The restaurant is genius. They’ve packaged-up a fast-food burger joint in organic, interior-designed ribbons and created a Macdonalds that it’s okay to eat at if you’re middle class. It would be interesting to compare the calorie count or the fat content of a Big Mac to that of the bacon cheeseburger I ate this afternoon. This thought occurs to me as I dislocate my jaw like a python in an effort to take my first bite, and a stream of meat juice and hot fat trickles over my fingers and onto my plate. There can be no healthy high ground to claim here.

Like McD’s you pay at the counter, up-front before your meal. This is brilliant business: fewer staff and no tables needlessly filled whilst occupants wait for their bill. This also means, crucially, that you can leave without interacting with anyone. As soon as you’re done, you’re gone. There’s no chance for the waiters to remind you that they exist, and therefore you feel little obligation to tip. And because of the set-up you don’t have to look too far for justification. After all, you ordered at the counter, right? And you helped yourself to water, so what did they actually do?

It’s clear that someone responsible regards this as a problem. Perhaps the churn rate was too high, or maybe the quality of applicants fell once word got out. Either way, clear measures are now in place to leverage one of the fundamental human traits and fix the problem. Reciprocity.

As I pay, the casier hands me two glasses: “Help yourself to monkey nuts by the door”. Hmmm. Monkey nuts. That’s strange, they don’t have anything to do with burgers. Later, the chips arrive and the waitor asks me if I’d like mayo (yes please), and he returns with a pot so delicious it makes me question the identity of the low fat gloop in my own fridge. Twice I’m asked if I want something for free, and twice I am explicitly given something. I’m sensitive to these kinds of tactics after reading in Yes! about the tricks waiters use to increase tips. And these small incidents are both clearly attempts to leverage my innate sense of reciprocity and obligate me to tip.

Reciprocity is a deeply ingrained human trait. Return the favour. One good turn. Do unto others. So deeply ingrained that most of the time we’re not really aware of it when it motivates our behaviour. Psychologists know this and canny restauranteurs know this too. But I suspect that when we know it’s happening; when we sense a deliberate attempt to manipulate, we’ll be even less likely to tip. I wonder what effect these efforts have had.

I walk out, smugly drafting this post and jangling the pound coins still in my pocket, too clever to be caught out by these manifestly obvious tactics. But then, with a start, I realise I’ve been had after all. The reason we chose GBK was the two burgers for £10 in Jan offer. Two for £10 in Jan. Jan.

The offer was running out. Scarcity.

According to the science of persuasion scarcity, along with reciprocity, is one of the six cardinal motivators. Zing! I got got! So it’s hats off to GBK after all, as if a delicious burger wasn’t enough to make  me warm inside.

And if you’re interested in the other four motivators, comment on this post within the next three days and I’ll give you them all for free!

Welcome back

…No one’s been like Gaston
A king pin like Gaston
No one’s got a swell cleft in his chin like Gaston…

Brainworm alert: Gaston’s song from Beauty and the Beast:

Oliver Sachs discusses the concept:

Excellent.

• Lovely timelapsed videos of Tokyo sunsets. Turn your sound off though. Easy to see where Chiho Aoshima finds inspiration.

  static : pulse from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.

• Prezi, a mindblowing alternative to Powerpoint. Check an example. I’ve also started using Free mind recently, and open source mind-mapping bit of software. Good for keeping track of my projects.
• Paper Nikes. Also check this Nike viral site for Blue Lobster, presumably some forthcoming shoe. Slightly too polished to leave us genuinely uncertain. But I’ve blogged it, which is all they really care about.
• Get ready to grab your facebook username. Saturday 5.01am

First, what’s changed?

Most obviously, there’s no ‘up’ button to get to the parent directory. I’ve been using it for 6 weeks now and I still find myself hovering over the toolbar, looking for that friendly brown manila with the green arrow. Appallingly you can’t even ‘customize’ (sic.) the toolbar to show it, and although there are third party apps that address this, I don’t think I’ll be going down that route on my property-of-HM-Gov’t machine.

Instead there’s a new file path device where the address bar used to be. Actually it’s a hybrid of the two, but you only find this out if you click on it. The trail tells you where you are in the directory structure and each node is clickable, allowing you to jump to whatever parent level you want.

In principle this sounds okay: instead of clicking the up button 4 times (presumably an unacceptably onerous chore to the Microsoft engineers) you can make a single click on the parent node you want to visit. Big. Deal. I suspect the new method presents significantly more cognitive load than simply clicking ‘up’ anyway: For starters, you have to actually read the path, which means using your brain’s text parser. Then you have to know what your target directory is called, which means employing recall. Then, since we typically read from left to right, we read from root to target node. This means the deeper your target is in the structure the longer it takes to pick it out. Surely to go up a single level is the most common task, but this takes the longest time in the new file path device, and so it is simply not optimised.

Of course, to go up a level you could just say to yourself “look for the node second from the right”, and perhaps this is how people actually behave. But this node varies its spatial position on-screen depending on how deep in the structure you are. It does not occupy a fixed position on-screen like the ‘up’ button, so you’re still stuck with most of the cognitive load I’ve talked about. And we all know the very first lesson of usability 101: Don’t Make Me Think.

Incidentally, the whole thing breaks down totally if you’re deep enough in the structure for the file path device to fill up completely. It doesn’t wrap onto two lines (a mediocre solution that websites usually employ), rather it dumps completely the root node (and whatever other oldest-ancestor nodes it needs to) and shifts everything else left. Even if you had, as a user, learned parent nodes spatially, which is how humans work (close your eyes: where is the back button on your browser?), this method capriciously moves them again. It fundamentally prevents learning by associating a spatial location with a task.

So why have they done this? I think I understand.

Explorer’s change from XP to Vista represents a fundamental shift from displaying files from a hierarchical viewpoint to a breadcrumb viewpoint. Breadcrumb, by the way, is a slightly misused Hansel and Gretel metaphor which I don’t think I need to explain.

The hierarchical viewpoint requires the user hold a reasonably accurate model of the computer’s directory structure overall. The breadcrumb viewpoint only requires the user to understand what they have just done; the path they’ve followed to get to this point.

The former assumes a lot of knowledge which new users simply don’t have. The latter, it is reasonable to assume, is better for new users: they don’t have a mental model of the file structure, and they don’t need one (nor are they likely to acquire one using Vista explorer). Anyone who’s ever had to explain the directory structure to a new windows user will attest to this. So that’s it: the new system is optimised for newbs, and if you don’t like it, tough.

As an aside, just who is their target market anyway? What fraction of people these days are computer novices? Perhaps the very large majority, if I strip away my developed-world prejudices for a moment.

Anyway, I certainly hope the problems Vista explorer supposedly solves are real for some users, since at least I could then think of my pain as a sacrifice for the greater good. But I can’t help thinking they’ve thought about it too much, a Microsoft problem which I’ve talked about before.

I won’t go into the other usability problems I’ve encountered. I won’t want to stop if I get started on the pointless filter controls (that are incomprehensible and easy to confuse with the handles when you want to widen a column); or the toolbar icons that change depending on what is selected (consistency anyone?); or the ‘favourite links’ area, which points I know not where (some contents seem to follow my login, others don’t). Gah!

They’ve come up with an overly clever solution to a problem which certainly doesn’t exist for me. And in the process they’ve introduced a hat full of usability problems. What a shame I have to fish around for alternatives to something so fundamental to using Windows when the old model was so satisfactory.