Change Blindness: What Are You Paying Attention To?

Depending on what we focus on, our brains can be completely blind to obvious changes going on around us. This is called, “Change Blindness” and it is unnerving when you can easily see it. Here are a couple videos showing this in action. The first is an experiment conducted at Harvard where 75% of the people in the test don’t notice that the man in front of them has turned into another man. Below the Harvard experiment is a video of magician Derren Brown exploiting this blind spot we have in a much more dramatic way. Can you imagine a white male changing into an Asian female without noticing, right in front of you?

This is similar to “The Awareness Test” video I posted last year. What I always think of first when I see things like this is what are we failing to capture when observing people using the products we design? What do we don’t-know-we-don’t-know?

Direct link to Harvard's Change Blindness Experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38XO7ac9eSs

Derren Brown - Person Swap - The most amazing home videos are here

Direct link to Derren Brown's Person Swap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBPG_OBgTWg

YouTube is the new Incubator: Panic Attack! (Ataque de Pánico!)

Following in the footsteps of singers Esmee Denters, Justin Bieber and Arnel Pineda (Journey), YouTube has launched the career of Filmmaker, Fede Alvarez. Fede spent about $300 creating a 4 minute short film and posted it on YouTube. Just like Journey being able to find a singer in a way they could never do in the past, Fede’s video was seen by Sam Raimi online and quickly signed to produce a $30 million film. Here is what Alvarez said about the process of being discovered:

"I uploaded (Panic Attack!) on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of e-mails from Hollywood studios... If some director from some country can achieve this just uploading a video to YouTube, it obviously means that anyone could do it."

YouTube has become a listening channel for discovering talent, wagging serendipity for anyone out there who has the goods. What have you uploaded today?

Here is the video from Fede Alvarez, Panic Attack:

Direct link to Panic Attack video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dadPWhEhVk

Not Knowing Something is a Business Requirement: LED Traffic Light Design Fail

If you had to create a new traffic light bulb, what would your business requirements be? It turns out that it’s not just about the amount of light they cast or the energy they use. There was a hidden business requirement in designing new traffic lights bulbs. LED traffic lights are much easier to see and consume up to 90% less energy, but something the designers didn’t consider was something incandescent traffic lights do naturally. They melt snow. People can see current traffic lights in snow because the heat that they produce melts the snow that accumulates on them.

If someone made that a requirement in designing the new LED lights, they would have addressed it. Instead, police departments are reporting an increase in traffic accidents where LED traffic lights are installed. Are there important product features that get removed during an upgrade because people weren’t aware of their importance? Product Managers have to make sure they know what features of their products are vital.

Domino’s Is Changing, But Half of Us Still Prefer Our Local Pizza Place

There is a story out today that Domino’s is changing the taste of its pizza because it ranks very low amongst customers. The company says that it took two years to upgrade their recipe and that they have invested much more than they have on food launches in the past. Is this why Domino's isn't what people prefer?

At the bottom of this story there is a place to vote on your favorite pizza. The “mom-and-pop place near where I live” beat everyone easily with 49%. Do we love our local pizza places because of just the flavor? People love to recommend and talk about their favorite pizza. Domino’s might want to look at the entire mom-and-pop pizza place experience and the connection people have with them.

Want to Hear Better? Touch Someone

On this Black Friday, I was listening to NPR instead of shopping with the masses when I heard this interesting story on listening. A recent study in the journal Nature found that sensations on the skin help you hear better. Sounds such as "Pa" require a burst of air while others like "Ba" or "Da" don't. Bryan Gick, a professor of phonetics at the University of British Columbia says:

From my point of view, we're whole-body perceiving machines. We just take all of the information that comes at us in our environment and merge it into a percept of something that happened in the world.

We already knew that seeing a person's lips while they are talking helps our perception, but feeling their words is really interesting to me. It got me wondering...When we design user experiences are we too one dimensional? A lot of companies, including Google, use statistics as their core view of their users. A holistic view of our customers could uncover product features we couldn't find through stats alone.

Here is the full article from NPR:

http://weblogs.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120873368

CNN.com: Living with Technology vs. Technology

I noticed that CNN.com has a new main section of news on its home page, "Living with Technology." At first I thought they just changed the title of the category that I frequent quite often, "Technology." It turns out they added this new category, and by the title you would think that they would use it to spotlight stories about social networking and iPhones and such. The other seems like a good place for news on IBM or Hubble stuff. It turns out that both share similar story content. Seems like people just want more Technology news. Cool.

Silent Silence of the Lamb Hills

When trying to create a good experience, sometimes it's just easier to leverage someone else's good experience. I was walking through Best Buy and noticed that these two movies just happened to be placed next to each other. Silence of the Lambs is such an excellent movie, I guess it was easier for the designer of the Silent Hill movie to just borrow its likeness. Why create when you can steal?

Nationwide Airline Delays Caused By Bad Weather? Try a Bad Router Card

Thursday Morning, airports from Atlanta to Los Angeles reported delays for more than four hours. Was this because of rain? Snow? Wind? Geese? It was because of a single router card in a computer that processes flight plans for the F.A.A. When this went down, they had to create these flight plans by hand. It didn't just cause people to have to wait longer on lines at airports. The U.S. Military couldn't see this info that they track so much more carefully since 9/11.

As more and more of our daily lives are taken over by computer systems, their fragility needs to be looked at more. This system that the F.A.A. uses is antiquated. Is there something they can learn from Amazon or Google at how to better manage things?

I'm always amazed at how we allow our imagination to carry us through a film with outrageous plots. We often see villains in movies control large systems with silly little apple laptops. Hearing that you can take down a nationwide system by the failure of a single router card makes those movies seem a bit more real now. Hans Gruber is smiling somewhere.