Monthly Archives: September 2008

The Psychology of Comfortable Air Travel

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The Singapore Airlines Suites

Robert N. Charette at IEEE Spectrum has a terrific interview with James Boyd, Singapore Airlines’ vice president of public relations for the Americas, about the thinking and psychology that goes into the design of Singapore Airlines’ customer experience.

Below are some of the highlights.

On the In-flight entertainment system:

In-flight entertainment is not just about providing you with music and movies; it also fits into the psychology of how we create a satisfied passenger. This is a business where consumers who are used to having a tremendous amount of control in their lives have to give up most of that sense of control.

Airlines tell you when you have to come to the airport, when you can board, when the aircraft is going to leave, how long it’s going to be aloft, and when you can get out of your seat, and that creates an enormous amount of stress for passengers. From a psychological perspective, we use the IFE system as a means of providing almost the illusion of control for the passenger.

If you can start, stop, pause, and rewind from a broad slate of options, it gives you something very specific to do. More important than that, it gives you a way to exercise control over your environment. We find that that is a really critical tool for helping to create a more satisfied passenger.

On the sommelier service:

The primary benefit of the wine program and the sommelier training our cabin crew go through is in creating a credible point of interaction between the passengers and the crew. You can have a discussion about the wine, we can set up a little impromptu tasting for you, or our cabin crew can speak intelligently from an educated perspective about what it is that they’re pouring and why this might be a better selection for the meal you selected from the menu.

So those few moments of credible, appropriate interaction between the cabin crew and the passenger are basically built around the “prop” of wine. Obviously, it’s important that we serve quality wine, because it supports the brand, et cetera, but in the same way that the entertainment system helps create a satisfied passenger by giving them control over their experience, the wine program creates that point of interaction that makes people feel that they have been looked after in a credible way.

In contrast, my understanding is that at Air Canada, they use an in-depth psychlogical study to determine exactly how rude and incompetent they can be before customers snap, then they back off from that line just a little bit.

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Deletionpedia: Wikipedia’s Memory Hole

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typing

Back in the days when people were still referring to the Internet as “The Information Superhighway“, a friend of mine liked to make this pronouncement: “The Internet is not an information superhighway. It’s a typing superhighway. Just because someone types something onto a computer doesn’t make it information.”

I’ve always loved that quote, and never has it applied to any website better than it applies to Deletionpedia, a collection of nearly 64,000 articles (so far) that have been deleted from Wikipedia. This is an awesome concept. It’s the world’s second collection of writing that is guaranteed to be useless, the first, of course, being the Toronto Sun. I simply love that a deliberative body has looked over this stuff and decide that it doesn’t meet the high standards of a public encyclopedia that dedicates tens of thousands of words to the television show Lost.

Here is some of the gloriousness that is Deletionpedia:

The complete list of entries for “List of Films with monkeys in them”

  • King Kong- was a gorilla but monkey family
  • Dunsten checks in- Orangatan part of monkey family
  • King Kong vs Godzilla- fictional mechanical gorilla

Some background on the Shady/Aftermath vs. Murder Inc. feud:

In the song, he not only made fun of 50 Cent, Eminem (he called him Feminem), and Dr. Dre (he had called him a bisexual and claimed that Suge Knight knew of Dre bringing transvestites home, and both are false), but he had also dissed his friend Busta Rhymes who signed to Aftermath at that time. The track also insulted Eminem’s daughter, Hailie, by saying that she’ll grow up to be a slut or a drug addict like Eminem’s ex-wife Kimberly Anne Scott and mother Debbie.

And one of the un-told tragedies of Hurricane Katrina, Air Gumbo:

Air Gumbo is an airline based in Lafayette, Louisiana, USA. It is a proposed low-cost airline start-up seeking to launch services from New Orleans to cities in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. It planned to launch scheduled services in November 2005, but the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina apparently forced the airline to reconsider that plan[1], and as of October 2007, the airline has not started operations.

This thing really is a browser’s paradise, and each article also includes a link back to the original deletion discussion on Wikipedia. This is my favourite new thing on the Internet in weeks.

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Lively Links for Fri., Sept. 19th

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The Soul is Dead. Long live the Soul.

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It’s been a hell week, one for the record books really. I certainly wish I hadn’t launched a new blog and then been totally incapable of posting to it for a week, but that’s just the way things go.

In any case, one of the things I’ve been working on has been research into neuromarketing for an upcoming column in Report on Business. One of the most interesting things I came across in the course of this research was a 1996 essay by Tom Wolfe titled, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died“.

Wolfe is one of my favourite writers and I must have read this essay when it was reprinted in Hooking Up, but it had totally escaped my memory. It’s funny how often something like that happens, a piece of writing needs to come along at the right point in your life or you can totally miss out on how great it is.

The essay was written in 1996 at the dawn of modern imaging of the brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) had just been developed, and for the first time we were starting to get a grasp on how the brain reacts to various kinds of stimulation in real time. fMRI measures

the flow of blood in the brain, so as various portions of the brain demand more glucose and oxygen they “light up” the display. It’s like watching the weather patterns of the mind.

Wolfe was very impressed by the technology available at the time, but he also thought that within ten years (2006) there was a good chance that fMRI would seem primitive. That has not been the case. fMRI has not been superseded by new technologies that give a deeper insight into the brain, not yet anyway. In fact, we don’t seem to have made much progress at all, either in terms of technology or on any of the larger philosophical debates that Wolfe thought would define our discussions of morality, free will, and the nature of what it means to be human in the 21st century.

The main thrust of Wolfe’s argument is the notion that in the coming decades we’ll have so much insight into the human mind and the actual mechanics of it, that quasi-religious notions like the existence of the soul will start to seem incredibly old-fashioned. He reports that when Nietzsche wrote “God is dead,” it wasn’t a pronouncement, but rather a simple accounting of an idea that had already taken hold in the minds of educated people. Darwin had replaced the need for a God in people’s understanding of the universe. Wolfe thinks that modern neuroscience will do the same thing for the soul.

I find this argument fascinating, but I don’t really buy into it. Darwin provided an explaination for why the world is the way that it is. Neuroscience, and fMRI in particular, is merely descriptive. It allows us to see what is happening in the brain, but it has yet to provide us with a deeper understanding of why the brain does what it does. It’s a weather map, not a climate model. (Look for that line to be repeated in my column when it comes out.)

Ultimately, I think that the soul and free will have a much better chance of standing up to any advances in science than God ever did.

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Lively Links for Fri. Sept. 12

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John McCain Approved This Message

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How surprising is it that John McCain, war hero, maverick, man of principle, is taking the low road in this election? Not surprising at all. He has no other choice. This is from Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University and author of The Political Brain.

With all that stacked against him, the only road that could take McCain to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the low road, one of the few pieces of infrastructure left in good repair by President Bush. His father paved it against Michael Dukakis, George W. Bush repaved it running against John Kerry, and the GOP repainted the dotted line in now-Senator Bob Corker’s 2006 contest with Harold Ford. The path to success for McCain is to make the election a referendum on his opponent, by working in silent concert with 527 groups and media outlets such as Fox News to pursue character assassination, guilt by association, and, most of all, the effort to paint Obama as different, foreign, unlike “us,” and dangerous (and did I mention that he’s black?).

That’s from a piece Dr. Westen published in The New Republic over two months ago, but it stuck with me ever since. Westen also maintains a semi-regular blog at the Huffington Post.

It saddens me that McCain has been reduced to taking the low road. The only thing sadder will be if it works.

Lively Links for Thurs. Sept. 11

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Lively Company: Swype

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A few weeks ago I got a Samsung Instinct, the so-called “iPhone killer” available from Sprint in the US and Bell here in Canada.

I got off to a rough start with the phone. I returned my first one when it hung any time I tried to trying to play video. The second phone I got started crashing anytime I added a bookmark in the web browser. I took the phone back to Bell and had them do a master reset, and that solved the problem for a day or so, but it then re-appeared. I finally managed to solve the problem on my own, but it took a few days.

Despite the rough start though, I’m fairly happy with the Instinct now. It’s definitely not an iPhone killer, if for no other reason than it’s not a software platform. It has a not of nice features though, and I’ve found the EV-DO web browsing to be surprisingly fast. The biggest problem is still the browser, which is a bit wonky at times, but there is hope that Opera mini will be available on the phone before the end of the year. Considering how much cheaper the Instinct was in comparison to the iPhone, both initially and on an on-going basis (plus the amount it would have cost me to break my existing Bell contract), I’m happy with the choice.

All that is a long lead-in, to the fact that for the last month I’ve been getting used to typing on a touch screen. From the little I’ve used the iPhone, the Instinct’s keyboard is definitely superior. The keys are a nice size, and the phone gives a nice little vibration and makes a click every time you press a letter. This “haptic feedback” system so impressed me that I was sold on the idea that this was way of the future. Sold, that is, until I saw this video from this year’s TechCrunch50 conference.

Swype was a runner-up to Yammer, a Twitter for business, for top company at the conference. Yammer looks neat, but I just don’t think there’s a high enough barrier to entry for competitors. The tech looks pretty simple, it’s just a matter of being able to scale properly, and we’ll have to wait and see how good Yammer turns out to be at that.

I really believe that Swype is the company that’s going to be changing your life first. The technology is impressive as hell. It was invented by Cliff Kushler, one of the people behind T9, the predictive text system that is already on two million cell phones. Amazingly, Swype has a memory footprint of only about 1MB, which bodes well for it being ported to just about mobile device.

We’ve been waiting for the death of the keyboard for a long time. Voice recognition was always touted as the technology that, once it got good enough, would free us from having to type. In my experience, however, speaking aloud isn’t a natural way to write something. Voice recognition is also disturbing to everyone else around you. I can’t imagine sitting in Starbucks and narrating my novel, but even if I could, we’re still nowhere close to a good enough voice recognition system, despite decades of research.

On the other hand, I can definitely imagine sitting down with a stylus and using Swype on a netbook. In fact, that’s what I want to be doing right now.

Lively Links for Wed. Sept. 10

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It’s Not Easy Being Free

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For a number of observers, one of the most confounding things about Radiohead’s In Rainbows experiment last year was that even after the band allowed fans to download the album from their website, a huge number of people decided to download it via bit torrent instead.

Forbes noted, “But for hard-core music pirates, even free hasn’t been enough of a draw. According to music industry analysts, hundreds of thousands of Web users who frequent copyright-infringing file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay and TorrentSpy, have chosen to download In Rainbows illegally, distributing their contraband around the Internet just as they might with any other pirated album.”

Now comes the news that even though the season premier of Prison Break was available for free on Hulu.com and Fox.com, more than a million people decided to torrent it instead. Cue hysteria. Betty Shiffman over at Wired quotes Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight Research:

“This is a group of people who define themselves in part by the technology they use and the application of that technology. Chances are that this is only happening in a defined age group. You’d be hard-pressed to find 60 year-old guys passing this stuff off to their buddies.”

This is just plain wrong. Downloading a movie via bit torrent instead of watching it on Hulu has nothing to do with a technology identity or a pirate mindset. First of all, I’d be willing to bet that a lot of those downloads came from outside the US, where content on Hulu and Fox is blocked. If you’re in Canada or overseas and people are talking about the new episode of your favourite show, then of course you’re going to bit torrent it, you’ve given these people no choice. It’s not that they identify as techno-pirates, they identify as fans of the show.

Next, what this whole issue really comes down to is two competing products. One is available in the same place as all the other products someone downloads (a bit torrent search engine) and one you have to go out of your way to get. Given two identical products, people will choose the one that’s more convenient for them. It’s the difference between going to a butcher shop to get your meat or a grocery store. A lot of people don’t mind going out of their way to go to a butcher, and even paying more, but in return they have to get a better product.

It’s not enough to take your product, make it free, and throw it up on the Internet. If you want to complete with piracy, you have to offer a better product than the pirates offer. One way to do this, for example, would be to build a robust community around the website for fans of the show. That way, fans who missed an episode could watch the show at the same place they get their fix of spoilers or speculation and chat with other people who love the show. So far, the networks have done a terrible job of creating online communities, getting their asses handed to them by sites like Television Without Pity.

The Wired article also quotes Eric Garland, the CEO of Big Champagne.

The networks haven’t necessarily improved upon the experience on pirated sites, so users don’t have much incentive to leave those sites.

This is dead on. Media companies have to figure out ways of improving the product they offer on-line. If they do that, people might even be willing to pay for access, the same way people long ago chose to pay for cable instead of relying on over-the-air broadcasting. Give us better choices and a better product and we don’t even mind if the butcher puts his thumb on the scale every now and then.