How things become "Things"

I don't know quite what to call them but I am fascinated by "unintended special events." That's a horrible term, but I'm referring to things that became "Things" accidentally. This is hard to explain so I'll just start giving some examples.

Black Friday
The first day after Thanksgiving has long been deemed "black Friday" by retailers (which means black as in, "in the black" -- making profit). But there was never some universal decision to make this a special day. I can't give a particularly knowledgeable history here but my best guess is that this became "black Friday" completely by accident. Over the years, as a consumer focus on Christmas shopping became more prevalent, I think we as a society moved more and more toward a "holiday to holiday" mindset. The stores stock items relevant to Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas in successive order, and the combination of Thanksgiving being over and most people having that Friday off from work turned that day into an ideal shopping day. Retailers capitalized on this, creating special sales, and the process fed on itself until the day became a shopping event. This year it got particularly crazy with one person at a Wal-Mart trampled to death and gunfire at a Toys 'R' Us. But when it comes down to it, there is no particular reason for this to be a special event. It is a byproduct of the holiday calendar and consumer marketing.

Superbowl Ads
By most standards, TV commercials are an annoyance -- they're something we put up with because they fund the networks that provide us with hours of (ostensible) entertainment. But now watching the Superbowl specifically for the commercials has become a national pastime. Much like Black Friday, this was an event that fed upon itself. Knowing the huge audience for the Superbowl, and the limited attention spans of viewers, companies put more and more effort into making their Superbowl ads stand out. As the audience got wise to this, they became more discerning, comparing the ads against each other, turning the event into the competition for the best Superbowl ad of the year. The free press (and today, re-viewing on sites like YouTube) often make the multi-million dollar investments for 30 seconds of airtime into cultural touchstones. Today, some people who don't even care about the Superbowl itself still watch just to see the ads -- something virtually no other program can lay claim to.

Red Carpet Fashion
The purpose of awards shows like the Oscars is to, well, give awards to the best films (or music, or TV, etc.) of the year, and to drum up some publicity and ticket sales in the process. But it was never the stated intent of such shows to promote fashion. But as more and more stars took the opportunity to look their best on Oscar day, the reporters on the red carpet in turn paid more notice to their clothes, and now many networks and publications give their own awards for "best dressed." Joan Rivers in particular has made "who are you wearing?" a key question on the red carpet. (It's worth noting that the term "red carpet" itself is a thing-turned-"Thing" -- it was only through the repeated use of red carpets on the walkways into awards halls that it came to be synonymous with awards shows and premieres.)

There are certainly more examples, but I love thinking about how these unexpected turns happen. There are a ton on the internet alone -- LOLspeak, viral marketing -- and I think it's important to distinguish this from "memes," which are brief trends that everyone knows about for a few months but soon die away. I may post a part 2 soon but I like being reminded that no matter how shrewd a marketer or advertiser may think he/she is, ultimately the biggest trends occur through a series of unplannable accidents.

More on the overlap of politics and usability

In my last entry I mentioned how I feared getting too political. But despite that fear I'm going to soldier on. I've become borderline obsessed with the economy, and various approaches to handling it, and have constantly been thinking about the decisions I would think best were I in a position of power.

Full disclosure -- I have considered myself most closely connected to libertarianism, as I like the concept that we really should be free to do what we want without government intervention. But, and here's where usability kicks in -- we don't always *know* everything necessary to make the best choices.

There seems to be two sides to this -- either you say that it is up to you to educate yourself, and a bad choice is your own fault, but you are free to make it, or you say that people should be prevented from making such bad choices through regulation and laws that take bad options off the table.

I've come to appreciate the concept of "soft paternalism" or "libertarian paternalism," which basically says, you are free to make whatever choice you want, but we are going to try our best to steer you in the right direction.

This is almost the essence of usability in a nutshell. Make it easy for people to make choices that will satisfy them. Emphasize the most common or most logical paths but provide alternate routes to get to other options if someone knows specifically what they already want. The wikipedia article I link above has a great description, with specific reference to "defaults" -- a concept that usability expert Jakob Nielsen has written about, stressing the importance of setting defaults wisely so they are set to the most likely beneficial setting.

Compare the two. Wikipedia, giving the example of setting your retirement contribution from your paycheck (emphasis mine in both quotes):

The asymmetry of soft paternalism can be seen in the case of a policy which raises default rates. Those who are making an informed deliberate choice to put aside zero percent of their income in tax deferred savings still have this option, but those who were not saving simply out of inertia or due to procrastination are helped by higher default contribution rates.

Now read Jakob Nielsen:

Users rely on defaults in many other areas of user interface design. For example, they rarely utilize fancy customization features, making it important to optimize the default user experience, since that's what most users stick to. ... By educating and guiding users, default values help reduce errors. It's therefore important to select helpful defaults, rather than those based on the first letter of the alphabet or whatever the first option on your original list happened to be.

Imagine for a moment that at all aspects of our lives, rather than starting from "zero" on any new thing, we started anything by being told right off the bat what the most common or most beneficial starting place was, but were given the option to change that in any way we see fit. Smart businesses already apply this in many areas, essentially putting Nielsen's usability advice in effect. But I think the applications of such a concept are much more far-reaching.

I don't know that this means that "soft paternalism" and "good usability" are identical, or that the concepts therein can be applied universally, but I was struck at the similarities between the two. At the very least, it shows that you can successfully apply similar philosophies to different disciplines.