Tag: #knowledge

The Apple Has Fallen Far from the Steve

December 27, 2016 / Paul / 0 Comments

On Episode 28 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking about Apple the Iphone 7 taking out their headphone jack.

Introduction

Jacob: Welcome to The Edge of Innovation. My name is Jacob. I had the privilege of hosting Paul, and we are going to be talking about the iPhone 7 today, not just the iPhone 7 but specifically the lack of a headphone jack on it.

Paul: Wait a minute. You’ll telling me that took the headphone jack out?

Jacob: 3.5. Straight off.

Paul: Wow.

Jacob: This has been—

Paul: But I’ve heard you could drill a hole into them and it’s behind there.

Jacob: I was going to bring it up. That’s one of my favorite parts about this whole story. They…there’s like a guy loaded up a YouTube video, putting his iPhone 7 in a vice, and then all through the YouTube said, “This will not work.” And then thousands of people still did it.

Paul: Well, we don’t know about the thousands. Yeah. But at least there was more than one.

Jacob: There was at least a few.

Paul: More than zero.

Jacob: Yeah. More than zero. I would like to think of it as a thousand.

Paul: Do you think they need to turn in their humanity cards or what?

Jacob: I think it calls into question the quality of our our public education. I just… I can’t imagine.

Paul: What were you thinking is the question, really. What were you thinking?

Jacob: It’s a, it’s a hidden feature that you…

Paul: So Apple took it. Actually, they built it in. They just covered it up.

Jacob: Right. Right.

Paul: Interesting.

Jacob: So the whole—

Paul: That would have been really stupid of Apple to do that.

Jacob: Yeah. So I haven’t actually… So I have an iPhone 6, and I’ve actually refused to go to the iPhone 7.

Paul: Because of this issue.

Jacob: Because of this issue. I could easily do it with the way my plan is set up. But yeah…

Paul: So there’s no financial penalty or disincentive financially.

Jacob: No. We’re through Sprint and, if you lease your phone know, and so it’s just, whatever, $5 and month, and you just go get the new phone. But so, I wanted to bring it up as a topic to talk about because there’s a lot of issues in it.

Paul: Well, I don’t really think it’s that big a deal. I mean, my toaster doesn’t have a headphone jack and neither does my microwave, so I’m really not sure. But, you know, I don’t carry those with me, you know. So that’s a good point. That’s a good point.

Jacob: We’ve previously not been used to using your headphone jack on your previous toaster.

Paul: No. No, all the toasters I’ve had to date have not had headphone jacks. They’re all Bluetooth headphones. Yeah, it is interesting. You know, it’s a, as Apple spun it, which I think was a mistake…

Jacob: I think they said it was brave and courageous.

Paul: Brave. Courageous. Courageous, you know, and, you know, I don’t know. People in the floods recently had firefighters rescue them. I think that’s courageous.

Jacob: Strikes me as courageous.

Paul: Yeah, you know, I don’t think changing, you know, making a decision, a difficult decision, to remove the headphone jack… You know, it would be… It’s, it’s a pretty big space, relative to the amount of space that the headphones and the, uh, the wires that go to it and all that, it’s a pretty big space in the, in the microcosm inside of an iPhone. So I can understand that that space was there.

Jacob: It was valuable real estate.

Paul: Valuable real estate. That’s a great way to put it. But you know, they didn’t take it out of the iPad. You know, so I think it’s a little disingenuous to say, “We’re taking it out because we think people should use wireless.” You know, it’s wireless or nothing.

Jacob: Yeah, well, and you know, some of the story was, “This is a hundred-year-old technology. We’re finally coming up to—”

Paul: Yeah, so it light. I mean, you know… You know… As I was saying, you know, I think the iPhone 8 is going to do away with the screen, and the earphone, you know, microphone, and everything. It’s going to be, basically, an ethereal… You know, you’re going to open the box. You won’t be able to see, taste, touch, or use it, but it’s an iPhone 8.

Jacob: But it’s interesting. So the whole category, though, of taking away the headphone jack, it has some… As I was looking into this, and I’ve been watching articles, it has some collateral damage. I don’t even know… Either they intentionally and spitefully did this, or they didn’t think about it, and there’s kind of the collateral damage. So one of them is, for example, like there’s a device called the Square that plugs into the headphone jack.

Paul: The was immediately my thought, is the peripheral devices that depend on the headphone jack, what are they going to do?

Jacob: What? They’re going to go into the adapter for the thunderport? So, there’s that, but then also, because now that the headphones are basically, linked, you know. So they have the wireless headphones, somebody… There’s been some major concerns about how that affects music in terms of, because now you have a device that has to be authenticated and synced to your phone, and there could be a way for Apple to say, “Well, if you haven’t bought your music through us…”

Paul: Oh, sure. Absolutely. They could downgrade the quality and do all sorts of—

Jacob: Or not even allow you to sync it. So it’s…

Paul: Well… Yeah. That would be interesting. So you can’t listen to this non-properly purchased music of these headphones because we have control of the wire. That’s an interesting comment. The, the interesting thing I heard is that, the quality is better. Well, the quality isn’t necessarily better. A wire is pretty darn good for quality. There’s a lot of debates in audio file circles, about the quality of cables. And there’s people who charge enormous amounts of money for cables. It’s a very mythical thing.

But there’s this well-known test for, double-blind test with audio files, So they did the A/B testing. They did these interconnects that were very expensive. I mean, ridiculously expensive. That was A, and then they switched it over to B. And the people, very critical people, very, you know, very astute listeners, couldn’t tell the difference.

You should ask the question now, well what were the connections used for B. Well, they were coat hangers twisted together.

Jacob: No kidding.

Paul: And if you understand the physics of, metal wires, you know, electrons, you know, yeah. There’s a little bit of difference here, but it’s not extreme.

Jacob: It’s… I had somebody once try to tell me, like, this cable for your guitar will transmit the signal faster than the other one. I was like, the physics don’t change.

Paul: Yeah. It’s really hard to slow down electricity or speed it up. And so, you know, there were some people who were saying listening to it through the headphone— or the thunderbolt port, was better quality, so much better quality. I’m not sure that that’s the case. There’s an A-to-D converter, analog-to-digital converter or digital-to-analog converter that does the headphones. They still have to have a digital-to-analog converter to get it into the thunderbolt port or out the thunderbolt part. So the same translations are occurring.

Now I will say, you know, you go and buy good headphones, and they’re going to sound better than cheap headphones. So I’m not, I’m not saying that that’s wrong. But the here… You know, here it is, you know. For… You had sort of hinted, you know, why did they do this. I don’t know. I mean, they, they… I think Apple does have, as part of its psyche, that they need to be ones who push the edge and challenge the, the status quo.

Jacob: And that was my question. Is this the floppy disk innovation of the phone, you know? The mobile phone, you know, dropping the floppy disk from being in the desktop suite was a huge deal.

Paul: Yeah, but the reason it was dropped is because it wasn’t needed. You know, you had USB sticks. So the evolution, you know, when you had 360k floppy, one of them — that was all you had — then you went to 1.2-megabyte floppy. Then you went to the 1.44-megabyte floppy. When you had to super drive, which was 2.88, and then memory sticks came on. So it’s like, “Well, why would I need a floppy?”

And they kept having them for years after that. And then it was, “Well, I just never use the floppy,” and, you know, stores didn’t even stock floppies. So we took the device out. So there wasn’t a need for it, but you know, people still do listen to music on their phones. And, so there… You know, it’s sort of like, you know, we’re going to do the hard thing here of removing that. But why wouldn’t they do that on the iPad?

Rumors are coming out that next week, they’re going to, uh, come out with a new MacBook Pro. And one of the commentators or reviewers said, “I think it will still have a headphone jack.” So, you know, if you’re saying this is an intellectual exercise that we shouldn’t have headphone jacks, because too many headphones are killed in the wild. Like turtlenecks. I mean, how many turtles are killed to make those turtleneck sweaters? And you’ve got to draw the line, you know.

So the little headphones that are out in the wild, they want to stop harvesting them. And we’re going to rescue the headphone. Well, no. That’s not really the case. So It’s a pretty bold thing. I’ll betcha one of the things that drove it is it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to make that, because that’s an expensive piece of equipment.

Jacob: Yeah. Well, and that’s certainly part of the equation. I mean, do you think that this is a sort of thing where they are going to be on the front edge of this new, of a new wave of mobile device technology? Like, all, you know, Androids, iPhones, across the map now are not going to have headphone jacks? And are they being disruptive? Or, you know, how does that kind of play out into the field of this decision?

Paul: You know, I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I don’t think a lot of people are going to follow it. It just seems silly. It’s such an entrenched technology, and all of the devices, the iPhone 6 can work with wireless headphones. So it’s not an improvement. It’s taking something away that I’ve come to expect and especially if I’ve invested in expensive headphones. You know, alright, yeah, I can get an adapter and plug it in…

Jacob: But yeah. So you’re saying that this seems like another instance of Apple feeling like they have to be “The innovators.”

Paul: I think so. I think that they have, you know. They have been the innovators, “the” innovators. And I think they need to do things that are innovative and the problem is, is that this product lifecycle, there’s not a lot of innovation left, you know. And, uh, you know, there’s this whole concept that we as consumers are addicted to innovation. Uh, we expect it. We expect things to get quantum levels better.

But you know, you go and you… You know, I’ll offend some people here, drink a glass of milk, they aren’t improving milk much these days, you know. It’s pretty much leveled off, you know. And you know, we had TVs that were made out of big bulky glass. Now we’ve got flat-screen TVs. You know, now we’ve got HD. Now we’ve got Ultra-HD, and you know, there’s that constant drive for better. Most people who sit in front of an old TV and a new TV can see the difference between non-HD and HD. And I think most of the people who were faced side by side with an HD and Ultra HD would see the difference. They would say, “Wow. That’s really amazing.” And they’d be motivated to do it.

This is a little bit of a contrarian, you know. Because it’s sort of like saying you don’t get something better. We’re just going to take something away. And, and that’s an interesting choice. You know, it’s an interesting way to go.

Jacob: Well, the other part of it that’s interesting to me is that, as I understand it, they don’t… The phones now will not come with the wireless headphones. So now it’s like $160 or whatever to get the headphones, which to me, is just an additional price hurdle that I’m like…

Paul: Well, it’s a way to drive more revenue.

Jacob: Well, it’s definitely a way to drive more revenue, but does it favor the high-end market more so than like the everyman sort of…

Paul: I don’t know. I mean, I am shocked at the number of people I see wearing, Apple watches.

Jacob: Well, that’s true.

Paul: And they’re expensive.

Jacob: Like $500?

Paul: At least. And an iPhone is expensive, and you know, we have… If you look at it, you know, 40 years ago, or 20 years ago, you would have never seen a teenager walking around with a $500 device. That would have been unthinkable. But now we’ve normalized that. And I mean, I got them for my kids, you know, and that’s an amazing change that has occurred through external forces, that my children need to have a $500 device, if not even more than that. But let’s just say $500.

So, you know, Apple, it’d be interesting to see, of the people who buy an iPhone 7 or buy an Apple device, buy the Apple accessories for it. Because you can get $29 Bluetooth headphones, you know, you can get them with a wire, you know, that go to a beltpack or a backpack, you know. And you know, so there’s lot of ways to get it. So if I’m Apple, I need to do things to increase revenue. They are reaching the apogee of their profitability.

That’s a crisis for a business. So what am I going to do? Well, let’s take the headphone jack out and make people buy Bluetooth headphones. And they know that a large proportion of those are, by default, going to buy the ones that Apple make, you know. And I do think it will cause innovation. It will cause innovation in battery technology. It will cause innovation in all these different areas. So there are byproducts.

Jacob: Right. Byproducts that are benefits to the industry.

Paul: Absolutely. But, uh, they made it occur, and I think it’s profit motivated, which isn’t bad. That’s the way it, you know, it works. But I do think, you know, there becomes this whole area here, you know, in this, sort of the addiction to innovation. And, there’s two types of innovation. One is disruptive, and one is incremental. We’re in the incremental place. Now it would be cool, you know, you don’t realize innovation until you see it, you know. I mean, there’s some people like Steve Jobs who see it before other, other people.

Jacob: Well, and the… Yeah, when you’re talking, the moment I think of, like the disruptive is that famous talk where, “Just one more thing,” and he drops the iPhone. I mean, that totally demolished the entire industry, and everybody was recovering.

Paul: Right. Yeah. It disrupted it, really. And it was a change, and all the pieces were there for everybody to put together. But nobody did, and it’s like the minute it was shown, it was obvious. That’s a disruption. Incremental is, okay, let’s, let’s, you know, make the screen harder. Let’s, let’s do this.

Jacob: Make it waterproof.

Paul: Make it waterproof, and so, you know, people, have different sort of elasticity with, you know, if you see something disruptive, it’s like, “Wow. That’s cool. I gotta have it.” But you know, when I grew up, and with technology, I’m one of those people that says, “That’s really cool. I gotta have it.” Most people aren’t that way. They look at it, and they say, “Oh, that’s cool. That’s nice. Oh, well, mine’s fine.” If they’re in the market for buying one, they’ll buy the one with the cooler feature, but not the majority of people don’t say, “New feature. I’ve got to go buy it.”

So that incremental, disruption… I’m sorry. That incremental innovation is not as profit making.

Jacob: Well, I mean, I look at the… So they cut out the, the headphone jack, I’m like, “Well, how does that improve my life?”

Paul: Right. That’s true.

Jacob: I mean, you know, that’s how I look at it. I’m like, if the next iteration is supposed to be an improved product for whatever I use it for in my life, it’s not obvious to me how cutting away something that I… I mean, I have lots of headphones, you know. So, so now you’re adding an additional problem for me to figure out how to connect my iPhone, my iPhone with my existing headphones.

Paul: Right. And it’s interesting, you know. There’s a lot of human… The way humans interact with technology, and one of the things that I’ve noticed with people wearing headphones on an iPhone, or you know, even from the iPod days, is that if you walked up to them, they’d yank the things out of their ears. Now that’s a very different thing. And it was… It was… I didn’t require thought. So you’d just reach up, pull it out, and you’d be conversing with people. Now you’ve got these detached little things. You’ve got to pull them out, and okay, what am I going to do with these?

Jacob: Oh, my gosh. The first thing I saw when they said, “Hey, we’re going to have wireless headphones,” I imagined myself wearing them, and I knew that what would happen is right when I was walking over the street grate, that they were going to fall out.

Paul: Yeah. That’s true. That’s probably true.

Jacob: You just thought, I’m walking across the street in the city, and — boom! — gone. There goes $150 right now the drain.

Paul: Well, $75. You’d only lose one.

Jacob: Right. Okay, yeah.

Paul: You can probably only buy them in pairs, though. So you’ve got always that extra one. It’s like shoes. Oh, man. But I think that, you know, that the… I think we need to be careful, you know. There’s… We’ve talked a lot in the past about cognitive load. And, if anything, I’ve always looked at technology as a way to reduce cognitive load. I don’t want to have to remember that this is this. I want to write it down and have the system remind me that, “Oh, you had to be at this point,” you know. I’d like it to be — and they’re getting there, you know — that “You have to be here at 5:00. It’s 3:00. We’ve checked the traffic. It’s going to take you half an hour to get there. So you need to leave at 4:30.” You know, that would be really nice, you know. And, you know, deal with that fallout of, of that real information.

But one of the things I noticed with iOS10 rr0, two major things. One, it’s a lot slower. And, uh, I had an iPad, have an iPad Air 2. Very happy with it; had it for years. And that’s one of the, that’s one of the issues that, Apple has had is they haven’t been selling as many iPads, because people are happy with them.

So I upgraded to iOS10 and everything is slow, I mean, to the point… You know, I use Outlook, Microsoft Outlook on, on the iPad and on my iPhone. It was almost unusable. And, uh, am I keeping you up?

Jacob: Yeah. Sorry. I just… When you mentioned Windows 10, I just think…

Paul: I see. Did I mention Windows 10? I don’t think I did. So… I mentioned Outlook. So it was really slow, so what did I do? I went out and bought a new iPad, because, you know, the processor is much faster. But, my gosh, they just came out with a new gee-whiz thing, and it forced me to spend $700 on a new iPad. That’s not nice. You know, they effectively obsoleted my machine.

Jacob: Right. The forced obsolete, obsoletion.

Paul: Obsolescence.

Jacob: Obsolescence. I was an English major.

Paul: Yeah. “Was” is the operative word there.

Jacob: But that forced—

Paul: If you’re in Canada, would you be a Canadian major?

Jacob: I said, Can— I said, “Oh, he’s a… He’s from Canadia,” the other day.

Paul: Well, this do say “Ca-NAH-dah” up there, so, a…

Jacob: Yeah. So that forced obsoleshence.

Paul: Obsolescence.

Jacob: Obsolescence is uh incredibly frustrating with products, because I’ve noticed that it’s about, like, uh, you know, it’s about the 18-month mark of a two-year contract that is just…man. It just, like, gets filled with sand.

Paul: So that was one thing. The iPad got so slow that I had to replace it. And the other thing was, is the swipe to unlock. I was… I had muscle memory for that, and I still find myself fumbling over, okay, now I’ve got to hover my finger over the button. That muscle memory was so ingrained in me. And okay, so you say, “Well, that’s no big deal. You’ve got to change it.” But it’s another thing that is… It’s another little log that goes on the cognitive load, uh, and, you know, I look at that, and there’s some way you can turn it off, but I don’t think it’s exactly the way it was before, uh, and I just look at that decision, and I’m saying, “Oh, you know, now I have to press and click.” I’m like, “Why do I have to do that?”

And you know, there was a choice made. And I’m sure there was a big, you know, executive meeting about it. You know, we’re going to do this. And I’d leave well-enough alone in some areas.

But again, they’re trying to push toward innovation.

Jacob: So do you think, just as we’re concluding on this, do you think that other makers in the industry are going to follow suit? Or are they going to kind of brush off this innovation from Apple?

Paul: Well, what did, what did, did Google and the new phones include a headphone jack?

Jacob: I’d assume as much.

Paul: I think they did. I think it would have been in the news had they not. It will be interesting to see who adopts it. I don’t think they will. I don’t think they’re going to follow suit.

Jacob: It will be interesting to see if Apple regrets this and puts it back in the iPhone 8.

Paul: Yeah, boy, I don’t know. They’re not good at that.

Jacob: Yeah. They don’t retreat very much. Do they?

Paul: Yeah. They don’t. They don’t. And yeah. But again, you know, hey, they should be intellectually honest and take it out of all their devices, because, you know, those little headphones in the wild. I mean, who’s going to protect them?

Jacob: Well, thank you for listening to this episode of The Edge of Innovation, talking about the iPhone 7 and the deletion or the, saving of the iPhone jacks. I think we’ll put it like that. Right? We’re saving iPhone jacks by not having them in the iPhone 7 now.

Paul: Saving headphone jacks.

Jacob: Headphone jacks. Yeah.

Paul: Save the headphone jack.

Jacob: Save the headphone jacks. That should be our mantra now for the iPhone 7. Thanks for listening today, guys. And we hope you have a good week.

Tech Talk for the Holidays

November 28, 2016 / Paul / 0 Comments

On Episode 27 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking about technology in time for the holidays! We discuss how often companies should update technology and how to get the best deals when shopping for products.

Staying Security Smart

November 14, 2016 / Paul / 0 Comments

Today on the Edge of Innovation, we discuss how to be put safeguards on your computer to be safe from hacking.

Unwrapping the Christmas Present of Understanding

September 19, 2016 / Paul / 0 Comments

Today, on Episode 19 of the Edge of Innovation, we discuss the psychology of design with researcher and author Victor Yocco. Learn more about Victor and his new book Design for the Mind, here: http://www.victoryocco.com/

Show Notes

Learn More about Victor Yocco
Download Victor’s new book: “Design for the Mind”
(Psssst! At checkout, enter code “39yocco” for a 39% discount!)

Transcript

Introduction

Paul: This is the Edge of Innovation, Hacking the Future of Business. I’m your host, Paul Parisi.

Today we have the pleasure of speaking with design researcher and author Victor Yocco about his new book Design for the Mind: Seven Principles of Persuasive Design. Over the next few episodes we’re going to explore the principles taught in Victor’s book and really try to get to the heart of psychology and web design. Victor, welcome.

Paul: Was there an “ah-ha” moment as you came out of the… When was the “ah-ha” moment?

Victor: Well, so specifically around writing the book?

Paul: Well, no. More so the realization that your, your need to be an effective communicator and how it translated. I mean, because, obviously, the book came about at a certain point in time. But before that, you had formative thoughts. And—

Victor: Sure.

Paul: So, what happened, or was it just an epiphany?

Victor: I don’t think… I don’t have a great epiphany story. I would love to say, “Standing in front of the elephants one day…” But I would say, as a body of projects that I have a part of, I had a really good advisor in grad school who really got me a lot of hands-on experience and a job doing work in the setting that I was also doing my research. And I think that it’s something that, as I look at, you know, how I can give guidance to other people who are coming up in our field — whether or not they want to engage in research or design — but it’s engaging with people was very eye opening for me. Having to understand that people will feed off of you and people will respond to you in a way that reflects how you are approaching them. The way you present a topic is critical, you know.

If you run up to somebody in a zoo who’s obviously not there to engage in any type of research knowingly, and you say, “Please take my survey,” that’s one way of doing it. But if you make it something much more approachable, and you make somebody feel comfortable with who you are, and you ask them if they’re willing to spend a couple of minutes with you, then you get a completely different response. Even if it’s the person you thought, when you were approaching them, “Oh, man, they look grumpy and like they’re in a rush.”

So, really, seeing over time that a lot of these principles that I was learning are implemented sort of subconsciously when we want to interact effectively with people. And then, you see examples that are a little more blatant and also can be off-putting, like the used car sales pitch or something like that, which is where, I think, persuasion and that word really can come across as off-putting to people but that, from an academic perspective, persuasion is just taking information and presenting it in a certain way that provides your side of the story that provides people with an argument of for why they should consider doing or thinking the way you’re asking them to. And it doesn’t involve anything like coercion or forcing somebody, which is where we get into…

People often ask me about, well, what do you think about dark patterns of design. And that those are much more, like, trickery and coercion versus a persuasive technique says, “Hey, I think a certain way, and you should too.” Or, “I’d like you to think this way, ” Or, “I’d like you to engage in this and here’s why.” And it sort of wraps that information in a container that uses a persuasive technique. But it doesn’t say, “Hey, I’m dropping you off here on this site. And the only way you can get out is to check this opt-in box that will allow you to then start receiving emails 10 times a day or have your credit card be billed monthly unless you call in instead of being able to cancel it online.”

So, I do try to draw a distinction, which I think there’s a subtle distinction to some people. But I’m comfortable saying that I don’t think persuasion is necessarily dark patterns or that it’s engaging in any kind of trickery if you’re sticking to what the true value of persuasion should be from an academic perspective.

Paul: Yeah. I would agree. Now, many of the things that you’ve said, once you say them… We have a joke in the office that, you know, when you say something and it’s like, “Well, that’s obvious,” well, it wasn’t obvious before you said it. So, it’s not like… But I think many of the things that you’ve talked about in the book and that we’re going to talk about today, once somebody hears them, they’re going to say, “That’s obvious.” But before then, they’re not. And so, how do you…

Well, one of the things that I think is great is that you have taken all the obvious things and given us a very good roadmap with a lot of case studies so that we can take the…just persuasion. “You should be persuasive” is a good example. Well, duh, of course you should be. But if you don’t say it, and I would imagine, as I’ve looked at websites, and you’ve looked at websites, you say that probably a large majority of them fail at their persuasiveness.

Victor: Right. And I think that… So I like how you summarized that, which is, a lot of it is obvious. And I think that I state that fairly, obviously, in my book as well. Which is a lot of what you’ll see from a psychological perspective, you’ll think of as either maybe common sense or also like you naturally do that. And what a book like Design for the Mind does, I think, that can be helpful, is it also gives you the language behind what you’re doing. And it gives you an understanding so it’s not just, “Oh, hey, people enjoy looking at what other people are doing. And so that’s why social media can be effective.”

It’s like, people develop a social identity, and part of that is they compare themselves to others, and when they see people that they align with, they want to know more, and they want to engage in that type of behavior. And when they see people that they don’t feel like they align with, they want to do behaviors that make them more different from those people. And then, all of a sudden, you understand why does this work, or why might this not be currently working, but how can you fix it.

And I think it also can make you sound a lot more intelligent in front of a client, or if you’re pitching your colleagues for something and you can bring in some language that actually describes why you think your idea would be effective.

Paul: Well, I think that’s important to highlight. So, somebody that’s not a PhD in psychology or even has ever took a psychology course, I mean, it’s like electronics. In electronics, one of the things I’m fascinated with, you know, there’s resistors and capacitors, and we have ways to describe those with units and measures and all that technical lingo. And what you’re saying, I think, in Design for the Mind and making it accessible to the average person, average web designer, and even the experienced one, is there is a set vocabulary. And there are meanings to that vocabulary. Is that true? Or am I off base?

Victor: No, you’re correct. And each chapter that covers concepts has a specific section where I say, “This is how you would… This is examples of how you would talk about this principle,” in a way that doesn’t come across as condescending or would get you in trouble because you’re going to start using words that you don’t know what they mean, but it is like… Here, it can be made approachable in a way that your banking client, your banking project manager that you work with can say, “Oh, heck, I really understand what you’re saying. And I think this is going to be a great idea because of that.” And that’s really what I would like, you know, one contribution of the book to be, is that even if somebody read through it and said, “Yeah, this is all really obvious and I’m doing it.” But they could also say, “And now I understand why it works,” or how to talk about it. And that, I think, in itself, is something that can be valuable as setting you apart and helping your process to understand, “Okay, this is what I’m doing.”

And maybe, hopefully, somebody who’s super-motivated would want to go find out more, and go beyond what I could cover in the book, because there is so much psychology and research — some good, some bad — that’s out there that you could continue. You could an encyclopedic set of books on psychological principles. Whether or not I would want to would be another questions.

Paul: Well, I think one of the things that I want to pull out for our listeners is the fact that you’re not inventing these psychological principles. These are well-worn principles that are well established. What you’re doing is putting them into a context so that people who are interested in communicating via the internet, the web, can effectively apply these principle. Just talk about that a little bit, because somebody, you know, you’re not inventing anything here. So it’s not like, “Oh, he’s got some crazy idea about this. This is the way things work.” No, you’re not doing that.

What you’re doing is you’re taking it and developing it for somebody like me who doesn’t know or have a depth of knowledge there. And allowing me to understand. Sort of unwrapping a Christmas present and saying, “Oh, my gosh, this is… I now have a language that I can now quantify all the things I’ve been thinking about.”

Victor: Right. And you heard it from Paul. The book is the equivalent of a Christmas present.

Paul: There you go. It’s a great Christmas present.

Victor: But beyond that…so, yes. Exactly. And I this will… I can jump into my sort of story and catch people up to date in terms of where I came from zoos and—
Paul: Yeah. Exactly.

Victor: — By talking through that. So, I… Working with zoos, working with educators, working with art educators, working with people whose main job is to work with people and try to deliver content to them, I realized, as an academic, as somebody who was going to school to get my PhD, that there’s two completely different languages that are spoken between practitioners and academics.

Now, again, that’s fairly obvious. We all know the whole ivory tower versus real life. And so I became fairly proficient at translating what I was becoming familiar with in my academic studies to the real world scenario of on the ground at an art museum or a zoo or a science center.

So, a few years after that, I was offered a job to come do research with Intuitive, where I’m at now, in digital settings. And I really had no idea what user experience was or what digital design was. And that wasn’t why I was hired. In the beginning, I was hired because I had a really good research background. And I was able to convey that I could quickly learn the language of design and that I had a history of working closely with practitioners. Because, how Intuitive is set up is that researchers research, designers design, and they work together on projects to inform each other. So I have close colleagues who are designers on all my projects and they attend to different research activities, and I download what I find to them, and we work together to conceptualize the finding into recommendations. But my background wasn’t that I was going to come in and start designing solutions to anything. I was going to create studies and translate data into meaningful recommendations.

And what I realized once I got here, though, was what you said earlier, was, wow. Everything that I have learned that you apply in this zoo setting to communicate to people can be instantly applied to, with some minor modifications, a digital setting, and how we want people to behave. We might not have some noble goal of preventing the extinction of a specific species, but we want people to understand why they should be using online bill pay. Or why they should be signing up for their accounts online versus using pen and paper, and that if we’re going to try to promote these behaviors, we need to account for the psychology of users in those settings.

And I gave an internal presentation around the elaboration likelihood model here where I work at Intuitive, and it sort of just sparked me from there that I pitched an article on the topic to A List Apart, and they said it sounded good, and from there I sort of entered this realm of writing around a topic of applying psychology to design that I had never really thought as being something that I was passionate about as I turned out to be. Or really, that I was as, uh, I guess, effective at conveying to a practitioner what these academic principles meant. And so that’s where, then, the idea that I could turn enough content around and turn it into a book came from.

So—

Paul: Did you think you were qualified?

Victor: That’s a good question. I didn’t necessarily care, I guess. But I figured, from an academic standpoint, I was qualified to talk about the principles, that I had enough familiarity, and I had written about them and studied them for years, that that part didn’t concern me. It was more do I have the qualifications to be accepted as a colleague of designers. And every day that went by, I be getting more experience in that realm. And working with some really top-notch designers on a regular basis was helping to build my confidence, and then also, seeing how I could look at the work we were doing and identify how the principles would be playing out or where they might be more effective if they were applied.

So that was something that helped with, I guess, boosting my level of feeling like I could be someone who wrote that book. And it seemed to be a space that I was very comfortable in, which meant a lot to me as far as wanting to keep moving forward.

Paul: Were there times where you ruffled feathers of designers, where you were saying something wasn’t as effective as maybe they thought it should be or would be?

Victor: Well, I guess that I’d have to say that, no, because I can’t think of anything specifically where I butted heads with anybody. I think that the designers that I work with, I tend to have a pretty good relationship when it comes to back and forth. And so, while I definitely try to put out the psychology and accounting for the users at all times, when a decision gets made and I make sure that my voice is heard, I think that beyond that, I don’t have a lot of pushback, I guess.

When we… A lot of times, what we have the luxury of doing is also engaging in some level of usability testing. And that can also help. I put out in the book that, you know, I understand, again, we look at what works best on paper. And then when you look at reality, things are totally different, that we all want to include — or most of us, at least — want to include research as part of our process, and the sad truth can be that sometimes that doesn’t happen. And psychology can be a way of trying to sort of prop that up or be a proxy when we don’t have direct data that we’ve collected from users and potential users.

But usually, I find myself in a situation here where we have built a project that will at least include usability testing once we’ve started moving forward with something. Often we have upfront research where we’re able to do interviews or contextual inquiry or, really, go in and start to understand what the product is, because we’re client facing. We don’t have our own product.

But when I’ve ever encountered something that I’ve thought, “Okay, this could use some tweaking,” we’ve put it into a testing scenario to try to see what exactly would be best. And that sort of removes the personal from it when you can look at it.