It Could Be Worse

Bristol, Britain’s first Cycling City, aims to introduce a Paris Velib-style cycle hire scheme, operated by Hourbike. My fear is that, by having a system that is too small, the scheme will fail. Some quotes from the Happy Birthday Velib video (linked below) bear this out:

“you have to go big enough to where it’s at least 1 bike per 200 residents. I think that’s a bare minimum for the good function of the system”

“cities who made too small an organisation, too small [a] network, don’t have real success”

“when you have not enough stations. not enough bicyles, the people don’t choose it”

“It’s seamless, it’s easy, it’s fun. What’s better than having a public bike be a part of your public transport system?”

– Happy Birthday Velib on Youtube

(Found via Karl McCracken’s blog)

Apparently, yes: they do: the relentless obsession with Carbon emissions (while important) has led us into a blind alley of thinking that electric vehicles are somehow “green”. A clue: they’re not, unless the energy used to propel them comes from a renewable resource. Otherwise, all you’re doing is swapping local pollution and emissions for those far away; you know what they say about “out of sight…”.

Carbon emissions are only one of the car’s many downsides. An electric car:

• will still get stuck in traffic,
• will still be driven at reckless speeds, even by the “otherwise law-abiding”
• will still kill people in crashes
• will still insulate people from their surroundings, sucking the life out of communities
• will still prevent occupants from getting any exercise

We need more cycling, not hare-brained schemes like this. In fact, paying people to cycle is a positive step that would be a net benefit in reduced health costs and road maintenance costs.

As widely reported elsewhere, a judge has ruled that cyclists may be partly at fault if they are knocked off their bikes while not wearing a helmet. The issue was discussed on BBC Radio 2 by Matthew Bannister, standing in for Jeremy “Daily Mail FM” Vine.

Just after the intro to the piece, there was an advert for the BBC’s coverage of Formula 1 car racing (something that encourages some drivers to drive like idiots), an unfortunate juxtaposition but typical for the MSM, where “dog bites man” or “car driver kills people” isn’t news.

Seeing as my comment wasn’t read out, I thought I’d publish it here.

Cycle helmets aren’t a panacea. They tend to cause cyclists to take more risks, and some research has shown that helmet-less cyclists are shown more respect and given more overtaking room than helmet-wearing ones.

The only thing that compulsory helmet wearing will do is reduce the number of cyclists. Fewer cyclists = less safety for those who remain. The greatest thing that would increase cycle safety is more cyclists.

There were lots of messages and calls saying “yes, you should wear a helmet” “a helmet saved my life” and “helmets should be compulsory”.

They should all go and read The Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation. The issue isn’t as simple as “wearing a helmet = greater safety”.

There was also the usual “serves them right, pavement terrorists” rubbish, as well. This person should ride a bike for a bit, and then comment further.

There are some great blogs there documenting the worst excesses of a car-supremacist culture (in which we in the UK live): both the behaviour of drivers and the panderings of local authorities to them, despite claims by certain extremist groups that drivers are persecuted by councils.

Bristol gets a lot of attention as the UK’s first cycling city, and it undoubtedly has too many cars in certain parts of the city. Bath, a much smaller city, also has parking problems in certain areas. It also arguably has worse cycle provision. I ride a combination of roads, car parks and cycle lanes during my 3-mile commute.

On my ride to work today I witnessed two examples of how bikes get a raw deal in day-to-day encounters.

First: a van in the ASL zone at a the bottom of Brougham Hayes.

It didn’t inconvenience me, but it just displays an insidious arrogance in the mind of some drivers; a mindset that thinks that non-motorised vehicles don’t have a right to be on the road.

Second: a delivery truck parked in the contra-flow cycle lane in James St. West:

I stopped and spoke, very politely, to the driver. He was polite too, and his reply came down to “what can I do? I can’t park on double-yellow lines! I’ve got my hazard lights on!” as if the hazard lights protected cyclists from the oncoming traffic if/when they had the guts to cycle round the truck. There were some empty (albeit private, off-road) parking spaces that he could have pulled into, but no. The cycle lane it was, because it’s an easy target.

The truck belonged to a company called CEVA Logistics, whose tag-line is “Making Business Flow”. I assume they don’t mind business flowing right through the tattered remnants of the Highway Code and any unlucky cyclists in their way.

I’ve been a member of our local Freecycle mailing list for a few years, successfully using it to offload and acquire various items, from a double futon bed to an mp3 player.

In 2006, Giles Turnbull blogged about Freecycle’s shortcomings, from a usability and webapp point of view. It boils down to “Freecycle is a great idea unsuited to living inside a mailing list once the size of the list is >100 people”. Giles’ proposed solution was a web app, and his post contains some pretty detailed design descriptions. I’m sure that there’s an interaction designer in Giles trying to get out

(There’s probably something interesting there about group psychology and Dunbar’s Number, but I’m more interested in finding a practical solution.)

Other people have tried to build Freecycle-like philosophy in a webapp form, e.g. SnaffleUp, but they (so far at least, but it’s early days) lack the one thing Freecycle has in spades: a critical mass of users. Oh, and a snappy brand.

What if, instead of building a Freecycle-like webapp in competition with Freecycle, an app were built on top of the existing mailing lists, teasing out all that lovely data and metadata and making it queryable, sliceable, diceable and geo-plottable?

There are three pieces of information pertinent to an item on Freecycle:

• what it is
• where it is
• whether it’s still available

There’s no API to Yahoo Groups at the moment, but it’s possible to get Freecycle mails sent to a mail account on a *nix box, where they could be parsed and inserted into a database for querying by item name, description or location. If we group items by sender, it should be possible to determine that when a “taken” follows an “offered” with the same/similar subject line, then that item has changed from being available to unavailable.

All of that data is present in a Freecycle email, but the inconsistent way in which people format their subject lines makes parsing out the item and location a bit of a challenge.

An ideal Freecycle subject line looks like this:

[BathFreecycle] OFFER: Cat basket (Combe Down, Bath)

However, they are often more like this:

[BathFreecycle] offered cat basket bath

(As an aside, Bath’s Freecycle list is a great test case, as the name of the city is also the name of an item. Supposing someone wrote “Offer: baby bath”, one would assume that they weren’t trying to offload their offspring but had merely omitted their location. Formalising this in the parser would be hard, if not impossible, such that it may have to be flagged for review by a human.)

A way around this would be to prime the parser with a list of possible locations. Once you remove the list name, the offer/wanted/taken/received prefix and the location, you’re left with the item.

The variability of people’s use of grammar, spelling and format (despite the fact that your messages are moderated until you’ve demonstrated that you can write a subject line properly) makes the subject parser the biggest challenge in implementing this solution.

All of this does raise the issue of increased ease of, and cross-group, querying. Already there are scammers on Freecycle lists, making bogus offers then directing people toward pyramid schemes and the like. Also, it’s seen as bad form to post the same item to more than one group simultaneously; having said that, it’s ok to subscribe to several lists (if you can keep up with the volume of email).

This geocoded database would make it much easier for people to snap up “big ticket” items, possibly to sell on (it happens at the moment). If Freecycle’s aim is purely to keep usable or servicable items out of landfill, does this really matter? Also, I can imagine the central Freecycle organisation not being happy if this “hack” were built on Freecycle outwith their blessing and control.

I know other people find Freecycle frustrating. Does this (very rough) outline of a solution sound like it makes sense?

(I found this in my inbox during a clearout…)

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Prada suit, Gucci shoes, Dior sunglasses and D+G tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd, “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”

The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers: “Sure. Why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Vodafone cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an e-mail on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulae. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-colour, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturised HP LaserJet printer, turns to the shepherd and says: “You have exactly 1,586 sheep.” “That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep,” says the shepherd.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the boot of his car. Then the shepherd says to the young man “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?” The young man thinks about it for a second and then says: “Okay, why not?” “You’re a consultant” says the shepherd. “Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie. “But how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required,” answers the shepherd. “You showed up here even though nobody called you, you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you know f**k-all about my business. Now give me back my dog.”

It feels quite weird to be writing this, but I’m leaving IOP Publishing after nearly eight years: my longest-running job by a country mile. I’m going to Digerati Studio, a Web agency in Bath; no more train-induced commuter stress for me.

I’m leaving just as the first project I worked on at IOPP – the Magazines Online Subscriptions system — is being retired, which I feel is poetic: a complete project lifecycle.

I’ll be doing similar work to what I’m doing now, but for clients in other firms (rather than elsewhere in the same company) and using different server (PHP) and desktop (Mac) technology. I’ll also get to do some User Experience Architecture work, an area I’ve been wanting to get into for some time.

While this means I won’t be in Bristol anything like as much as before, I still hope to get along to SkillSwaps and other such events. I also plan to be at Horts to meet ex-colleagues after the IOPP Christmas Company Meeting and catch up on the gossip.

As Merlin Mann is fond of saying: “see you in cyberspace…”

Off the train; voices in a garden. I look and see barbeque smoke.

Up the hill, more smells of outdoor cookery; further on, it blends with the aroma of the chip shop.

A beautiful reminder of the summer we never had.

(This is turning into a marathon: parts one, two, three and four precede this one. I can’t guarantee your sanity should you choose to read that lot.)

Joshua Porter: Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design

“Rationality be damned…”

We (humans) work on limited information to make a decision - the Bandwagon Effect.

Heuristics

Heuristics are a shortcut to making a decision. They’re useful (else we would likely never make a decision, make a decision very, very slowly and/or go insane in the process) but they are subject to cognitive bias.

Design-related biases

• Including Not Invented Here (which I loathe; hey - I have a bias against it!)

Representation bias

• leveraged by Freshbooks to go after the type of audience they want
• Yelp.com’s reviewer of the day
  • these are power users that are showcased as being representative of the wider community, even though they’re not

Loss aversion

More people would take a bet on a 50% chance of a win than a 50% chance of loss, even though the result is the same!

Losses loom larger than gains [as illustrated by the LHC switch-on this week, and the focus on the infinitesimally small chance of earth-swallowing black holes]. For instance, here is OpenID described in terms of gains and losses:

“Log in anywhere with your domain!” - gains

“Don’t forget another password!” - losses

Any feature described in terms of future savings is probably better described in terms of an immediate loss.

Ownership bias

People value things more when they have a sense of ownership, and this is reflected in the names of many online services: Youtube, MySpace, myhotel. Also, Flickr is littered with “you” descriptions.

This ownership bias is a factor in the 9x effect (mentioned during Joshua’s workshop), where sign-up is actually nine times harder than we think.

On Slide.com, sign-up is deferred until later; the user gets to make something first, creating a sense of ownership (and the need to avoid losing that which they’ve created - more loss aversion).

More to come. Yes, really.

(Parts one, two and three precede this…)

After the workshop ended, a few of us decamped to Komedia Bar for an ale; at 7pm it was time for the emerging tradition that is the Pre-Pre-Party Burgers, next door at Gourmet Burger Kitchen. GBK had reserved half the restaurant for dConstruct attendees, so it wasn’t too difficult to get a seat. I stuck my coat on an empty chair on a table otherwise occupied by Ross, Mark and Adnan, all of whom were fine burger-eating company, despite having never met me before in their lives

Burgers eaten, we headed for the Pre-dConstruct Party, at Po Na Na’s in The Lanes, the area that was originally the fishing village that eventually became Brighton. The party was sponsored by Chi.mp, a still-in-beta-as-I-write-this service for claiming your identity online and doing aggregated life-streaming. I’ve signed up for a beta invite, but no word yet. Still, I got a free t-shirt and baseball cap, neither of which I’m likely to wear, unfortunately. The t-shirt says “Never mind the bollocks, here comes Chi.mp” and is extra-large so looks like a tent on me: two good reasons not to wear it to work. The baseball cap is one of those trucker’s caps that ironically fashionable people were wearing a few years ago, but since I may be ironic or fashionable but not at the same time, I decided that it’s not for me.

This was to be the start of a large well of freebie-related disappointment at this year’s dConstruct. I had planned to stock my wardrobe for the coming year but, alas, it seems that the economic woes of the wider world have reached Noomeejaland and no-one wants to spend on quality giveaways! What we need is more VC cash to flood into the industry… no, wait: we don’t.

Anyway: there were free drinks, at least, so it’s not all doom and gloom. It was good to see some familiar faces from Bristol and Bath (Alex and Laura Francis, Dan Dixon, Mel Kirk, Ryan Carson, Keir Whitaker) plus Mike and Dominic from Carsonified, who I’d not met before. I also got chatting to some new faces: Andy and Geoff and a couple of guys who work at Cardiff Uni and who’ve just been through the same Groupwise -> Lotus Notes transition that we went through a few years ago (”but at least Groupwise IMAP actually worked!”).

I’m far too old to be partying all night, and I have two young children, so I’m tired by 10pm these days. I didn’t stay very long at the Pre-Party, where the music was so loud that it wasn’t really possible to hold a conversation. I do sound old, don’t I? Off to bed, said Zebedee.

Next morning, breakfast with friends! Chris Hall and Alex and Laura Francis were also staying at The Kemp Townhouse, so it was a more sociable affair than the day before. The Smoothie of the Day was the same as yesterday’s, suggesting that it’s actually the Smoothie of More Than One Day; it was, nonetheless, delicious. I started with muesli as before, but followed it up with pancakes with smoked salmon. This was a mistake: the pancakes were far too filling compared to the muffin that you get with Eggs Benedict or Florentine, and I couldn’t eat it all. I hate wasting food.

The Actual Conference

As the conference agenda was printed in full on the attendee badge, I could relax a bit; opening remarks weren’t due until 10am. I checked out of the hotel and wandered over to the Brighton Dome, venue for the conference. I realised part-way there that I’d forgotten my invoice, without which I’d fail to claim back expenses. One phone call to the hotel later and the manager promised to leave it with Chris, who was staying the Friday night as well.

With no more checking in to do (as I had my pass from the workshop day) I grabbed a coffee, bumped into Adrian again and we found a seat for the talks.

After an intro from Richard Rutter and Glenn Jones (of Madgex, one of the sponsors) it was time to hear from…

Steven Jones: “The Urban Web”

(Steven is author The Ghost Map, an account of Cholera, Information Design and Social Networks in 19th Century London)

Steven gave a fascinating account of how a doctor (amateur InfoDesigner), a vicar (social networker with hyper-local knowledge) and the availability of open data in a standardised format led to the tracing of Soho’s 1854 Cholera outbreak (the penultimate one in the city) back to a contaminated water pump outside 48 Broad St.

These principles, discovered during the book’s writing, led to the development of Outside.in a (US-only, atm) web site that aggregates hyper-local knowledge, even from non-geocoded sources. This seems fraught with the risk of inaccuracy or outright wrongness; in fact Leisa Reichelt (one of last year’s speakers and a user experience designer) Tweeted: Not convinced by the premise or the implementation of outside.in. I guess it takes some people less time than others to see through a web site’s glossy presentation (and Outside.in is glossy) to see the reality underneath. (Not that glossy presentation is bad, it’s just that it needs to be glossy presentation of something that’s functionally sound.)

Anyway, if you can look past that, Steven dubbed this stuff “The Geo-Web” and gave an example of Outside.in being like virtual CCTV: a van exploded in Brooklyn, where he lives, someone Tweeted about it and it (somehow) ended up in a geo-specific alert/feed.

But, as Chris Hall pointed out, there are massive trust issues with all of this (like many Web projects, the creators of which seem to assume everyone’s as nice and cuddly as they are) and the opportunity for cheap, non-destructive “social” terrorism, or at least mischief.

Aleks Krotoski: “Playing the Web”

(Aleks writes for The Guardian, is a gamer and an academic. She’s also a very lucid, funny speaker - not what I’d expected (which was someone rather arch) from reading her stuff in the paper.)

Her talk’s tagline is “how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place”. There’s a Games world out there, and a Web world; it’s not often the two collide in any meaningful way.

Web people love games. Why? Stickiness! (which leads to advertising and profit, usually). Games people, however, aren’t really bothered about the Web.

• It’s not about the graphics - it’s about play.
• It’s not even about the story - it’s about play.

Games are part of the Experience Economy, which “is a way to make something fun sound really dull”

How do they do it?

1. Controlled systems
   • but gamers feel the need for openness
   • do anything, go anywhere, meet anyone
   • there can be to much openness, though; it’s a fine line
2. Enabling systems
   • The Internet and the Web have always had community
   • Games only started getting community later on
   • There are people selling games for Second Life for Real Cash Money on eBay; this is virtual stuff with real value
3. Psychological systems
   • Games don’t have to be active - see PMOG, which is based on your “real Web” activity

There’s a feedback loop between gamers and game designers

• They often overlap (i.e. many game designers are gamers)
• there’s little awareness of formal HCI best practice…
• but they get it right by gut feel [as do web devs... sometimes?]

Gamers are a pretty homogenous bunch: most likely (though not exclusively) male kidults; web users, on the other hand, are much more diverse: they are anybody and everybody.

The challenge, then, is to talk to and work with people from the world of games and meet them half-way.

“gamers make the best designers” a lesson there, decision makers where I work often don’t use the internet much — Chris Hall

Should people who are immersed in Web culture have a greater decision-making clout at IOP Publishing? That’s a tough one, as it may be that “ordinary” (i.e. non-Web-immersed) users may be left cold by services designed “by gut feel” only. User-centred (and activity-centred) design is of paramount importance if we are to be truly “customer focused”.

To be continued…