AS THE TITLE SUGGESTS, I am going to talk about design in terms of "heuristics" and "general probability." Wait, wait, wait, don't close this browser yet. Those two terms may seem like jargon but basically what they mean is rule of thumb (for heuristics) and statistics (for general probability). We owe this very important domain of knowledge to two psychologists: the late Amos Tversky and the Nobel Laureate and Princeton Emeritus Professor Daniel Kahneman.
Yes, it is the same famous genius Amos as recounted by the New York Time best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell in D avid and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants -- Tversky Intelligence Test was: "The faster you realized that Tversky was smarter than you, the smarter you were." In addition to being a genius (in the sense that Amos was almost always able to see things the way they were) Amos was a hardcore optimist.
In fact, I quote him most of the time whenever I need to see things clearly: "When you're a pessimist and the bad things happen, you live it twice." In fact, there is a sort of psychological theory that shows that you are actually likely to make that mistake that you think you would if you are a pessimist -- it's called a "negative self-fulfilling prophecy." I recall how I thought I would fail an exam because I was so bad at this very subject.
I was anxious during the exam because of that thought, and lo and behold I failed and had to re-sit that exam. Looking back, that exam wasn't even that hard. My anxiety gave me the sense of uncertainties, which later on became the root of my emotionally immobility and therefore inability to focus to the exam task at hand. In other words, if you are a pessimist you would worry once about it and the second time when it happens.
Sadly, because Amos prematurely passed away in 1996 (at the age of 59) before another genius Daniel received the Nobel Prize in Economic Science based on the work that the two had done together over the three decades (I know, I know, it's actually not one of the original Nobel Prize's categories but it's a good substitute).
Otherwise, it'd be no question whatsoever that both of them would be the joint-winners of the Prize together (a wonderful biography, and also one of my favorite books of all time, of their collaboration is Daniel Lewis' Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds.) In probably one of the most important books in the field of psychology (and probably the most readable one) Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us through a tour-de-force of, what has been known for half a century as, "cognitive psychology." He shows us the anatomy of consciousness, telling us where we are actually not as smart as we thought we are -- but that's also not all that bad given that sometimes evolution doesn't always pick the smartest ones.
Kahneman's key idea is simple yet complex. Let me give you two tests to prepare you for that. The first one is a classic and it comes from Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly (also another wonderful book that I highly recommend). Grab a pen and quickly jot down your answers to the following three questions. These are problems that are not designed for a calculator or a deep calculation, but your commonsense: In a department store, a Ping-Pong paddle and a plastic ball cost $1.10.
If the paddle costs $1 more, how much is the ball? In a textile factory, five machines take exactly five minutes to make five shirts. How many minutes will it take one hundred machines to produce one hundred shirts? A pond has water lilies growing in it. The flowers multiply quickly, each day doubling the area they take up. If it takes forty-eight days for the pond to be completely covered with water lilies, how many days will it take for it to be half covered?
Don't read on until you have written down the answers. Don't spend too much time thinking about it. If you're like most people, the quick intuitive answers that come to mind are: 10 cents, 100 minutes and 24 days. And these answers are all wrong. You could go back to those questions again, and this time you could use the pen and paper to do some calculation if you'd like. The correct answers are 5 cents, 5 minutes, an 47 days. I'll show you just the first question.
The ball costs 5 cents, and therefore the Ping-Pong paddle, which is $1 costlier, would cost $1.05. The bill for two items would be $0.05 + $1.05 = $1.10. Actually, we don't even need to use those pen and paper at all. Why did most people think that the answer was 10 cents. Then? Here are another two questions that do not require any calculation and come from my own experience of teaching a design thinking workshop. When was the QR code invented?
(you know, one of those codes that you can use your phone to scan and can do almost everything with it these days?) Who invented it? Well, if you're among the majority of people, it wouldn't take you more than a 2-3 seconds to answer the first question. What's your answer? 5, 8, 10 years? And for the second question, if you are like most people, you would have pretended to think as if you actually knew (because somehow you have heard it from somewhere?).
At the end, if I insist that you give me the answer, you probably would not mind using your phone to look it up on Wikipedia. Did you get the answers right for both of them? If you are among the majority of the people, you would not have thought that the QR code was invented in 1994 -- yes, 28 years ago. Second, you would not have any idea who invented it, let alone for which reasons (I'll leave that to you to find out on Wikipedia).
Here, why most of us think we know the answer to the first question without having to insist on looking it up on the internet? In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman argues that there're two fictional systems that we use when we think. We tend to use our "hot" automatic system to make a decision, which for most of the time would work.
This hot system is precisely the one that helps you quickly recall when was the first time you saw anyone's using QR code and calculate how many years that was. This hot system also has many academic names, such as emotion (for David Hume), nature (for Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and id (for Sigmund Freud). The cold system, on the other hand, ponders over the question.
When you have to think about something that you do not have the answer off hand, you would resort to this cold system to help you evaluate, argue, and therefore make an optimal decision. The cold system (Kahneman calls it System Two, as opposed to the hot System One ) often only works when it's obvious that System One won't do the job -- as the question of who invented it.
Neurons in your brain will work very very hard to find out whether you have the answer, and if we don't the System Two won't pretend that we do and will tell us to find out on your laptop or your phone. Kahneman argues that we humans are prone and tend to make mistakes when we use the hot system when we actually should be using the "cold" system, which is almost always better than the hot "automatic" system, to make a decision.
This is especially the case when we are to make a decision under some pressure and uncertainties, during which it's very likely that we would let the worst system of the two to do the job (when that's the last thing you would want). The only problem with the cold System Two is that it is, unfortunately, kinda lazy and we usually just resort to whatever comes quicker to mind -- like that answer of when QR codes came about.
In fact, we have many casual terms for this hot system, such as "gut feeling," "rule of thumb," and "hunch." Where and why are we so confident about this hot system? As the writer Malcolm Gladwell eloquently points out in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, it is because this system is based on our empirical experience and it can be pretty awesome especially if it comes from an accumulated knowledge over time. Truth be told, it's this system that keeps humans alive all these years.
When most of us see a snake, for example, we should thank our hot System One that tells us to "run" from it instead of activating the cold System Two to want to spend time pondering whether the snake is poisonous. There's also other uses of this hot system. In the first chapter of Blink, Gladwell discusses how the experts' cold system fails to detect a counterfeit feature of a statue.
Only when those experts rely less on their scientific findings from the statue but on their "gut feeling," they would be able to tell that "something doesn't feel right." What does this thinking, fast and slow, has to do with design? Because people are prone to use their hot System One to make a split second judgement of what they like and do not like, design has to somewhat appeal to this very system.
When asked, the Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and the father of what is known today as behavioral economics argues that "People are not stupid; it's just the world is hard." So, according to a survey by Columbia University decision researcher Sheena Iyengar, we make more than 70 decisions everyday. Some of which have the potential to lead to a life-changing outcome. Wait a minute, 70 decisions???
That's a lot of decisions, according to Iyengar these decisions range from whether to take the usual route to work despite the traffic, or take a new route that you would risk getting lost and be late at work; to whether or not to ask your colleague next door out for lunch because it'd be a polite thing to do so even though you would rather eat alone because that's your habit and you'd enjoy your meal better that way.
" The world is hard," as Thaler argues; it would have been much better if there's one way to get to work that is always free of traffic and that you and your colleague next door can speak your mind freely about what you would like your lunch to be like. Decisions, by definition, are paradoxical in nature, otherwise you would not have to make them.
You have to choose one and every time you choose, there's a path that is not taken that could lead to a totally different outcome. And sometimes that/those path(s) that are not taken would give you the sense of regret. The term "paradox of choice" coined by Barry Schwartz comes handy into the circle of popular lexicon in business, management and philosophy. Schwartz shows that the more choices we have to choose from the more likely we will regret those that we end up not choosing.
In fact, our obsession with choice thanks the doctrine of liberal economy (i.e., the more choices they are the better it is for the consumers to choose liberally and at will) encourages us to, unfortunately, seek that which makes us feel worse off after that choosing. Cognitive psychologists have shown us how limited our cognitive capacity is; hence, we resort to the quick intuitive system based on your gut feeling (sometimes quickly rationalized as the cold System Two ) to make those decisions.
Well, I have been thinking that perhaps this very concept can be applied to design too. Many of us tend to think that we know and have solutions to things that we don't because of our hot, automatic, emotion-based, and "blinkish" System One. We tend to think that you can or can't design based on the split second decision that should not be used frequently to come up with a meditated solution. Before Kahneman, we might or might not already know that gut feeling is not always our best bet.
But it's Kahneman who first scientifically shows us that our judgments tend to improve if we remove our gut feelings. This is a truly meaningful knowledge that I always recall whenever I encounter any difficult situations -- for whatever I was about to do to mitigate the situation, have I looked at the question and the situation enough with the cold System Two?
Because the gut feeling relies on your emotion before you have thought clearly about the problem, Dr Marshall Rosenberg, the father of the theory of non-violent communication, would also argue that the use of the hot System One to respond to a difficult question is a recipe for a violent communication. So, most designers will lose our jobs if humans are always rational in the economic sense.
We, in the words of Kanehman an Tversky, "are NOT intuitive statisticians" so we cannot always see through the big picture of things (i.e., the law of large number), and are always well prepared for the unexpected, unfamiliar, and unacquainted. As we know, that's not the case. We tend to prefer the expected, the familiar, and the acquainted; which explain somewhat the difficulty of any new products, services, and experiences into the new market.
There're so many instances that a great product failed to stay in the market because it did not appeal -- customers couldn't connect to it. So, the designers' task here is how do you design something that appeals to the intuitive system of the users so that the users would like to give it a try, and hopefully, to like more of it.
Here are the three main findings after having used Thinking, Fast and Slow in my design thinking class last term: First, Simplify, simplify and simplify -- The media and digital designer theorist and guru John Maeda writes in The Laws of Simplicity "The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction." Simple design tends to work better with human's limited cognitive capacity. Things that "look" and "feel" overly complicated tend to tricker the hot System One to refuse it off hand.
Look at these remote controls below, which one would you want to hold in your hand and use? [gallery ids="4617,4618" type="rectangular"] Second, disentangle "truth" from "attitude" -- when we use the hot System One to make a decision for us, we are prone to fail to distinguish between what is the truth and what is just an attitude.
Almost always, when you use the cold System Two to carefully evaluate a statement such as "That's impossible," you'll find out that that which is actually possible, but perhaps because it has never been done the idea of which automatically goes to the defensive mode of being called "impossible." There's a time, not so long ago, when it's understood as the "truth" that the Mainland Chinese was and would always be the cash-based society.
Credit card companies found it hard even to sell the idea of credit cards to their prospective customers. It's believed as the truth that Chinese people only trusted the materialistic aspect of cash -- if it's not red and in your hand then it's not money. Today, China is the fastest growing cashless society. One can walk out of the house for months without having a single Chinese Yuan and live a good life -- they can even buy a car or a house using their smartphone!
This was mainly because the pioneer of cashless payment in China understood that the idea that "Mainland Chinese was and would always be the cash-based society" was "just an attitude." Chinese did not trust the idea of credit cards, let alone third-party companies to whom the banks could resort in building cashless ecosystem, so they did not want to risk losing their money into the cyber clouds.
So, the first thing that this company did was to strengthen the financial security between the banks, rigorously test out the system in various condition, and eventually show it to the prospective customers how it work in reality -- using the "first rule of simplicity" as a guide. Third, shifting the existing perspectives -- What's the most important par of a toothbrush? Quick, quick, I need an answer now.
It had long been believed that the most important element of a toothbrush is the brush (dur!), until the company Oral-B sought help from an anthropologist to find out that it really did not matter how good the brush was if the handle did not well fit the hand and facilitate the various movement needed for toothbrushing. Our hot system one tends to resort to the easiest way out -- and easiest answer too in this sense, but don't be too quick.
This is when the extended version of cold System Two that involves a long-term anthropological research in the community of people would help you to understand the key to problem-solving. A bonus -- find a uniform a wear it daily. People ask me why I only have a few shirts and pants.
All my photos in the past 3 years only feature myself in, at most, three kinds of outfit: a black or red t-shirt (98% of the time), a blue or white shirt (3% of the time) and a blazer on top of either a t-shirt or a shirt (2%) -- and those are basically all I possess in terms of clothing. My two pairs of pants are in dark black and navy blue. Those are all I actually have.
Because I have so few choices, my decision in the morning is automatic. I walk to a closet (or my balcony where I hang my clothes to dry), pick whatever I find first without wearing eyeglasses (hence I couldn't see and therefore my choice would be all random), and then whatever I picked up would become my outfit for the day.
These options that I have are also quite swap-able, so a combination of any of the available choices of pants and shirts would result in something quite acceptable (not like a red shirt, green jeans, and blue suede shoes of anything). Lo and behold, those are a lot of decisions that I no longer have to make in the morning, leaving more room for other things that are more important!
I do the same thing for fragrance -- I only have one of them so that I could skip the step of choosing which one to wear. The same research above about choices result in this very fascinating analysis about the success of people who like to wear a uniform by choice, as reported by Elle Kaplan: Look no further than President Barack Obama for the perfect solution. He once said, "You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits.
I'm trying to pare down decisions." It might be that our Commander in Chief and a slew of other successful business people (including Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg) are on to something. Obama's approach might be a little extreme for the average businessperson, but he has the right idea. He's simply avoiding what many refer to as "decision fatigue", by trimming down the amount of choices he makes each day, and keeping his "willpower" in check for the right ones.
I sense that this "willpower" has something to do with Kahneman and Tversky -- in fact, it's another way of saying "cognitive capacity." In fact, most creative people stick to a few "classic clothes." Have you heard of a little book called Why Architects Wear Black? Honestly, I have not read it -- but I just couldn't agree more with the observation in the title of the book. So, starting from today, save your willpower for what really matters.
The Power of Now