Author: Rachel Ganz

Ethics and personal responsibility

Sir Peter Rubin, head of the GMC (General Medical Council), was invited to give evidence to the parliamentary commission on banking practices about the requirements of a regulatory body.

He pointed out that the GMC had considerable control over medical education, and therefore doctors educated in Britain had been required to learn a standard of ethical behaviour. He also pointed out that doctors bear personal responsibility for their actions, whereas bankers do not. (Parliament TV of the evidence).

My education has included little practical ethics (a philosophy module at York covered Kant’s categorical imperative, which offers useful advice about behaviour about speaking truthfully to men carrying axes). My MSc discussed organisational behaviour, risk management and research ethics. In the module on ergonomics, we were told that bad design can cause accidents, and told that in future we might bear personal responsibility for accidents that were due to poor design. For example, is the person who decided on the position of the signal passed at danger at Ladbroke Grove (wikipedia details here) personally responsible for the deaths of passengers caused by the signal being difficult to see? Geoffrey Counsell organised a fireworks display near a motorway. He is being prosecuted for manslaughter, because it is possible that smoke from the display obscured visibility and caused drivers to crash. They can’t be prosecuted, because nobody really knows whether they were driving dangerously or not.

How is responsibility shared out? When something goes wrong, we look for an individual to blame. It is as if we imagine that there is a single chain of cause and effect, that we can follow, and find the original person who didn’t spot the missing horseshoe nail, or who put the shoe on badly, and then blame them for the consequences. While it’s never that simple (I’ll talk about organisational cultures another time), there’s still a question for any interface designer. Does what you do make it more likely that someone else will make a mistake, and possibly destroy their own or someone else’s life?

Another moment of fury

Back at work. This time my fury was inspired by Jack. He has been occasionally closeted with GandD over the last couple of months, and today he was demonstrating his cool new stuff.

Cool it may have been, but only in the sense of an approaching iceberg. We (in theory) have until the end of January to finish and test the latest release. Three weeks, loads of time isn’t it? That could be my new nickname for Jack “Loadsatime”.

For reasons best known to himself and GandD, they didn’t want, well, anyone with experience of users, such as myself, training or support, to comment (or even know about) the new features until they were properly implemented. So this was the gleaming remove the drapery moment; cut the red ribbon and reveal the glorious finished product.

Except, is there a way of putting this tactfully? Except there is no point in asking for feedback on a finished product unless the only feedback you want is “Isn’t it mahvellous dahling”.

What is that there for? Oh, I thought it might be a good idea. Do users need it? I don’t know. Is that very important bit that users might actually want to use easy to find? Well, it’s obviously really easy, you just open this dialog and find that button and then set this option…. You can imagine the rest. And, given the fact that there is three weeks left, they aren’t going to change anything at this stage, are they?

Admittedly, he did have three cast-iron and valid excuses
1. Gavin wanted it like that
2. David wanted it like that
3. It would have taken months to implement in a sensible way.

Well, maybe excuse no. 3 isn’t that valid, because it hinges on that big elephant in the sitting room, well, not merely an elephant in the sitting-room, there’s a volcano in the bathtub, a hyena in the kitchen, and fourteen zombies locked into the attic bedroom.

And they’re all asking the big question?
How are priorities set?

Loadsatime Jack can’t set them, because he does what GandD ask him to do. They have a difficult call to make.

First, they have limited development resource.
Second, they need to use it in a way that brings in returns

Some things, such as re-writing the whole thing from scratch, just ain’t going to happen. Not unless we get a massive injection of cash from some venture capitalists. And GandD wouldn’t sell their company unless it was sinking.

How can I persuade them that a project that is easier to use may be more worth having than one with more features?
How can I demand that a lot of that limited development resource is spent on making existing stuff better, rather than adding new stuff. At the moment I can’t think.
But perhaps I could persuade them that involving the idea of the user earlier in the process would be a good plan. Before they decide which features go in, even. At the moment though, I think I’ll just go out for a long walk and avoid the undead for tonight.

Hawthorne and placebo and real benefit

The Hawthorne effect (here’s the wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect) describes how any intervention has a positive effect. By paying people attention, you change their behaviour. Were I a Deepak Chopra or a dancing Wu Li master, I would probably relate that to the idea of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or Schrodinger’s cat because everybody thinks they know what those mean and they sound as if you’re wise because there’s deep maths in there somewhere.

Instead, I’m going to relate it to the placebo effect. This is much more straightforward, and is obviously used in medical trials. People are given a placebo treatment, which resembles the active treatment with the active ingredient removed, and the effects of the placebo and the active treatment are compared. In a double-blind trial, neither the experimenter nor the subject knows who has received the placebo and who has received the active treatment.

The reason this is important is because people want to believe that interventions work. One of the subjects I studied at UCL was affective interaction: how humans, computers and other devices affect each other emotionally. One of the theories expressed was the idea that humans are attempting to achieve homeostasis. You have an input of one sort or another, and you change your behaviour to achieve stability. One of the ways you do that is to tell yourself a story in which things have meaning and value. And one of the ways that things achieve meaning and value is how they fit into a culture. Tall people (on average) earn more money than shorter people. Good-looking people are more likely to get jobs, etc., than ugly people. We live in a world of admiration of beauty, where beauty is equated to goodness.

If someone tells us they are doing something to help us, we want to believe them (unless we are cussed and cynical creatures).

The vast number of self-help books, business-help books and teach-yourself books are sold to us by people who have persuaded us that they can help. We want to believe them. We listen to their advice. And the more we pay for it, the more highly we value it (just as the more we pay for wine or pain-killers, the better we think they are).

So if we are told that someone is coming in to tell us how to redesign a control room, and that person is being paid $5000 a day, then we react to it. And when the control room is redesigned, we react to that. But until the change is seen in practice, over time, we don’t know if we are reacting to what we think is a valuable intervention, or to an intervention because it’s a change and we have been paid intention to, or because it has actually improved things.

With any luck, that highly-paid consultant has listened and observed the people doing the work, and added their insights and experiences to the redesign. So when they complain that they knew this all along, and they could have told management how to do things better, they will have done so. And management will have listened because this time it comes with a high price tag that conveys its worth,

Preparing to return to work

It has been a long break for me, and I have mixed feelings about what awaits me on my return to work. Most of the other staff also took the week off between Christmas and New Year (though Jiri did not). I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I always feel that I should invite Jiri round for Christmas lunch and never do. He is probably perfectly happy on his own.

There is the standard stuff that always appears when you have had a break. The stack of problems that people discover because they’re not really working but are exploring the software to have something to do. The new features that Gavin has invented while going on a long walk after an all-night party. The new contacts that David has made while playing golf on Boxing Day, and their suggestions for what is needed to penetrate new markets. The stale issues that people couldn’t deal with just before Christmas so they put on the pile to be dealt with after Christmas when they would feel more inspired and less jaded.

All the tinsel that draped the stairs and monitors has been put away. Jiri is very happy because he managed to get an enormous amount done while the office was empty. The cleaners haven’t been in over the new year so his desk is festooned with crumbs and empty packets of Czech festive items. Jack isn’t back yet – he’s gone ski-ing with his girlfriend. Mr Grumpy is in, and he is delighted to be back at work. For someone who complains so much, he seems to enjoy life far more than most of the people I know.

I promised that I would provide a systems analysis of the company and I am just considering how to do it. Like most small companies, it consists of a series of departments, each run by a manager. Departments contain some specialised staff and some people who have ended up there and learnt on the job. In a good company, the departments will be work-shaped. That is, a department has a function to perform and its staff and systems enable it to carry out the function within the department. That’s easy if it’s a closed function, but speaking from experience, every function will require (at the very least) information from the rest of the company.

For example, marketing has a big marketing push to carry out in the new year – get customers before the end of the tax year in April, when they’re likely to have some extra budget to spend. Marketing need to know all the stuff about customers patterns of purchase (which is their own skill) and they need to feed that back into the company. They also need to know what the company is producing that they can sell in the new year. How do they do that? Do they get the over-optimistic views of GandD, or do they get the more realistic views of Ian? Do they have to come and chase and check whether what they have been told is true, or will the right information be passed on at the regular meetings? Have they got the experience to discount GandD’s over-optimism, and if so, how do they know which bits to discount? This is not something that can be codified, because the (say) 30% of stuff to discount will change each time? This is skill, but to be able to learn the skill, you have to know what goes in and what goes out. You have to know at what point the product starts to stabilise and you have real information to deal with. And from that, you have to find out what customers want and feed that back into development.

So marketing has several roles:
1. To sell stuff to customers (this is how it’s seen within the company, anyway)
2. To understand what the company produces and when it will be ready
2. To understand what customers need and when they buy it (that’s their own skill that enables them to do their job)
3. To tell the company what customers need and when they buy it
4. To create a trustworthy competent public image for the company

Now Jeanette is fabulous at selling. She’s pretty good at knowing what the company produces and how much of GandD to ignore. And when to ask them what is actually happening. And when to tell them stuff is a waste of time. But I’m not sure how much all of her knowledge about customers – why they buy, and even more importantly, why they don’t buy, filters back into the company. Should it? Can Jeanette’s sense of what people want be as important as what David picks up on the golf course?

Failure demand and value demand

Today’s lesson is not about how long it takes to drive to Newquay and why it rains when I am driving but not when my partner is. That would be yesterday’s lesson (and that would explain why I didn’t post yesterday). The surf was quite impressive in Newquay. As always, I wish that I’d gone down into it rather than stayed up on Pentire Point with the wind trying and failing to get me off my feet and face-first into the gloopy mud.

Today’s lesson is from John Seddon, and it’s about what work is worth doing. He splits the work people have to do into value-demand and failure-demand. Value-demand is when your customers/clients/ citizens ask you to do something for them that you want.
Failure-demand is when your c/c/cs ask you to fix something for them that they didn’t want.
So, selling someone a piece of software that does the job they want is a value-demand. Responding to a support call is a failure-demand.
Registering their details, is that a failure-demand or a value-demand? I think it’s a failure-demand. Most customers don’t want to fill out their details unless they can see the point. Yes, they’re happy to provide a delivery address, that enables you to give them something they want. They may or may not be happy to register the software, depending whether they can see the benefit. They want to provide the minimum of information to do so. I.e, if you hang your marketing questionnaire on the registration document, they want want to complete it. And every time they make a mistake filling out a form and you ask them for more information, that’s a failure demand. You’re not asking them to fix their problem, you’re asking them to fix your problem.

Back in the days when I used to train people in using software, we used to provide a questionnaire so that people could comment on the training. At the end of it was a comment box, asking people what sort of training they would like. Some people wanted online training that they could access as and when they wanted. Some people wanted a member of staff to come and sit with them and help them through the problem. They didn’t want training, they wanted a good fairy.

There is a question. If someone wants help are they asking:
1. Please can you make this problem go away (that’s a failure-demand)
or
2. Please can you show me what to do in this situation (that’s a value-demand)

Many of our current problems are because people are in situations that they don’t want to be in in the first place. The usability problem is how do you design things so that they help people not to be in the problem in the first place?

Sometimes that’s done by changing the product’s interface. Sometimes it’s done by changing its function. And sometimes it’s done by changing its marketplace. The water pouring down on the West of England this December would be highly desirable in other circumstances. Unfortunately, the only desirable aspect I can think of at the moment involves a steep slope and a mud-slide (followed by a bath, a fire, and a lot of washing).

My solution to all society’s problems

“Be nice”

There you are. That was easy, wasn’t it.

I started reading the book on Systems thinking in the public sector, and my heart has already sunk into my boots and then slightly further, when it began with a quick summary of the basis of monetarism in game theory. Not because I’m not interested in the subject matter, but because of the discounting of altruism as an important motivator in human affairs.

When I think about my life, the key thing is how I spend my time. Time is something that we know is a limited resource. We all have some and we all share that knowledge. Other things, such as family, money, status, justice, friends, stuff, individuals have more or less of, depending on circumstances. How they value them can be measured in how much of their time they dedicate to them.

Each time you make a choice in how you spend your time, you are unconsciously stating your values. So, if you’re not sure what you think is important, then see how you spend your time. And if there’s a mismatch, you are probably not at your happiest. Anybody who visits me knows that I put a higher value on drawing than on housework, but they also know that a certain level of housework is done before I can start drawing, because otherwise I have fears that the evil monster who lives in the back of the fridge and sows mould on cold leftovers will come out and eat me. (Yes, I know that mould spores, don’t attempt to out-pedant me).

Well, how societies encourage their members to spend time gives us an idea of what that societies values are. So, if we’re encouraged to sit in traffic jams rather than use public transport, what does it say about society? Does this mean that we somehow value traffic jams? Is it the opportunity to meditate that they provide us with? Is it the conversion of fossil fuel directly into pollutants without any side-benefit of transportation? Is it the fact that it’s a community activity that many people can take part in.

Suggestions in the comments box please.

The smell of brandy lingers

Coming down to the kitchen this morning, there was a definite odour of brandy. This may have been from the left-over Christmas pudding (flamed in brandy) or the sundry articles involved in flaming. The new Christmas experiment this year was playing Snapdragon. We didn’t research how to play, so merely put raisins on a plate, poured flaming brandy over them and then snatched raisins out of the flame. There was a certain excitement in watching raisins re-ignite. Apparently we should have put raisins in a bowl of brandy and then set light to that. Oh well, maybe next year. We still have some brandy left, and it’s not high on my list of liquids for easy drinking.

I am feeling slightly jaded this morning, and pondering the pleasures of doing things that are difficult and entertaining and challenging. Playing music and singing, well, all the arts in fact, are not improved by making them user-friendly. User-friendliness is about tools rather than skills.Many human pleasures involve setting oneself challenges and putting barricades in one’s way (otherwise called rules).

I went to the public library before Christmas to stock up on reading material for the festive period. I was very entertained when I realised that my heart had leapt in excitement – not from the new Barbara Kingsolver or Martin Amis, but when I saw a newly returned copy of John Seddon’s Systems Thinking in the Public Sector. Just what I needed. Admittedly I’ve read the new Barbara Kingsolver and am in the middle of Rupert Everett’s second volume of autobiography, but I’m sure that once the mince pies have been digested, I’ll be telling all my friends about how to set up systems in a better way – because usability applies to organisations as well as objects. Yes, my new year’s resolution – do a blog post on systems in my company and how to improve them.

I’m not bitter, honestly

I would like to know how people agree on a vocabulary for interface items.

Do they have a style guide (wonderful but under-rated and unappreciated) that lists all the features in the product and what are used to describe them.
Then, if they do, do they have a system of checking whether the term they’re using already exists in it with a totally different definition?

For example, I can now get on my hobby horse. One of my bugbears is the way that computers have hi-jacked the words data and information.

There’s a whole philosophical argument that it isn’t data unless it has meaning. It certainly isn’t information unless it has meaning. Information technology is a total con. You can waggle a wire in a box and get something. Now, how do you work out what is noise and what is signal? That’s question one. You’ve separated them out, but the signal doesn’t have any meaning, you can have a morse key being blown by the wind and it will send signal, but it won’t necessarily send data, let alone information.

Information only exists in context. For example, I cannot display a web page on the radio. The radio can pick up wireless signals. The signals representing the web page can be transmitted using wireless, so why can’t the radio show it. It can play sound transmitted using that medium, so why is light any different? Well, duh, it’s obvious isn’t it. It’s like saying that just because a computer uses heat it can boil water to make tea.

More fun to think about is “does a book contain information if it’s written in a language you can’t read”? How about, does a USB stick contain information if it’s been encoded with an uncrackable code and you’ve lost the password? Yes, you can think in terms of systems which would enable you to access the information, but if you don’t have those interfaces, does the information exist?

A lot of what people do is try to give meaning to the world around them. And one of the ways they do it is to take words and overload them with meaning in different contexts. So a sheet on a sailing ship has one meaning which is different from a sheet in a laundry or a sheet on a printer. And we normally decode these multiple meanings by context. But when you are in a known context, you really, really don’t need people using the same word twice with different meaning.

So, how do you get people to think if the new term they’re using is in fact an existing term. That already has meaning in this context? Judging from my jaundiced view of humanity, you don’t. But if you’re lucky, you can point it out to them and they realise that they have made life a little bit harder for everyone who uses the product.

How many boxes do you need to be incomprehensible?

Calculating tax isn’t easy, I agree. So why not make it as difficult as possible. Yes, we are in the wonderful world of options.

And my favourite set ever are the binary boxes. Yes have three boxes that can be checked. Hence you don’t merely have three possible states, you have 2^3 states.

You can have no box checked. That, apparently is the default behaviour. Let’s call it run payroll(monthly)
Then you can have one box checked. That means update payroll to today
Then you can have another box checked, that means calculate payroll to date x
Then you can have both of them checked, that means calculate payroll between date x and today
Then you can have other, which means calculate between whichever date it was and the next day that payroll would have run in the normal course of things (I think – or maybe it means do it but using offshore tax rules – or maybe it means do it without public holidays unless you are in the southern hemisphere) .

How am I supposed to explain how stupid that is? That just because something is efficient and delivers the maximum options in the minimum space doesn’t mean that it is useful.

Sometimes I hate my job. Sometimes I want to groom dogs or persuade the NRA that guns are not a basic necessity of life.

And I want a Ben Goldacre t-shirt saying “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that”
(look Ben – I’m putting in a link http://www.badscience.net/2008/12/i-think-youll-find-its-a-bit-more-complicated-than-that-and-other-excellent-christmas-gifts/

Like anything else, computers are easy if what you want to do is easy. What’s hard is finding the easy way to do something.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible

Mr Grumpy has been off work for the last three days. Cold, flu, job interviews? I have no idea. David has been rushing round the building in a blue silk suit pretending that he is a media medico, ready to reassure and persuade. And Gavin and Jiri have had a full head-on shouting-match. (I could possibly insert another couple of hyphens into that sentence but I’m not quite sure.)

Remember all that happy excitement when Jiri agreed that redesigning his section of the interface was a good thing? That was then, this is now. Gavin wandered through, saw that Jiri had messed with his code, and suggested that now was a good time for a review meeting.

They went into the presentation room, with the screen and the white board and the digicam and the video conferencing facilities. They shut the door, but after a few minutes noise and steam began to emerge from round the edges. And I knew that Jiri had finally cracked and started telling Gavin that he was wrong, that his approach was wrong, that his code was inefficient, and that a design path that consisted entirely of Gavin and David sitting together and feeding sharks was not effective.

I also knew that if any of the other developers had been in there, they would have crumbled by now. Beardy Nick would do anything to avoid a row, up to and including coming in at 8am every Sunday morning for six months while the system went live. And CJ doesn’t really believe that he knows enough to disagree with anyone, about code. And Ian likes working within the realms of the possible. But Jiri, whether it’s because he’s Czech and has been through National Service, or whether it’s because he is unutterably stubborn and weighs as much as a small car, will pick his corner and come out fighting.

I knew the obvious thing to do was to leave them to it. Instead, I wondered if there was anything I could do to influence the outcome, at the very least, distract David so that he couldn’t weigh in on Gavin’s side.

It was surprisingly easy to persuade Lulu, the receptionist, that it would be a good idea to put an announcement over the intercom that it was such a lovely day we were all going to head for the pub.