Design for the Wisdom of Crowds
Sunday, March 15th, 2009Derek Powazek - Powazek Productions
- Wisdom of Crowds - James Surowiecki
- Doesn’t mean a group of people in a room are automagically smart
- Starts with Francis Galton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton); guess the amount games, average of crowd is usually pretty close to actual
- Most emailed stories, NYT
- So why is the collective wisdom of the internet so dumb? (See YouTube comments)
Bringing WOC online
Small Simple Tasks
- simple rating systems (hotornot.com, threadless.com)
- Wired.com assignment zero: started out with too large of task. Nobody wanted to volunteer. Broke it down into simple segments, assignments accomplished
Large Diverse Groups
- Shuttle disaster: centralized group of people who ignored the larger crowd; happens when people put the group ahead of themselves (don’t want to stand out, risk alienation)
- Chevy Tahoe crowd sourced advertisement debacle
- Large diverse groups means more input coming in, more resistant to group-think
Design For Selfishness
- People will not participate in your thing unless they’re getting something from it (doesn’t give us a free pass, people will call/not do anything)
Result Aggregation
- How do you take the aggregate (the score) without turning into a game of winners and losers?
- The Heisenberg Problem: Once you have a leaderboard, people will want to show up on it and may not use nice means of doing it
- Instead of showing a ranked list have a list of just good stuff
- Threadless: don’t show rating until voting has ended
- Popularity does NOT have to rule: Amazon.com product review page - most helpful positive review and most helpful negative review displayed with equal weight
Implicit vs. Explicit Feedback
- Explicit: voting and rating
- If you can’t think of a reason to use thumbs up or thumbs down, don’t.
- Implicit: pageviews, searches, velocity, interestingness
Design Matters
- How you ask the questions changes the answers you get
- Visual cues can even effect tone of feedback
- Red vs. Blue: color affects recall, memory. Red gets people worked up, more attention to detail to prevent failure. Blue makes people laid back and more receptive to emotional responses.
Putting It All Together
- http://brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click - Asked community to rate themselves, then rate art; crowd curation
- http://getsatisfaction.com/apple - Simple “I agree” button; can also add comment, comments bubble up to top based on favorites; includes simple stats/aggregation; mood rater
Seeing Things
- Our brains will make up a story to make our experiences make sense
- Online removes all sensory inputs, we just have lines of text: our brains work twice as hard to fill in those lacking inputs
- Getting people to feel like they’re in touch with something they’re used to can alleviate a lot of anxiety in an unfamiliar experience
Prog thoughts
- We rely very much on explicit feedback, I would even put our tracking metrics in the category
- we need to friendly up our feedback form ASAP
- Self-rating display (Brooklyn Museum) sounds a lot like Bobby’s covg project
- How cool would it be to have a mood display on our feedback pages for unpopular flows? Customers that feel validated feel happier
