A recent Wired article discussed the dangers of trying to influence users through nudging — the practice of structuring a person’s choices in such a way as to get a desired result. It highlighted one of the key dynamics facing today’s high-tech companies as they shift from relatively independent creators of “whiz-bang” software to full-fledged consumer-oriented businesses. This tension between following your bliss and taking into account the expectations of others can be a tough cultural change for some companies.

As corporate self-interest becomes more important than user satisfaction, the nudging company’s approach to consumers becomes fragmented and incoherent.

The target of the article was Facebook but it could just as easily be applied to anything from politics to parenting. I remember learning pretty quickly that if I wanted my five-year-old daughter to put on a sweater, I didn’t come right out and ask her if she wanted to put on a sweater … I asked her if she wanted to put on the red sweater or the blue sweater. Sheer genius. Of course, as she got older, she got wise to my evil machinations and the nudging approach started to fail.

The problem for businesses is that their customers are at least as savvy as young children and these people get frustrated when websites, surveys, or automated phone menus don’t offer up reasonable choices (or even try and trick them into doing something they don’t want to). This type of behavior can contribute to reduced customer satisfaction, lost revenues and lower brand value.

This recent article from Fast Company provides some great examples of how to make the statistics of big numbers more meaningful to the average person. This is a great skill to hone. Relating events or ideas to common human experiences helps make these things more easy to to understand and leads to more productive discussions.The approach is similar to developing the “return on investment” for a business case. The more clearly you can show the benefits of a particular solution, the more likely you are to gain traction with the people you are trying to influence:

“A good statistic is one that aids a decision or shapes an opinion. For a stat to do either of those, it must be dragged within the everyday. That’s your job — to do the dragging. In our world of billions and trillions, that can be a lot of manual labor. But it’s worth it: A number people can grasp is a number that can make a difference.”

It is also similar to the concept of human scale in architecture. The design of things like stairs, steps, seats, doors, windows, railings, hallways, ceilings, tables and shelves are all influenced by the physical and sensory capabilities of human beings. You can play with this scale to make things appear either monumental or intimate but the range of variability is limited to what people can actually use. People find places designed for automobiles — like parking structures, arterial streets or big box retail stores — alien and uncomfortable. The same is true for numbers or statistics that fall outside the range of human comprehension.

So what is the “Goldilocks zone” for these measures? It depends on the metric, of course, but here are a few guidelines off the top of my head:

* Yes, I know.

As I was flipping through the stations on the TV the other day, I became particularly aware of the slight delay between the time I pressed the button on the remote and the actual change of the channel. This is one of those minor annoyances that shouldn’t bother anyone but it just seems weird that all the amazing technological advances in television (high-definition picture, thousands of channels to choose from) should come at the cost of the “crispness” in performance that I remember from the old analog broadcasts.

The lack of responsiveness really becomes noticeable during casual browsing. The two- or three-second pause between channel clicks appears to be much longer than the amount of time the average human needs to evaluate the onscreen content. This sets you up for a lot of waiting and really has a negative impact on the user’s experience. If you have cable, you can use the guide feature, of course, but it just doesn’t provide the same satisfaction as a good, old-fashioned, rapid-fire channel surf.

In a recent article, Jacob Nielsen revisited the topic of website response times and noted that delays of even a few seconds can contribute to an unpleasant user experience. He highlights three basic response speeds and how they relate to the human attention span:

• 0.1 seconds provides a user with the feeling of an instantaneous response — a level of responsiveness that is essential to supporting the feeling of direct manipulation.
• 1 second keeps the user’s flow of thought seamless and still allows them to feel in control. This degree of responsiveness is needed for good navigation.
• 10 seconds keeps the user’s attention but they are starting to feel that they are at the mercy of the computer and wish it was faster. After 10 seconds, their mind starts to wander.

These limits would apply equally well to an established technology like television.

A friend recently sent me this link to a discussion on the merits of obscure airport security notifications about snowglobes. Oddly enough, I experienced the snowglobe issue firsthand on a recent trip to New Mexico. The circumstances:

• My daughter collects snowglobes
• Snowglobes are the classic souvenir
• Terrorists have attempted to smuggle incendiary fluids in small containers
• The Feds only allow liquids in containers below a certain size onboard
• Snowglobes contain an undetermined amount of liquid
• Snowglobes are therefore banned from carry-on luggage
• This information is provided to passengers only after the luggage check-in
• There is no service that allows you to package and mail anything from the airport terminal
• Nobody buying a snowglobe at a local tourist trap is going to piece all of this together beforehand
• Terrorists and government bureaucracy now stand in the way of my daughter’s happiness

This whole situation was extremely annoying and I have to admit that a sign or some sort of notification would have helped. The trick for delivering a message like this is how (and when) to target your audience. Obviously, a sign taking up precious real estate in the terminal can be distracting and dilutes the effectiveness of more important messages. On the otherhand, there is a small subset of people who would really benefit from this information if it could be delivered at the right moment.

Interestingly, this incident did answer a question that had beeen bugging me throughout the trip: why is it so hard to find a snowglobe in Albuquerque? All I could find were items that looked like snowglobes but were partially filled with sand. It wasn’t like the area didn’t get snow – people ski there — so what was the deal? My guess is that the local tourist shops developed the sandglobes in response to the airport security issue. They were everywhere. Maybe the snowglobe warning should have been delivered at that point.