Thursday, December 4 A couple of recent articles dovetail nicely about how specifications, and what those specifications describe, influence how people make buying decisions.
The first is from a study looking at how choices between competing products are made, first based on subjective criteria, and then when specifications are introduced.
In an initial experiment, Christopher Hsee and colleagues asked 112 students to choose between one of two hypothetical cameras: one boasted better resolution, the other having superior vividness. Based on sample photos taken by the two cameras, but without detail on the precise resolution specs, most participants (74 per cent) chose the camera that took more vivid photos. By contrast, when given the resolution specs as well as the sample photos, many more participants chose the camera with higher resolution.
In other words, after knowing the specifications more participants chose the worse performing product based on subjective criteria (print vividness). This explains why we see point-and-shoot cameras with gigantic megapixel counts, even though 4-5 megapixels is about all a small camera (or to be precise, a small sensor) can handle well. The article goes on to describe some other non-tech scenarios where the same situation played out, by the way.
Second is an article by Michael Schrage that discusses the fascinating history of some specifications, such as horsepower, that today we take for granted but which were invented to make it easier to sell new technologies. James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, also invented the term horsepower that today we use to measure engines of all types.
The term horsepower represented clever rhetorical engineering by Watt and partner Matthew Boulton, whose business had prospered by charging mine owners only one-third of the cost savings achieved by replacing less-efficient Newcomen steam engines with their own.
Seeking to broaden their market, the collaborators thought brewmasters might find value in this new production technology. But 18th-century British breweries used horses — not steam — to power the turning of their mills’ grindstones. So it behooved Boulton and Watt to recalculate their steam engines’ appeal accordingly….
This notion of using innovative metrics — measures that gauge the unique value inherent in an innovation as a means of marketing it — goes well beyond the traditional approach of adding new “features” and “functionality” to attract consumers to products and services. By creating fresh language for the way people calibrate the worth and efficacy of a particular idea, innovative metrics have the potential to be so intrinsically compelling — or at least so creatively marketed — that they become, like horsepower, the overriding identity of a product or brand.
Note that Schrage’s article may have limited free shelf-life, so take a look at it soon.
Related articles:
specifications, metrics, research, consumer choice, buying decisions, michael schrage | IN CATEGORIES... Business, Culture, Brand, Innovation Monday, November 24 
Good article in the New York Times about Netflix’ competition it’s been running the last couple of years to improve its recommendation engine. Hundreds of people have tried to win the $1 million on offer, but no-one has yet cracked the 10% improvement barrier that Netflix has set. In other words, the contestants have to improve the quality of suggestions that Netflix makes to its members based on their previous ratings by 10%.
There are many reasons why this is difficult to do, attested by the asymptotically slowing rate of improvement. One class of movies is particularly tricky - those which are love-it-or-hate-it in nature. Napoleon Dynamite epitomizes this category - Netflix and the contestants have a terrible time predicting whether someone will like it or not based on their past track record.
People go through phases in buying things, and our multiple personalities come out in what we buy and enjoy. We are not (entirely) self-consistent, logical beings.
Even so, it sometimes seems like recommendation engines just seem to miss the boat. By all rights, Amazon should be able to make highly accurate recommendations to me about all sorts of things, given the amount of stuff I’ve bought there, yet it is incredibly inaccurate. It keeps recommending products that I’ve already bought (e.g. I just bought one digital camera so it immediately recommends another - why would I need two?) or which are off-base in the long term (I buy a gift for a baby shower, and it throws all its reco’s off).
ny times, amazon, netflix, recommendation engine, social software, search, clive thompson | IN CATEGORIES... Technology, User Experience, Software, Innovation Monday, November 17 Despite the vaguely technical title, the latest James Bond installment, Quantum of Solace, is almost completely devoid of gadgets.
Gee-whiz gadgets have been a mainstay of the Bond oeuvre, from car ejection seats to lighters that convert into pistols, from watches with lasers to personal jetpacks. But with the “reboot” of the series starting with the last movie, Casino Royale, the film-makers have dramatically downplayed the use of devices as deus-ex-machina methods of getting Bond out of a jam.
I saw QoS last night (overall a solid B effort, not as good IMO as Casino Royale) and the only gadgets of significance that I noted were:
The film-makers have seemingly confined Bond gadget plot devices to the dustbin of history. Or perhaps they’ve just decided that it’s become impossible to compete with out-wowing real-life technology and they will rely instead on mundane technology and impossible action sequences.
The gadget that I want? The titanium skeletal structure and self-healing epidermis that James Bond obviously has been upgraded with. Or how else would he survive the insane beatings that he receives without so much as a slightly tussled hair and a few specks of blood above his eye? The Italian construction site fight scene is insane: I counted at least 47 points at which one or more bones should have been broken. Yet he walks out of it like the Robert Patrick T-1000 in Terminator 2, completely unscathed and not even breathing hard.
On a related note, here’s a Lego animation done to an Eddy Izzard skit about James Bond’s gadgets:
james bond, quantum of solace, casino royale, gadgets, aston martin, microsoft | IN CATEGORIES... Technology, Culture, Brand, Innovation, Product Review Monday, November 10 
I’ve recently seen some commercials for an Essentials line of cleaning products from Arm and Hammer, and I’m really liking the concept behind the products. I haven’t used them so can’t talk to efficacy, but the concept is brilliant and really shows a more thorough approach to sustainability.
As you can sort of see from the picture above, attached to the top of each bottle is a cylinder. This cylinder is a cartridge that contains a concentrate. When you get the bottle home, you fill it with water and then attach that cartridge to the top of the bottle. Now when you squeeze the trigger you get a spray that is made up of tap water mixed on the fly with the concentrate in the cartridge.
This is very clever for two reasons:
Arm and Hammer also claims the ingredients are “plant based” and/or biodegradable, though as always with such claims the devil is in the details.
Nevertheless, kudos to Arm and Hammer for taking an innovative approach to their packaging and distribution. Is it perfect? No, but it’s a bold first step designed to appeal to a mass-market audience from a brand that has built some light green credentials from its baking soda legacy.
green, arm and hammer, essentials, sustainability, packaging, packaging design, waste reduction, green waste | IN CATEGORIES... Design, Sustainable Design, Brand, Innovation, Product Review Wednesday, November 5 This was the nerdiest election ever. The amount of data collected and analyzed in a public way on blogs, news sites, and television was unprecedented. And it wasn’t just the quantity of the data, but the amount of insider talk on mathematical models about how to crunch the numbers that was new this cycle.
There’s always been discussion about how to interpret polls, how to treat exit polls with caution, and so on. But this year was a whole different ballgame. Compared to 2004 when individual polls held sway (such as Zogby famously predicting, wrongly, that Kerry would win), this cycle has been dominated by meta-pollsters — analysts who aggregate together dozens of polls in various ways. Judging by the success of this method, we can expect this to be the future.
While some sites such as Pollster.com have been doing this for a while, it was newcomer Nate Smith of fivethirtyeight.com who became the poster boy and constant presence on talk shows. Smith used to work for Baseball Prospectus, a firm of math nerds that makes projections about baseball teams and players, and he famously predicted that the Tampa Bay Rays would win 90 games this season, which seemed ridiculous considering they’d lost 96 games in 2007. In fact the The Tampa Bays exceeded Silver’s projection by winning 97 games and narrowly lost the World Series.
Whereas Pollster.com tracks trend lines of polls to provided a blended assessment, fivethirtyeight.com uses a variety of methods to weight various polls, and mixes in data about demographic trends per region. Silver discusses the modeling that he does on the site (without giving away all the secrets), and the site itself is an orgy of dense charts and statistics, leavened by good writing and photography.
How did he do? Well, as of this writing three of the states are still toss-ups, but his model nailed every single other state. The chart below shows his Monday projection (including three states that would be tossups, 2 of which are still being counted, 1 day after the election), followed by a chart of the actual outcome from The New York Times. Pretty impressive.
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election, polls, pollster, pollster.com, fivethirtyeight.com, barack obama, nate silver, nerd, maths, mathematics, analytics, surveys, zogby | IN CATEGORIES... Culture, Innovation