You make two paper bags and put a rose in each… [Y]ou mark one of the bags “Rose” and the other bag, although it also has roses inside, you label “Mowed Grass”… Then you invite people to sniff each bag… They they have to rate how pleasant the smell is, how sweet the smell is… And it turns out that a rose by another name—Mowed Grass—does not smell as sweet. People overwhelmingly said that the bag marked rose smelled to them, sweeter.

NPR has a fantastic interview with Lera Boroditsky, in which she describes this and a few other experiments she and her students have performed. She’s also written How Does Language Shape the Way We Think?, which goes into more detail (though not about the rose experiment).

(via Lost in Translation)

Are there going to be generalists? Sure. Many of them, working in small- or single-person teams. And perhaps since they will likely do the bulk of UX work in their organizations, “user experience designer” is a fine title and role for them. But my hunch is that, like general practitioners in the medical field, what generalists in the UX field will work on will be constrained to a set of limited problems. For anything really complex, specialists will deal with it. I’m pretty sure this is the situation we’re in right now, in fact.

I was reminded of this bit of wisdom from Dan Saffer while reading a recent over-hyped blog post.

[O]nce gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to.

New York Times Magazine has a superb update on the claims made by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

I lived in France for two years, and like many English speakers, struggled with the gender of nouns. I’ve often wondered whether gender affects perception of the world. It turns out it does, to an extent. The language we speak does affect the way we view the world, but it isn’t a “prison house.”

I also posted this to draw your to the phrase “stuck in their monochrome desert of ‘its’.” It’s just splendid. It sent shivers down my spine.

A closer look at [Trader Joe's] selection of items underscores the brilliance of Coulombe’s limited-selection, high-turnover model. Take peanut butter. Trader Joe’s sells 10 varieties. That might sound like a lot, but most supermarkets sell about 40 SKUs. For simplicity’s sake, say both a typical supermarket and a Trader Joe’s sell 40 jars a week. Trader Joe’s would sell an average of four of each type, while the supermarket might sell only one. With the greater turnover on a smaller number of items, Trader Joe’s can buy large quantities and secure deep discounts. And it makes the whole business — from stocking shelves to checking out customers — much simpler.

Swapping selection for value turns out not to be much of a tradeoff. Customers may think they want variety, but in reality too many options can lead to shopping paralysis. “People are worried they’ll regret the choice they made,” says Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore professor and author of The Paradox of Choice. “People don’t want to feel they made a mistake.” Studies have found that buyers enjoy purchases more if they know the pool of options isn’t quite so large. Trader Joe’s organic creamy unsalted peanut butter will be more satisfying if there are only nine other peanut butters a shopper might have purchased instead of 39. Having a wide selection may help get customers in the store, but it won’t increase the chances they’ll buy. (It also explains why so often people are on their cellphones at the supermarket asking their significant other which detergent to get.) “It takes them out of the purchasing process and puts them into a decision-making process,” explains Stew Leonard Jr., CEO of grocer Stew Leonard’s, which also subscribes to the “less is more” mantra.

from Inside the secret world of Trader Joe’s.

This is an interesting example of the paradox of choice. One of the criticisms of the paradox of choice is that, in fact, increasing choice has no impact on satisfaction:

Over the past ten years, a number of such experiments have been done by academics to evaluate the asserted paradox of choice for product categories ranging from mp3 players to mutual funds, and a paper was published in February (Scheibehenne et al) that conducted a meta-analysis of 50 of them. (h/t Tim Harford) Across all of these experiments, the average effect of increasing choice on consumption or satisfaction was “virtually zero”. Further, this meta-analysis showed a positive average effect of increasing choices for those experiments that, like the jam experiment, tested the effect of choice on consumption quantity rather than some measure of satisfaction as the outcome. That is, when it comes to sales, more choice is better.

In Trader Joe’s we have an example of a store that limits choice and still has a fiercely loyal customer base. Of course, this is correlation and not cause. Additionally, as the Trader Joe’s article points out, limited choice is just one of a number of reasons why people love Trader Joe’s. These other reasons are why customers trust Trader Joe’s to filter their choices for them.

I’m still halfway through Barry Schwatz’s book, and haven’t made up my mind about the paradox of choice yet. Nevertheless, having an example of the successful application of the idea is useful.

Is this a model of creation? If we make music—primarily the form, at least—to fit these contexts; and if we make art to fit gallery walls; and if we make software to fit existing operating systems: is that how it works? Yeah. I think it’s evolutionary; it’s adaptive. But the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there.

This is a reverse view of things from the traditional Romantic view. The Romantic view is that first comes the passion, and then they outpouring of emotion, and then somehow it gets shaped into something. And I’m saying well, the passion is still there, but the vessel that it’s going to be injected into and poured into: that is instinctively and intuitively created first. We already know where that passion is going.

When David Byrne started performing music from his CBGB days in Carnegie Hall and Disney Hall, he realized that it didn’t sound as good in these grander venues. He began wondering about how venues shape the music that is performed in them. This utterly fascinating talk on how architecture helped music evolve was the result.

To help out, visit the Open Web Education Alliance funding bid page, join up, vote and offer some feedback.

What’s this all about?

This is about providing a solid, standards-based curriculum that educational institutions can use to prepare students studying web design and development for the realities of the job market. I could go on, but I think Henny Swan does a much better job than I could do in this video:

Convinced? I was pretty sure you would be. In that case, please go vote for them and show your support

Want to know more?

Henny has a great post explaining exactly why this is important.

If you want to see the type of curricula that have been developed, the WaSP InterACT curriculum and the Opera Web Standards Curriculum are a good place to start.

Finally, the InterACT project has just released InterACT With Web Standards, the first in a series of books. You can buy it on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk.

Tonight I attended a panel at the RSA on whether or not consumers should be nudged.

The first two panelists, Sir Martin Sorrell and Dr Andy Wood, decided to address Corporate Social Responsibility at WPP and Adnams respectively. While interesting and impressive, neither panelist directly addressed the questions of whether or not customers should be nudged.

Fortunately, Dr Sally Uren of Forum for the Future decided to address the question directly. She began by saying that a value-action gap existed. In other words, most consumers care about sustainability, but don’t act on that concern.

She then suggested five steps could be taken to try to close that gap.

1. Sustainability has to be integrated into the brand. Most consumers take only 45 seconds to decide what they want to buy. They don’t read labels.
2. The message must be simple. She gave the Ariel Turn to 30 campaign as an example.
3. People need to feel good about their decisions.
4. People need to feel that their actions matter. She brought up the recent huge increase in recycling as an example of a lot of small actions affecting a much larger change.
5. Give feedback.

She concluded that consumers should be nudged, but that behavior change alone wouldn’t be enough. Technological innovation also has a role to play, but is useless unless people start using improved technologies.

While I still have my doubts about nudging, both ethically and in terms of overall effectiveness, I thought her five steps felt somewhat familiar. Much of what she proposed sounds like basic advice for improving the user experience of a website.

The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.

…This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.

William Gibson discusses how the future tends toward the quotidien at his posthumanity is always just over the horizon and related to Sjors’ idea that we are always and forever waiting for a better future.

I find the notion that we slip so easily into the future somehow comforting. It’s less passive than the notion of a disruptive future. The future isn’t something that we sit around and wait for, it’s something we’re responsible for creating and actively choosing on a daily basis. You can complain about not having that jetpack you were promised, but chances are it’s already here.

Look, behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, like with Wikipedia and whatnot, it’s very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn’t change that quickly. It’s quite likely that the opportunities have changed.

Clay Shirky, speaking with Daniel Pink about cognitive surplus and intrinsic motivation.

This was an eye-opener for me. If we really are entering an era in which the role of UX design is to encourage behavior change, then Shirky’s view of behavior is important. The idea that we’re providing opportunities—rather than trying to persuade or seduce—makes a lot of sense to me. It’s a step in the direction of treating people like people rather than users.

Significant Objects is an extraordinary project. Over the last year, they’ve been buying ordinary items at thrift stores and garage sales. They give these to authors like Bruce Sterling and Jonathan Lethem, who write short stories about the item. Then they put the items for sale on eBay to raise money for Girls Write Now.

There are two things I love about this project.

The first is that this means I’m not the only one who wanders around thrift stores, picks up random items and starts imagining the possible stories behind them.

The second is what this project says about people as meaning-making machines. Any of the objects on its own is just some cheap crap. Associate it the object with the project, with a charity that encourages young girls to write, with a writer and with the story that writer has written, and the object is given a meaning beyond itself. It is suddenly a significant object. Physically, it’s the same cheap crap, but as Doug Kessler points out, more meaningful means more valuable.

(via The B2B Marketing Blog)