Category Archives: Information Seeking & Foraging

The Human Hardware Series on Search Engine Land

I must say I’m having fun writing the Human Hardware series on Search Engine Land. What I wanted to do is take some of the inherent behaviors and cognitive limits of humans and explore how this impacts our online interactions. And yes, to me, that’s fun!

If, like me, you’re interested in the “why” of things, I think you might enjoy this series. I’ve written 3 installments so far:

Human Hardware: Working Memory

How we use our working memory to make decisions, the capacity limits of working memory, and how working memory and long term memory work together. I take a look at Herbert Simon’s work on bounded rationality and satisficing as a shortcut to making decisions.  I also explore Daniel Wegner’s theory of transactive memory in this column. Finally, I look at how working memory dictates how we digest search results.

Human Hardware: Men and Women

Humans come in two models: men and women. Despite rampant political correctness, there are distinct differences between us (in case you hadn’t noticed). This column looks at some of the cognitive and neurological differences (I tried to keep my comparisons from the neck up) and how it impacts things like shopping, navigating and asking directions, understanding conversations and spending time online. I spend some time outlining gender research differences we’ve seen in past usability studies.

Human Hardware: Dunbar’s Number

In part One of this two part installment, I pose this question: Do we have limits on how many friends we can make? Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, believes the answer is yes, and that number is 150, give or take a few. I look at Dunbar’s research and reasoning, and how this limit has impacted human evolution and our creation of social networks. I touch on the evolution of language, the Great Leap in human evolution (why we went from throwing rocks to creating art in what was relatively the blink of an eye) and the importance of grooming as a social glue.

I’m pretty pumped about this series, as it ties directly into my book research, so this has been a way to work out a few of the ideas. To be honest, I have no idea how many installments there will be in the series. Along a similar vein, and in case you missed it, you might enjoy the Google Habit series that ran on MediaPost and earlier in this blog. Just check the archives.

The Last Word on Breaking the Google Habit

First published March 13, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

When I started this series of columns, I had no intention of making it a series. But now, with the fifth (and final) installment, it looks like I may finally break this particular habit. It’s been fascinating for me. Hopefully it’s been equally interesting for you.

We Develop Strings of Habits

In last week’s column, I talked about environmental cueing and reinforcement. Here, cues in our environment (the ubiquitous toolbar search box, for example) trigger a habit, and the expected outcome (the delivery of relevant results) reinforces the habit. This creates a sustaining cycle.

But there’s one other aspect of habits that we should look at. We tend to develop habits as strings of events. One environment cue might trigger a series of actions. The classic example is those who need a cigarette when they have a drink. Some recent research paints a fairly bleak picture of North American society and shows how obsessed we are with habit-inducing cues. The “why” question poised was why French people were less obese than Americans, despite a diet high in fat. It turns out one major reason why is that Americans let external cues, such as which TV show is on, drive their eating patterns. We always have a bowl of Chunky Chocolate ice cream while we watch “Desperate Housewives.” The French tend to eat when they’re hungry, and stop eating when they’re full. For the French, eating is a joy. For Americans, it’s a habit.

Swimming Upstream

As I mentioned before, to break a habit, you have to intercept before the habitual behavior, rather than try to educate and modify after the fact. And the less thought required to execute the behavior, the harder the habit will be to break. If your habit takes a few seconds to do, the opportunities to intercept and kick in the rational brain are minimal. This provides a distinct challenge to anyone looking to usurp Google’s search crown. Searching is becoming easier than ever.

The competitors have to look at that split second that exists between the awareness of the need for more information and the instinctive move to the nearest search box to launch the query. It’s in that tiny sliver of time that the opportunity to break the Google habit exists.

Searchis Interruptis

So, given the fleeting nature of this opportunity, how do you grab it? One way is to anticipate the need of search before it happens. This is the implicit query work that Microsoft was experimenting with sometime ago. As you work on a task, potential search queries are monitored in the background and are presented to the user. But a constantly shifting window of potential searches would probably drive us all batty.

Another way is to integrate search at an application or OS level, making search even easier and inserting a habit-breaking context switch into that tiny sliver of indecision that exists between awareness and Google.

Attack the Weakest Links

But even integration of search at this level won’t be enough. Remember, we tend to give the advantage to the incumbent. We actively look for reasons to maintain the habit, and we ignore information that runs counter to our habitual choice. Even if a search alternative is one click less to get to, that alternative still has to provide a significant reason to switch. They not only have to beat Google at the game of search, they have to do it in a decisive way. For this reason, a competitor has to attack Google’s user base at the weakest point, the ones that are using Google because it’s handy, not the Google loyalists.

True User-Centricity

This brings us to my last strategy for breaking the Google habit: a truly user-centric search tool.

Up to this point, verticalization in search has taken one of two forms. Either engines have attacked a topic category (i.e. Business.com and B2B, Lawyers.com and legal services, Expedia.com and travel) or a type of content (i.e. Blinkx and Youtube for video, Technorati for blog posts). These approaches tend to be vulnerable because we are creatures of habit. Generally, we prefer to use one place to launch our searches. We’re already using Google for most of our searches, so if it can provide an equivalent experience to these vertical engines, it can quickly assimilate the traffic and squeeze the verticals out.

This is not as easy as it sounds. Google has yet to provide an equivalent experience in most of its verticals, but now that it appears that the default design of the search results page is no longer a sacred cow, I would expect the functionality gap to close quickly.

But what if we took a different approach? What if rather than verticalizing around a topic or content bucket, we verticalized around a type of user? What if we maximized the search experience for millennial males or female baby boomers? The verdict on personalized search seems to be that a one-size-fits-all solution is a long way off on the horizon, but an intermediate step might be to tailor an engine for a segment that shares similar needs and expectations. By focusing on a niche strategy, you might be able to break the Google habit, one segment at a time. In this way, you might be able to provide the discontinuous innovation needed to catch people upstream, before they get swept away with the Google tide.

Human Hardware Series on Search Engine Land

I’m kicking off another series in the Just Behave column on Search Engine Land. I’m calling it the Human Hardware series, and it it I’ll be exploring some of the inherent traits of humans and how they affect our online interactions. In the first installment, last Friday, I looked at working memory, channel capacity and satisficing, area I’ve explored in past posts. Here’s a brief excerpt:

As people start to dive into the human genome, it’s somewhat startling to find the lack of diversity in the human gene pool. As different as we all think we are, we actually are alike in many more ways. We share a remarkable similarity in our physiological and neurological make up. Added to this is the fact that there are several inherent traits we all share, the result of thousands of years of evolutionary tweaking. There are absolutely deviations from the norm, but as a quick glance at any bell curve will tell you, for any given trait or characteristic of humanity, including intelligence, loyalty, physical strength or the ability to juggle, most of us cluster around the center line, otherwise known as the norm. It’s the inherent limits of the vehicle we inhabit, our body.

And lest you start feeling too superior, we actually share 98.4% of our genetic material with chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relative. There is more genetic diversity between two breeds of dogs than there is between us and the average chimp. In fact, apes and chimpanzees are genetically more divergent than chimps and humans. Try wrapping your mind around that one on your next trip to the zoo.

As we start looking at our success in predicting behavior, the peak of the bell curve for our target population is where we have to start. It helps to understand the human hardware issues, which form the foundation of our understanding of predicted behavior. From here, we can tilt our strategies to accommodate diversions in either direction from the norm.

Why is the human gene pool so shallow? It’s because we all come from the same place, a relatively small population of modern humans in Africa, some 150,000 years ago. Recent research has shown that genetic diversity lessens as we get further and further from Africa. And one particularly interesting study speculates that all blue eyed people come from the same common ancestor. Our family tree has remarkably few branches if you go back far enough.

The rest of the column can be read over at Search Engine Land. Next week I’ll be running Part Two, looking at the differences of men and women.

More Steps to Breaking the Google Habit

First published March 6, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Let’s imagine that my ongoing series about the forming of habits (installment 1, installment 2 and installment 3) has so captured your curiosity that you want to find out more. You’re reading this column from your computer. You make the decision to find more information about breaking a habit. Now, let’s slow down time and look at the steps. There, in the upper left of your browser, is the Google toolbar. Or maybe you have the Google sidebar in the lower right of your window. Perhaps you’ve got Google’s homepage bookmarked. Whatever the shortcut, you don’t suddenly stop and think, “Gee, for this search what would be the optimal search engine to use?” No, without thinking, you go right up to the handiest search box and key in “breaking habits.”

It’s All About the Cues….

In psychological terms, what we’ve just described is a stable environment. The layout of your window is something you’re familiar with. You don’t have to think about it, you just do it. And the vast majority of times, this works for you. You have created an expectation of success. The cues remind you, below the level of rational consciousness, that this course of behavior generally produces the desired outcome. And each successful search reinforces that.

This cueing and reinforcement cycle is a powerful factor. Several academic studies (see Verplanken & Wood for a review of the literature in this area) have shown that habitual use has two important lock-in mechanisms that perpetuate the behavior. First of all, expectations of success curb our desire to search for alternatives. All those millions of advertising dollars from Ask or Microsoft, and the ads they bought are falling on deaf ears.

Secondly, the one type of information we do pay attention to is information that confirms our habitual bias. Because we have an expectation of success, our ears perk up when we hear things that confirm and reinforce that expectation. We are looking to remain consistent with the habit, rather than break it. This is true even with something as insidious as smoking. Imagine how powerful this would be with a benign behavior like using a search engine. Millions of dollars of TV ads can be trumped by one person telling us that Google is also their favorite engine because it always delivers what they’re looking for.

The Forgiving Habitual User

Further, even when we have a less-than-ideal experience, our expectation framework tends to “cut it some slack,” mentally averaging out the experiences and rounding it up in the incumbent’s favor. We become pretty forgiving of our habitual choice and hyper-critical of the alternatives.

So, given the formidable odds against breaking a habit (remember, in most cases, habits are good things that reduce our need to think through everything, so evolution has a vested interest in keeping them in place) there are still circumstances when it can happen.

Ch..Ch..Ch..Changes…

One of these is when there’s a disruption to the stable environment. When we have to adjust to a new circumstance, we’re also open to new cues that go into the new environment. In the non-virtual world, this would be moving to a new home, especially in a new city or starting a new job. In the virtual world confined to our 21-inch monitor, it would be buying a new computer, upgrading our operating system or switching to a new browser. Any of these events, or a combination of them, offers an opportunity to search providers to make themselves one of the new environment cues. There’s been a disruption in the typical flow that used to lead to acting without thinking, so there’s an opportunity to cause people to think about the alternatives.

One tremendous opportunity to get in on the ground floor of our adaption of a new environment is presented by our increasing use of mobile. The even smaller real estate on the mobile screen represents a tremendous opportunity to put a stake in the ground and start the habit-forming cycle. Google already has a head start in this area, but it’s far less than what they’ve established on the desktop.

Next week, more ways for competitors to disrupt the Google habit, including what it might take to overcome the incumbent’s advantage.

Breaking the Google Habit

First published February 28, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

What will it take to beat the Google habit? There’s billions of dollars that hang on the answer to that question. My last two columns looked at the nature of habits and how they can lead to an advantage for incumbents by “locking in” customers or users.

Before we look at some possible answers, it’s important to understand how and why previous attempts at breaking habits have fallen short in an area where far more academic work has been done: health care (Verplanken & Wood, 2006).

Educational campaigns have proven to have little effect on changing habitual behavior. In fact, studies have shown that these campaigns can actually trigger an increase in the unwanted behaviors! Oops, that wasn’t supposed to happen.

The frustration of physicians who are battling unhealthy lifestyle choices in their patients was perfectly summed up in an address given by John McKinley to the American Heart Association over 30 years ago.

“You know,” McKinley said, “sometimes it feels like this. There I am standing by the shore of a swiftly flowing river, and I hear the cry of a drowning man. So I jump into the river, put my arms around him, pull him to shore and apply artificial respiration. Just when he begins to breathe, there is another cry for help. So I jump into the river, reach him, pull him to shore, apply artificial respiration, and then just as he begins to breathe, another cry
for help. So back in the river again, reaching, pulling, applying, breathing and then another yell. Again and again, without end, goes the sequence. You know, I am so busy jumping in, pulling them to shore, applying artificial respiration, that I have no time
to see who the hell is upstream pushing them all in.”

This has led to a reexamination of the “downstream” method of altering behavior; trying to rationally convince people to change their behavior after it’s already become a habit, for example, with education campaigns. The fundamental problem here is, you’re trying to apply a rational solution to an irrational problem. We don’t think about habits, we just do them. That’s the very definition of a habit.

The Strength and Cost of Habits

There are two other components in habitual behavior that have to be understood: the strength of the habit and the cost of executing the habit. Both factor into how hard the habit will be to change. The strength is how closely habits are tied to our personal beliefs, good or bad. If we stop at Starbucks every day because we absolutely love everything about Starbucks, that’s going to be a very hard habit to break. Smoking ups the ante with an actual physical addiction.

Also, how much does it cost us to continue the habit? It I have to go four blocks out of my way to go to Starbucks, that has a personal cost to me. If it’s right on my way to work, that’s different.

Habitual Use of Search

So, let’s wrap up this week’s column with a summary of what we’ve learned about habits, and apply it to search:

·    You typically can’t change habits by a rational appeal after a habit is formed. This explains the failure of every television campaign for search engines looking to grow market share.

·    The strength of habit is a big factor in how likely the habit is to stay in place. So, if you’re looking to steal users from Google by breaking their Google habit, you’re going to be looking to the those folks that use Google because it’s handy, not the ones that have six Google T-shirts hanging in their closet.

·    And finally, you’re going to have to look for a way to catch users before they use Google by intercepting them upstream. The reason Yahoo has been able to maintain its market share over the past few years has a lot more to do with the scope of its presence and the fact that the company can put a Yahoo search box in front of more people before they can get to Google, and a lot less to do with the quality of the search experience. And that’s also why Microsoft’s share has eroded, as more and more default home pages are being switched from MSN.

Next week, in the series that may never end (talk about habit-forming), we look at how challengers to the Google search crown can hope to break the habit. Hint: All the clues point in one direction — upstream!

 

More on Why Google is Habit-Forming

First published February 21, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In last week’s Search Insider, I introduced the idea of habits, and why they can be hard things to break. This week, I want to explore how search engines can be habit-forming as well.

Cognitive Lock-In

Habits form and stay formed because there is usually a cost associated with discontinuing the habit. In a commercial interaction, this is referred to as the “cost of switching.” These are the lock-in mechanisms that companies hope will keep you from walking across the street to their competitors. In theory, the cost of switching on the Internet should be negligible, creating a frictionless, “perfect” market. There’s no financial penalty. The Internet erases geographic boundaries. And this should be especially true in search. After all, other search engines are only a click away. But researchers (Johnson, Bellman and Lohse, 2003; Brynjolfsson and Smith, 2000) actually found the opposite to be true. It seemed that customer stickiness can actually be greater online. So, if it’s so easy to switch, why aren’t more people doing it?

It appears, based on research (Zauberman, 2003), that there’s another cost of switching, the cost of learning new interfaces. This has been called “cognitive lock-in.”. As you become comfortable navigating through a site, the cognitive cost of learning new interfaces tends to build your loyalty and keep you “locked in” to the site. This happens in the real world as well, and could explain my wife’s seemingly irrational loyalty to the bad grocery store I described last week. She knows where everything is. She knows where to park. And she knows who to argue with when products don’t meet her standards (as well as how to get her point across — it’s an Italian thing). It may not be great, but it’s familiar!

Will Differentiation Increase the Power of Lock-In?

A recent study (Murray and Haubl, 2007) found that cognitive lock-in comes from habits of use as well as habitual choice. Both are relevant in the search space, but let’s put habitual choice aside for a moment. Habits of use form when we become familiar with using a product, the actual mechanics of how it fits us in realizing our goals. We know how to use Google, for example, and how to refine it to get the results we’re looking for. We know which links take us where, which tabs to hit and even through we never use it, the “Feeling Lucky?” button reminds us we’re on Google. When Google tried to remove it, based on lack of usage, there was a huge user backlash.

This sense of familiarity meant that until recently, all search engines looked the same. The same ten blue links, the same treatment of sponsored ads, the same basic layout. But in a recent set of interviews with all the major engines’ design and usability teams, it was made clear that we can expect more differentiation among the engines. Ask’s departure was just the first step in this movement.

It’s Not Just a Tool, It’s a Badge

But it’s not just the utility of an engine that increases lock-in. There’s also habitual choice. This comes from our lock-in to a brand. We always drink Coke, we always drive a Honda, we always fly Southwest, we always search on Google. Yes, even something as utilitarian as a search engine engenders brand allegiance. We identify with brands because they help define us as individuals. And this has happened to varying extents in the search space.

There Will Never Be Another Google in Search

You might ask, if Google became a habit, what’s to stop another engine from also becoming a habit? Well, first of all, it won’t be nearly as easy for a new player as it was for Google. Think back to when you first used Google. No one engine had established itself as the user’s choice, creating the “lock-in” effect. I used to hop back and forth between four or five engines, depending on my objective and the closest engine at hand. I’d perhaps start at Infoseek or AltaVista, and if I didn’t get a great result (which was pretty much always true) I’d try Excite or HotBot. Then, finally, in desperation, I’d sort through the hierarchal jungle that was Yahoo. No engine had become a habit.

Google’s genius was in providing pretty good results for a wide variety of searchers. Suddenly, I didn’t have to hop from engine to engine, because nine out of 10 times Google provided better results. By the time the rest of the engines had closed the gap, I was already locked in. Now, arguably, other engines provide better results for certain types of searches. But Google is habitual. It’s going to be an uphill battle for the competition. In fact, Google is such a habit; its name has even replaced the word “search.” We now “Google” it.

So, where does that leave the competition? I have some ideas, but they’ll have to wait till next week.

Why Google is Habit Forming

First published February 14, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

My wife Jill was the victim of another drive-by “why-ing” — and I, of course, was the perpetrator.

There’s a small specialty grocery store where we live that Jill visits every week or two. And almost every time, she complains about the experience. Outdated stock is repackaged. Food is rancid. The staff is surly. But she keeps buying there. After listening to another long-winded vent, I dared to go where no man should go. I asked her “why?”

There were a number of reasons that she gave. It’s on the way on her daily route. Parking is convenient. Prices are low. But the biggest reason was one she didn’t express, because she didn’t know it. It had become a habit. And habits are tough things to break.

Why We Have Habits

Like almost everything else, habits are a way we cope with the world. They’re cognitive shortcuts so we can save our brains for more appropriate work. And most times, they work pretty well. When things work the same way the majority of times, we don’t have to think about them every single time. We relegate them to habits. It’s why we have such difficult times with doorknobs, even when we’re given instructions (“push” or “pull” –and thanks to SI reader Peter Simmons for the example). Our brain is in short-cut mode, so it’s not taking the time to read signs. Based on the shape of the door handle, the presence or absence of push plates, whether we’re entering or exiting and other cues, the brain makes a decision to push or pull without really consulting our conscious mind. We won’t even see the sign (which would engage our consciousness) unless we don’t get the result we expect.

Habits are grooves worn in the brain, and they tend to be relatively durable because of that. The rule of thumb seems to be about three weeks. So, if you moved a light switch from the right side of the door to the left side, it would take about 21 days before your brain stopped telling your right hand to turn on the switch.

The Hand is Quicker Than the Brain

Here’s the important part of that circuit (the one in the brain, not the one that turns on the light). The loop between the brain and the right hand is an unconscious one. It’s made of synapses firing on autopilot. At a conscious level, you know the switch is on the left side, but the conscious loop is slower than the unconscious one. It’s the laziness of the brain at work. If we don’t have to think about everything, why should we? So your right hand is already patting the wall looking for the switch before your rational, thinking brain catches up and says, “It’s on the other side, idiot.” This has to happen a couple dozen times before the new groove in your brain is established and you can go back to not thinking about turning on the light switch.

Why Incumbents Usually Win

Now, in my typical, roundabout way, I am getting to why this is important in search. If we think about habits, it starts to become clear why Google has such a huge market share advantage. I’d like to introduce another idea called the “incumbency effect.”   When it refers to politics, the incumbency effect means that once you win an election, you have a greater chance of winning subsequent elections for the same office. This is due to several factors that give you the edge in the eyes of voters: familiarity, experience in the role, access to funding and the ability to call in favors racked up during the previous term. All things being equal, incumbents are tough to beat.

But in other arenas outside politics, the incumbency effect can also be driven by the fact that habits are formed. It’s not just the rational reasons why an incumbent can be tough to dethrone; it’s also the irrational ones. The incumbent has worn a groove in our brain. And to knock off an incumbent, with all these things in their favor, you can’t just be a slightly better alternative. You have to be significantly more attractive. Either the incumbent has to screw up badly, or you have to offer a dramatic improvement over them.

As per usual, my weekly allotment of words has run out before my idea, so I’ll pick this up next week, when we look at the incumbency effect and a parallel concept, cognitive lock in, and how they’re playing out in the world of search.

More on Search, Transactive Memory and the Elastic Mind

First published January 31, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Thomas Young was the last person who knew everything. Or, at least, that’s Andrew Robinson’s claim in his book of the same title. Whether you agree or not, the accomplishments of this 19th century Quaker were certainly impressive. In contradiction to Newton, he proposed the wave theory of light, furthered our understanding of the mechanics of the eye, helped invent Egyptology and decipher the Rosetta stone, created a measure of elasticity in engineering, was an accomplished physician, created a technique for tuning keyboard instruments, compared 400 languages, coined the term Indo-European and still had time to pioneer developments in carpentry and life insurance. Thomas Young was the human Google of his age.

Today, our world is much more complex. There’s too much knowledge to store in just one mind. So, we tend to find other places to keep it for when we need it. Hence the concept of transactive memory, which I touched on last week.

Misty, Watercolored Memories

We have different methods for storing different types of memories. The way we remember our 21st birthday (if we still remember it at all) is different than the way we remember our phone number. Then there’s the way we remember how to ride a bike, or what Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” sounds like.

And some people are better at remembering certain types of things than others. That’s why we’ve adapted to extend our memory capabilities by using transactive memory. We rely on others to store memories that we might need at some point. Our wives remember birthdays. Our kids remember how to program our smart phone. Our co-worker remembers how to run the virus scan on our computer. We don’t have to remember all these things; all we have to remember is who does.

The Transactive Web

But what about computers, and, by extension, the Internet? What about search? Doesn’t this take transactive memory to a level never thought of before? Even the reduced work load of remembering who remembers what is significantly more trouble than just being able to instantly recall information with a well-placed query. We dump the details of our life on a hard drive somewhere, and search for it when we need it. Even if we’re looking for something we didn’t know we needed, like the recipe for haggis (how many of you celebrated Robbie Burns Day last Friday?) we can find it when we needed it. And we don’t have to remember it, because we know it will be there come next Jan. 25.

The Adaptive Brain

And that brings us to the second point I raised last week, that of neurological plasticity. Our brain prunes itself, getting rid of capacities we really don’t need anymore, and strengthening those that we do. This happens to the greatest extent in the first few decades of our lives, but it is a lifelong process. I am forcibly reminded of this when my 14-year-old daughter asks me for help with her algebra homework. At one point in my life, I knew this stuff. But most of those neurons have long since disappeared. To offer any help at all, I have to relearn what I once knew, building new neural pathways.

So, as we have to worry less about remembering certain things, like facts, dates, phone numbers and addresses, will our semantic memory capabilities, the place we store these things, become less exercised and therefore, pruned out of the way? And in its place, will we develop greater skills in navigating online spaces?

It’s really not a question, it’s already happening. We can see the difference in the generational abilities in the online space, or when our kids kick our virtual butts in a Wii showdown. But we’re still in a place where we’re balanced on the cusp between the pre- and post-digital world. We still have a foot in each realm. Let’s fast-forward a generation or two and see which capabilities that seem so essential to us today have disappeared. And which new talents, unfathomable to us today, have taken their place.

Exponential Technological Advances

Now, obviously, this is nothing new. We don’t need to remember how to shoe a horse, and our great-grandfather would be amazed (and possibly aghast) at a trip on a California freeway. Change has always happened, and humans have always adapted. But there’s something different now. Raymond Kurzweil calls it The Law of Accelerating Returns. The need to adapt to leaping technological advance is getting more and more demanding. Technological growth is exponential. At today’s rate, we experience 20,000 years of progress in a century. In the year 2045, Kurzweil believes we’ll hit a point where machines become smarter than humans. Could the human mind, which is amazing in its adaptability, simply be outstripped by technology?

One last thought. If you believe in evolution (as I do) humans have evolved as the preeminent species through a long line of trial and error, with our environment as the ultimate judge of genetic worthiness. The problem is that evolution is a long, slow process. Our evolutionary environment, the one we’ve adapted to excel in, is a hunter-gatherer society several thousand years past. Evolution never equipped us to function in the world we live in, except in one regard. It equipped us with an adaptable mind that allows self-awareness. And even that is inextricably tied to our human nature. The human mind is a wonderful thing, but unfortunately, it doesn’t benefit from Moore’s Law.

Search, Transactive Memory and the Plastic Mind

First published January 24, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In 1986, University of Virginia Psychologist Daniel Wegner came up with an interesting theory. He realized that we depend on others to remember some of the things we need to know. This is especially true in couples and families. Some of us are better at remembering phone numbers and birth dates. Some of us are better at remembering how 401Ks and computers work. In couples, the longer we spend together, the more we divvy up the memory workload, depending on our spouse to prop up our spotty memories.

Wegner called this transactive memory. With it, we don’t have to remember everything. We just have to remember who knows what. Wegner found this to be true in any small group who spends a lot of time together. The bigger the group, the larger the extended memory capacity.

That’s the first concept I want you to think about. Now, let me give you another.

It’s the Second Chimp on the Left, the One with the Scar

Babies are born with a capability that you and I don’t have. They can recognize and distinguish between faces of different species. For example, if you introduce a 6-month-old baby to six different chimpanzees, then show them pictures of the chimp faces, they’ll be able to recognize them and tell them apart. But to us, they will all look like chimpanzees. The same is true of sheep, or lemurs. To us, a sheep is a sheep is a sheep. It seems we lose this ability around 9 months of age, according to Olivier Pascalis at the University of Sheffield.

Why can we no longer tell chimpanzees apart? We’re born with this ability because at one point in our evolution it was important. The ability to tell animals apart led to a greater chance of survival. But that’s not really true today. Today, in our complex social world, it’s much more important to be able to tell human faces apart. So at about 9 months of age, the brain starts to concentrate on that. And, in this case, something has to give. Sorry chimps, but after a while, you’ll all look the same to us.

There’s one more point I want to share here. Dr. Pascalis found that if parents continued to develop their babies’ ability to distinguish between non-human faces by repeating the exercise, the babies retained that skill.

The Pruning of the Young Mind

It’s not so much this lost ability I find interesting. It’s the underlying reason, the ability for the brain to change itself from birth to maturity. Humans received another gift in the evolutionary lottery, an adaptable mind. The brain you get at birth is not the brain you’ll end up with. A 2007 study at Oxford University found that newborn brains have almost 50% more neurons than adult brains. Babies have more raw “brain material” to work with. They get shipped with the full menu of evolutionary options, including the ability to tell monkeys apart.

But over time, in a process known as “pruning,” the brain starts to discard options it doesn’t use very often. Weak, underutilized neurons, forming neural pathways we never use, get pruned and, in some cases, reconfigured, to make way for pathways that are more commonly used. To go back to our facial recognition example, being able to keep track of all the faces in one’s ever increasing circle of friends and family is a huge task. And it’s right around 9 months that we start venturing out in the world, meeting more and more people. The timing of this is not coincidental.

Fertilized Neurons

But our brains not only get rid of unused functions. They also nurture commonly used functions. The same Oxford study found that although our neuron inventory decreases, we actually gain significantly in another type of cell — glials. Glials are the most important brain cell you’ve probably never heard of. They act as a support system for our neurons, nurturing them and making them more effective. And adults apparently have three times the number of glial cells found in infants.

So, for the next seven days, until my next column, I want you to think about those two concepts: we rely on external sources to extend our memory, and our brains are adaptable, able to rewire themselves to discard capabilities that are no longer important to us, and build capabilities that are more important.

See where I’m going with this? Until next week…

SpaceTime: Another Dimension to Search

The quote on the home page of SpaceTime is intriguing:

“I think I’ve found a product that makes the Google interface look like it was designed by Apple.”
Rob Enderle, Enderle Group.

Now, those are two pretty big names to throw around. But you know what? Based on an initial test drive, SpaceTime just might be up to the challenge. This is a paradigm shift in browsing behavior. When I interviewed Jakob Nielsen last summer, he took Ask to task for calling their interface 3D.

Gord: Like Ask is experimenting with right now with their 3D search. They’re actually breaking it up into 3 columns, and using the right rail and the left rail to show non-web based results.
Jakob: Exactly, except I really want to say that it’s 2 dimensional, it’s not 3 dimensional.
Gord: But that’s what they’re calling it.
Jakob: Yes I know, but that’s a stupid word. I don’t want to give them any credit for that. It’s 2 dimensional. It’s evolutionary in the sense that search results have been 1 dimensional, which is linear, just scroll down the page, and so potentially 2 dimensional (they can call it three but it is two) that is the big step.
Well, SpaceTime attempts to jump the gap to the 3rd dimension by giving web browsing depth as well as heighth and width. Is it successful? Yes and no. But there’s enough “yes” here to significantly change your browsing experience, especially when it comes to searching, and to entice you with what the possibilities might be.

spacetimeopensm

(I tried to get more screenshots, but SpaceTime is a bit of a memory hog, and I didn’t have enough to run SnagIt and SpaceTime as the same time without them both crashing)
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time writing and talking about how search helps us make decisions where we have to gather and compare alternatives, as in researching an upcoming purchase. This is called satisficing, and search is built to be a natural extension of our working memory. But one of the drawbacks is searches fairly rigid interface. We can usually only see one page at a time. Even the introduction of tabbed browsing, while a step in the right direction, still feels rigid and linear. We pogostick back and forth between pages and the search results. And as I’ve said before, linear is not how humans operate. We’re used to dealing in random ways in 3 dimensional environments. The 20th century squeezed us into a linear, 2 dimension, sequential mode, just because we didn’t have any choice, but the 21st century will be one of navigating within 3 dimensions (and probably 4, as technology allows us the shift timelines to suit our purposes more often) and picking our own random paths through them, berry picking our content. SpaceTime (notice the inclusion of the 4 dimensions in the name) is an interface built to allow this to happen.
Don’t Worry, Be Crappy
Guy Kawasaki always says, when you have something revolutionary, don’t worry, ship it even if it’s crappy. It worked for the Mac. Let’s hope it works for SpaceTime.
Now, to be fair, the SpaceTime interface is far from crappy, it’s a prettty polished piece of work. But if we’re moving into a 3d environment, I want to be able to interact with it in an intuitive way. SpaceTime doesn’t quite allow me to do this yet. I can’t grab and manipulate items in the 3d space. I have to use the buttons and controls SpaceTime provides to go from page to page. But the advantages SpaceTime offers, allowing me to quickly flip from page to page, all the time keeping a visual history of my browsing in a bottom timeline, more than makes up for the pain. This turns pogo sticking into an experience more like spreading options on a table in front of you, allowing you to spot the things that appear to be what you’re looking for. And that’s a big shift from what we’re used to.
In the test drive, I also found that auto loading videos and other rich streaming media seemed to give the SpaceTime interface some hiccups (interrupting the SpaceTime continuum — sorry, couldn’t resist) but I’m sure that’s being worked on. This is version 1.0, after all. Generally, it performed pretty well. In fact, one of my favorite uses was browsing through videos in SpaceTime.
But if we look forward into where things are going, with multitouch displays and surface computing, SpaceTime is the step that’s needed into a much more natural user experience. I’m sure the grab and manipulate options I’m looking for are just a version or two away, waiting for more access to the underlying OS to integrate these features in. But Microsoft or Apple has to let this happen. In fact, once you get used to operating in SpaceTime, going back to 2 dimensions just seems clunky. I’d be amazed if one of the two doesn’t snap SpaceTime up soon. Of course, it could also be that SpaceTime just got out first and there’s something in the Apple or MS labs very similar. I’d love to see a mobile version of SpaceTime on the iPhone!
And this is the cloud on SpaceTime’s horizon. While it’s revolutionary, it can’t survive as a stand alone app. This is something screaming to be incorporated into our online experience, and much as I like it, I probably won’t use it again. It’s great for searching, but rather pointless for standard browsing. Where it shines is when you need to consider a number of alternatives, as in search. It’ll linger at the bottom of my programs list, out of sight and out of mind.  I’m too used to my current browsing experience, and the paradigm shift required to use it as my new browser is too great. Without being adopted by a major player, the proverbial 800 pound gorilla, TimeSpace may die on the far side of the Chasm. And that would be too bad, because SpaceTime is all kinds of cool. Let’s hope either it shows up on a MS or Mac interface, or finds a niche it can survive in. Perhaps it’s the next Google acquisition.
Check out SpaceTime. Just one word of advice for them. Dump the autoplay video. It irritates the hell out of me. And is it just me, or does CEO Eddie Bakhash look like Danny Bonaduce?
But I digress.