The ROI of Good Design

Good design may not be everything, but it’s still something that should permeate every aspect of your brand. These days, audiences expect more; good design isn’t a luxury, it’s a given and it’s the first thing that makes you stand out from the rest. Smart leaders see it as an investment, keeping it in mind and on paper even in the earliest stages of business planning. Others wait to learn the hard way just how important it really is.

Design advocacy organizations around the world like the UK’s Design Council, the Finnish Design Business Association and the international Design Management Institute have spent years on studies and research to prove design’s various benefits and to develop tools that quantifiably measure its positive effect on sales, profits, market growth and valuation. Putting a price tag on creative processes is no easy feat, but devotees know that they’re right about the importance of design.

Good design means good business, period.

Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned pro, these points should get you nodding yes, and thinking about design in a new way.

TURN HEADS

When something looks good, people notice. And when something looks bad, well, they notice that, too. Make sure you give them something to remember, and for the right reasons. People will define your brand by what they see, so make sure they like whatever that is. Whatever your market, chances are it’s rife with competition. Good design sets you apart and gets you noticed. Take Apple, for instance. A black silhouette against a pop of bright color will forever be associated with the brand and its iPod. Sometimes the most striking solution is surprisingly simple.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Make it count, because you only get one. Good design reads as relevant and professional and helps build trust. According to Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus, authors of Web Design for ROI, when opening up a website, people tend to make a decision regarding an organization’s credibility in as little as 1/20 of a second – and that judgment of credibility is based on design. If it lacks focus, clarity and ease-of-use, it’s sure to deter potential customers. 

LinkedIn is a great example of a company homepage that projects confidence and a direct call-to-action while showcasing its value as “the world’s largest professional network.” Registration couldn’t be easier, too. The result? The network, which launched in May 2003, has 277 million reported users (as of February 2014), with two new members signing up every second.

BIG PICTURE

Too often, companies see design as an expense, instead of an investment. Like good content marketing, good design is strategic, engaging, functional and influential. It unifies the brand, clarifies your message and tells your story. At its best, good design is always evolving to meet the needs of its audience. 

Nike’s website shows us how with a sleek look and updated categories for improved usability. Online shoppers need no longer search based on gender and item alone; the brand recognized that many fans identify themselves as athletes first and in turn, designed an inspired solution allowing product search by sport.

Above all, design should be clear and memorable, directing people to your goals in the user-friendliest of ways. It’s what keeps people engaged, clicking, scrolling – and buying. Not something to skimp on, now is it?

NUMBERS DON’T LIE

Sometimes, the proof really is in the pudding. ESPN.com, for example, is due for a redesign this year. It’s only been about five years since their last online makeover, which ESPN Digital Media revealed came after learning through focus groups that “their home page was too cluttered, too difficult to navigate and had far too much going on.” By listening to their audience and responding accordingly, the redesign garnered a 35% increase in site revenues. 35%. It’s no wonder they’re eager to see what the next round will bring. 

Still, some skeptics crave a set ROI, a clear picture of exactly what they’re getting for what they’re putting out, and that’s not always available. Why? Proving quantifiable efficiency means separating design from all other business-driving elements, which it’s usually linked with from the get-go.

Nevertheless, champions of design continue to find examples that illustrate its benefits.Findings from the Design Council report that “shares in companies where design plays a critical role consistently outperform key stock market indicators by 200%,” and that “for every $130 spent on design, design-alert businesses realized a $298 return.” Slowly but surely, the numbers are adding up.

While pinpointing metrics continues to be a challenge, it shouldn’t be too hard to recall some of these points the next time you’re faced with a nonbeliever. 

Source

"The impossible can be possible" is what Ben Harrison intelligently proclaims to an audience of captivated listeners. As a respected authority in the field, he strongly suggests that there are limitless possibilities for 3D printing and the duplication of human tissues that can counter the degenerative effects of aging and disease on the human body. Wow!!! Source

Scientists Create 3D Printed Heart Membrane That Can Keep Heart Beating Perfectly Forever. This video shows a rabbit heart that has been kept beating outside of the body in a nutrient and oxygen-rich solution. The new cardiac device — a thin, stretchable membrane imprinted with a spider-web-like network of sensors and electrodes — is custom-designed to fit over the heart and contract and expand with it as it beats. Source

CUPID drone features an 80,000 volt stun gun. Tech company Chaotic Moon have shown their smartphone-controlled drone called CUPID, able to detain a subject by using an 80,000 volt stun gun. The power output is so strong, it creates an electromagnetic field large enough to ruin any electronics within a five foot range. The electronics in the drone itself are shielded in a Faraday cage. There’s a video up here of the drone ‘detaining’ an intern. Source

What will sports look like in the future?

How science + technology are changing the limits of the human body and the shape of competition

If you’ve ever seen grainy old sports footage—for example, a boxing match from the late 1800s, a Princeton/Yale game from 1903, or Babe Ruth’s famous home run from 1932—you probably noticed something: how different the game looks, compared to its modern counterpart. The equipment looks too clunky, the uniforms impossibly baggy. Even the bodies of the players look weirdly out of shape. Why is that?

Like any human endeavor, sports evolve over time. Science and technology fuel these changes, providing ever-better gear made with superior materials, better information about nutrition and training, and improvements in data generation and analysis that help push the limits of athletic capability.

At TED2014 — which kicks off in just nine days — two speakers will talk about the role of science and technology in sports. Sports science journalist David Epstein will discuss how athletics change rapidly over time, while NFL punter Chris Kluwe will ponder the impact augmented reality, particularly Google Glass, could have on major sports. The TED Blog invited these two to have a conversation with Cynthia Bir, lead scientist at ESPN’s Sport Science, who took a look at how basketball players use physics to make shots at TEDYouth late last year.

Below, an edited transcript of that conversation. Read on to hear how each of these thinkers parses the fine line of fairness when it comes to new science and technology in sports, and what each thinks competitions will look like 10 years from now.

To start off, how did each of you became interested in looking at the intersection of sports and science?

Cynthia Bir: I’m a biomedical engineer and my focus of research is in injury biomechanics. It’s an obvious area where we need to study the injuries that might be occurring, and the ways that we can prevent or predict them. A big topic right now is traumatic brain injuries in sports, and so being able to really understand what happens in various sports—not just football, but in all sports, in terms of what causes traumatic brain injuries—is key. I have some personal interest, because I have kids and they participate in a variety of sports. And so it’s one of those things that if you feel like you’re actually making a difference with your research, it adds some validity to it.

David Epstein: For me, I was a national-level middle-distance runner and went on to become a science grad student. I transitioned into sports science writing after one of my training partners dropped dead after a race. I got really curious about how that could happen to someone who otherwise seemed to be a picture of health. So ultimately, I had his parents sign a waiver to allow me to gather up his medical records, and learn that he suffered from this particular gene mutation that’s most commonly the cause of sudden death in athletes.

It was that experience, as well as another experience in sports in high school that led to me writing about genetics in sports. I grew up with a lot of Jamaican guys, and we had this great high school track team. At the age of 16, I looked up Jamaica in an atlas and realized there are two-and-a-half million from that island—I started to wonder what was going on there. As I moved up to running longer distances in college, I was running against Kenyan guys, getting to know them, and realizing they were all from the same town, basically — from this big minority tribe in Kenya. It was, again, “What’s going on?” Inside my own training group, where I was living and eating and training with five guys, we were becoming more different in many ways athletically rather than more the same, even while we were doing the same training. I started to want to look into some of those questions. That’s how I transitioned out of science grad school and into sports science writing.

Chris Kluwe: I’ve been in the NFL for eight-and-a-half years, and obviously played high school and college athletics before that. For me, I’ve always been interested in the idea of science and technology emerging—science and technology that we don’t really pay attention to at the time, but when we look back, we say, “Oh, hey, that was a pretty cool idea.” Things like cell phones or the Internet that transformed the way we lived our lives. As an athlete, what I’ve seen with Google Glass and with augmented reality is, I think, not quite a transcendent moment, but one of those moments where things will shift. Sports are a vehicle for many, many people—you have a very wide audience, and so when you get these emerging technologies in sports, then you see them adopted very rapidly. That’s what I was interested in. The idea that now we can actually record from a first-person perspective what it is like to be a world-class, professional athlete on the field, and then experience that through either seeing it on TV or other media.

With Google Glass, how do you see that technology changing the landscape of football—and other sports—in the future?

Chris Kluwe: I think it will initially shift the viewing perspective. People will now have another way to watch the game—from the athlete’s perspective. It’ll no longer be just the overhead cameras and the sweeping Skycam— you’ll actually be able to see what your favorite player did on the play from his or her perspective. That’s something that we’ve never really had up to this point.

From there, it leads to people becoming more comfortable with the idea of things like augmented reality and virtual reality, which leads into that being adopted more and more into everyday life. In the sporting world, that means augmented reality being adopted into the actual sports themselves. For football, you could have a projector that displays your next series of plays on your helmet as you’re running back to the huddle. Or something that highlights the receiver, or warns you if a guy is coming off your blind spot, for instance tackling against quarterback.

You see this a lot in the military—on displays in fighter jets, and I think they’re working on actual ground-based troop systems as well—there’s this filter of information between you and the world, an additional layer of information that you can use to enhance your own senses. I think we’re at that point right now where not a lot of people realize that, just like not a lot of people realized that the Internet was going to be something that spread and covered the entire world, or that cell phones would be as ubiquitous. No one even thinks of not having a cell phone, but there was a point when cell phones were big briefcase, clunky things that only executives on Wall Street had.

NFL punter Chris Kluwe picked books for the TED2013 bookstore. Before he published his own, Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies. Photo: Michael Brands

Cynthia and David, what’s an advance in science or technology that you think will change the landscape of sports in the coming years?

Cynthia Bir: I would have to say some of the motion-capture techniques that are out there. They no longer require markers or instrumentation to be placed on the athlete—you can just use the camera. Some people are using Kinect systems, and some people are using a little more high-tech systems. We’re able to tell exactly how the athlete is moving in real time. When you have an athlete performing at a certain level, you’re trying to explain, “Okay, this is what you need to do,” or “this is the motion.” Having a system where you can get real-time data, provide it back to that person and say, “You’re pushing off with your right leg more than your left leg,” or “you need to adapt this,” or “you need to adapt that”—it’s going to really enhance a lot of athletes’ ability to perform. We have a lot of biometric type feedback stuff available to us now as well in terms of just being able to monitor heart rate, respiratory rate, and things of that nature during the actual event. So I think that instant feedback that we’re now getting with our sensors will be critical.

David Epstein: I’m going to give two. One is individualized training. I’m interested what’s happened with sports science in the decade since the sequencing of the human genome. Although there’s a lot left to learn, just as we’ve learned the differences in my gene that’s involved in acetaminophen metabolism from yours—I might need three Tylenols while you need one to get the same effect, or maybe no amount works for me—we’re finding genes that make some people more trainable to particular training programs than others. Not only genes, but actually direct physiology, whether it’s properties of muscle fibers or things like that, that can help you figure out what the best training plan is for an individual. Just as there’s no perfect medication regimen for any individual, because we’re so biologically unique, there’s no one single perfect training plan that works for everybody.

Some countries that are starting to put this into effect. Denmark and the Netherlands are doing things like muscle biopsies, and moving athletes around sports based on that. Or if the athletes are plateauing in training, you can tailor training to their specific physiology to get better effects. That’s really neat, and can be done with fairly easy interventions. I think we’re going to continue moving in that direction, toward individualized training to get the optimal training environment for every individual.

The other thing I wanted to mention: occlusion testing, where you block certain parts of perceptual information digitally or virtually. Either in the field with special types of glasses and things like that, or in videos by deleting parts of players’ bodies or time segments of the action, to figure out what information athletes actually need to predict what’s coming in the future faster than they could do consciously. You can use that to understand what they should be exposed to the most, what kind of practice scenarios are not wasting time, essentially. It turns out that pitching machines are completely wasting time, because they don’t teach you the perceptual cues of a pitcher’s body that let you anticipate a pitch. This is why softball pitchers can always strike out major-league baseball hitters. I think this occlusion testing is helping us focus our training time only to athletes’ better perceptual skills. And it might even be connected to some of the virtual reality stuff that Chris is talking about. That would be a great way to use it on the field

Chris, hearing Cynthia and David talk about these examples, are these things that you’ve used in training. Have you used motion-capture video, or individualized training, or occlusion testing, or anything like that?

Chris Kluwe: Yes, I’ve actually seen occlusion testing used on the practice field. Nike had a pair of polarized lens glasses that would flash to block incoming light, essentially blinding you every half a second or every second, whatever you wanted to set it at. It is mainly for the receivers training to focus on the balls coming in and predict where the ball was going to be, even if they couldn’t watch it the entire way in. When you’re running on the field, when you’re trying to fight the defensive back, then you’re not going to be able to just stare the ball all the way into your hands. You have to predict where it’s going to end up, and then know when to close your hands to catch it. I’ve seen stuff like that.

When it comes to using technology or science to improve sport performance, what’s the line between fair and unfair? I was thinking of the example of doping earlier. That’s a medical technology that is totally taboo in sports. So what do you think is different between doping or something like Google Glass, or an improved swimsuit, or lighter running shoes, or any of these technologies that you just mentioned?

Chris Kluwe: One of the main concerns with doping right now is the fact that it isn’t regulated and people are worried that it is cheating, in a sense. It’s allowing you to move past what your body would normally be capable of. And that’s determined by the rules of the game itself. That’s more of a societal question: what do you determine as the limits for your game? Are doping or mechanical assistance allowed? That’s not really so much a sports question as it is a “what do you want from your sports” question.

But in terms of stuff like augmented reality, like sports science, I think that’s a natural progression of any sport. People want to know more about sports, they want to understand why things work. And you see that in baseball, with the rise of sabermetrics—the idea that there stats that we can track and collate that may actually make a difference, so we need to be tracking and collating. And if we don’t, we’re at a competitive disadvantage. With augmented reality in football, a team that has algorithms that allow them to predict what the other team is going to do a tenth of a second faster will have a competitive advantage. And so now, your scouting department is important but your IT department is just as important, because they’re in charge of making sense of that data. I think it is a natural progression of sports themselves.

David Epstein: I think Chris said something beautifully that we should all think about, which is that you have to ask: what do you want from your sport? With respect to doping, sports are—we would say—the ultimate human contrivances. It’s just like taking agreed-upon rules for something that’s otherwise not meaningful, and adding meaning. And so I think when it comes to doping, there’s a lot of debate about whether we should look the other way, but I think it’s totally fair to argue about changing the rules. If you feel like the value in sports emanates from agreed-upon rules, then I think if you’re into those rules, it’s important.

There are certain things that are on the banned substance [list] that won’t always be. Things that should be explored for helping players recover more quickly, and I think it’s a shame that they’re not. That said, I wouldn’t say it’s a non-issue if a player decides to do that anyway, because the rules in sports, are important. As far as the technology goes, I think if we only wanted to see strictly what the normal human body was capable of, we’d make people with 40-hour-a-week jobs play against one another. We’re already to the point beyond the athletes themselves. The support group and the technology companies are part of the expression of human creativity that is sports.

Cynthia Bir: The only thing that I would add: is it just some sort of mechanical advantage? Certain people have better access to equipment and resources and things of that nature, and that’s just what happens as you progress through the echelon of sports. But if something comes out that for some reason gives a mechanical advantage that has nothing to do with athleticism, then I think that needs to be looked at.

Cynthia Bir shows how basketball players use physics to make split-second decisions at TEDYouth 2013. Photo: Ryan Lash

How do these scientific and technological improvements that we’re talking about trickle down from the pros to the average player? One of those people who, like David said, works 40 hours a week and maybe plays on the company softball team, or a kid in a soccer club at school. At what point do these technologies reach the rest of us?

Cynthia Bir: I think that it depends on the technology. There is an advantage when dollars are put into the technologies at the higher levels—ultimately it will trickle down to the Little Leagues of the world. There’s a lot of research and development that’s going on across the board that will trickle down and help out even the weekend warrior at some point in time. The developmental cost is already there, so it’s then mass-produced. Some things will trickle down faster than others, but ultimately, I think, all will have advantages that the general populace will see.

David Epstein: I think Cynthia’s totally right. It depends on the technology. With respect to some of the technology that pro athletes use for health, sometimes I’ve been a little disappointed at the lack of trickle-down. But I think maybe that’s just because I’m expecting it to happen too quickly.

What are some examples of that?

David Epstein: Some of the things with brain testing. Not even technology, but just the kind of healthcare that you have, that kind of sideline assessment. Some of the neuro-cognitive testing that’s done for concussion or brain trauma has pretty much been shown to be too easy to actually assess a lot of concussions. So you’re just not making your test difficult enough, and that seems to me not to have been realized at lower levels of football. This part of the competitive population is the largest, has the most vulnerable brains, and is at the most risk. And it sometimes has the least care.

But I think in terms of things that improve training and the kind of technology that Chris was talking about, absolutely. There is no better advertising than a high-performance, elite, world-class athlete using something where a zillion people can see it. There’s the capacity for trickle-down much more rapidly than in many other scenarios.

Chris, as far as Google Glass—it’s still expensive, but have you heard from any recreational players that have tried that out in their own sport?

Chris Kluwe: I’ve seen videos from people who’ve worn it, or worn GoPros or something similar, trying to get that perspective in. Obviously a lot of it has to do with the popularity of your sport, and what the ease of access is to get that technology. Because when you see actually it’s using a product, that product is obtainable in terms of the average working person’s income, it’s going to trickle down much, much faster than something like, say, a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. For the average person, that’s not something they can just go out and pick up at a sporting goods store.

Professional sports are more the prototyping stage where companies put this technology out there so that they can gauge the interest in it, and see what kind of impact it has on the game. If people are interested in it, economies of scale can be put into place to make it obtainable by enough people. That’s when you start seeing that trickle-down effect. That’s when you start seeing people getting better Nike and UnderArmour-type compression girdles and sports gear.

In terms of the concussion testing, that’s something that I don’t think you’re going to see trickling down until the sport itself makes even more of an emphasis on saying, “Hey, this is something that we have to deal with.” Because right now, it’s very much a public perception thing where the NFL wants people to say, “Yeah, they’re trying to do something.” But the fact remains, the NFL wants players out on the field playing the game because that’s how they make their money. That’s what people are there to see. Until that changes, then you’re not going to get that trickle-down to the lower levels of sports, because the players will always want to go back into the game, because they’re out there to play. It’s up to the people around them to be able to say, “No, you can’t go back into that game because you haven’t passed the appropriate test. You can harm yourself further by going back in. You need to be saved from yourself.”

Cynthia Bir: I think what we’re dealing with right now, it’s not a lack of education. There are a lot of resources out there. The CDC has resources available for Heads-Up: Concussion and there are SLICE programs out there, which is a concussion recognition program that goes into high schools and junior highs and talks about how to detect concussions in sports. There is some trickle-down that’s occurring in that area. There is a lot of information and technologies available out there for both high school and Pop Warner leagues. It’s just a matter of getting the word out to the coaches, to the trainers, to the parents that that’s available.

I agree that some of the sideline cognitive testing probably hasn’t been, I guess you could say as diligent as what we would like it to have been in the past, but I think there’s a lot of new technologies and a lot of new testing that’s coming out that will be implemented in the next months. Not years, but months. The problem’s been recognized, and we’re starting to move forward.

David Epstein: There definitely is way more stuff out there than there was and I didn’t mean to imply there wasn’t. One thing I’ve seen are high schools that have athletic trainers—certified athletic trainers. And a lot of high schools, unfortunately, don’t.

Cynthia Bir: That is true.

David Epstein: And to Chris’ point, he made me think of one technology I’ve seen—the so-called AlterG treadmill. You slip into a pressurized kind of bubble for your lower body, and you can adjust how much of your body weight this pressurized bubble carries. I first heard of that maybe a couple of years ago, only with really elite athletes, but I’m just started seeing it pop up in physical therapy clinics and also in a few gyms here and there. I think the price is starting to come down. If that price keeps coming down, that will be something that’s sort of more standard in gyms, because it’s really, really useful, especially for rehab.

My next question is for Cynthia. I saw a talk that you gave online about the limit of human sport performance, and I was wondering if you could talk about some of the major limits both for the human body and in the ways science and technology can maximize our capability for sport.

Cynthia Bir: Every sport is so different, right? And there’s going to be different limits on different sports. But I think some of the points that we talked about earlier in terms of the technology—like identifying different genes and different ways that we can enhance and recover—will ultimately lead to athletes who are breaking records. That was my point in the talk: that if you look at the Olympics, especially the Summer Olympics as I didn’t really track it for the winter ones, we were still breaking world records. And you have to wonder, “Okay, what’s our limit? Are we going to get to that point where we can’t beat a time, or we can’t improve something?” There obviously are going to be limits. Biomechanically, we’re just built in a certain way and you’re only going to be able to have somebody run a 40-yard dash so fast. Have we reached them? No, I don’t think so. I think we’ll still see some improvements. We’ll see world records broken in every sport as we learn about the body and we study it and research it more.

Chris Kluwe: I would just want to hit you back on that previous point. Basically the entire idea of sports is trying to discover what those limits are. Because every generation, we feel like we’ve reached that pinnacle where we’ve run the fastest 40 time we’re going to run, or we’ve gone the fastest through the downhill we’re ever going to go, or this technology is perfect, or technology can’t get any better. But then we always go past it.

I think the key thing for sports science is understanding that every generation thinks it’s going to find those limits, but so far we haven’t. So we have to continuously keep looking for those limits, because I don’t even know if we’ll know when we find them. It will take quite a while to accumulate enough data to realize that.

You look at the strides that have been made over the past even 50 years in terms of shoe technology. You look at what cleats are these days compared to what cleats people wore back in the sixties and seventies. It’s night and day, and it drastically changes how you play your game. And that’s just something you wear on your feet. So I think it’s very much that sports science is that constant pushing, that constant testing of those limits—of trying to find where that absolute maximum limit is—that’s something we’re probably not ever going to find. In order to find that limit, we don’t just need know how the human body works in terms of physio-mechanical structure, we need to know how the human mind works in terms of: How do you make yourself push that extra ounce of energy? How do you make yourself keep going when every cell in your body is telling you that you can’t—that you’re done. But your brain finds a way. You can’t just look at it as a pure physiological performance, it has to be everything that makes up your body and your mind.

Cynthia Bir: That’s a good point. I think, anecdotely, that sports psychology is becoming more popular. You hear about it more, you hear about people who actually go and talk to sports psychologists in terms of, “I have a mental block, how do I get past this?” Or, “how do I focus my mind and do this?”

I think you’re right that it’s the physiological part of the body, and then it’s the technology too. That’s a very good point—that we don’t know what shoes are going to look like 10 years from now, because we sure didn’t know what they were going to look like 10 years ago in terms of what they are now. Materials have improved—lighter materials, different types of rubbers for the insoles. I think you’re right—several components come together to improve performance.

A very cool graphic from David Epstein’s book, The Sports Gene.

David Epstein: I agree with all of that. I also want play devil’s advocate a little bit. In terms of the brain, I just visited a lab in South Africa where they are doing various things and then measuring the electrical impulse between the brain and the muscle fibers to see how many muscle fibers are recruited in different tasks. To see how that can be manipulated and fool somebody about their work out. They have all kinds of different interventions to see how they can trick the brain into allowing you to use more of the physical resources. Because your brain’s not going to stop you from dying, apparently. It doesn’t mind if you run a little faster. There was a really cool study I saw there where they would fool people about how hot it was in the room they were in, and it basically negated the effect of the slowdown that the heat had on them. They would reset the thermometers, and all kinds of stuff like that.

Cynthia Bir: That’s the most scary.

David Epstein: Pretty cool, yeah.

Chris Kluwe: Incredible.

DE: Yeah, very. So if anyone Googles “central governor theory,” that’s what they’re working on.  This is why amphetamines, for example, are an incredible endurance aid, and yet they only act on the central nervous system—they don’t act in the muscles. It turns out this lab did a placebo-controlled trial and with amphetamines. Normally your brain stops recruiting as much muscle when your core temperature hits 104 and you have to slow down. The amphetamines allow you to keep going without knowing that. So it removes your central inhibition from overheating. It’s a great endurance aid, but it also means it makes you prone to heatstroke if you go too hard. But they don’t act in the muscle.

To play devil’s advocate a little bit more—women’s records in track and field have been completely stuck in the eighties. Women appear to be getting slower, and I think that’s largely because that was an era of mega-doping that’s a little harder to do now. So I’ll be curious to see if women’s track and field athletes ever again eventually climb back toward those records, because so far that hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, men’s records in track and field are not all stuck. I’m really curious to see which records stagnate, and which won’t. I think the endurance records—the marathon and ultra-marathon—are the ones that we’re really going to see a lot of progress in, in the near future.

Chris Kluwe: The interesting thing to see about records is that, generally, record-breaking progression is very logarithmic, in that you have kind of those big chunks at first, and then it really starts to slow down as you get closer and closer to what that limit is. Until you have that next breakthrough in sports technology—in science, in bio-physiology, whatever it happens to be. Until you hit that breakthrough, then yeah, you’re going to plateau. Then it becomes—that’s that next breakthrough?

One last question for all of you. What are each of your predictions on the craziest, coolest or most shocking thing we’ll see happening in sports 10 years from now?

Chris Kluwe: For me, personally, probably the most outlandish thing I can think of—I’d say there’s maybe 25% chance of it actually happening—is the idea of actually replacing human bodies with artificial bodies in terms of sports. Where people will either remotely access or log in, in a fashion, to an artificial body. If it’s a robot body, or something constructed with synthetic polymers, something like that, in order to reduce the risk of injury to actual human beings. Because I think you’re starting to see that more and more—especially in football players, but in other sports as well—that people are starting to understand that there is a toll that sports takes on a human body. As a society, we have to ask ourselves a question—is this worth it to us in order to be entertained? Is it worth it to us to have people drop dead after a race? Or to be crippled for life in order that we can watch and be entertained? As technology progresses to a point where it is possible to duplicate the human experience, but also take it out of the equation so people aren’t actively being harmed, I can see that definitely taking off and supplanting actual flesh-and-blood sports at some point.

More realistically, I think what will happen is that we’ll start to see much more augmented reality and virtual reality interfaces in sports. I think that that’s a natural progression—as people become more used to that type of technology in their everyday lives, then it becomes natural for them to see it in their entertainment as well.

David Epstein: I think some of it depends on who enters the competitive population. I think there’s a good chance that we’ll see a double amputee, because of advances in prostheses, be capable of winning a gold medal in the able-bodied Olympics. Actually, I heard the US right now has the largest Paralympic athlete pool ever, because it’s had soldiers coming home with injuries for a while now.

One thing I think we’ll see for sure, within the next 10 years, is more widespread use of hyperoxic training, which is people who are training with masks on to give them more than atmospheric oxygen, because it turns out that the body will work out much harder than you can normally. The oxygen mask that football players use between plays, when those have been tested versus placebo masks, they actually don’t work, because when you’re resting, there’s plenty of oxygen in the air around you. The problem is you can’t get it where it needs to go quickly enough in your body. But when you’re actually working out as hard as you can, and you’re an elite athlete, you can move your blood so fast that it doesn’t catch as much oxygen as it could. So if you’re working out with a mask on, that increases that oxygen pressure around you, and you can actually work out way harder than you would be able to normally. I think you’ll also see places like some of the countries that have sort of centralized sports science institutes build facilities that are hyperoxic conditions to allow athletes to train in them often.

Cynthia Bir: I would say that we’ll see the move to some of the real-time technology and feedback used during an actual sporting event. Because we do a lot during training and we do a lot during practices, and we get numbers and feedback. But to actually do it during a game is quite different. We’ve done a lot of research. Let’s say in boxing, when you have people sparring versus during an actual bout, you see quite a bit of differences in terms of punch forces and what is sustained during the fight. So I think having some more of the real-time monitoring of all sports—football, baseball, everything—will provide that instant feedback. That’s kind of what we’re all about now in the world, and in the US specifically, is getting that instant feedback and having those numbers and those metrics right away so you can make decisions. I think we’ll start to see more and more teams, coaches and athletic trainers using that instant feedback, whether it be to detect an injury or to say, “Okay, this is what’s happening on the field, and this is how you need to adapt to it.”

Check out David Epstein’s book, The Sports Gene »

Notifications are a UX Anti-Pattern

Don Knuth, one of the fathers of modern computer science, has this to say on email:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.

His distinction captures a remarkable fact for those of us who keep our email tabs open all day: email allows anyone to interrupt you, at any time, for any reason.

Imagine describing the analogous interaction design pattern for old-school snail mail to a version of yourself from thirty years ago, before the widespread emergence of email and the web: “Well, instead of having your mail delivered once per day, it will be delivered constantly, at all times, with each new piece of mail. And each time a new piece is received, the postman will call you, and tell you who the mail is from, what it looks like it’s about, and so on. If you want, you can have the postman open the mail, and you can hear its contents.”

Absurd, right?

Gmail has acknowledged this absurdity with its recent introduction of tabs; emails sorted into the Promotions tab do not trigger the same kinds of notifications as emails sorted into the Primary tab, etc.

But when you step back for a moment, it’s easy to see how the problem is much, much bigger than just email: the notification design pattern has crept its way into the interaction design of almost every major tech product we use.

New text? Buzz buzz.

New comment on a facebook thread? New notification.

New mention on twitter? New notification.

To be fair, not all notifications interrupt attention at all times: whereas the buzz of a text message will probably distract you no matter what you’re doing, notifications in things like facebook and twitter are just a bit softer and more customizable attentionally, and won’t necessarily interrupt you, unless you hear an associated sound, or opt in to a buzz on your phone, etc.

The problem is, whether they happen to interrupt your attention or not, they reinforce a cycle of behavior that benefits the app creator, but damages you, as a user. I call it the “(Interrupt)-Check-Interact-Reward” cycle.

Here’s how it works—if you’re familiar with classical conditioning, this story will be a familiar one to you:

Let’s start with the end of the cycle since it’s the most straightforward. Using facebook, Gmail, twitter are satisfying activities; that’s what keeps us using them. Call it fun, productive, pleasurable, whatever: using the software is a positive experience by our definition, and that’s what keeps us coming back. This is “Interact-Reward.”

Notifications that interrupt your attention take this cycle outside of the world of the app. Instead of opting to visit facebook.com and have a rewarding interaction, facebook decides it’s going to interrupt whatever you’re doing, and notifies you of some activity. Suddenly, the behavior that you go through to get the reward looks slightly different: you are interrupted, you check your notifications, you complete your interaction, and you get your reward. This is Interrupt-Check-Interact-Reward.

Already this starts to make us a look a bit like Pavlov’s dogs. Whatever pleasure we got out of the interaction on the app originally, we learn to associate with the new stimulus of the notification itself. We start to crave the notification for its own sake, instead of the interaction that the app is designed for.

But it gets worse. The “leaky,” soft notification that I referenced above, which is how facebook and twitter operate by default, doesn’t alwaysinterrupt you when you have a “notification.” This is where the parenthetical “(Interrupt)” part of the cycle comes in. Associating the notification with the reward of using the software and then withdrawing it some of the time reinforces the desire for the Check part of the cycle.

Does that make sense? Imagine if your phone only notified you of textssome of the time, and you didn’t have full control when or why. You’d get caught in a loop of wanting to check your phone for texts, wondering whether anything had happened since the last time you checked. And if, just often enough when you checked, someone new had texted, this behavior of Checking would be reinforced by the pleasure of seeing the new text, and the Checking behavior itself would come to be what you craved.

This is why facebook stopped emailing copies of notifications to people’s inboxes by default: they learned that emailing people less about what’s happening in the app actually keeps them coming back more. If the Interrupt always happens, why bother Checking? This is like randomly checking your phone for texts even though you haven’t noticed a buzz or notification. You might do it once in a blue moon when you’re bored or an awkward situation calls for it, but since the Interrupt always happens, it’s what you associate with the pleasure of receiving a new text, and you don’t feel a compulsion to constantly Check. Once the Interrupt is selectively withdrawn, the Checking behavior is what becomes associated with the pleasure of the interaction.

Notifications start to look like a great way to keep you glued to an app, and not such a great way to serve your interests as a user.

Indeed, facebook, Gmail, twitter, et al. all suffer from the same fundamental dilemma: they profit from advertising, and the longer a user spends on the site, the more ads they can be served. So on the one hand, in simple terms, it’s their absolute goal to maximize time on site for every user.

On the other hand, time on site is clearly inversely correlated with good design for a whole host of tasks from the user’s perspective. All other things being equal, the longer it takes to compose an email in gmail, to search for an old tweet, to look up a friend on facebook, the worse, for the user. Longer times indicate more difficulty doing whatever it is the user intended to do.

Put another way, to maximize user happiness/productivity/goals, what is theoptimal number of times that a user should check gmail, facebook, or twitter, in a day, for example?

Of course, this question has no answer—not all users are alike, not all days are alike for any given user, and so on. But app designers and the companies who pay them have to strike a delicate balance between their short- and long-term interests: in the short-term, their interests are heavily aligned towards maximizing the number of interactions that you have with the app, regardless of whether or not it’s to your detriment. In the long-term, ruthlessly squeezing logins out of you may hurt them if they fear that it will eventually cause so much fatigue in you that you’ll abandon the app, having recognized that it was all just a con game to get you to login again, and again, and again.

But is that a realistic fear for facebook, twitter, Gmail? I am reminded of this brilliant piece by Alexis Madrigal on the “machine zone.” It’s the place that MIT anthropologist Natasha Schüll says that slot players go when they’re at the slots, and, perhaps surprisingly, it’s not about winning money at all: it’s a hypnotic, trance-like state where distinctions between you and the machine, even feelings of time and space, feel like they have fallen away. These are the gamblers’ words, not mine.

Reading Madrigal’s piece, I wonder: are modern web products the most sophisticated addiction machines in the history of mankind? Schüll’s book is called Addiction By Design, and it seems clear to me that notifications in most modern web products are designed to addict, not to help us live better lives.

The test for the appropriateness of the notification design pattern is simple, because the modern mobile phone is essentially just an always-on notification machine. Wherever we see notifications, we should ask: would it be absurd if, instead of receiving these notifications, I received a phone call or text letting me know of the same activity? If the notifications fail this test, they are probably designed to addict, as well as or instead of being designed to be informative.

This is not an entirely fair test, and it is oversimplifying. A phone call is not a text is not an email; there is a time and place for all sorts of information and interruption. But I think it still stands as a useful thought experiment to begin to distinguish between well-designed notifications and those that are designed to create a coerced, unbreakable loop of app usage.

Let’s kill notifications that exist to addict and set each other free from the never-ending arms race of cheap con games to compete for user attention.

We set out to build software to help communities we are passionate about, to solve their problems; what a travesty it would be if we allow ourselves to become the designers of ever-more-sophisticated ad-serving slot machines. Source

Capturing User Feedback

In this post I’m going to share with you my process for how I capture user feedback when performing customer interviews remotely. Capturing user feedback accurately is essential for a couple reasons. One, the information and learning you get does not just have a short term impact. This feedback can play into design decisions that are made in the future; it’s important to remember what you captured so you can reference it later. Lastly, unless you’re a one person team, you need to share the user feedback with other people in an organized, easy-to-digest manner. These are the steps and methods I use to control the process in an efficient and informative way.

1. Organizing Interviewees

I like to do this in a low-fi way as to not add a lot of overhead to my process. With the help of the client, I create a list of interviewee leads. Either myself or the client will reach out to them to warm them up and tell them what we’re doing and why we need their feedback. Then I’ll send an email asking to setup a time to talk. Keeping track of the status of each potential interviewee can get unwieldy very quickly. For this reason I use a simple Kanban board made in Keynote to keep track of where people are in the process. This allows me to very quickly understand who I need to continue reaching out to. Download the Keynote file.

2. Interviewee Information & Notes

I start off every user interview with casual conversation to make the user comfortable and I also want to get to know them. I have a folder of text files organized by users names. In the text file is some basic information about them like what they do, where they work and their contact information. I may include some basic questions in the text file that I ask all users and will record those notes there. This is also where I’ll eventually export an .MP4  audio file of our conversation.

3. Sharing Artifacts & Capturing Feedback

Before I interview people, I need a place to share artifacts like designs, sketches and wireframes with the people you’ll be talking to. My favorite method is to use RedPen.io. RedPen is great because I can upload an artifact and people can leave comments directly on it. Alternatively, I can use it to record the notes that I take. Either way it’s great to see the comment correlated directly to the part of the interface it’s referring to. RedPen is also very useful because unlike Dropbox – it doesn’t get blocked by Enterprise firewalls as much. Below is an example of a sketch I sent to someone I was interviewing. This person in particular was very enthusiastic about offering feedback, so much so that she came back to RedPen in her own time the next day and added more thoughts.

In addition to note taking I will record the user interviews (with permission) whenever possible. Screenflow is great and I can export the audio of the interviews so I can easily reference them later.

4. Organizing Feedback (For Sharing & Distribution)

This is something that is best done as you are collecting feedback; it is best done when fresh. In a Keynote file I place in the artifact that was used during the interview, the user’s name and basic information like where they work and what they do. I use the bubble/comment shape and transfer over my feedback notes from RedPen. This allows everyone on my team to see exactly what feedback was left and where.

I hope you enjoyed this post. If you have any questions, be sure to leave them in a comment and I’ll reply!

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Humans With Amplified Intelligence Could Be More Powerful Than AI

With much of our attention focused the rise of advanced artificial intelligence, few consider the potential for radically amplified human intelligence (IA). It’s an open question as to which will come first, but a technologically boosted brain could be just as powerful — and just as dangerous – as AI.

As a species, we’ve been amplifying our brains for millennia. Or at least we’ve tried to. Looking to overcome our cognitive limitations, humans have employed everything from writing, language, and meditative techniques straight through to today’s nootropics. But none of these compare to what’s in store.

Unlike efforts to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), or even an artificial superintelligence (SAI), the human brain already presents us with a pre-existing intelligence to work with. Radically extending the abilities of a pre-existing human mind — whether it be through genetics, cybernetics or the integration of external devices — could result in something quite similar to how we envision advanced AI.

Looking to learn more about this, I contacted futurist Michael Anissimov, a blogger atAccelerating Future and a co-organizer of the Singularity Summit. He’s given this subject considerable thought — and warns that we need to be just as wary of IA as we are AI.

Michael, when we speak of Intelligence Amplification, what are we really talking about? Are we looking to create Einsteins? Or is it something significantly more profound?

The real objective of IA is to create super-Einsteins, persons qualitatively smarter than any human being that has ever lived. There will be a number of steps on the way there.

Last month, researchers created an electronic link between the brains of two rats separated by thousands of miles. This was just another reminder… Read…

The first step will be to create a direct neural link to information. Think of it as a “telepathic Google.”

The next step will be to develop brain-computer interfaces that augment the visual cortex, the best-understood part of the brain. This would boost our spatial visualization and manipulation capabilities. Imagine being able to imagine a complex blueprint with high reliability and detail, or to learn new blueprints quickly. There will also be augmentations that focus on other portions of sensory cortex, like tactile cortex and auditory cortex.

The third step involves the genuine augmentation of pre-frontal cortex. This is the Holy Grail of IA research — enhancing the way we combine perceptual data to form concepts. The end result would be cognitive super-McGyvers, people who perform apparently impossible intellectual feats. For instance, mind controlling other people, beating the stock market, or designing inventions that change the world almost overnight. This seems impossible to us now in the same way that all our modern scientific achievements would have seemed impossible to a stone age human — but the possibility is real.

For it to be otherwise would require that there is some mysterious metaphysical ceiling on qualitative intelligence that miraculously exists at just above the human level. Given that mankind was the first generally intelligent organism to evolve on this planet, that seems highly implausible. We shouldn’t expect version one to be the final version, any more than we should have expected the Model T to be the fastest car ever built.

Looking ahead to the next few decades, how could AI come about? Is the human brain really that fungible?

The human brain is not really that fungible. It is the product of more than seven million years of evolutionary optimization and fine-tuning, which is to say that it’s already highly optimized given its inherent constraints. Attempts to overclock it usually cause it to break, as demonstrated by the horrific effects of amphetamine addiction.

Chemicals are not targeted enough to produce big gains in human cognitive performance. The evidence for the effectiveness of current “brain-enhancing drugs” is extremely sketchy. To achieve real strides will require brain implants with connections to millions of neurons. This will require millions of tiny electrodes, and a control system to synchronize them all. The current state of the art brain-computer interfaces have around 1,000 connections. So, current devices need to be scaled up by more than 1,000 times to get anywhere interesting. Even if you assume exponential improvement, it will be awhile before this is possible — at least 15 to 20 years.

Improvement in IA rests upon progress in nano-manufacturing. Brain-computer interface engineers, like Ed Boyden at MIT, depend upon improvements in manufacturing to build these devices. Manufacturing is the linchpin on which everything else depends. Given that there is very little development of atomically-precise manufacturing technologies, nanoscale self-assembly seems like the most likely route to million-electrode brain-computer interfaces. Nanoscale self-assembly is not atomically precise, but it’s precise by the standards of bulk manufacturing and photolithography.

What potential psychological side-effects may emerge from a radically enhanced human? Would they even be considered a human at this point?

One of the most salient side effects would be insanity. The human brain is an extremely fine-tuned and calibrated machine. Most perturbations to this tuning qualify as what we would consider “crazy.” There are many different types of insanity, far more than there are types of sanity. From the inside, insanity seems perfectly sane, so we’d probably have a lot of trouble convincing these people they are insane.

Even in the case of perfect sanity, side effects might include seizures, information overload, and possibly feelings of egomania or extreme alienation. Smart people tend to feel comparatively more alienated in the world, and for a being smarter than everyone, the effect would be greatly amplified.

Most very smart people are not jovial and sociable like Richard Feynman. Hemingway said, “An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.” What if drunkenness were not enough to instill camaraderie and mutual affection? There could be a clean “empathy break” that leads to psychopathy.

So which will come first? AI or IA?

It’s very difficult to predict either. There is a tremendous bias for wanting IA to come first, because of all the fun movies and video games with intelligence-enhanced protagonists. It’s important to recognize that this bias in favor of IA does not in fact influence the actual technological difficulty of the approach. My guess is that AI will come first because development is so much cheaper and cleaner.

Both endeavours are extremely difficult. They may not come to pass until the 2060s, 2070s, or later. Eventually, however, they must both come to pass — there’s nothing magical about intelligence, and the demand for its enhancement is enormous. It would require nothing less than a global totalitarian Luddite dictatorship to hold either back for the long term.

What are the advantages and disadvantages to the two different developmental approaches?

The primary advantage of the AI route is that it is immeasurably cheaper and easier to do research. AI is developed on paper and in code. Most useful IA research, on the other hand, is illegal. Serious IA would require deep neurosurgery and experimental brain implants. These brain implants may malfunction, causing seizures, insanity, or death. Enhancing human intelligence in a qualitative way is not a matter of popping a few pills — you really need to develop brain implants to get any significant returns.

Most research in that area is heavily regulated and expensive. All animal testing is expensive. Theodore Berger has been working on a hippocampal implant for a number of years — and in 2004 it passed a live tissue test, but there has been very little news since then. Every few years he pops up in the media and says it’s just around the corner, but I’m skeptical. Meanwhile, there is a lot of intriguing progress in Artificial Intelligence.

Does IA have the potential to be safer than AI as far as predictability and controllability is concerned? Is it important that we develop IA before super-powerful AGI?

Intelligence Augmentation is much more unpredictable and uncontrollable than AGI has the potential to be. It’s actually quite dangerous, in the long term. I recently wrote an article thatspeculates on global political transformation caused by a large amount of power concentrated in the hands of a small group due to “miracle technologies” like IA or molecular manufacturing. I also coined the term “Maximillian,” meaning “the best,” to refer to a powerful leader making use of intelligence enhancement technology to put himself in an unassailable position.

SEXPAND

Image: The cognitively enhanced Reginald Barclay from the ST:TNG episode, “The Nth Degree.”

The problem with IA is that you are dealing with human beings, and human beings are flawed. People with enhanced intelligence could still have a merely human-level morality, leveraging their vast intellects for hedonistic or even genocidal purposes.

AGI, on the other hand, can be built from the ground up to simply follow a set of intrinsic motivations that are benevolent, stable, and self-reinforcing.

People say, “won’t it reject those motivations?” It won’t, because those motivations will make up its entire core of values — if it’s programmed properly. There will be no “ghost in the machine" to emerge and overthrow its programmed motives. Philosopher Nick Bostrom does an excellent analysis of this in his paper "The Superintelligent Will”. The key point is that selfish motivations will not magically emerge if an AI has a goal system that is fundamentally selfless, if the very essence of its being is devoted to preserving that selflessness. Evolution produced self-interested organisms because of evolutionary design constraints, but that doesn’t mean we can’t code selfless agents de novo.

What roadblocks, be they technological, medical, or ethical, do you see hindering development?

The biggest roadblock is developing the appropriate manufacturing technology. Right now, we aren’t even close.

Another roadblock is figuring out what exactly each neuron does, and identifying the exact positions of these neurons in individual people. Again, we’re not even close.

Thirdly, we need some way to quickly test extremely fine-grained theories of brain function — what Ed Boyden calls “high throughput circuit screening” of neural circuits. The best way to do this would be to somehow create a human being without consciousness and experiment on them to our heart’s content, but I have a feeling that idea might not go over so well with ethics committees.

Absent that, we’d need an extremely high-resolution simulation of the human brain. Contrary to hype surrounding “brain simulation” projects today, such a high-resolution simulation is not likely to be developed until the 2050-2080 timeframe. An Oxford analysis picks a median date of around 2080. That sounds a bit conservative to me, but in the right ballpark.

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