a recording function. I imagine they were crestfallen when Morita told them to remove that extra function. The technology involved,* given the economics of mass production, would have added no more than a few pounds to the final purchase price, so why would you not add this significant extra?* Any ‘rational’ person would have advised Morita to go with the engineers’ advice, but according to multiple accounts, Morita vetoed the recording button.
This defies all conventional economic logic, but it does not defy psycho-logic. Morita thought the presence of a recording function would confuse people about what the new device was for. Was it for dictation? Should I record my vinyl record collection onto cassette? Or should I record live music? In the same way that McDonald’s omitted cutlery from its restaurants to make it obvious how you were supposed to eat its hamburgers, by removing the recording function from Walkmans, Sony produced a product that had a lower range of functionality, but a far greater potential to a change behaviour. By reducing the possible applications of the device to a single use, it clarified what the device was for. The technical design term for this is an ‘affordance’, a word that deserves to be more widely known. As Don Norman observes:
‘The term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. [. . .] Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.’
Once you understand this concept, you can perhaps understand why Morita was right.* It is always possible to add functionality to something, but while this makes the new thing more versatile, it also reduces the clarity of its affordance, making it less pleasurable to use and quite possibly more difficult to justify buying.
The world is full of invisible intelligence of this kind. One defence I always make of traditional architecture is that it is user-friendly. A few years ago I was one of a group of people speaking at a conference in a brutalist 1960s building on the South Bank in London. All of us were wandering around the outside of the building, trying glass doors, unable to work out where we were supposed to go in. Say what you like about the British Museum, but nobody in 150 years has ever approached its classical portico and thought, ‘Hmm, I wonder where the door is?’
Imagine for a second a door with a handle and a ‘push plate’, above which appears the word PULSH. Had Sony produced a Walkman with a recording function, this is what it would have been. A PULSH – a thing whose function was not unambiguously clear. The Walkman also exploits a clear psychological heuristic, or rule of thumb – ‘the jack-of-all-trades-heuristic’, whereby we naturally assume that something that only does one thing is better than something that claims to do many things. Similarly, when we hear ‘sofa-bed’, we instinctively think of an item of furniture that is not great as a sofa and not much good as a bed, either. And some of you may have encountered a spork, an unsatisfactory spoon, which is rather less use as a fork.
Copyright © Shutterstock
Any idea where the door is?
Those of a scientific inclination will – quite fairly – make the point that there is no evidence that removing the recording function from the Walkman was a good idea. There is no parallel universe in which a multi-function model was launched and subsequently flopped. It is also true that recording functionality was added to later versions of the Walkman, though this occurred after the function of the device had been widely adopted and understood.* However, all I can rely on here for evidence is a recurrent pattern of events – it is surprisingly common for significant innovations to emerge from the removal of features rather than the addition. Google is, to put it bluntly, Yahoo without all the extraneous crap cluttering up the search page, while Yahoo was, in its day, AOL without in-built Internet access. In each case, the more successful competitor achieved their dominance by removing something the competitor offered rather than adding to it.
Similarly, Twitter’s entire raison d’être came from the arbitrary limitation on the number of characters it allowed. Uber originally did not allow you to pre-book cars. Highly successful publications such as the Week effectively take the world’s newspapers and make them digestible by removing a lot of extraneous content; McDonald’s deleted 99 per cent of items from the traditional American diner repertoire; Starbucks placed little emphasis on food for the first decade of its existence and concentrated on coffee; low-cost airlines competed on the basis of what in-flight comforts you didn’t get. If you want to offer ease of use – and ease of purchase – it is often a good idea not to offer people a Swiss Army knife, something that claims to do lots of things.* With the notable exception of the mobile phone, we generally find it easier to buy things that serve a single purpose.
However, the engineering mentality – as at Sony – runs counter to this; the idea of removing functionality seems completely illogical, and it is extremely hard to make the case for over-riding conventional logic in any business or government setting, unless you are the chairman, chief executive or minister in charge. Although you may think that people instinctively want to make the best possible decision, there is a stronger force that animates business decision-making: the desire not to get blamed or fired. The best insurance against blame is to use conventional logic in every decision.
‘No one ever got fired for buying IBM’ was never the company’s official slogan – but when it gained currency among corporate buyers of IT systems, it became what several commentators have called ‘the most valuable marketing mantra in existence’. The strongest marketing approach in a business-to-business context comes not from explaining that your product is good, but from sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt (now commonly abbreviated as FUD) around the available alternatives. The desire to make good decisions and the urge not to get fired or blamed may at first seem to be similar motivations, but they are, in fact, never quite the same thing, and may sometimes be diametrically different.
Part 3: Signalling
3.1: Prince Albert and Black Cabs
I mentioned earlier in this book that there are five main reasons why human behaviour often departs from what we think of as conventional rationality. The first of these is signalling, the need to send reliable indications of commitment and intent, which can inspire confidence and trust. Cooperation is impossible unless a mechanism is in place to prevent deception and cheating; some degree of efficiency often needs to be sacrificed in order to convey trustworthiness or to build a reputation.
For instance, in London I c
an put my two daughters into a car driven by a complete stranger and rely on them to be driven safely to their destination, because the stranger is driving a black cab. Before anyone can drive a black cab, he or she is forced to undergo a gruelling four-year initiation programme known as the Knowledge, for which they are required to memorise every street, major building and commercial premises within six and a half miles of Charing Cross Station, an area that includes 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks. This requires that they spend most of their spare evenings and weekends riding around on mopeds on test routes, before appearing in front of regular examination panels to test their knowledge of the quickest or shortest route between any two points; so gruelling is the process that it seems to enlarge the hippocampus of those who take part in it. In cabbie folklore, the model for the Knowledge was first suggested by Prince Albert.* The test is certainly Teutonically stringent: over 70 per cent of the applicants either fail or drop out.*
As useful as it once was, many people feel the Knowledge has been made superfluous by the arrival of satnavs and Google Maps. Conventional economic thinking, obsessed with ‘market efficiency’, would argue that the Knowledge seems a ‘barrier to entry’ erected to maintain the scarcity of cab drivers. I was tempted to agree – but that was before I realised that the Knowledge had as much value as a signal than a navigation skill.
A market like the London taxi industry, where you almost never interact with the same person more than once, needs a high level of trust in order to work, and one way to establish this confidence is to demand serious proof of commitment before you are admitted to the trade. It is in the interests of all honest cab drivers to maintain a standard of trust; if only 0.5 per cent of cab journeys resulted in a rip-off or a mugging, faith in the whole system would evaporate and the entire business would collapse.
Alchemy Page 13
