You are given a frequent buyer card for your local coffeeshop. Each time you buy a cup of coffee you get a stamp on your card. When the card is filled you get a free cup of coffee. Here are two different scenarios:

Card A: The card has 10 boxes for the stamps, and when you get the card all the boxes are blank.

Card B: The card has 12 boxes for the stamps, and when you get the card the first two boxes are already stamped.

Question: How long will it take you to get the card filled up? Will it take longer or shorter for scenario A vs. scenario B? After all, you have to buy 10 cups of coffee in both scenarios in order to get the free coffee. So does it make a difference which card you use?

The answer apparently is yes. You will fill up the card faster with Card B than with Card A. And the reason is called the “goal-gradient” effect.

The goal-gradient effect was first studied in 1934 by Hull with rats. He found that rats that were running a maze to get food at the end would run faster as they got to the end of the maze.

The goal-gradient effect says that you will accelerate your behavior as you progress closer to your goal. The scenarios I describe above were part of a research study by Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky, and Yuhuang Zheng (full reference is below).  They decided to see if humans would behave like the rats. And the answer is, yes they do.

Here are some important things to keep in mind about the goal-gradient effect:

• The shorter the distance to the goal the more motivated people will be to reach it.
• You can get this extra motivation even with the illusion of progress, as in Scenario B above. There really isn’t any progress (you still have to buy 10 coffees), but it seems like there is some progress so it has the same effect
• People enjoy being part of the reward program. When compared to customers who were not part of the program, the customers with the reward cards smiled more, chatted longer with café employees, said “thank you” more often and left a tip more often (all statistically significant for you research buffs out there).
• In a related experiment the same researchers showed that people would visit a web site more frequently and rate more songs during each visit as they got closer to a reward goal at the site. So this goal-gradient effect appears to be generalizable across many situations.
• Motivation and purchases plummet right after the goal is reached. This is called a “post-reward resetting phenomenon”.  If you have a 2^nd reward level people will initially not be very motivated to reach that 2^nd reward. Right after a reward is reached is when you are most at risk of losing your customer.

And for those of you who want to read the original research:

Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky, and Yuhuang Zheng, The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis Resurrected:Purchase Acceleration, Illusionary Goal Progress, and Customer Retention, Journal of Marketing Research, 39 Vol. XLIII (February 2006), 39–58.

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A man is walking down a busy city street on his way to an appointment, and he sees what looks like a college student drop a folder of papers. The papers scatter on the ground and the man glances over but keeps on walking. What do you think? Why didn’t the man stop to help with the papers?

If you answer “Well, he’s a self-absorbed person who doesn’t usually help out strangers on the street” then chances are likely that you have just made a “fundamental attribution” error. People have a tendency to give personality based explanations for other peoples behavior more weight than situational factors. Instead of explaining the person’s behavior in the story above as being due to his “self absorption”, you might ascribe his behavior to the situation, for example, “He’s late for a critical meeting with the bank and doesn’t have time to stop today. In other circumstances he would have stopped.”

Research on the fundamental attribution error shows the following:

• In cultures that value individualistic behavior (like the USA),  it is common to ascribe behavior of other people to personality. The fundamental attribution error is common in these cultures.

• On the other hand, in individualistic cultures people tend to explain their OWN behavior to situational factors more than personality factors.

• In cultures that value collectivist behavior (for example, China), people make the same fundamental attribution error, but not as often as in individualist cultures

• Most of the research has to do with individuals deciding on personality vs. situational effects, but some research has been done on group decisions and whether they are influenced in the same way. It seems that they are. People attribute the decisions of a other group to the individual member’s attitudes, but attribute the decisions of their own group to the collective group rules.

Why do we do this? – I think the best theory about why we make the fundamental attribution error is that when we believe that personality causes our behavior that makes us feel that we have more control over our life. And we (especially in the West) need to feel that we have that control.

Can’t stop making mistakes — The research shows that it is very hard to stop make the fundamental attribution error. Even when you know you are doing it, and even if you know all about it, you will still make the same error.

Is “fundamental attribution error” the same as “correspondence bias”? – Psychologists like to come up with lots of terms. Both terms have been used, and they are often used interchangeably. However, some psychologists argue that what I’ve been describing is actually the correspondence bias, and that the fundamental attribution error refers to the REASON for the correspondence bias: that we underestimate situational factors. Well, that sounds like hair splitting to me!

But maybe I’m just saying that because I’m a curmudgeonly psychology nut who doesn’t like to agree with people (ok, that was just me trying to make a joke by showing correspondence bias!).

So what’s the take-away? — Now that you know people tend to make this error, what can you do about it? Probably not much in terms of getting people to change their interpretations of others’ behaviors. But try and build in ways to cross-check your own biases. If your work requires you to make a lot of decisions about why people are doing what they are doing, you might want to stop before acting on your decisions and ask yourself, “Am I making a Fundamental Attribution Error?”

If you’d like some fairly heavy reading on the topic, I recommend:

Bawronski, Bertram. Theory-based bias correction in dispositional inference: The fundamental attribution error is dead, long live the correspondence bias. European Review of Social Psychology, 2004, 15, 183–217.

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I am one of those people who loves giving speeches and presentations. From what I have heard, I’m in a minority. Many people dislike giving speeches, but I’ve always had a hard time understanding that. My delight in giving talks is probably tied up with my love of theatre, my desire to be the center of attention (although I am actually an introvert), and my need for approval (and hence applause). People often tell me that I’m a great presenter, or that they loved my talk, or that my talk was the best one at the conference etc etc. so my love for speaking seems to work.

But in all honesty, I’m never quite satisfied with the talks I give. I think most of the time I am improving, but I am always running the presentation through my head afterwards, saying, “oh, I should have …”.

Over my 30 year career of crafting and delivering speeches, classes, and presentations, I’ve attended seminars, read a lot of books, had private coaching, studied some of the “masters”, and experimented with the art and craft of speech making and speech delivering. I’m always looking to improve. I’ve learned a lot about presentations and speeches over the years, and below are my 10 Most Important Secrets of Powerful Presenters:

1. Always be working on the next level — This past May I was a speaker at the (wonderful) UXLX conference in Portugal. The conference was organized with two days of ½ day workshops sprinkled with 20 minute TED-like talks, and a final packed day of back to back keynotes. I was on late in the afternoon of that last day, so I got to hear masterful presenters talk about user experience all day. I was very impressed, not only with the content and creative ideas, but with the delivery. I decided that, although I’ve got some favorite talks I’ve been giving, it’s time to “up my game” yet again. Since then I’ve been experimenting, going to a higher level in my craft. Everyone is at a different place in their presentation or speech crafting skills. You don’t have to become the best speaker in the world overnight. But you do need to analyze your strengths and weaknesses now, and decide what “taking it to the next level” means for you right now. What do you need to do, and how will you get there? Make sure you pick a realistic next level that you can reach within a 6 to 12 month timeframe. Then go after it. Always know where you are now, and what the next level is.

2. It’s ok to have your own style – There is no one way to be a great speaker. Being a great speaker doesn’t mean that you have to open with a joke, or that you have to have highest quality photos in your powerpoint deck. There are some things that all great speakers have in common (see the rest of the points below), but you can experiment and come up with a “style” that works for you. Are you funny? Serious? Warm-hearted? Controversial? Pick what you are comfortable with and then make it your own.

3. Craft your speech – Although some people are good at “extemporaneous” speech making, most of us need to carefully craft our speeches. A formula I often use (modified from what I read in Tim Koegel’s book: The Exceptional Presenter) is:

a. Statement/description of the current problem situation
b. Description of the consequences of not doing anything differently
c. Description of the action you could take that would solve the problems
d. Specific “call to action” (exactly what is it you want the audience to do as soon as the talk is over)

What is really neat is that you can take a,b,c above and create a 10-30 second version of them. Then you start your talk with the mini version of the a,b,c. That launches the talk and you spend the bulk of the talk giving proof and examples around a,b,c, then close at the end with d.

For d.  I like to ask myself (or my client who I giving the talk for), “What is my objective? At the end of the talk, when people are leaving the room, what is it I want them to be saying to themselves? Saying to others? What action do I want them to take immediately (make sure it’s a realistic action).” Then I craft my talk around that call to action.

Voila! (French for “there it is!”) . You have crafted a powerful talk.

4. Only use visuals and props when they are necessary to get the point across or will add novelty and interest – if you have visuals, slides, or a powerpoint or keynote deck it should ONLY contain items that have visual interest or are necessary to make a point. If you are discussing the new electric car that your group has prototyped you probably want to have a picture of the car, or a model or the actual car. If you are showing the new website design then you probably will show the new site on the screen. But if you do not have something necessary or interesting to show then you should SHOW NOTHING. The idea of just talking without visuals may make you nervous, but when you think about it, it is quite absurd to be showing your talking points or notes on the screen in front of everyone. And isn’t that what a lot of people put on their Powerpoint or Keynote slides? NEVER EVER have Powerpoint or Keynote bullet talks that have the major points of what you are saying at the time in the talk. That is your outline and your notes and does not belong on the screen in front of everyone. The slides and visuals you are using are not for you at all. You need to learn to work from notes or note cards so that you are not dependent on what is on the screen to know what you are supposed to say next. And remember, not all visuals have to be slides in a Powerpoint or Keynote deck. You can use props to make your point, like the programmer I saw once who held up cooked spaghetti to talk about poorly written code, or Jill Bolte Taylor who uses a real human brain when she gives her talks on her experience having a stroke.

5. Speak in a loud clear voice – Practice speaking loudly and clearly. If you can, hire a voice coach (not a speech coach, not a singing coach, but someone who can teach you how to use your voice more effectively). I worked with Sandra McKnight from Voice Power Studios. She was great at diagnosing my voice strengths and weaknesses and helping me to develop a stronger and more effective speaking voice.

6. Video yourself talking and then fix the weird things you do – We all do it. We jingle the change in our pockets or rock back and forth on our heels. Or we mess with our hair, or cross our arms and look forbidding. Find out what your “thing” is that you do that will be distracting to the audience. You don’t want them to be looking at you and wondering when you are going to do “it” again, rather than concentrating on what you are saying. If you watch a video of you presenting you’ll see (and be able to correct) all the weird things you do.

7. Be passionate – What inspires people most is when you are inspired too. Let your interest and passion for your topic shine through. If you aren’t passionate about what you are saying, then figure out how to adjust the content so that you are.

8. Use stories – There is research that shows that people process information best when it is told in story form. So use lots of stories in your presentation to get your points across. The preference is for real stories that happened to you, as they will be the most believable.

9. Look at people in the audience – The best speakers have eye contact with the audience. Pick one person in the audience and look at them for about 3 seconds while you are talking. Then switch to someone else, then someone else and keep going. You can probably look at or close to everyone during the course of your talk.

10. Practice, practice, practice – Pick one thing at a time to change or improve or try out. Then DO IT. The more you speak and the more practice you get, the better you will become.

There are many more great ideas, but I wanted to keep this to the top 10. If you are interested check out the workshop I teach on the topic.

So what are some of your favorite tips that I left out?

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Photo Credit: Mr. Thomas

Ok, I’ll admit it, I am exaggerating a little bit when I say people are inherently lazy. What I really mean is that people will do the least amount of work possible to get a task done.

Is lazy another word for efficient? – Over eons of evolution humans have learned that they will survive longer and better if they conserve their energy. We’ve learned that we want to spend enough energy to have enough resources (food, water, sex, shelter), but beyond that we are wasting our energy if we spend too much time running around getting stuff.

How much is enough? — Of course questions about how much is enough, and do we have enough stuff yet, and how long should the stuff last (and on and on), still vex us, but putting the philosophical questions aside, for most activities most of the time humans work on a principle that is called “satisficing”.

Satisfy plus suffice = Satisfice – According to Wikipedia, Herbert Simon was the person who coined the term satisfice. It was originally used to describe a decision-making strategy whereby the person decides to pick the option that is adequate rather than optimal. The idea is that the cost of making a complete analysis of all the options is not only not worth it, but may be impossible. According to Simon we often don’t have the cognitive faculties to weigh all the options. So it makes more sense to make a decision based on “what will do” or what is “good enough” rather than trying to find the optimal or perfect solution.

Designing with satisficing in mind — So if people “satisfice” rather than “optimize”, what are the implications for those of us who design web sites, software, products, or even design surveys? Satisficing leads to some interesting design guidelines which I’ve listed below.

Design web sites for scanning, not reading – In his excellent book Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug applies the idea of satisficing to the behavior you can observe when someone comes to your web site. You are hoping the visitor will read the whole page, but we know that “What they actually do most of the time (if we’re lucky) is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. There are usually large parts of the page that they don’t even look at.”

Assume that people will look for shortcuts — People will looking for ways to do something faster and with less steps. This is especially true if it is a task they are doing over and over.

But if the shortcut is too hard to find — Then people will keep doing it the old way. This seems paradoxical, but it’s all about the amount of perceived work. If it seems like too much work to find a shortcut then people will stay with their old habits (they are even satisficing about satisficing).

Provide defaults — Defaults  reduce the amount of work. When you provide defaults on a web form, for example, the person’s name and address is already filled in, this means there is less that people have to do. The downside of this is that people often don’t notice defaults, and so may end up accepting a default without knowing. Here again, the answer lies in the amount of effort. If it takes a lot of work to change the result of accepting a “wrong” default, then think twice about using them.

Take care with the order and wording of your survey questions – Satisficing is particular difficult for surveys. People will get into a “groove” of answering all the questions the same way because it’s easier and they don’t have to think. If your survey is more than a few questions long you will have to mix it up, and provide different options and formats for the questions or you will find that a given individual has chosen twenty-five “6′s” in a row on your scale.

What are your experiences, either as a user or a designer, with the concept of satisficing?

Photo credit by Mr. Thomas

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Two weeks ago my iphone was stolen (or I might have lost it –  I’m still not sure). I’ve been fascinated by the psychology of what it felt like to not have a cell phone.

Of course, there was a time when no one had cell phones — It’s hard to remember these days, but I actually spent a large part of my life without a cell phone. You would never have known that by my initial reaction. I was in the Schaumburg, Illinois Ikea store when I realized that I didn’t have my phone. I had made a call from the store, so I knew I’d had the phone went I went in, but it was now gone. I searched all over the store to all the places I had been (it’s a big store and I had been in the store for over an hour). I checked with the customer service desk to see if anyone had turned in a phone. No luck.

Panic and powerlessness – As I reluctantly walked out of the store I felt both panicked and powerless. Was my phone in the store somewhere? Had it been stolen? Should I stay until I found it?  I was on my way to someone’s apartment in Chicago, and the plan was that I was supposed to call her when I was close. But now I couldn’t call. What if she wasn’t there, because she was out running errands waiting for my call? Not only could I not call her, I had lost my map app. What if I couldn’t remember how to get to the apartment? What if I had a flat tire (if you read my blog you know that recently happened). I could feel my heart racing. I took a deep breath to calm myself down as I pulled out of the parking lot of Ikea. I had been to the apartment several times, I was fairly confident I could find it. Plus I realized I had my iPad which has the same map app, so I was fine there. And if I had a flat tire or an emergency I’d figure it out at that time. I made it to the apartment, and the person I was meeting was there. First crisis averted.

From panic to peace — What was most interesting, though, was what happened over the next 4 days. I didn’t have a cell phone. I was visiting with family and friends. I relaxed. No one could reach me, no one from work would call while I was with my family. I couldn’t check my emails. I couldn’t call anyone else. I found that I was “in the present’ more. I had to commit to a particular plan of action, and couldn’t change my mind, call someone and change our plans. You would think that all that opportunity to change your mind would put you “in the present”, but I found it was the opposite. I had to commit to a course of action, but once I did that I let go of all the mental chatter about possibilities, changes, decisions, and just experienced the present moment. If I really needed to make a call everyone around me had a phone, but I found that I didn’t even need or want to use anyone’s phone.

I reluctantly buy a temporary phone — I decided that if my iphone wasn’t turned in by Sunday night then I would go buy a no-contract, very inexpensive “temporary” phone (until the new iphones come out.. .a wait of a few weeks). When it was time to go buy this temp phone I found I was reluctant to do so. I didn’t really want a phone, but felt like I should have one for the drive back home from Chicago to Wisconsin. So I purchased a Net 10 no contract service and an LG phone.

Net 10 almost a flawless user experience – To activate the no-contract phone took about 3 minutes and was an easy and usable process and website. Wow, you rarely hear me say that!

(What to do BEFORE you lose or phone or it’s stolen) — Here’s an aside. I found out after I lost the phone that there are simple (and free) things you can do to protect your phone, your email, your passwords, and your data in the event your phone is lost or stolen. I didn’t realize this and I hadn’t done any of those things! Don’t be like me.

New iPhone on its way — Today I (along with probably millions of others) ordered a 4G iPhone. Everyone is oohing and aahing about this phone, but I am reluctant.  My days of no (or at least, limited), cell phone interruptions will be over. I’m thinking of having some cell phone moratoriums — days when I turn off my cell phone and go back to that living-in-the-present mindset.

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I used to collect computer error messages. It was kind of a hobby. I’ve got a great collection of them, some of them going back to the old character based computer screens. Most of them are not error messages that were trying to be humorous. Most of them were written by computer programmers that were trying to explain what was going wrong. But many of them end up being quite funny (unless you are the one who got the message in the middle of trying to do something important. Then nothing seems funny). My favorite was from a company in Texas. When there was a “fatal” error, meaning the system was going to crash, a message came up that said, “Shut er down Henry, she’s spewin’ up mud!”

Error messages are probably the part of a software program that gets the least amount of time and energy, and maybe that is appropriate. After all, the best error message is no error message (meaning that the system is designed so that no one makes errors). But when something goes wrong it is important that people know what to do about it.

The reality is that something always goes wrong. People make mistakes. Whether the user makes a mistake in working with a computer, or a company that makes a mistake by releasing software that has too many errors, or a designer designs something that is unusable because he or she doesn’t understand what the user needs to do. Everyone makes mistakes. So here is my list of important things to consider about people making mistakes:

Think ahead about what the likely mistakes are — Figure out as much as you can about what kinds of mistakes people are going to make when they use whatever it is you have created. And then change your design before it goes out so that those mistakes won’t be made.
Create a prototype of whatever it is you have and then get real people to use it so you can see what the errors are likely to be.
Test your prototype with users (usability testing).
Write error messages in plain language. If you are creating a message to show someone or play audio to someone about a mistake they made, tell them the following:

• that an error has been made
• what the error is
• how they can correct it
• where to go to get more help in fixing the error

Use active voice and be direct. Instead of saying: “Before the invoice can be paid it is necessary that the invoice payment be earlier than the invoice create date”. Say instead, “Enter an invoice payment date that is BEFORE the invoice create date.”

Need it to be error-proof? It is very difficult to create a “system” that is free of all errors, and that guarantees that people won’t make mistakes. In fact it is impossible.  Ask the people at 3-mile island, or Chernoble, or British Petroleum. The more costly errors are, the more you need to avoid them. The more you need to avoid them the more expensive it is to design the system. If it is critical that people not make mistakes (i.e., you are a nuclear power plant, or an oil rig, or a medical device), then be prepared. You will have to test twice or three times more, and you will have to train two or three times more. It is really expensive to try and design a fail-safe system. And realize you never will fully succeed.

It’s just the way we are. We make mistakes!

If you have some favorite error messages that you have seen, consider sending them to me and I will add them to my collection.

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Last week I gave the keynote talk at the Big D conference in Dallas Texas. (It’s a great conference and I suggest you check it out next year.) The conference was Friday and Saturday, although I could only go to the very beginning of day 2. I had to leave in the morning to go to the airport and catch my flight home.

Problem #1: I’m one of these “nervous” travelers, so I always make sure to leave plenty of time to get to the airport. I left the conference building on the deserted campus of Southern Methodist University, and walked to the parking garage where my Avis rental car was parked. As I went to get in I saw that I had a flat tire — completely flat. The question now was, could I deal with the flat tire and still get to the airport on time?

Thus began an hour and one half long very frustrating journey into voice interface hell. I called the number on my Avis paperwork, and went from voice tree to voice tree to voice tree. I was trying to get help with the tire, as well as find out if I could leave the car and get a cab to the airport. I would try one branch of the voice tree be on hold for 15 minutes. I would call another branch and talk to someone who would transfer me back to the same place I had been 30 minutes ago. I made at least 15 different phone calls and talked to at least 12 different people.

I will admit that there were times when I was sobbing into the phone, and although a few of the people on the other end sounded sympathetic, there appeared to be no way they could help me. At one point I decided to change the tire myself and just drive to the airport, but then discovered that, although there was a spare tire and a jack, there were no other tools (lug wrench?) in the trunk.

After 90 minutes of this, I did manage to talk to someone who was going to come tow the car. I gave him directions to where it was, hoped he’d be able to find it, left the keys in the car, and called my hotel (that I had already checked out of) and asked them to send a taxi. The taxi driver obliged my request to drive really fast, and I even made my plane home. I have no idea if Avis ever got the car. I sure hope they did! Of course I have not heard from them.

Apple vs. Avis: Let’s contrast that experience with what happened when I discovered that I had a large crack in my beloved iPad screen. I’ve had the iPad for a few weeks now, and am definitely attached to it. Imagine my dismay upon discovering a huge crack. I called Apple (I always buy apple care for my apple products) and was transferred to a person in about 2 minutes. He actually wasn’t sure what to do (said it was the first time anyone had called in with a cracked screen to him). After first asking if the crack was sharp and would hurt me (it wasn’t, but I appreciated his concern), he asked if they could call me back. Which of course they promptly did. We then discussed options (go to a store, but there is no store near me, or send it in by fedex, or have them send me a new one and then I send it in etc), I picked an option, and the whole thing was taken care of in a matter of minutes.

I know that an iPad is not the same as a rental car. But the real difference here is that Apple wants to take care of problems and has created a support system to do so, and Avis has not. I pay to have “apple care” and they do care. Apple has put the customer/user experience high up on their list of priorites. Avis, on the other hand,  is a confused conglomeration of support around the world. I’d pay extra to have “avis care” but there is no such option. At this point, the slogan, “we try harder” is merely a slogan without any teeth behind it.

Apple will continue to get my business. Avis will not. Assuming I rent a vehicle once a month for $250 each time, that’s about $3000 a year. Over a 10 year period that’s $30,000. You’d think that Avis would not want to lose $30k of business from a single customer.

It’s all about the customer experience. It’s all about what happens when something goes wrong. Things always go wrong. Have you researched your company? What happens when something goes wrong for your customers? Have you experienced what it’s like from their point of view? Have you put time and attention on customer care when there are problems? Your true business is not just the product or service that customers initially come to you for. It’s the relationship you have with them. It’s when things go wrong that you find out who your friends really are. And it’s when things go wrong that you find out which businesses you want to continue to have relationships with. People make decisions about what companies to work with, and they make those decisions largely unconsciously. They will decide to work with companies they trust. How you handle problems and mistakes has a huge impact on trust.

What is the trust quotient of your organization?

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A few days ago I found myself in a hotel room outside of Chicago with my 19 year old daughter moaning and sometimes howling in pain. She’d been sick for a week, each day with a new symptom, and this morning her eardrum felt like it was going to burst. We decided that I should cancel my client meeting and take her to an urgent care clinic instead. Of course, we don’t have universal health care here in the States, so first I had to call my insurance provider to find out if there were “in network” doctors we could go to and still be covered by our plan. The insurance company told me to go to a particlar web site,  and said that any doctor we picked through that site would be considered in network.

Using a web site under stress — By now 10 minutes have passed and my daughter is still sitting on the bed behind me moaning and wailing. Instead of helping her, I have to go to a web page and fill out forms and look at maps. The first thing that happens is that I encounter a drop down menu that is meaningless to me:

When I look at this web page now (days later, crisis has passed), it doesn’t seem too confusing, but when I was trying to fill it out, trying to get my daughter some help, the web page was daunting and impossible, and not at all intuitive.

Stress changes your perceptions – Research on stress shows that a little bit of stress (called arousal in psychology terms) can help you perform a task, because it heightens awareness. Too much stress, however, degrades performance. Two psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson first postulated this arousal/performance relationship, and hence it has been called the “Yerkes-Dodson law” for over a century.

Arousal helps up to a point – The law states that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases. Research on the law shows that the amount of stress/arousal that is optimal depends on how difficult the task is. Difficult tasks require less arousal to reach optimal performance, and will start to break down if the arousal level is too high. Simpler tasks require more arousal and don’t fall off as fast.

Yerkes-Dodson Law

Tunnel vision — When arousal first goes up then there is an energizing effect, as the person is paying attention. But as the stress increases there are negative effects. Attention gets unfocused, people have trouble remembering, problem solving degrades and “tunnel vision” sets in. Tunnel vision is where you keep doing the same task over and over even though it isn’t working.

Glucocorticoids — More recent research has shown a similar curve when studying the presence of glucocorticoids. These are the hormones that are released when we experience stress, so the Yerkes-Dodson law appears to have direct physical evidence.

Maximum frustration — As I tried to use the web page to find a doctor I kept getting errors, and typical of someone under stress, I kept doing the same task over and over even though it wasn’t working (tunnel vision). At one point I was crying tears of frustration, cursing over the lack of usability of the web site, and upset that I could not just find the name and address of a clinic we could go to.

Patient care, not computer care – I finally turned away from the computer, got my daughter some tylenol, gave her warm washclothes to hold against her ear, and got us both calmed down. Then I found a clinic at the website  (where we went later that day, only to have them say she was fine. By the way, our insurance didn’t work and we had to pay cash after all — i.e., I didn’t need the web site). My daughter is better, and I didn’t even have to cancel the client meeting.

Test under stress – If you might have people using your site when they are under stress, keep in mind that too much stress will change the way they see and use the web site. And here’s a plea to BeechStreet.com… test your website thoroughly assuming that people are tense, stressed, and with howling children in the background. It’s a totally different experience.

If you’d like to read the research —

Yerkes RM, Dodson JD (1908). “The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation”. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology 18: 459–482. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Yerkes/Law/.

Lupien, SJ, Maheu F, Tu M, Fiocco A, Schramek TE (2007). “The effects of stress and stress hormones on human cognition: Implications for the field of brain and cognition”. Brain and Cognition 65: 209–237. PMID 17466428.

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I am about to head to Portugal for a week, and I was interested in exploring different possible destinations in Portugal. I may not have much time for touring (I’m going to speak at the UXLX conference there), but if I did have time, where should I go? I have to admit to pretty much total ignorance about Portugal, the different regions, landscapes, and parts of the country, so I went to the official tourism web site for the country.

Give me a little bit at a time — The Portugal tourism site did an OK job of  what is called progressive disclosure. This is fancy term that is used in the field of psychology to refer to providing information in increasing chunks of size and complexity.

We can only handle so much — Humans can only process small amounts of information at a time (consciously that is… the estimate is that we handle 40,000,000 pieces of information every second, but only 40 of those make it to our conscious brains). One mistake that web sites make is to give too much information all at once, like this web site from the Canadian government:

There is no chunking here, there is not progressive disclosure. It’s just all the information thrown on the page all at once. The result? You don’t read it, you just leave.

Feeding bits of information – The Portugal site was just OK when it came to progressive disclosure. New Zealand does a much better job. The New Zealand tourism site has multiple levels of disclosure, feeding you the information bit by bit. Here’s the first page on the regions of New Zealand:

where I see the overall map and names of the different regions. If I hover over one of the regions in the list then I see a thumbnail of information:

Continuing on with this idea of progressive disclosure, if I click on that region then I link to a page with more pictures and little more detail:

there is a big map and there are tabs to go to for more information. If I scroll down I’ll have details on the region:

This is a great example of how to use progressive disclosure.

It’s not the clicks that count (pun intended) – One thing I’d like to point out is that progressive disclosure requires multiple clicks. Sometimes you will hear people say that websites should minimize the number of clicks that people have to make to get to the detailed information. The number of clicks is not the important criteria. People are very willing to make multiple clicks, in fact that won’t even notice they are making the clicks, if they are getting the right amount of information at each click to keep them going down the path.

Think progressive disclosure, don’t count clicks.

Should I let the web site design influence whether I book a ticket? Not this time at least. This time I’m headed for Portugal, where I plan to use the Portugal tourism site as a case study in my workshop!

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I sat in a folding chair in a high-ceilinged room in an old building in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When I signed up for my first improvisation theater class (many years ago), I didn’t know what to expect.

As I waited for the “leader” to arrive I felt more than a little apprehensive. The room was spare, with a wood floor and 20 chairs, most of them filled with a motley group of people, ranging in age from 18 to 65. It was very quiet. A few people were talking in low voices. I was still, staring at a point on the floor about 10 feet in front of me. I didn’t know anyone in the class. What had I gotten myself into?, I wondered. Could I sneak out before the leader arrived?

Then the door opened and a bright confident woman of about 35 swept in, looked us all over while smiling, asked us to stand up, and led us through a rapid-fire series of  “theatre exercises”. We scrunched up our faces to relieve tension, and played an unusual version of follow the leader to experience the relationship between how we hold our bodies and how we feel. We listened to people have a conversation in “gibberish” and learned how much communication happens with tone of voice, pitch, and gestures rather than the words we speak. We played out various scenes with team members to learn to listen, think, speak, and react in the moment.

The 2-hour class was over before we knew it, and we left talking and laughing together. For those two hours I had been in a “flow state”. All the cares of my day-to- day life had vanished and in their place I had experienced being in the present, and creating with others.

As I walked to the bus stop I felt buoyant, hopeful, and elated. In just 2 hours time I had learned skills that would stay with me for a lifetime, and had a lot of fun in the process. I had learned how to watch and listen to other people, how to “read” a situation intuitively, how to make decisions quickly, and communicate my ideas clearly in words and in actions. I had learned when to be a leader and when to be a follower, and how to pull a team together.

Now it is many, many years later. With knowledge about research in psychology, 30 years of teaching and leading seminars and workshops, and several years of theatre “under my belt”, I am very excited to be re-creating that experience I had all those years ago for others. I’m now offering the Insight Improv workshop: Take proven improv theatre exercises, mix them with research on psychology, a group of people (you or you and your team) and a workshop leader (me), and you have fun and insights at the same time.

People ask me what the insights are that I learned back in Cambridge, and what the insights are that they will learn when they come to a workshop. And of course I have to answer “It depends!” After each improv exercise we stop to talk about what the psychology research has to say on the topic, for example, when we do the exercise called “follow the leader” I share the recent research that shows that when you move your muscles in a certain way it can trigger a release of hormones which then affects your mood. Recent research shows that when men puff out their chests more testosterone is released and when men cave in their chests the testosterone is lessened. When you frown chemicals are released in the brain that lower your mood. Conversely, if you smile then endorphins are released that make you feel better. This is just one example of the psychology research that we talk about after each improv exercise.

In addition to talking about the research, different people share some of the insights that they have. Everyone reacts differently to each exercise, so this is where your personal insights come in. For example, one person talked about an “a-ha” moment she had in one of the exercises – she tends to feel the need to be the leader, and she always thought that being a leader took more skill than following. But in one of the improv exercises she realized it could be hard work to be a follower. She had a choice about following without caring, or following well, and that it was not necessarily easy to follow well. For her, following had meant not caring, or being weak, and now she was going to have to re-evaluate that in her day-to-day work.

What did I learn those many years ago in Cambridge? Here are just a few of my learnings and insights:

• How to think quickly on my feet; how to make quick decisions when I need to
• How to listen to what people are really saying by watching what they do with their body
• How to listen to what people are really saying by hearing their pitch and the emotional tone
• When I should be a follower and when I should be a leader
• How to get a team or group to bond quickly
• My interaction styles that are effective and those that are not
• And how to have fun with a group of people I don’t know at all!

I’m excited to be offering these workshops. What do you think? Any questions or comments?

And if you are interested in sponsoring, hosting, or attending, send an email to InsightImprovInfo@gmail.com.