The Transportation Research Board (TSB) recently published a 100-page PDF called Guidebook for Airport Terminal Restroom Planning and Design. If I know anything about the readers of this site, it’s that this is the kind of stuff we live for. Service design for airport toilets? Sign us up!
The TSB report ends with an appendix on the “Airport Restroom of the Future.” After a surprisingly detailed history of public toilets, the TSB concludes that gender-neutral restrooms would offer travelers the most relief. Not only would they better address evolving gender identity norms, but they would also reduce congestion, maintenance, and accessibility by foregoing the barriers that help create the constriction of today’s restrooms. The TSB’s mockup puts individual sink basins in stalls to avoid flow to a common sink area, and adds a spacious waiting area flanked by two “art vitrines.”
I doubt airports care much about this, but it’s at least nice to see the TSB investing in this kind of service design research.
Jennifer Kahn’s The Happiness Code, an article about bringing rationality to self-improvement, is interesting in and of itself. But it’s Hannah Whitaker‘s photo illustrations with lettering by Luke Lucas that really drew me in. I’m sure many of you despise pithy “wisdom quotes” as much as I do. So these are like smooth balm to a tortured soul.
You can see more of Hannah’s excellent work here. Luke’s personal website with some his great graphic design projects is here.
I’ve seen Anshu Sharma’s Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy come up in my feeds a bunch of times over the last couple of days. I personally found the writing quite confusing, and had to read it several times to figure out what he was trying to say. I even drew a picture to help me.
If I understand the argument correctly, Anshu is saying that wherever your core business is in the technology stack, it’s easier to expand your market by going down the stack than up. Like so:
This is obviously an oversimplification and leaves a lot of things out, but it was just a way for me to make sense of the article. That said, it’s this part in particular that stood out for me:
The bottleneck for success often is not knowledge of the tools, but lack of understanding of the customer needs. Database engineers know almost nothing about what supply chain software customers want or need. They can hire for that, but it is not a core competency.
The reason for this is that you are yourself a natural customer of the lower layers. Apple knew what it wanted from an ideal future microprocessor. It did not have the skills necessary to build it, but the customer needs were well understood. Technical skills can be bought/acquired, whereas it is very hard to buy a deep understanding of market needs.
In other words, it’s easier for Apple to take on Intel than it is for Apple to take on Facebook. Likewise, it’s easier for Amazon (AWS) to take on hardware manufacturers than it is for them to take on Salesforce. And the reason for this is that most companies understand the customer needs of the components their core business is built out of, but they don’t understand the customer needs of the businesses that other companies build using their components.
Update: This tweet from Peter Matthaei is a much better summary than the one I came up with:
.@RianVDM If your company uses something, it’s down the stack; anything that companies can build with your stuff is up the stack.
It’s an interesting theory, especially if you consider the logical conclusion that apps and services like Facebook and Salesforce (etc.) are at the top of the stack, and everyone not originally in the software business is going to have a really difficult time competing with them. I’d be curious to hear what others think of this…
Most businesses don’t admit how costly things like company wide announcements, project management, interviewing, internal politics, and large scale collaboration are on productivity. They all work against flow, and should be considered a handicap on product teams. Small teams substitute process with trust, eliminating overhead.
Sad music might make people feel vicarious unpleasant emotions, found a study published last year in Frontiers in Psychology. But this experience can ultimately be pleasurable because it allows a negative emotion to exist indirectly, and at a safe distance. Instead of feeling the depths of despair, people can feel nostalgia for a time when they were in a similar emotional state: a non-threatening way to remember a sadness.
I guess this is the reason we love to immerse ourselves in all kinds of books and stories as well. It’s a safe way to experience unsafe things. Or, as C.S. Lewis put it, “We read to know we are not alone.”
I’ve long held Jakob Nielsen’s Useful = usability + utility formula in high regard. The Introduction to Usability article it comes from is still one of the best intros to user experience I’ve seen. That said, I’ve recently started to wonder about the ideal ratios on the right side of the equation. What combination of usability and utility results in the most useful product? Is it a 50/50 split? 70% usability, 30% utility? It’s a purely academic exercise because there’s no way to prove any of it, but it did lead me to a theory:
I believe that utility (whether a product provides the features users need) is initially more important than usability (how easy & pleasant these features are to use) in product design.
Let me say right up front that I’m not saying usability isn’t important. I’m just saying that when it comes to a product being used extensively (and payed for) by users, it is more important to get the utility right from the start. Users will struggle through bad usability (up to a point), but they won’t use a wonderfully usable product that doesn’t serve a real need (see Path).
I’ll give two personal examples to back up this view1. My favorite social network at the moment is Goodreads. The site is slow, the UI is confusing, and the mobile apps make me feel completely lost, and yet I keep coming back to it. Because Goodreads is extremely good at what it does: helping me find books I’d enjoy, and letting me share good books with friends.
The second example is Pinboard. If I could take only one website with me to a deserted island it would be Pinboard. I use it more than any other online service. It helps me save, categorize, and find all the useful articles I’ve read over the 5 years I’ve been using it. The UI has tons of little weird quirks, and it’s very much barebones. But that doesn’t matter. It’s indispensable to me, so I care very little about its usability.
These two examples lead me to a second theory:
The more utility a product has, the less its usability matters.
I like Goodreads, but at some point if the usability becomes too frustrating, I’ll just leave. For Pinboard, on the other hand, I’ll walk through usability hell and back just to keep using it. It’s that essential to my work.
I’ve said this a few times in this article, but let me reiterate: I’m not, for a second, saying that usability isn’t important. I’m proposing that if you have a product that has insane levels of utility, its usability becomes a secondary factor in its success. To put it another way, the ROI on increasing utility is probably much higher than the ROI on improving usability.
The moral of the story is this: first find an idea that people can’t live without, then make it a beautiful, usable product. It’s very difficult to do it the other way around.
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Nick Bilton quit his Nest Thermostat because a software malfunction left him unable to heat his house for a while. In Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold he extrapolates to concerns about what happens when connected devices stop working as they should:
We’ve seen this before, with wireless fobs for keyless cars. They are supposed to make life easier by letting us do away with car keys, but they also make it easier for thieves to break in (by using a simple radio amplifier).
It also happened recently with Fitbit, the maker of wearable activity trackers. The company was hit with a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco asserting that the wristbands failed to “consistently and accurately record wearers’ heart rates,” which is vital for those with certain medical conditions.
I’ve heard dozens of other stories from people with connected homes who were locked out by malfunctioning door touch pads, or about newfangled security alarms going off in the middle of the night because a bug (one with wings, not a digital one) flew by.
This reminds me of Daniel Rivero’s Robots are starting to break the law and nobody knows what to do about it. Since companies are starting to require customers to sign agreements that prohibit them from filing law suits in the event of a malfunction, there is no one to hold responsible. Combine this with last week’s The internet of all the things, and I’m suddenly not so keen on this “connected home” thing any more.
Though everyone says they’re addicted, [Roni Frank, co-founder of Talkspace] says, they aren’t necessarily motivated to solve the problem. She compares it to cigarettes. “In the early years, people were smoking like crazy,” she says, “and at some point, everybody started to be aware of how harmful it is. I think the same thing will happen with social media, and how it is basically promoting poor mental health.”
Social media therapy is not the only aspect of Talkspace that has yet to be fully embraced by the mainstream. The idea that therapeutic help can come from an app, in general, has been met with some skepticism. “Developing a relationship with your patients in online therapies can be a problem, because you can’t see emotional cues,” Madalina Sucala, a clinical psychologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who has researched how clinicians feel about e-therapy, told The Verge, “and sometimes you can’t convey empathy.”
Filing this in my ever-growing “what a time to be alive” category.
