No one can argue that social media hasn't had a significant impact on modern life. My current favorite example is the Zooniverse series of “citizen science projects” that bring people together to apply human brains to tasks in science that computers aren’t very good at yet, like identifying types of galaxies in Hubble images or craters on the moon. Supported and produced by the Citizen Science Alliance, this is social media at its very finest: Bringing communities of people together for the common good of humanity. The whole thing, I gotta say, leaves me a little verklempt.

On the other end of the ultility spectrum we have Cookie Bonus Solitaire, a little nothing of an iPhone solitaire game that cleverly bakes in cheating. It also incorporates robust social features like profiles and chat, achievements and leader boards, the whole shebang. I used to play Cookie Bonus Solitaire daily on my commute, but got irritated when there were constant updates to the social features of the program. Hello? Solitaire is not a social game, that’s why they call it “solitaire.” I finally deleted the game in disgust when it got to be too much, chalking it up to me just being some old fuddy-duddy who just doesn’t get it.

But, this is where I draw the line.

This is only acceptable in a home-care situation where people can keep track of the health and well-being of infirm individuals. Beyond that? No. Just no. Sleeping is not a social activity, and I say that as a married woman who sleeps alone only on business trips. What’s next? Social colonoscopy?

How did this happen? I can see it now: a conference room at SDI Technologies, a red faced manager pounding the table and demanding innovation. “How can we make this alarm clock more hip? What is it that all the kids are into these days? Social networking, right? How can we incorporate that?”

This, my friend, is where a brave soul should have spoken up. Not everything is social.

Understanding how the brain works is important in interaction design not only to be able to craft experiences that support the way people think, but also to avoid common biases in our own brains as we make design decisions. One bias that sneaks into design problems all the time is called the “availability heuristic”, or the tendency to judge how important or common something is based on how easy it is for us to think of an example. For example, if you were to ask me how the baby boomers react to technology, the first example that jumps to my mind is my mother who happens to be a complete technophile and Apple fangrrl. Because of the ease with which that example comes to mind, I am at risk of grossly overestimating technical interest and ability amongst the baby boomer population.

If you’re involved in the design of products, you run into this problem all the time. Stakeholders use their own most easily-retrieved examples to compare against, whether it’s the CEO who is influenced by the pundit he read that morning, or the product manager who knows that one guy who is just like your target market, or the designer who is really designing for himself -- the self being the extreme “available example.”

Availability biases leads to poor design decisions because they are based on single, potentially skewed, examples; they also result in thrash because each individual involved in the design has his or her own reference example, making consensus difficult.

Effective research is only the first step toward avoiding this problem. Properly conducted ethnographic research will provide an understanding of the needs, goals, and behaviors of your target market, but it won’t solve the problem of availability bias on its own. It is too easy for designers and stakeholders to be influenced by, say, the most recent interview conducted, or the most memorable one.

Fortunately, we have a well-honed tool to elegantly overcome this problem: the persona. A well-crafted, research-based persona is an archetype that smooths out the idiosyncrasies of real individual people while retaining the patterns of needs and behaviors in the target market. At the same time, a persona retains enough human detail to feel like a real person. With practice and dedication, the persona becomes the first example that comes to mind. You still suffer from availability bias, but the bias is in favor of reality.

Incidentally, I got to thinking about the availability bias when Chris Noessel pointed me to this video on YouTube. Be forewarned: the tune is catchy and likely to cause a nasty case of earworm . Bradley Wray, FTW.

What tools do you use to overcome cognitive biases in your work?

There comes a time in any parent’s life when she has the face the inevitable: Her child’s first cell phone. That time has come at last for me, and I confess I have been dreading it. What if she buys 50 ring tones? What if she calls China? What if she sends a prank photo to a friend and ends up going to jail and having to register as a sex offender for life? (That’s right, I’m a parent: I can go from “my kid might overspend my money” to “my kid might go to jail” in ten seconds flat.)

It was with utter delight, therefore, that I stumbled across kajeet, a cell phone service for ‘tweens and their parents. What sets kajeet apart is not their phones (they don’t make any), or their network (they’re essentially a Sprint reseller), but the service. With kajeet, parents can fine-tune what their kids can and can’t do, and who pays for what. You can set up separate wallets for the parents and the kid, such that the parents can pay for phone calls to Mom and Dad, but the kid has to pay for calls to friends or goodies like ringtones and wallpaper. You can set up times of day for certain activities, like only emergency phone calls during school hours. You can even track the location of your kid’s phone using its built-in GPS and online tracking tools.

When I discovered kajeet, I was in parental heaven. The service was so exquisitely tuned to my needs that I started to get professionally curious. What was the process that had led to this product?

The kajeet origin story goes something like this: Three dads saw a need, and created a company. Now, that’s a great start, but there had to be more to that story. They must have done their homework. So to learn more I spoke with kajeet’s SVP of Corporate and Business Development, Carol Politi.

Figuring out the right way to capture information during user and stakeholder interviews can be tricky. I like to capture as much information as possible because I’m never sure what will turn out to be important later on. Audio or video might seem to be ideal; however, recording makes subjects nervous, lessening the value of the interview. Besides, going back through the audio or video is extremely time consuming and therefore usually cost-prohibitive.

I touch-type very well, and so I have the uncanny ability to type an almost verbatim transcript of an interview while simultaneously keeping eye contact and participating in the conversation. This can come in handy during some kinds of meetings, such as internal meetings or during a kickoff with a client, when everyone involved understands and is invested in the process and I, as the naïve consultant, can be forgiven for wanting to capture every word.

This approach is much less successful in the context of a user interview, however. Not only is it kind of creepy, but the presence of a computer acts as a barrier to communication. It’s noisy, and the screen acts as an actual physical barrier between interviewer and interview subject. Furthermore, a computer is a complex, interactive device, so looking at the screen can be distracting for both interviewer and interviewee. Since we like to err on the side of a quality interview over perfect documentation, for a long time this has meant using a paper notebook for user interviews.

Enter the tablet PC.

Wanna Bet is a new show on ABC wherein celebrities bet on whether “ordinary” people can accomplish extraordinary things. Whichever celebrity has the most money at the end of the program gets to donate it to the charity of his or her choice. The way it works is that the show introduces the ordinary person, describes the (usually very odd) action this person is going to attempt, and the celebrities write down their prediction and bet amount. The attempt is made, the person succeeds or fails, and then the celebrities reveal their bets to much fanfare.

So far so good, right? The trouble is that there is some kind of disconnect in the betting process. On the first episode George Takei (better known as Sulu from Star Trek) excitedly revealed that he had guessed correctly and had bet $20,000. The show’s hosts, however, informed him he had only bet $2,000. For anyone not employed as a designer of interactive systems, it looked like George Takei was having a senior moment. It was embarrassing. The other celebrities on the show spent the rest of the episode pretending to have flubbed their bets to make up for it.

So where’s the failure here? George Takei is getting on in years; maybe he’s just not very comfortable with technology. Leaving off a zero is an easy mistake, right? Maybe, except that in the very next episode of the show, the same thing happened to comedian Melissa Peterman who thought she bet $5,000 but “really” bet $6,000. She’s only 37 and sharp as a whip. The show is now two for two, and I would argue there is a failure in the system.