roll for initiative

A friend “lent” me a copy of the December 2006 issue of the Harvard Business Review, in which there was an interesting article about “the curse of knowledge” by Chip and Dan Heath (brothers maybe?). (Unfortunately, I don’t think they have online versions of the HBR without subscription, but you get a copy of the article for $6 at the HBR web site.)

Chip and Dan were arguing that when upper management puts forth vague business strategies and mission statements like “Provide best-of-breed services and products”, they’re not just drinking the kool-aid. They argue that to someone who’s been immersed in the “logic and conventions” of business, those platitudes actually represent a sort of “business shorthand”. To the biz folk, those statements represent vasts amounts of business related knowledge, accumulated over years of b-school and industry experience.

[I supposed that every discipline uses similar shorthand … with designers talking about “envisioning transparent interactivity”, PMs saying stuff like “push back non-critical cycles to open up the critical path”, engineers talking about “shutting down the retention fields to prevent the overloading the Jefferies Tubes”, etc. etc. etc..]

Unfortunately, those business strategies and missions statements have a tendency to come across vague and ambiguous to the rest of us, the ones without all that internalized business acumen.

The problem is further compounded by what’s called “the Curse of Knowledge”. Once you know something, you behave as if you’ve always known it and it’s difficult for you to think like someone who doesn’t know what you know (sounds positively Rumsfeldian).

To illustrate their point, they referred to a 1990 psych study by Elizabeth Newton, then a psych grad student at Stamford. (Unfortunately, the study was included in her non-published dissertation, so it was unable to read the original study. Thanks anyway, Google Scholar.) In her study, Newton divided her participants into two groups, tappers and listeners. Tappers had to tap out a common tune on a table (I imagined them doing this with their fingers or a pencil), listeners had to listen and say which song it was.

Funny thing is I tried this with some friends back when we were kids and it’s incredibly difficult for the listener to pick out a song. Try it with a friend: ask them to identify a tune you’ll tap out, and pick something easy, like Happy Birthday or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

When Newton asked the tappers to predict how often the listeners would guess the song correctly they said that the listeners would get it right about 50% of the time. Since they knew the song they were tapping out, the task seemed incredibly easy for them and they assumed it would be the same for the listeners.

The ACTUAL success ratio was much much smaller. Out of 120 songs, listeners only got 3 right, for a success ratio of 2.5%.

So, back to the biz guy and his grand-yet-incomprehensible-ideas. Chip and Dan argue that there are ways for you to beat the curse of knowledge trap. It’s all rather basic, really. If you’re aware of this curse of knowledge, you’re in a good position to be able to avoid it’s pitfall by translating your ideas back into lay-speak. (Though I guess the challenge would be to do so without coming across as patronizing.)

Chip and Dan suggest using “concrete language” and “stories” to avoid the curse of knowledge and get your point across to other people. Which seems extremely similar to “speak the users language” and “use scenarios and personas” … all things we user research folks try to do with users and designers.

Maybe there’s a market out there for user testing business models and strategies. Damn, maybe I should patent that!

The last post was just a setup for today’s brilliant (hopefully) thought.

As previously mentioned, I’m not a big sports fan - I don’t watch a lot of sports. I do get into 4-year sports - the kind that only show up once every 4 years, like the Olympics and the World Cup.

And I’m not a big fan of sports video games. No knowing much about sports is actually a big handicap when playing sports game - especially in multiplayer matches against people who actually know that they are doing.

But like my interests in the 4 years spots, every 4 years or so I do like to bust out the latest version of FIFA. True to form, during the last World Cup I did play a few matches of FIFA on the Xbox 360 and found it quite enjoyable.

And the TV to Games to TV cross pollination mentioned yesterday is quite evident in FIFA 2006. For example, in FIFA 2006 you have many camera options, one of which is a “broadcast camera” which uses a camera style similar to what you would experience when watching a game on TV. I haven’t tried playing many matches with this camera style so I’m not sure how it’ll work during actual gameplay, but it’s a great example of video games adapting to user expectations based on their experiences with traditional media. Not to mention (too late!) the real world broadcasters that provide the in-game color for the game. I could go on and list various other ways in which the video game borrows from TV broadcasts to make the experience more exciting and “realistic”.

But what I really want to talk about is the in-game Heads Up Display (HUD) and how TV could borrow from it to make the viewing experience a bit more enjoyable, especially for us quadrennial fans. (And hopefully, these ideas won’t detract from the more frequent viewer … unlike the horrid super puck from back in the day.)

In any case, as can be seen in this image, the HUD in FIFA displays various bits of information. Some of these you’d see on a TV broadcast, like the time remaining, the score, and the teams playing (duh). Some of these are specific to the game, like the player’s name (and his stats) who is currently being controlled by the video game player. The final bit of the HUD is an image of the pitch (that’s the field to you yanks) with colored dots representing the players and the ball and their location in the pitch.

And THAT’S the bit that I think broadcasts could borrow from the FIFA games (if EA hasn’t patented that, which they may have). With RFID technology, it’s possible to put a chip on each player and the ball (which they did in the last World Cup anyway). When viewing the game you’d get to see the action near the ball, but you could also glance at the pitch overview graphic and see where the defenders of the attacking team were, how far up their goalie was playing … generally, you’d get a sense of where all the other off-screen players were. Personally, I think this would open up the TV viewing experience greatly … making it somewhat more similar to watching the game at a stadium where you can decide to follow the action or focus on the other players to see how they’re setting up for the next play.

Here’s an in-game clip that shows a bit of the gameplay and the HUD in action: FIFA 2006 Gameplay Video. Take a look at it in full-screen mode and see how that little graphic gives you a fuller appreciation of the entire pitch.

So …all you all footballers out there … would this add to your viewing experience or is this another Super Puck?

Video games have long borrowed from other media forms. Developers use cutscenes and in game cinematography to drive the storyline - and the best cutscenes are as effective as the best Hollywood has to offer. Horror games make great use of sound effects and music to heighten the suspense, much like horror films have been doing since Nosferatu.

Games have also borrowed from TV. One of my favorite games from back in the day was Interstate ‘76, which had a hokey ’70s TV show feel, including a great opening sequence. Watch this great opening movie and credit sequence and tell me that it doesn’t hit that ’70s action series feel on the head: I’76 Opening Movie.

Today, video games are becoming such a big part of popular culture that we’re starting to see some design ideas going the other way - from video games to TV and movies.

Sports broadcasts and games are a prime example of this cross pollination. Football video games were overlaying the scrimmage and 1st down lines decades ago - which is a common practice in football broadcasts these day.

Sports broadcasts have also borrowed some camera techniques from video games. The flyover, fly-by-wire, aerial camera required need technology to pull off but video games have been using that for a long time … which they probably originally borrowed from the movies to begin with.

Examples of this type of borrowing are everywhere. The Matrix’s “we’re all living in a virtual reality MMORPG” is heavily influenced by video games. Max Payne took the bullet cam and made it the interactive bullet time. And it’s only a matter of time before sports broadcasts figure out how to do real-time bullet cam. And soon after that DVRs will figure out how to give users the ability not only to stop and rewind live TV, but also allow the viewer to change camera angles at the same time … basically a bullet time camera for live TV.

Sign me up!

Abstract:

In the first of an (hopefully) ongoing series, the author examines yet another topic about which he knows very little but has spent an inordinate amount of time over analyzing: the design Pringles™ Potato Crisps. True to form, he uses examples from other areas and disciplines (some of which he may know more than a little and others about which he knows next to nothing) to shore up his thesis.

Introduction

First off, I’ve got to admit that trying to continue with this pseudo-APA style for this entire post would have been needlessly cumbersome and probably quite annoying. So I’ll borrow the general headers, but the prose will be somewhat-less-than academic.

Some time ago I was eating some Pringles™ Potato Crisps and I started to geek out on what a company like Proctor and Gamble must go through to put a product like Pringles™ Potato Crisps on the market. I’m familiar with the whole putting-products-on-shelves bit as I do some of that in my day job as a “user-researcher” for a video game publisher. I know what it takes to get a game on the shelves and I started thinking about the user-researchers, marketers, product designers, and comestible engineers over at P&G.

I was imaging that they deal with the same issues we do in games – the constant balancing act between the marketing forecasts, the designer’s vision, the end-user experience, the engineering challenges, etc. etc. etc., that we go through when we’re developing and publishing a product. As I’ve said before, “making games fun ain’t all fun and games”. Maybe the good folks of P&G have a similar saying … “Making tasty treats ain’t all … treaty and tasty-y” … hmm needs some work.

In any case, I picked up a new flavor of Pringles™ (well, new to me, anyways) today: Chipotle. Clearly, someone in the New and Emerging Markets Group of the Demographics Analysis Department at P&G’s Savory Tuberous Product Division noticed that the Latino population in the US increased up 57.9% between the 1990 and 2000 censuses and is expected to grow another 71% between 2000 and 2020. Excited by these numbers, they called a meeting with other bigger marketers and executives and some savvy up-and-comer greenlit Project Chupacabra to “Investigate the feasibility and desirability of Latino-themed snack lines”.

Thusly greenlit, a crack team of product designers and (hopefully) user researchers were brought on board to work with the marketers to create a new product that would “introduce the growing Latino population in the US and abroad to the exciting and rewarding active Pringles™ Lifestyle™”. Because, as we all know, Potato Crisps products are not just a snack, they’re a lifestyle choice.

At the kick-off meeting, the Chupacabrans realize that their work is cut out for them: designing a snack line that celebrates the joie-de-vivre, work ethic, and family values of Latino culture while still being sensitive to regional and national differences is going to be a challenge. The project timeline is another complication as everyone knows that summer is THE snacking season. Kids are out of school and parents are struggling, juggling work and keeping the kids busy, trying to keep Dylan out of juvi and Madison out of Planned Parenthood. So sales of both savory and sweet items in the Portable Foods category spike during the summer months.

Rolling up their sleeves, the Chupacagbrans begin planning their first steps – ethnography, consumer focus panels, competitive testing, and other types of user research to help inform the design process.

Coming soon: Project Chupacabra Part 2 – Know thy user.