Starbucks CX Point-of-Sale Challenge: Intro

I am not a coffee drinker, but I generally like the Starbucks brand from the business development and the tenant-patron perspectives. As we know, three things matter in legacy retail ecosystems – location, location, and location. Starbucks has done exceptionally well from that standpoint: it has all the right locations to lure you inside. But when it comes to its tenant and customer experience, there may be room for improvement. I was “there” to see Starbucks become an American landmark of the worldwide coffee culture. Even if you are not in love with Starbucks’ coffee, chances are that you go to a Starbucks store every now and then – to use the free internet, to buy a bottle of water, to meet with a colleague, or just because your friends decided to meet there before going to a concert. What can go wrong at a Starbucks in terms of tenant experience and retail customer experience? Or for that matter, how could you improve Starbucks point-of-sale systems to improve its overall CX and its global customer success?

The problem at hand has to do with ordering frozen Starbucks items such as sandwiches, wraps and quiches – not the ones that sit in the public-facing cooler, but the ones shown on the display behind glass and require a barista or a point-of-sale clerk to get one from somewhere behind the counter. When your in-store interaction takes place early in the morning, all is peachy because everything is in stock. But shortly after 10am, this changes, at which point inventories dwindle and the main way to find out if what you want is in stock is to get the clerk to shout across the room to ask someone else or to leave the register, walk over to the refrigerator, open the door, let some warm air inside, dig through several shelves of items to see if your item is physically present and, finally, come back and complete the order. How does this affect Starbucks customer experience? And how does Starbucks need to change this model if it is serious about selling you a great lunch or dinner? And for that matter, is Starbucks really competing with Mickey D’s for your lunch or dinner burger dollars?

And finally, CX aside, can we financially justify making tweaks to Starbucks point-of-sale systems to improve inventory tracking? Let’s talk about these fun things. And for those of you who share my respect for the Starbucks brand, let’s hope that the company is already working on a reliable fix.

Really? Starbucks v. McDonalds: a New Perspective

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: whether Starbucks strategic business executives are willing to admit it or not, Starbucks is slowly but surely moving into the fast-food business – presumably the fancier end of the spectrum thereof, but still – and is competing with the others in this domain. Let’s face it: the introduction of Starbucks food items beyond their traditional pastries was a strategic move intended to get more customers to spend more money at Starbucks – money that they otherwise would spend on a Big Mac or on a Spicy Chicken Sandwich and some Curly Fries from Jack in the Box. This may sound blunt, but in marketing and economics, Starbucks would be called a “substitute good” for McDonalds, for example.

There are good signs that Starbucks wants your daily meal allowances. One is an increase in inventory; check. Another is an increase in variety; check. Another is an increase in freshness and availability of food warming equipment; check. Finally, there should be a trend toward larger portions within any category, such as larger sandwiches and cookies; check – for example, the Starbucks biscotti went from 90 calories to about 200 calories, while their average sandwich size grew from under 400 calories in 2014 to over 550 calories in 2018.

With that in mind, I would want to see Starbucks get better at handling its orders and managing its inventory. But notice what happens when you order a sandwich or a pie that’s not in stock the next time you are at the drive-through intercom or at the counter of a well-established food chain store (e.g., McDonalds): immediately, the point-of-sale clerk will tell you – without a shadow of a doubt – that the product is out of stock. And if they fail, they will certainly tell you at some point before they actually take your money at the pickup window. Logical? You bet it is. It is easy and simple – because the McDonalds point-of-sale user interface, for example, tells the clerk how many sandwiches they have in stock (whoa, you can track that?); and the only time the clerk needs to physically go back to the kitchen to check stock is when the stock quantity on the screen is 3 units or less. That’s how Starbucks competition does it. Enough said. Now, back to the topic.

Starbucks Customer Experience: Worst Case Scenario

From the customer experience perspective, there is only one thing worse inside a Starbucks store than having an item on the menu but not having it in stock: that “thing” is having the item on the menu, processing the customer’s order, taking the money from the customer, making him or her wait for a minute or two, and then telling that customer that the item is out of stock and having to issue a refund or to get the customer to change his/her order to another item (which, by the way, is technically known as ‘Bait and Switch’ and is – well, sorry Starbucks! – technically illegal in every state and in many countries across the world. This is how we did it in the 20th century, and I can’t think of any logistical or strategic reason to keep doing it in today’s age of technology.

Starbucks Customer Experience (CX) Problem Defined

Clearly, this discussion is not about basic issues that can affect just-about any coffee shop – e.g., a broken espresso machine, a clerk who forgets to write ‘decaf’ on your cup or to wash hands after using the bathroom. We are talking about a Starbucks point-of-sale clerk who takes your money for a refrigerated item that is stored away from the clerk’s counter, gives you a receipt, tells you to have a nice day, and then (or I should say “and only then”), a minute or two later, another person from behind the counter proclaims that the item you ordered is not in stock and offers you a refund or a substitute item. Apart from all practical inferences, you feel awkward; the people standing in line and observing this also feel awkward; likely (and hopefully), at least one person behind the counter also feels awkward. Are you OK with this customer experience? But wait – let’s be reasonable and give them some slack: Starbucks has just started selling sandwiches and wraps, and it must be OK that they still haven’t polished their act. Or is it? Are you aware that Starbucks started selling sandwiches over 10 years ago?

Let’s rephrase: Starbucks employs hundreds of business analysts, engineers, as well as customer experience and user experience specialists working day and night to make sure that its retail point-of-sale systems are usable and to make sure that your next Starbucks visit is nothing short of awesome, but none of these people understands the devastating effects of poor customer experience on the company’s performance. Already then. Am I missing something?

Starbucks CX, Man-hours… and My Own Story

I have been buying the Starbucks Artisan Sandwiches since their debut circa 2008 until current time. They used to be small 300-to-400-calorie sandwiches but are now becoming exceedingly bigger (450-600 calories), as Starbucks is taking strides toward competing in the fast-food market (more about that below); to me these sandwiches represent a quick, light lunch, which is what you need when you travel a lot. So, during nine consecutive months in 2017, I tracked my Starbucks visits, with an average of 7.5 Starbucks visits per month. My statistics show that, on average, 32% of the time the sandwich I ordered was out of stock, which is OK, technically, since my favorite sandwich is a popular one and since I always order it after 11am. But the process of finding out that my sandwich is out of stock is often more painful that it should be.

Namely, there are three types of behaviors that I have experienced from Starbucks staff when ordering my refrigerated sandwiches after 11am (the “beyond-breakfast” time). First, about 26% of the time, the point-of-sale clerk didn’t check the inventory before taking my money, but I got lucky because my sandwich was in stock; so far so good. Second, about 62% of the time, the clerk personally walked to the fridge to check the sandwich inventory or shouted across the bar to ask someone else to check inventory prior to taking payment (which obviously had a negative impact on my experience as well as on the experience of people in line behind me, even when the sandwich I ordered turned out to be in stock, let alone when it was not). Finally, the remaining 12% of the time I paid for my sandwich just to find out a minute or two later that it was out of stock.

During the same nine months, the same thing happened across over 20 thousand USA Starbucks stores, each of which sells an average of well over 50 different frozen or refrigerated sandwiches items per day (and we are not counting other refrigerated perishable items – just sandwiches). Every time a sandwich like mine is ordered after the morning rush, the clerk knows that inventory may be zero or close to zero and is supposed to shout across the store and/or walk over to the fridge to let some warm air inside and to check stock. That should be 270 MILLION screams across the bar and/or 270 MILLION walks to the fridge prior to taking sandwich orders in nine months… plus, in roughly one out of every eight and a half orders – the clerk who took the order without checking stock had to apologize to the customer, explain that the sandwich is not in stock, and then issue a refund and/or offer a different sandwich to the frustrated customer.

Let’s put this in perspective: if every scream and every walk to the fridge costs Starbucks just five pennies, we are talking about $13.5 million dollars in nine months. Now, combine that with the bad experience for the aggravated customers at least 12% of the time (which is really much more than that – because let’s face it: standing in front of the register while the point-of-sale clerk is dancing behind the bar for 10-15 seconds to find out if your sandwich is in stock isn’t necessarily a great experience, which also translates into an indirect cost to the company). And finally, how about the credit card transaction fees, the time it takes to talk with the customer, to process the refund, and in some cases to give the customer a pricier sandwich in exchange for the one he/she ordered? Should Starbucks care? Should Starbucks shareholders care? Should Starbucks fans care?

Customer Experience: a Function of the Critical Path

The Critical Path in any business process is the shortest possible path for completing a process, operation or a transaction. For instance, the length of the Critical Path for processing an order for a sandwich can be represented by a timeline, where over 80% of all single-item sandwich orders take from 40-55 seconds. From the standpoint of Business Process Management, Retail Customer Experience, and Point-of-Sale System Usability, an important question to ask would be this: “How can we increase the percentage and/or reduce the time?”

So, the Critical Path is clearly not a constant: depending on how intelligent and how adaptable the business process is, the critical path can improve or get worse multiple times during a single day. For example, what should happen when it is the peak hour of 8am on a Tuesday, the store is full of people, the line to the counter is long, and one of the three baristas didn’t show up for work and another one of the remaining two went to the bathroom? Will the point-of-sale clerk be more likely or less likely to do the let-me-go-to-the-refrigerator-and-check-if-we-have-your-sadwitch routine to complete the order? Or will he/she follow the path of least resistance, disclaim any liability for checking inventory, take your order in sincerest hopes that your item is in stock and assume that his/her job is done? The answer is obvious: in critical situations, human beings always follow the path of least resistance – the path that should never be mistaken for the critical path; and the company that fails to recognize this tends to cause customers pain, simply put. But there is light at the end of the tunnel!

Why People Go to Starbucks: More on CX

Statistics show that a whopping 90% of all people in the USA visit a Starbucks at least once a month. Why do people go to Starbucks? Quality of their coffee can be debated endlessly, but their service level and their product variety and quality are all extraordinarily consistent, and they are just-about everywhere. Plus there is some hip factor in the name and the atmosphere, and there is the free internet. In turn, chances are that even if you don’t regularly consume the products Starbucks sells, you probably go there quite a bit – if not to use the free internet, then to meet a business associate on a neutral ground, or simply to hook up with a friend for a quick handshake – just because their big sign out front serves as an easy street landmark, and because many of their stores have free bathrooms. Every time you visit, you are more likely to spend money there – yes, even if you don’t drink their coffee. In fact, a 2015 survey shows that over 70% of those who never buy food or drink at Starbucks still go there at least once a year to buy a gift card or a trinket for someone they care about. In other words, Starbucks is more than a retail store: it is a fully integrated social hub. This brings me to my next point: it is no accident that Starbucks is selling more and more food items.

Starbucks Customer Experience Wake-Up Call

The levels of business analysis and user research needed to define the requirements for a retail point-of-sale system that will track inventory of the items you sell every day are minimal. The level of secondary customer experience research and/or marketing research needed to understand how others in the retail industry track inventories is rudimentary. Also rudimentary is the level of competitor research required to understand how other people selling pre-heated sandwiches track their inventories. So then, what are those hundreds of business analysts, engineers, customer experience specialists and point-of-sale user experience analysts and UI designers at Starbucks working on day and night? Beats me. My hope is that they read this post – because I dig Starbucks and believe they can do much better.

Customer Experience and Tenant Experience are certainly a science, but their goal, in any context, is quite common-sense and straightforward – i.e., provide a usable point-of-sale system and a practical customer-employee or tenant-patron interaction protocol so as to maximize process efficiency and customer satisfaction. From the standpoint of selling sandwiches, this means one simple thing that Starbucks for some reason doesn’t do as of the date this article is published – tracking your inventory and establishing a policy that would not require a point-of-sale clerk to yell, dance, jump, roll, crawl, run or open the fridge door to check inventory before taking money from a customer for a sandwich that has a relatively high probability of being out of stock.
 

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Simple products break less

In working with engineers of all kinds, whenever my modest inputs are required to help ship better products, I like to say this: “Let’s make this feature work like a drum!” This expression is not my own – I “inherited” it from a good front-end developer friend, but it represents a principle in product design that I follow (more on that later). And believe it or not, it all started with cars and drums and LSD… as in Lean Software Development. Since we happen to be humans (even the geekiest of us), it often helps to remember why simplicity is the mother of genius – because simple things break less. This notion is at the core of great products and customer experiences.

A Little history: Hardware vs. Software

I take interest in precision engineering and love to study complex devices, including telescopes, watches, and other mechanisms. Naturally, I also have worked in digital design and industrial design. Many will argue that physical objects and devices are more difficult and expensive to develop, and so it may be unfair to compare those to software in terms of approaches to measuring usability and customer satisfaction. But I say that software and hardware are identical from the product development, usability, and customer experience perspectives. This is because

• both are designed for humans;
• both are designed to serve a specific need or to solve a specific problem;
• both can be expensive to develop and expensive to market;
• both can break;
• both are less likely to break when they have fewer moving parts.

From Toyota to LSD, to Agile

Did you know that the hip word “lean” goes all the way back to Korea over 60 years ago? To be exact, in 1947, Chung Ju-Yung founded Hyundai Group Companies and then dedicated the next 50 years of his life to turning Hyundai into a global conglomerate with over 150 thousand employees. Ju-Yung, whom I once had the pleasure of meeting in Seoul, survived and prospered not because he had a rich grandfather but because Hyundai was the first to use the so-called “lean manufacturing practices,” which helped the company develop amazing economies of scope and scale, starting with the manufacturing construction (its core industrial business) and about 40 years later leading to cool things like my Hyundai Genesis Coupe or your Hyundai widescreen display.

More specifically, lean manufacturing practices have their origins in the so-called Just-in-Time (or JIT) inventory control system – a production strategy that strives to improve returns on investment by reducing in-process inventories and the associated carrying costs. By mid 1950′s, Toyota went on to “adopt” the JIT system, when Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda developed what was then called the Toyota Production System, or TPS. In turn, because Toyota officially adopted and publicized the approach, it is also historically credited for the lean practices in manufacturing, albeit incorrectly.

A few decades later, in 2001, Kent Beck studied TPS inside-out and wrote what is known as the awesome Agile Manifesto, which Mary and Tom Poppendieck dutifully and wonderfully transposed into what most people in the world of manufacturing (and software) know today as Lean Software Development – a concept that was popularized by the book with the same title, which the Poppendiecks published in 2003.

More about Lean

The textbook – and the Wikipedia – definition of Lean Software Development is this: LSD is a translation of lean manufacturing and lean IT principles and practices to the software development domain. Again, the translation started with the original (be it the chicken or the egg), and the original had little to do with software as we know it. In other words, the supposed “break” between software and hardware in the context of usability and customer experience – whether it be in the context of software development or car manufacturing or anything in-between – is superficial and purely historical. Now, for the record, lean development – or LSD specifically – can be summarized by seven principles that, according to Wikipedia, are “very close in concept” to their manufacturing counterparts (listed here in the order of importance):

• Eliminate waste
• Build integrity in
• Amplify learning
• Decide as late as possible
• Deliver as fast as possible
• Empower the team
• See the whole

How does a drum play into this? (pun intended)

The lean approach to product development, which – as we now know – started with new industrial manufacturing trends decades ago, is about simplicity. Not the kind of simplicity that differentiates a plain-text editor from Microsoft Word, but the kind that separates a drum from, say, a violin or an electronic piano or keyboard in terms of complexity.

A typical piano keyboard is a nightmare from the standpoint of lean manufacturing. It has hundreds of microchips and dozens of hardware buttons and contains a vast amount of computing capacity that translates human inputs into music, which – mind you – can only happen with speakers and only when electrical current is present. A common drum, on the other hand, has only a couple of parts and will play sounds anytime and anywhere. You get the idea: a drum is simple, while an electronic piano is not.

Back to Software

To transpose an electronic piano into the product development domain, it has many complex parts that come at a great cost. Although these parts provide a great utility, they make the underlying product less dependable, more prone to breakage and malfunctions, and more difficult to learn. The same naturally applies to software products: beyond a certain point in development, many products become uncontrollably complex and result in a slew of features that a vast number of users – including many power users – can’t appreciate, which in turn increases costs, increases break points, and potentially lowers product usability and customer satisfaction. Practically speaking, there is something known as the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns – a fundamental economic principle, which is defined as the decrease in the marginal (incremental) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is incrementally increased, while the amounts of all other factors of production stay constant.

A classic example is adding more workers to a job, such as assembling a car on a factory floor: at some point, adding more workers causes problems such as workers getting in each other’s way or frequently finding themselves waiting for access to a part. In all of these processes, producing one more unit of output per unit of time will eventually cost increasingly more, due to inputs being used less and less effectively. Eventually, by increasing the product’s function you may actually be increasing its cost to a point of incurring an operating loss, directly or indirectly.

The same applies to software. In my mind, a good practical example is Skype, which I find to be a rather invasive application that I’d love to run on my MacBook Pro all the time… but choose not to because it consumes more system resources than I am willing to give up in exchange for the privilege of being easily accessible to my international colleagues.

With that in mind, I like to say – as one of my good colleagues taught me in 2006 – that all good products must start out as drum and not as a keyboard, while most products don’t ever need to turn into a keyboard. So, don’t let my odd metaphor confuse you when you hear these words from me while discussing an app, a website or a software project. For at the root of every successful digital product there lies a simple principle: if you are going to make an electronic piano, be sure that you have the advertising budget and the positioning strategy to market this baby to the people who will appreciate it. Otherwise, keep your product simple and don’t add things to it just because they are “nice to have.” The thought that “premature optimization is the root of all evil” (courtesy of Donald Knuth) also comes to mind here.

And every time you feel like questioning this logic, play with an Apple device to remind yourself that successful products don’t have to be complex, nor do they have to please everyone. Speaking of successful products that can be improved, I have written a related post about sealed batteries in Apple devices – check it out.

Do you want to continue this discussion? Message me on Twitter to start a conversation.
 

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Introduction: Wireframing and Prototyping

Wireframes and prototypes – as well as software used for wireframing and prototyping – make the process of creating an app, a website or any software or hardware product notably easier – by simplifying the product and allowing all involved in its development to focus on the product’s functions and user interactivity. Everyone in the production team – from stakeholders and information architects to project managers and quality assurance personnel – needs to understand how an application or website will work and what it is intended to do. For that purpose, wireframing and prototyping are not synonyms, technically speaking. Let’s look at their differences and similarities.

Wireframes Talk. Prototypes Work.

If you don’t have the time to do five more minutes of dense reading, read this paragraph… and you will know how wireframes are different from prototypes. Simply put, wireframes make a useful (and usually purely visual) representation of what the intended product is designed to do and enable everyone in the team to collaborate in the early stages of product development. Prototypes, on the other hand, take the process further by deploying a simplified “bare-bone model” of the product that often has some simplified functionality attributable to the desired final product (and can be held or manipulated if it is a scaled or unscaled hardware model). Using the words of a wise man (Can I be a wise man today please, mom?), a wireframe talks, while a prototype works. A prototype may work poorly and may have many unsolved corner cases in its look, feel and performance, but it does work! A wireframe doesn’t do that – it simply communicates.

A Semi-Objective Comparison

I feel it is not entirely fair to “compare” prototyping and wireframing: although they overlap quite a bit and are often used as interchangeable terms, they are different in intent. I don’t blame you if you believe that wireframing and prototyping are synonyms. But historically, wireframing has been defined as a very specific and narrow (not meant to sound negatively) spectrum of activities intended to represent the desired product – usually software or a web page; result of wireframing is exactly that – a wireframe, which typically has no testable functions and lacks the features to establish the product’s look-and-feel baseline.

Prototyping, on the other hand, is a deeper representation of the product and often includes a working product model (commonly with use of color and other “feel elements”). Alternatively, with regards to hardware, a prototype means a tangible three-dimensional form that has some functional characteristics of the intended final product. In other words, wireframing – in most working contexts – should be viewed as a simplified subset of the prototyping discipline, or perhaps a blueprint for the prototype.

Lo-Fi vs. Hi-Fi and the Associated Costs

It should be further noted that there is low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototyping. Low-fidelity (lo-fi) prototyping is characterized by a quick and easy translation of high-level design concepts into tangible and testable artefacts. Lo-fi is also known as low-tech, as the means required for such an implementation consist – most of the time – of a mixture of paper, cardboard and post-it notes In the Software Development Life Cycle context, many designers, developers and product managers will agree that wareframes vs. prototypes are like PNG files exported from Balsamiq or Illustrator vs. testable page mockups from Axure.

Whatever the context, a clear advantage of lo-fi prototyping is its relatively low cost and the fact that non-programmers can actively be part of the idea generation process. In contrast, the high-fidelity (hi-fi) prototypes, which are characterized by detailed representation of the design concepts, result in partial or sometimes “complete-but-limited” functionality. The latter, naturally, implies higher costs, both temporal and financial, and necessitates good programming skills to implement. The main advantage of hi-fi, high-tech prototyping is that users can truly interact with the system, as opposed to the sometimes awkward facilitator-driven simulations found in lo-fi prototyping. Obviously, there is a continuum from low to high-fidelity prototyping that usually stretches out from early to late design. This comparison on Wikipedia is an effective attempt to identify the differences between the key prototyping software on the market today.

Does Pixel-Perfect Mean Successful?

Successful products are clearly not just about wireframing and prototyping (if they were, applications would be developed by graphics artists and visual designers). Instead, they include a broad spectrum of tools and approaches to assist teams of designers, strategists, developers, managers and stakeholders in executing projects effectively, including diagramming, modeling, visualization and other processes. Clearly, good wireframes become good prototypes, and then good prototypes become good products. So, you could say that wireframes often precede prototypes, although in the hands of some of the most exceptional designers and engineers wireframing and prototyping are often part of a single unified process – process that is supposed to help the development team define the product’s most efficient roadmap.

At the end of the day, however, one thing is true: over 90 of all new products and services – in all industries, at all times, and on all continents – fail within 2 years. That’s an undisputed statistic that applies to all digital and tangible products as well as to ideas, methods and processes – in all business models… including an equal proportion of products that had pixel-perfect prototypes to begin with (Mom, why doesn’t it make money if it looks so nice?). That said, let’s not forget that sleek-looking wireframes (or prototypes) don’t compensate for lack of proper business analysis. In turn, this is why so many successful products are so ugly-looking, while so few good-looking products are successful. Think about it: does pixel-perfect mean useful or functional or valuable? Not really, unless your goal is to create a work of purely visual art.
 

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Overlooked in usability: aspect ratio conversion

In my years of interacting with screens – computer displays, television sets and proprietary video hardware – of varying sizes and intended uses, I find one factor to have a much bigger role in retail customer experience and in general usability than the title of this post may suggest – aspect ratios. Over 20% of the world is using electronic displays or TV’s with wrong aspect ratio settings, and it turns out that this has deep physiological and psychological effects that affect the users, the patrons (in the landlord-retail context), the product manufacturers, and everyone in the marketing and IT sectors. Should anyone care about this problem? I have done some research to find a few interesting answers.

Background in a Nutshell

It’s paradoxical: a retail store or a sports bar may easily invest over $20,000 into a collection of large high-resolution displays to showcase their products or to entertain patrons, but the screen is often fitted incorrectly into the viewable area of the device, and the images appear distorted, or stretched, resulting in a variety of complex cognitive responses, many of which are subconscious and all of which have a negative effect on the overall experience. What can we do to address these problems? And why is this important for the consumers and retail patrons?

The Problem is Bigger than Meets the Eye

Every time any picture – whether static or dynamic – fails to conform to the conventional model of our everyday dimensional space, our brain is confused, whether we notice it or not. Those of us who sense that the aspect ratio of an image or video is off (this includes virtually all techies and a significant cross-section of regular Bobs and Thelmas) are “officially” annoyed – e.g., when the baseball doesn’t look perfectly round or when Cindy Crawford appears to have put on 20 or so pounds to showcase the new pair of jeans in a short video inside a Levi’s store. Alternatively, those who lack the “visual sensitivity” just keep watching and assume that all is well and seem to experience no immediate discomfort. But all of us are inadvertently forcing our brain into overdrive, and it’s doing us no good.

I have looked into the metrics of user perceptions of static and dynamic picture distortion, as well as their conscious and subconscious responses. One fascinating discovery I have made is that roughly a third of all viewers cannot detect the distortion in the image when the aspect ratio is violated slightly – e.g., when we stretch a widescreen movie vertically by less than 15%. Most amazingly, 97% of all people – the annoyed techies, the unsuspecting ignoramuses with high standards for gadget quality, and everyone else in-between – watching videos with wrong aspect ratio for 30 minutes or longer are about 160% more likely to experience fatigue, headaches, or emotional imbalances.

Research: Physiology of Cognitive Image Conversion

When the image – whether static or dynamic – is slightly distorted (under 15%, in this context), we always perceive and understand 100% of the video content, but our brain must subconsciously work in overdrive to continuously make dimensional adjustments in order to “fit” the edges of the misplaced (or skewed) objects into their intended locations – e.g., when a baseball looks like an egg, the brain has to constantly work to convert your perceived image (an egg-shaped object on the screen) into the contextually intended object (a baseball). In fact, in 2012, a team of geeks somewhere in Sydney conducted a rather cool experiment to learn more about this Cognitive Image Conversion:

1. They picked three unrelated 30-second fragments from three music videos.
2. They made a distorted version of each fragment with a vertical or a horizontal stretch by 25%.
3. They then found 30 subjects – of them all were 25-35 years old, all had IQ scores of 90 to 120, all had college degrees, and all had normal vision (6 of them wore corrective glasses or contact lenses).
4. They then split the 30 people in two groups of 15 subjects and played the same three videos to each subject at 10 times the normal video speed (10x faster), asking each user to describe the videos. The first group watched the videos with the correct aspect ratio (the Control Group), while the second group watched the videos with the distorted aspect ratios (the Test Group). Naturally, members of neither group were warned as to whether their videos would be distorted or not.
5. The results were stunning, but not surprising: 13 of the 15 people in the Control Group (the group that watched the properly sized videos) were able to register a notably greater level of detail (objects and people present, colors, and shapes) in all three videos they watched than their counterparts in the Test Group.
6. The experiment was conducted with relatively small 22-inch (59mm) screens and with large HD TV’s, and the findings were essentially identical.

With that said, imagine how attention spans and the decision making abilities of airline pilots or surgeons, for example, can be affected by using computer or TV displays that fail to show the correct aspect ratios. Enough said.

Implications for Users and for Display Manufacturers

Interestingly, when a static image (i.e., a photo or motionless artwork) is off-aspect, we tend to experience minimal aftereffects – regardless of whether we have noticed the distortion or not. This is because the amount of processing required for the Cognitive Image Conversion is low when there is only one frame in front of you (and thus one frame for the brain to process and convert). But the story is different with motion: at the conventional 32 frames per second in a video, our brains tend to distinctly perceive at least every 5th frame, and when a video feed is distorted, the brain must in turn “continuously loop” – about 6 times per second, to be exact – to convert distorted frames into valid frames. It is no wonder, therefore, that 97% of us are more likely to experience headaches or irritation or other forms of psychological and physiological distress when watching videos with incorrect aspect ratio settings for over 30 minutes.

Now, if you are a TV manufacturer, imagine what happens with people who spend 1-3 hours per day – as many Americans and Europeans do – in front of a TV set: their personalities and their health can be affected by this level of distress quite dramatically. Similarly, if you are a retail tenant or owner who aims for great patron experiences, you are subjecting your customers to pure pain if your screen visualizations are shown with imperfect aspect ratios. Moreover, many people actually recognize that their irritability or headaches or other forms of discomfort ensue after watching the “twisted” TV screen for a while, and then the inevitable happens; they erroneously attribute the effects to the equipment and tell their friends and family this, more or less: there is something wrong with my So-And-So-Brand TV because it gives me headaches; I should have bought the TV made by So-And-So-Brand instead. For the cherry on top, think about your kids playing their games on “the wrong screen” and suffering from the resulting cognitive effects.

Whether it’s 4:3 or 16:9 or anything else, most users don’t know left from right (nor can they do the math) when it comes to setting up their monitors or TV sets correctly. Shouldn’t we try to help them? It’s been over 20 years since the appearance of wide screens, and we are still often confusing the hell out of our valued audiences by failing to give them the tools that would enable them to watch an average of 25 minutes of TV commercials per hour correctly between their silly-little six-minute movie clips!

The solution

Conventional stand-alone computer monitors are a “fair game” as they are configurable by the user from the connected computer. But the manufacturers of television sets have no excuse: they must identify the original broadcast’s aspect ratio (this goes for transmitted signals and for locally wired feeds) and optimize the display in only one of these two equally meaningful ways:

1. Option 1: maximize the viewable screen area (e.g., clip sides of a widescreen image to eliminate black background at the top and the bottom of the screen), or
2. Option 2: preserve the original content to ensure that the entire area of the original video is visible on the screen (e.g., leave the black background on the sides when you are watching an old movie on a wide-screen TV).

Any other options beyond these two should be buried deeply into the menu and must be relatively difficult to change.

Do you want to talk about this? Do you know of a more elegant solution? Message me on Twitter to start a conversation.
 

The post Business and Beyond: Adverse Effects of Wrong Aspect Ratios appeared first on HyperAbsolute: Business Ecosystem Blog by Sander Nizni.

Is Afghanistan at the top of your country list?

Are your users annoyed because the dropdown country list on your registration page starts with Afghanistan? They may be… do your research! And if they are, is this problem worth solving? The answer is far from obvious. And it has nothing to do with the stigma of “George Bush vs. Osama bin Laden.” Let’s start with Usability 101: about 6% of the 31-million Afghanistan population use the internet: that’s under 2 million… most of whom don’t speak English and/or don’t care about your site. Sorry for bluntness, but this is a business discussion. So, should a typical social networking hub or a retail site place Afghanistan at the top of the list? Or should it force its primary target markets (e.g, USA) to the top of the list?

Indeed, Afghanistan happens to be the first country in the world, alphabetically speaking. Still, many sites – especially those whose primary market segment is defined as either “USA audience” or “English speakers” – force the United States and/or United Kingdom to the top of the list. Problem solved? Not really. Because this may imply that any country or countries that appear above Afghanistan is/are “cool and important,” while other civilized nations (e.g., Australia, Brazil, France, Spain, Zimbabwe, etc.) are not. Not a politically correct solution then, is it?

In other words, if you are a Canadian, for instance, and your country dropdown on the registration page starts with United States, followed by Afghanistan, you are left wondering: “Am I welcome here?” Due to this concern, most global sites just leave Afghanistan at the top. What is the problem with that? Apart from the many sentimental implications, many users simply don’t have the patience to scroll down to choose their country and instead choose a random country near the top of the list (e.g., Afghanistan). In fact, I conducted my own research on this topic that involved analyzing a statistical sample of over 10 million web registrations across 11 retail and social sites, and the number of these “phantom” users is staggering – over 22%. Do you want your users doing that?

So, is there an elegant solution? Of course! The most intuitive one is – grow up! Don’t ask the user living in the United Kingdom or in Zimbabwe to click on the dropdown field and then scroll all the way down – that could involve 4-5 clicks and is inefficient. One may argue: “Even children know that you can type the first letter of your country, and then the selection will jump to the respective section in the country list down below, where you can further navigate using the arrow down key.” And I say, “Exactly, Ringo!” If your visitors are expected to use a letter key just to get closer to their country in the dropdown list, why not give them a chance to just type their country name in that field in the first place? This is why we have Ajax: when the user types the first letter or two of the country name, a list appears giving him/her all the countries that match. And, if you want to kick it up another notch, look up the visitor’s IP address and pre-populate the country field accordingly (but leave it modifiable so that users can override the value if they are registering while traveling in another country). Problem solved.

Do you want to talk about this? Do you know of a more elegant solution? Message me on Twitter or using the contact form on this site.
 

The post Web Form Usability: Afghanistan at the top? Really?! appeared first on HyperAbsolute: Business Ecosystem Blog by Sander Nizni.