Lone Gunman

User inter­face design­ers (and par­tic­u­larly icon design­ers) could learn a lot from comics and the the­ory behind them.

Tak­ing his cue from Scott McCloud’s excel­lent Under­stand­ing Comics, Lukas Mathis looks at how for opti­mum recog­ni­tion and in order to aid under­stand­ing, user inter­face ele­ments must find the sweet spot between uni­ver­sal­ity and real­ism. Like when draw­ing cer­tain comics, it’s about find­ing the opti­mum com­prim­ise between too lit­tle detail and too much.

Peo­ple are con­fused by sym­bols if they have too many or too few details. They will rec­og­nize UI ele­ments which are some­where in the middle.

The trick is to fig­ure out which details help users iden­tify the UI ele­ment, and which details dis­tract from its intended mean­ing. Some details help users fig­ure out what they’re look­ing at and how they can inter­act with it; other details dis­tract from the idea you’re try­ing to con­vey. They turn your inter­face ele­ment from a con­cept into a spe­cific thing. Thus, if an inter­face ele­ment is too dis­tinct from its real-life coun­ter­part, it becomes too hard to rec­og­nize. On the other hand, if it is too real­is­tic, peo­ple are unable to fig­ure out that you’re try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate an idea, and what idea that might be.

As a co-editor of the open-access jour­nal The­o­ret­i­cal Eco­nom­ics, Jeff Ely has seen his fair share of aca­d­e­mic papers and their asso­ci­ated titles. Inevitably Ely has con­structed a the­ory on how to title a paper (or any­thing else, for that mat­ter) for max­i­mum expo­sure, impact and intrigue.

In his hilar­i­ous tongue-in-cheek arti­cle detail­ing this the­ory, Ely offers his price­less advice on how to decide on an aca­d­e­mic paper’s title. The con­clu­sion: keep it as short as pos­si­ble (one word, prefer­ably), avoid colons and avoid questions.

A paper titled Law and Finance is guar­an­teed to be the sem­i­nal paper in the field because if it were not then that title would have already been taken. You can go ahead and cite it with­out actu­ally read­ing it. By con­trast, you can safely ignore a paper with a title like Val­u­a­tion and Dynamic Repli­ca­tion of Con­tin­gent Claims in a Gen­eral Mar­ket Envi­ron­ment Based on the Beliefs-Preferences Gauge Sym­me­try even if you don’t know what any of those words mean. The title is essen­tially telling you “Don’t read me. Instead go and read a paper whose title is sim­ply Val­u­a­tion of Con­tin­gent Claims. If you have any ques­tions after read­ing that, you might look into dynamic repli­ca­tion and then beliefs, pref­er­ences, and if after all that you still haven’t found what you’re look­ing for, check here for the low-down on gauge symmetry.”

Two pieces of advice fol­low from these obser­va­tions. First, find the sim­plest title not yet taken for your papers. One word titles are the best. Sec­ond, before you get started on a paper, think about the title. If you can’t come up with a short title for it then it’s prob­a­bly not worth writing.

The absolute worst thing you can do with your title is to insert a colon into it. […] As in, Tor­ture: A Model of Dynamic Com­mit­ment Prob­lems. Or Kludged: Asymp­tot­i­cally Inef­fi­cient Evo­lu­tion. In the first case you have just ruined a seminal-signalling one-word title by adding spu­ri­ous speci­ficity. In the sec­ond, you just took an intrigu­ing one-world title and turned it into a yawner.

The sec­ond worst kind of title is the ques­tion mark title. “Is the Folk The­o­rem Robust?” This says to the reader: “You picked this up because you want to know if the folk the­o­rem is robust. Well, if I knew the answer to that I would have told you right away in the title. But look, all I could do is repeat the ques­tion, so you can safely assume that you won’t find the answer in this paper.”

via @TimHarford

To keep the peace on the ever-expanding Stack Exchange Net­work of online com­mu­ni­ties, own­ers Joel Spol­sky and Jeff Atwood intro­duced the timed sus­pen­sion of dis­rup­tive users’ accounts. Over time the trans­parency of the timed sus­pen­sion process proved to be occa­sion­ally inef­fi­cient when dis­cus­sions arose regard­ing the mer­its of cer­tain sus­pen­sions. This led the admin­is­tra­tors of the com­mu­ni­ties to inves­ti­gate other ways of mod­er­at­ing prob­lem­atic users.

What they found were three fan­tas­ti­cally devi­ous secret ways to effec­tively con­trol trolls and other abu­sive users on online com­mu­ni­ties: the hell­ban, slow­ban, and errorban:

A hell­banned user is invis­i­ble to all other users, but cru­cially, not him­self. From their per­spec­tive, they are par­tic­i­pat­ing nor­mally in the com­mu­nity but nobody ever responds to them. They can no longer dis­rupt the com­mu­nity because they are effec­tively a ghost. It’s a clever way of enforc­ing the “don’t feed the troll” rule in the com­mu­nity. When noth­ing they post ever gets a response, a hell­banned user is likely to get bored or frus­trated and leave. I believe it, too; if I learned any­thing from read­ing The Great Brain as a child, it’s that the silent treat­ment is the cru­elest pun­ish­ment of them all. […]

(There is one addi­tional form of hell­ban­ning that I feel com­pelled to men­tion because it is par­tic­u­larly cruel – when hell­banned users can see only them­selves and other hell­banned users. Brrr. I’m pretty sure Dante wrote a chap­ter about that, somewhere.)

A slow­banned user has delays forcibly intro­duced into every page they visit. From their per­spec­tive, your site has just got­ten ter­ri­bly, hor­ri­bly slow. And stays that way. They can hardly dis­rupt the com­mu­nity when they’re strug­gling to get web pages to load. There’s also sci­ence behind this one, because per research from Google and Ama­zon, every page load delay directly reduces par­tic­i­pa­tion. Get slow enough, for long enough, and a slow­banned user is likely to seek out greener and speed­ier pas­tures else­where on the internet.

An error­banned user has errors inserted at ran­dom into pages they visit. You might con­sider this a more severe exten­sion of slow­ban­ning – instead of pages load­ing slowly, they might not load at all, return cryp­tic HTTP errors, return the wrong page alto­gether, fail to load key depen­den­cies like JavaScript and images and CSS, and so forth. I’m sure your devi­ous lit­tle brains can imag­ine dozens of ways things could go “wrong” for an error­banned user. This one is a bit more eso­teric, but it isn’t the­o­ret­i­cal; an exist­ing imple­men­ta­tion exists in the form of the Dru­pal Mis­ery mod­ule.

Years ago (and still, for cer­tain prod­ucts) con­sumers decried the idea of planned prod­uct obso­les­cence in indus­trial design: the inten­tional engi­neer­ing of prod­ucts to have a lim­ited use­ful life, such as with prod­ucts pro­duced with sealed-in bat­ter­ies or fridges that will only func­tion for seven years.

In recent years, how­ever, the need for planned obso­les­cence has moved from the sup­ply side to the demand side, with con­sumers them­selves requir­ing that their gad­gets don’t last so long that they become a bur­den: it’s desired func­tional obso­les­cence. Writ­ing about the influ­ence this has on our con­sump­tion habits, Rob Walker takes an inter­est­ing look at trends in prod­uct obso­les­cence and the rise of func­tional obso­les­cence as a demand-side phe­nom­ena rather than a supply-side one.

Con­sider that most ubiq­ui­tous gad­get, the mobile phone. […] The typ­i­cal Amer­i­can gets a new one every 18 months. […] The prob­lem, if that’s the right word for it, is that new devices per­form more func­tions, faster—and peo­ple, as a result, want them. […] The light-speed inno­va­tions in con­sumer elec­tron­ics have turned many of us into ser­ial replac­ers. A dealer in vin­tage home-entertainment equip­ment recently con­vinced me that it used to be pos­si­ble to buy a top-notch stereo sys­tem that really would func­tion admirably for decades. Imag­ine, by con­trast, that tomor­row some com­pany unveiled a cell phone guar­an­teed to last for 20 years. Who would gen­uinely want it? It’s not our devices that wear thin, it’s our patience with them.

The very real prob­lem of elec­tronic waste makes peo­ple like me hes­i­tate to replace good-working-order pos­ses­sions. Yet at the same time, we like to stay cur­rent with new tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions. So rather than pro­vide evi­dence of some cyn­i­cal cor­po­rate strat­egy, our gad­gets’ minor mal­func­tions or dis­ap­point­ing fea­tures or unac­cept­ably slow speeds largely pro­vide an excuse to replace them—with a lighter lap­top, a slim­mer tablet, a clearer e-book reader. Obso­les­cence isn’t some­thing com­pa­nies are forc­ing on us. It’s progress, and it’s some­thing we pretty much demand. As usual, the mar­ket gives us exactly what we want.

I don’t take infomer­cials very seri­ously, mainly due to how hilar­i­ous and absurd they are. How­ever I’ve now been won over and can see their poten­tial for cer­tain product–market com­bi­na­tions. How did this mirac­u­lous change come about? Through a sur­pris­ingly enjoy­able inter­view between Andrew Warner and the mas­ter of the infomer­cial, Tim Hawthorne.

From his many years of expe­ri­ence (he cre­ated the fourth ever infomer­cial, devel­op­ing over 300 since then; has worked with some well-respected com­pa­nies such as Apple, Nikon, 3M and Braun; and is respon­si­ble for about a bil­lion dol­lars in client sales), Hawthorne talks exten­sively and insight­fuly on the many infomer­cial sales tech­niques that his data show are the most per­sua­sive. Two items that I par­tic­u­larly liked:

The most per­sua­sive deal types:

Buy one get one free, or get the sec­ond one at half price. So you’re get­ting an imme­di­ate dis­count. Buy one and get a sec­ond one super size, so you’re actu­ally dou­bling or tripling the order. Buy one and the sec­ond is actu­ally going to be dou­ble the size. Drop a pay­ment. Let’s say that your offer is three pay­ments of $19.95, that’s your ini­tial offer. But wait, if you call now, if you order now, we’ll actu­ally make one pay­ment for you. So it’s only two pay­ments of $19.95. So that’s drop a payment. […]

I think one of the most pow­er­ful bonuses or pre­mi­ums that you can offer is free ship­ping. A lot of peo­ple don’t under­stand the power of this. For some rea­son, if I’m going to pay $99.95 and there’s an addi­tional $9.95 or $14.95 or $19.95 for ship­ping, that addi­tional amount which is very impor­tant to many ven­dors, if you can sac­ri­fice that, it has an amaz­ing impact on people.

Words and phrases that trig­ger action:

“Free” is still, I think, and will always be con­sid­ered the most pow­er­ful word in sell­ing. After that we would prob­a­bly think of words such as now, you or your, easy, eas­ily, guar­an­tee, break-through, rev­o­lu­tion­ary, fast, quick, instant, magic, new, spe­cial, exclu­sive, lim­ited time, risk free, only, save, money back, money back guar­an­tee, call now, and in terms of a clas­sic phrase, “but wait, there’s more”.

Every­body kinds of kicks around that par­tic­u­lar phrase and it’s used often. One of the rea­sons it’s used so often is that it’s so effective.