Wagon Ruts of the Web

Imagine that Google had discovered the ideal search algorithm and every search returned the best content from the web.  This ideal algorithm would be based on a  larger number of factors including back links, how long people stayed on a page, how long the page has existed and the relevancy of the content.  Under the ideal model, it would seem that each time a page was visited, the page would become even more solidified as the proper results for a particular search term.  This action would be equivalent to creating wagon ruts in the internet.  People continue to travel down the same path and that path becomes self fulfilling forcing people to travel in that path.

An example of wagon ruts worn into rock.

Does search fall into the same trap?

Source: http://www.txaisi.com/Texas_History.html

Unfortunately, while the algorithm was ideal and gave the best results for your search query, it would be very hard for new sites to get a better ranking since rankings would be based partly on historic data.  In some cases, the wagon ruts would be accepteble.  Suppose you searched for "official IRS website".  In this case, the first result should be www.IRS.gov.  However, if you searched for, "favorite song in Canada", you might be taken to a page that lists the most popular songs but would this be really relevant to you?  The context would determine how relevant the results were.  It is very likely, many different people have an opinion about the best song in the country and it is up to the searcher to further sift through the different pages.

It seems then, that search is a mix of exact matches and some not so exact matches.  The results for, "restaurants within 1 block of 1800 Union St" would fall into a wagon rut only changing when a restaurant physically went out of business or a new one opened. However, searches for, "best restaurant within 1 block of 1800 Union St", should return a a more open path result.  The campus map below shows many paths across a campus.  It is very likely, that people often leave the path and look for a direct route that meets their immediate needs.

There are many paths that let you cross this campus.

Source: http://www.ohio.edu/athens/greens/cgreen.html

YouTube shows evidence of wagon ruts.  Here is an example of a search for, "golf swing" taken two days apart.  Are these the absolute best results in the world for golf swing?  The only difference between the two results is the second ad.  The first ad is the same in both results.

YouTube search results on 4/9/12 and 4/10/12.  

The only change is the second add.

When searching YouTube, people are not usually looking for a wagon rut result.  They usually are looking for something new and interesting.  The one exception to this is when people are trying to find the original version of a video that has many parodies (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrfUXuBaJ1E&feature=youtube_gdata).

Research has been done that shows that wagon ruts are not only a result of technology but also are the result of social behavior.  In a study titled "Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market", http://www.filosofitis.com.ar/archivos/experimentalmarket.pdf  Matthew J. Salganik, Peter Sheridan Dodds and Duncan J. Watts showed that wagon ruts can also be created when people are influenced by other peoples choices.  When people were asked to rank different songs, people gave a higher ranking to songs that other people liked.  This causes some songs to rise to the top of the charts only because they happened to get some sort of initial push.

So how could Google or Bing improve their search results?  To improve the results, search engines should combine a mix of wagon ruts and open paths in their search results.  The wagon ruts would be helpful when people are looking for exact information that has a defined source.  The open paths would be used to introduce new possible results that might meet the users' requirements.  Over time, if the open path results are useful, they would upset the wagon ruts and become wagon ruts themselves.  This continuous testing would allow new ideas to be introduced without creating too much chaos in the results.

By mixing up wagon rut results with open path results, Google would present a broad result set that would help a rational person find the specific information that the person is looking for.

Best Backpacking Stove

Weight, reliability and flame control determine whether people like a stove.  The SVEA 123 and Optimus 111 Hiker stove are all-time favorites for reliability but are often criticized for being heavy.  MSR stoves like the Whisperlight, Dragonfly or XGK are lighter but their large number of moving parts and o-rings leads to constant failures and maintenance in the field.

Here is my recommendation on how to make the lightest most reliable stove. Start with the basic concept of a SVEA 123 using a brass burner, internal wick, self cleaning jet and fuel cap / pump attachment.

Begin by getting rid of the brass windscreen.  Next remove the brass fuel storage / stand.  Instead replace it with a round brass sphere that incorporates the fuel cap.  A sphere will hold more fuel for a smaller amount of material and will sustain greater pressures with thinner metal because of the round shape.  Additionally, if you turn a SVEA 123 over, you will see that the bottom is actually concave to withstand the pressure.  This adds extra weight, and makes the stove bigger for a smaller amount of fuel.

Here is how the guts of my new stove would look.  

Ideal Backpacking Stove

The sphere should hold enough gas for three days of camping.  Ideal for a 2 day weekend trip with one day to spare.  A larger bulb could be screwed on for larger group use.

Now build a lightweight cage around the stove to hold the pots as well as provide a windscreen.  The center stove would be attached to the cage spring like connectors.  That way if the stove assembly was dropped, the outer cage would absorb the shock and the inner stove would be protected.  Add little tabs to the top and the bottom of the cage to provide additional support.  The tabs would fold into the cage when not in use.

Stove with Windscreen and Fill Cap with Schrader valve

The fuel cap / pump attachment / pressure relief valve should have a Schrader bicycle tube inflaetor nozzle.   The pump on an MSR stove is the weakest link and should be eliminated.  By moving to a Schrader valve, you can get the entire bicycle industry to start developing lightweight pumps.  Each pump is interchangeable and the bicycle gear heads will have a field day.  Win / win for both industries.  Don't forget to add a small chain so you do not lose the cap.

The standard way of lighting a SVEA 123 is by holding it with your hands to warm it up until a little gas spills out and then lighting the gas.  In cold weather, you may not want to take your hands out of your gloves to touch a cold metal stove.  This is where the pump comes in handy.  Another alternative is to use a small cup on the end of a little stick.  Unscrew the fuel cap, dip the stick into the gas and then pour it into a small reservoir in the burner head.  Replace the cap, light the fuel and when the stove is hot, turn on the gas.  The cup could be incorporated into the fuel control key to keep from losing it.

By using similar components as a reliable SVEA 123 but incorporating a round gas tank and light weight wind shield, MSR, Primus or Optimus could create a next generation stove that is compact, lightweight and extremely reliable.  The most complicated part, the pump, could be based on the open standard of a Schrader valve allowing a large number of companies to contribute designs.  With this hybrid approach, many complementary companies outside the camping world would support the new design with pumps solidifying the stove as the leader in the industry.

How hospitals can help patients get to appointments on time.

Getting around a hospital can be very difficult. There are many signs that try to be helpful by showing strange names like Endocrinology (Hormones) and Otorhinolaryngology (Ear, Nose, Throat).  When you ask for directions, people often say things like “go the West side of the building”.  Without a compass, this kind of information is as helpful as directions in Venice that tell you to walk straight.

While doctors and nurses who work in the hospital may know their way around, it is very difficult for everyone else.  Most visitors to a hospital are there for the first time and a usually under a heightened state of stress and or pain.  Additionally after people are admitted to a bed, they have to give directions to friends and family to come visit.  This creates a blind leading the blind situation.

To solve this problem, most hospitals post maps around the building like this excerpt from the Stanford Hospital.

Map shows Stanford Hospital and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital

To get someplace, you look at the map, find the, “You are here sticker”, find where you are going from the list of strange sounding names and then figure out which way to walk.  After walking for a while you may recheck the map to make sure you are still headed in the right direction.  This whole process can take 10 minutes which is time you do not have when you are late for an appointment.  In communication theory, the process of reading a map is called decoding.  Most people do not encode maps quickly under stress.

Instead, hospitals should take advantage of people’s natural ability to follow a linear path and paint lines on the floor.  Instead of saying, “Go past Radiology, right at Endocrinology and left at Obstetrics” people would give directions by saying, “Blue Line 45”.

Here is how it would work.  A hospital like Stanford should paint lines on the floor similar to a subway.  The green line would lead to Cardiology while the yellow line would go to Labor and Delivery.  Colors that are difficult for people who are colorblind should be avoided.  In addition to the painted lines, a numbering system should be used similar to house addresses or freeway exits.  Zero should start at one end and then numbers for each yard should be used.  If one office is at zero, then the next office 21 feet away would be at 7.

Colored lines help you get around the hospital quickly.

When giving directions to someone, all you have to say is Green Line 79 and people would instantly be able to find the location.  The numbers will tell you if you have to go up or down the line and maps would show you where to transfer.  Each major entrance to the hospital would have a sign that shows you the shortest path to each of the lines from that entrance.

By adopting this numbered subway system, hospitals can make it easier for first time visitors to get around especially during a time of personal stress.  Not only would this make life easier for patients, but it would also cut down on unproductive time caused by late appointments.  This would also be helpful to suppliers, contractors and new interns would be able to reach their destination quicker.  Additionally, hospital staff would spend less time giving directions and could spend more time providing patient care.

How to keep your closet clean

Look in your closet.  Is it easy to find clothes on your hanger or do you have to push clothes aside in order to find what you are looking for?  If you have trouble finding what you want then your closet rod may be to blame.

Systems like factories or airports work more efficiently when they operate at a level below their maximum capacity to allow for minor disruptions.  A good example is major freeways.  Most freeways always have a spare lane on the right hand side.  If there is an accident during rush hour, the emergency crews can usually move the accident over into the spare lane on the side of the road and sort out the mess while traffic continues to flow.  This does not happen when there is no spare lane like in a bridge or tunnel.  If an accident occurs in one of these locations, traffic comes to a stand still until the accident is completely cleared.

Your closet is the same way.  When your entire closet rod is full of clothes, you can not push clothes aside to find what you are looking for.  You must judge a shirt or dress by the half-inch of cloth that is sandwiched between all the other items of clothing.  To pull a piece out, you must force open some space to get the item of clothing and as soon as you let go, the space is instantly filled.  You then have to fight to put the item back if you don’t want it.

This closet is at maximum capacity

In essence, your closet is operating at 110% efficiency.  There is no room for error and every time you want to see an item you must force open space. 

To solve this problem, closet rod manufacturers should give feedback about the capacity of your closet.  The can do this by adding a Red Zone to one end of the closet rod that covers 15% of the closet rod and the other 85% of the rod should be normal.  When you push all your clothes to one side of the closet rod, no clothes should be in the Red Zone.  If you do have clothes in the Red Zone, you need to clean out your closet. 

When your clothes enter the Red Zone, it is time to clean.

This way, when you are looking for an item of clothing there is more free space in your closet to move your clothes around and you will be able to quickly see the front of your clothes.  Additionally, you can quickly remove an item as well as put it back without fighting the other clothes.  The clothes that you enjoy wearing will be easy to get to and the clothes that take up space will be removed.

By adding a Red Zone to closet rods, manufactures can help your closet operate at an ideal 85% efficiency.  Not only will it be easier to take clothes out and put them back, but it will help you find your favorite clothes which is the whole purpose of a closet.

Special thanks to Jon Glommen for initiating this conversation.

How to save time online.

Most people start their day in the office by reading the news online.  Each person may have a favorite site that aggregates the news   You read the lists of articles and then click on the link that you find interesting.  The problem is that on each news page there are multiple links to other sources of information.

You may start off reading a story about a river rising causing flooding and the page could have an add for river rafting trips.  You click on the link which takes you to a river rafting site.  Before you know it, you are looking at pictures from last seasons guided trips.  This causes you to waste time reading something that you were not interested in when you started to read the news.

A link may take you to interesting pages that are not important.

To solve this problem, browsers like Google Chrome should allow you to set up boundaries on what you read.  Here is how it would work.  You choose one or two sites that you want to read during the day.  Google Chrome should allow you to go to your favorite news sites and to follow links away from the news site.  As soon as you click on a link on the news article that would take you to a third page, the browser would delay the loading of the page by 30 seconds. If the link is really important.  You will read it.  If the link is not that important, you will probably have gotten back to work by the time the page opens.

Google Chrome prevents you from wasting time online.

By setting up the boundaries ahead of time, you make a promise to yourself before you have the temptation about clicking on something that would just waste your time.  This feature would ultimately save you time by limiting your Internet usage to just reading the news during working hours.  The same technique could be used for Facebook.  You could decide that you only want to spend 30 minutes on Facebook during the day.  A timer would keep track each time you log on and would tell you how many minutes you have left.  At the end of 30 minutes you have to wait until the next day to find out what your friends had for dinner.

How to design a car to make it look cleaner.

Have you ever pulled up behind a car and noticed dirty finger prints on the trunk of the car?  Most cars with lighter paint can accumulate a small amount of dirt without looking dirty.  It is only when some of that dirt is wiped off that you start to see how dirty the car actually is.

Without the fingerprints, this car would look clean.

The reason for this is that the human eye can detect contrast much better then it can detect absolute color shades.  Look at the image below.  If you cover the background with two pieces of paper, you will see that the middle bar is the same color from left to right.  The human eye perceives a change only in reference to other colors.

The eye can recognize contrast better than absolute colors.

When people touch a slightly dirty car, they scrape off some off the dust and create a contrast.  This happens to most cars where the back door lifts up.  Most people grab the bottom edge of the door when it is above their head leaving fingerprints.  To minimize the impact of this problem, car manufactures should add a design element like raised trim in a darker color to the bottom edge of the door.  When you reach up to close the door, you would only touch the trim piece instead of the solid color door.  This would prevent fingerprints wiping away some of the dirt and showing that the car is dirty.  Of course, the trim piece would be designed to match the overall style.

A black trim piece that people would touch when they close the door.

By adding this simple design element, a light color car will not have fingerprints on the back door when the car is dirty.  This will make the car look cleaner even when there is a slight layer of dust.  A clean looking car does not have to be washed as often thus saving people time.  Therefore, a small change to the design of the car will prevent busy people from having to spend their Saturdays waiting in line at the car wash.

A Desktop User Interface That Fitts

One of the problems with the Microsoft Windows user interface is the fact that the menu bar is attached to the top of the active window.  When you move your mouse to the the menu, there is the potential that you can overshoot the menu and must move your mouse back.  This increases the amount of time necessary to use the menu.

Apple addresses this issue by putting the menu bar at the top of the page.  This makes it impossible to overshoot the menu and speeds up activity.  Bruce Tognazzini wrote about this issue in an excellent article titled, “A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts”.  In the article, Bruce writes about Fitts' Law that states, "The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target."  Anchoring the menu bar at the top of the screen creates an infinity large target which is in line with Fitts Law.  The problem is, that there is still a distance between the active window and the menu bar that must be crossed which slows users down.  Refer to the Dead Space in the picture below.

A better solution would be to use the same backstop that Apple uses but decrease the distance the mouse must travel to reach the menu bar.  A backstop should be placed at the top of the active window to prevent the mouse from moving beyond the the menu bar at the top of the window.  This would increase the effective area of the target while decreasing the distance traveled by the mouse.  If a user wanted to access another window, they could move the mouse to the left, right or bottom of the active window to escape.  A user could also use Alt Tab, a key combination that can be accessed by the left hand that usually does not access the mouse.

When the mouse hit the backstop, it would stop and only slide from left to right. If a user continued to push the mouse past the backstop, the pointer would eventually be released and could continue to move across the desktop.

By creating a local backstop at the top of the active window, Fitts law states that the time required to access a menu should be faster compared to both the Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh interface.  This will increase the productivity of anyone who routinely accesses menus such as graphic designers and will also make life easier for people such as seniors who may have poor hand eye coordination.

How Valley Fair can improve the kids playground.

On rainy days, the Valley Fair Mall in San Jose California is a great place to take the kids to get some exercise when they start to get cabin fever.  Since other parents are also feeling claustrophobic on these days, the play area can get pretty crowded and it can be hard to keep track of your children in all the chaos.  There are two things that the mall could do to make it easier for parents to watch their children; lower the wall by the slide and put a gate on the entrance.

The picture below is a representation of the play area.  The entrance is at the bottom and the play area is surrounded by a bench like you find in booth seats at a restaurant with a high back.

Several times while watching my own children, I have watched other small children leave the play area and head into the busy mall. Parents near the entrance usually stop the child and eventually the child’s parent will come looking for them.  This usually happens because the parent has two children and while the parent is watching one child, the other slips away.  It is just a matter of time until one child escapes without being stopped.

To solve this problem, Valley Fair should install a small gate at the entrance.  This will keep small children from walking off on their own.

The other problem stems from the large wall by the slide.  5 year old boys can climb the wall quite easily and usually take the fast route of jumping down.  Each day the older kids narrowly miss jumping on top of the smaller kids playing below the wall.

Another problem with the wall is how it blocks the vision of parents.  Because of the wall, there are only a couple of seats where you can see the whole play area.  If you are not in those seats, then the wall creates a blind spot where you cannot see your children.  As soon as you kid enters into a blind spot you need to stand up to walk around the wall to see your child.   See the picture below.

As you move left and right from the seat behind the wall, the blind spot also shifts.  The same blinds spot exists for parents sitting on the right hand side of the wall.

The only place that you can sit and see the entire play area is marked with an "X" below.

By removing the wall and adding a gate to the entrance, Valley Fair can greatly improve it's play area.  This will allow parents to see their children at all times and prevent small children from wandering off alone when parents are distracted.

An Ergonomic Blackberry Keyboard

When you look at the keyboard on a Blackberry smart phone, you see that the keys are arranged in a Smile pattern.  This pattern is ideal for full-size ergonomic keyboards because people have broad shoulders and their hands rest on the keyboard at an angle but it is not ideal for handheld smartphones.

In the layout below, thumbs have to move in and out as they trace a single row of keys.

The Frown layout below is even worse.  In this pattern, the thumbs need to stretch to reach the T and Y.  However, to reach the Z and M, the distance is much shorter which causes your thumb joint to bend and lift up while the whole lower part of your thumb moves back.

While a curved pattern seems ergonomic and definitely is helpful for full-size keyboards, thumbs follow a different pattern.  If you make a fist and wiggle your thumbs you will see that the thumbs move in an arc left to right.  To make your thumbs follow a smile pattern like the Blackberry, you need to pull your thumbs in for the middle of the arc and push your thumbs out at the end of the arc.

Instead Blackberry should organize the keys in a windshield wiper pattern that follows the natural arc of your two thumbs.  This will allow more keys to be accessed by simply moving your thumbs left and right.  Your thumbs will still need to move in and out but this motion will be reduced with the new keyboard layout.

The graphic below shows the improved keyboard layout that uses the windshield wiper pattern that follows the arc of your thumbs.

Windshield Wiper Keyboard Layout

By adopting the new windshield wiper layout, people can reach more keys by simply moving their thumbs back and forth and minimize the amount of in and out motion of their thumbs.  This should decrease typing fatigue and allow Blackberry users to get more value out of their smartphones.