James L Adams—People and Products

Cognitive limits and product quality.

Moore’s law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every 18 months.  Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel Corporation,  described this in a paper he gave in 1965.  It has been a remarkably good prediction, the number rising from approximately one thousand at the time to approximately two and a half billion in 2010.  This increase in device count has been central to the amazing increase in the performance of all digital equipment and the internet in this time period.

In the same period, it is safe to say that the ability of the human brain, at least as measured in number of neurons, has not increased at all.  This leaves us in new territory, in which we are experimenting with everything from human interaction, to our ability to utilize vast quantities of data, to strains in our traditional employment patterns.  Suffice it to say, that our brains are being tested as never before.  Yet this seems to not be taken into consideration in the design of many of our industrial products.

I use computers fairly heavily, but to do rather ordinary things.  But even though I try not to, I seem often to be upgrading software and hardware.  New software often demands upgrading of old, and hardware fails, leading to both new hardware and software.  As I write this, I am having problems with a magnificently high bandwidth internet connection that Google recently installed.  How could I pass it up, since we are a beta site for a network that delivers data at a gigabyte per second, which even impresses my grandchildren, and it is free for a year.  But I have had a failure because of a new piece of hardware, one because of a server in the system, and now because of a faulty router.  Google has rapidly responded to these, and after all it is a Beta site, but I have spent considerable time on figuring out the system and switching wires around in the house (fortunately we have  kept our old service).  In fact, I am about to keep track of the time I spend learning about new software and hardware, as opposed to the time I spend using it.  I still have vivid memories of the time we switched from analog to digital TV, along with the rest of the country.  Digital is better.  But I spent a great deal of time talking to a recording of Shaq Oneal, which I guess was supposed to entertain me until I could get to the tree that switched me to a long wait until I could talk to a person, who often then arranged for a service person to visit me after a day or two.

I feel I am cognitively overloaded now, and I am not even social networking.  My old passwords and user names are found faulty, so I have to concoct new ones and figure out how to keep track of them.  My e-mail traffic is heavy, I have a blog and a web page to keep up.  Stanford just adopted a new web page format (Drupal), and I am learning it, and have just realized the incredible number of modules available, and that it is also a Beta site with sometimes marginal documentation.  Going beyond the internet and my computer, our house continues to fill with digital equipment, and our cars have increasingly complex and different electrical systems, and I both by nature and for economic reasons feel I have to be able to maintain such things.  And there is rapidly increasing access to interesting information and entertainment.  People are constantly sending me amusing written and visual material, websites, and you tube videos.  But as the internet becomes crowded with more and more information, I am finding that instead of becoming more useful, it becomes more difficult and takes more time to sort through.

My wife and I are hooked  on  the simulcasts of the New York Metropolitan Operat, the last one we saw being the six hour final sequence of Wagner’s Ring series (yes I saw the other three).  The good news is that to do this we have to drive only a mile, park 50 feet from the theatre for free, and pay $20 for a very comfortable seat with lots of leg room and lots of choice and watch a simply amazing performance with great sound and fantastic camera work, all the while nattily dressed in our levis and sweatshirts and equipped with a large bag of food and drink, in case we wanted to avoid the popcorn-to-Starbucks coffee menu in the lobby.  It is absolutely wonderful. I didn’t even know I was an opera fan.

 Of course I could avoid all of these distractions newly brought to me by advanced products of industry, but give me a break.  I don’t have the discipline to do that.  Neither do you!

Is multi tasking the answer?  Unfortunately not.  Not surprisingly to me, there is more and more evidence that multi-tasking is somewhat of a myth.  We can  think about more than one problem at a time if the solving of them is rote.  If not, the mind simply does a lousy job on both.  We are trapped into one conventional human brain.  Designers of products traditionally overestimate the ability of customers to use them, because designers, after all, understand the product very well (remember the Three Mile Island Reactor accident?  The designers understood the reactor, but the operators did not understand it well enough).  But generally, we are able to understand the individual components of the world in which we live.  Our trouble is with the sum of these components. My wife and I can easily set the time on a clock, especially if we have instructions..  It is just when we have a lot of clocks (which we do), some of them have “creative” controls (which some of them do) and it is time to switch between standard and daylight saving time, that we feel the limits of our mind.

And I already talked about remotes.  I am not looking forward to our “smart” house.

Product Quality and the Senses

Our perception of product quality has a great deal to do with the senses. Not only do we not want our products to be ugly, but we would like them to feel good, sound good, taste good, and smell good.  Sight is our dominant sense, and we have a fair vocabulary to describe our visual images.  We also have a good ability to work with visual images —look at the controls and tools on Photoshop.  But the information we get from our other senses is a bit more difficult to work with.  As an example, consider smell, an extremely important sense, in that it quickly summons up positive and negative reactions and is a strong memory stimulus. If you smell a turkey being cooked, for instance, it might remind  you of last thanksgiving.  The first exciting car I ever owned was a 1956 Austin Healy, which I acquired when I was a young and unfettered Air Force Officer.  I loved it greatly.  It had leather seats, and among its small problems (Lucas electrical system) it leaked oil.

I usually have owned a British sports car  since then.  I presently have a 1970 E-Jag sitting in my garage (Lucas electrical system again).  When I sit in it, I smell leaking oil and leather seats, and it takes me right back to my Austin Healey and  Air Force days.  Sometimes, if depressed, I go sit in my Jaguar.  It will, incidentally, be running by summer, although I must admit I said that last winter.

But most of us are much less equipped to deal with smell in the design of products.  In the case of food products, perfumes, and others where smell is a strong selling point, we are better.  Not only have the components that provide odors been carefully analyzed, but such businesses have access to "experts" who have trained their sense of smell, and a vocabulary to describe various odors.  If you have taken a wine course, you have taken the first step in such training.  But the rest of us are short on both vocabulary and knowledge of the mechanics.  Can  you describe the smell of a pineapple in words?  Do you know the  chemicals you would mix together to attain that smell?  How about the smell of oil and leather?  People have worked on such problems.  Used car dealers have spray cans of new car scent that they apply during detailing.  Real estate agents know that baking cookies in the oven before showing the house helps sell it.  But as far as I know, there are no squirt cans of cookie smell.

We are not even clear on the mechanics of smell.  We know about lenses, retinas, the mechanics of the pupil and the iris.  We know the location of the optic nerve and the area of the brain that turns impulses to images.  But what happens in smell?  If we smell dog poop, do dog poop molecules enter our nose?  If so, what happens then?  Are there specialized dog poop receptors, and if so, where does the signal go in the brain and what does the brain with it?  And our reactions vary among individuals.  I love to smell ground beef being cooked in the kitchen.  It reminds me of hamburgers, which I love, and picnics.  My wife doesn’t like to smell it.  It reminds her of unhealthy food and greasy deposits on the wall.

But even through the process of our sense of smell may be somewhat mysteriousto us,  we at least should be very careful that our products do not emit odors that are inconsistent with their nature, and offensive to us.

The students in the Stanford Good Products, Bad Products course read from Diane Ackerman’s book The Natural History of the Senses.  The link to its Amazon page is in the recommended book list on the right of the page.  It is a wonderfully written book that uses the English Language to describe the workings of, and effects of the senses.  I recommend it to all.  Writers must attempt to convey the results of sensory input to readers in words.  The rest of us have not had much practice in that.  We can measure the stimulus better than work with the response.

Stanford Good Products Bad Products course (ME 314) update #3

The students continue to read my Good Products, Bad Products book and for each chapter submit examples of good and bad products, guesses as to why the bad ones might be bad, and ideas of improving them.  Since the class is large, the amount of information is too large to include in  this blog.  But each of the student groups that will present the final summaries is reading all of the submissions having to do with their topics and giving us a short summary of them.  I will include one of the summaries for Craftsmanship here, one for Emotions and Needs here, and one for Aesthetics, Elegance and Sophistication here.

I will not include any of the good and bad product write ups from the students here, but I will include summaries of good and bad products from the 2011 class. Products showing good craftsmanship are here, and poorly crafted products are here.  Examples of good products as far as Emotions and Needs are here, and bad ones are here.  Some products considered beautiful are shown here. And some thought to be elegant are here.  Finally, here is a list of products that the students found to be repulsive!

During this time period, Peter Mondavi, the Co-proprietor of the Charles Krug Winery, was a guest speaker.  This is one of the older wineries in the Napa valley,  and is noted for the quality of its wine. The Krug home page is here. The class also read from the book Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman (Knopf Doubleday).  This is one of my favorite books, and I have added it to my recommended list to the right.    She is a wonderful writer and not only talks about the senses, but is able to convey their power through words and stories.

The class also took a field trip the Littlefield Collection of restored military vehicles.  Jacques Littlefield, who unfortunately died a couple of  years ago, was one of my favorite people.  I had the opportunity  to get to know him well because he was a student at Stanford when I joined the faculty in the 1960's, and one of the most regular customers of the student shop.  As projects, he made radio controlled model army tanks.  Upon graduation, he accepted a job in manufacturing at Hewlett Packard.  When he decided to retire in his late 20's, I realized that perhaps he had access to money, and indeed he did, being the son of Ed Littlefield, a billionaire. 

Jacques spend most of his life, effort, and quite a bit of money collecting and restoring military vehicles, especially tracked one.  By the time of his death he had put together not only the largest private collection of tanks in the world, but probably the most beautifully and accurately restored ones.  The collection consists of approximately 100 tanks, and another 100 military vehicles of other types.

The field trip was for several purposes.  The collection shows an amazing level of craftsmanship.  It also demonstrates the love of a person for machines.  Jacques had access to enough money to do anything he wanted to, and he elected to spend much of his life working on and understanding a particular tpe of industrial product.  The collection results in strong, and sometimes mixed, emotions, on the part of the students.  And finally, although brutal devices of war, the mechanisms involved often demonstrate a high degree of elegance.  Jacques also loved trains and other equipment, and his home was complete with one of the largest 7-1/2 inch gauge  model train layout on the west coast.  The San Francisco Live Steam club continues to hold forth there.  And he donated the beautiful organ in the Stanford chapel, and liked it and the people who manufactured it that he had one installed in a specially built addition to his house.  As usual, the trip was most successful.

 

 

 

Product Quality and Standardization

When I was in the U. S. Air Force, I often checked out vehicles from the Motor Pool.  I loved the standardization which allowed me to jump in and drive away.  There was usually an on-off ignition switch that was plainly marked.  There was a big red button on the dash, that if pushed would cause the engine to start.  Controls for lights, horn, etc. were plainly marked and different shapes and sizes.

 Contrast this with checking out a strange rental car at night at an unfamiliar airport.  I no longer simply head for the appropriate freeway as soon as I get the car started (not always obvious how to even do that any more).  I now carefully find and test the many controls having to do with everything from lights to emergency brake, and even throw in the navigation system, if it has one and I intend to use it.  I am tired of washing the windshield when I think I am dimming the lights, and trying to figure out the radio as I move into heavy traffic.  One could be killed that way.

Standardization seems to have disappeared.  It seems as though every team designing or upgrading a product wants to put its own improved features on or in it.  Hey, I figured out a way to combine de-fogging the windshield with opening the gas tank door!  Look, this way you can operate the horn with your foot!  Let’s make all of the buttons the same color and size and line them up in straight rows.  Oh, and let’s not have labels.  They will make the design too busy.

I have bad dreams about burning to death in the back seat of a friend’s car after an accident because I can’t figure out how to work the door handle. And speaking of gas tank doors, it’s nice to now have a little picture telling what side the door is on, but is there any reason they are not all on the same side?

The same, of course is true for many products.  Software needs more standardization.  I realize that it is a counter-capitalistic and heretical thing to say, but isn’t it about time that the operating systems on P.C.’s and Apples converged?  They are very similar now, and after all, Microsoft owns a sizable chunk of Apple.  The remaining differences just serve to further burden already overburdened brains.  And how about projector connectors?  Etc, etc, etc.

This photo shows one of the two “entertainment systems” in my house.  It is a real one, not the type featured in Architectural Digest, or Wired Magazine.  It consists of used, but highly serviceable components,  Note the remote controls under the TV.  One of them is a  “universal” remote, but of course it does not access many control functions on the individual components. We could control them manually, but for various reasons, two of the components, including the receiver, are those dark boxes on the lower right.  A close up of them is shown below:

 

These photos were taken with a floodlight.  Normally the room is quite dark, especially if TV is being watched.  In that lighting it is essentially impossible to make out the labels or the controls, or even find the manual switches, even if one is lying on the floor next to them.    I suppose the designer might have thought that the owner would use the equipment so continuously that manual operation,  when desired or necessary,  could be done by feel. 

Note the lack of clues on how to accomplish various tasks.  We keep the extra five remotes around for when we need to control components such as these without lying on the floor with a flashlight and a magnifying glass, and of course the remotes often stray. The ability to manually control components would be enhanced if I rebuilt the cabinet, but I don't seem to get around to it.  But woe be unto the visitor who tries  to operate this mess.  In fact, woe often unto us. 

The system performs well visually and acoustically, so I am not about to replace it.   It would not only cost money, but I spend too much of my time learning to use new digital stuff.   Besides, this system  reminds me of how not to design controls and labels on devices such as these that are used in normal homes such as ours.

Course Update #2 - Lecturers and Human Fit

The students in the Stanford Good Products, Bad Products course are now interacting with guest lecturers, reading  and discussing chapters of my book, and submitting examples of good and bad products on the topics of the book, beginning with Chapter 4, Human Fit. 

Recent Guest Lecturers were Dave Franchino, the President of Design Concepts, Inc, and Matt Lonoci, Founder and President of Matteo.  Franchino founded very successful design firm in Wisconsin after an equally successful career at General Motors, and is one of the more eloquent and thoughtful designers around.  Lonoci, after briefly working in the financial arena, founded a company that makes high quality fabric products, in particular bedding. He is not only a fascinating story teller about quality in a product area that stdents in the class are typically not familiar with, but also a strong proponent of local manufacturing and treating employees well.

A word about the student examples.  At the end of the quarter there will be presentations on each of the book topics, beginning with Chapter 4.  The first three chapters have been read and thoroughly discussed, but because of the time constraints of the class, the students will only submit examples for chapters 4 through 9.  Students will be giving more formal presentations in the form of media-based cases at the end of the quarter.  There will be four presentations on each topic by groups of four students.  As part of their preparation, these groups will read all of the student examples on their topic, evaluate them, and prepare summaries.

The best way I can describe the student work is to show you examples by linking  you to four pages concerning human fit.  The first one is an overview from one of the student groups on the concerns appearing in the student examples of good and bad human fit.  The second contains three examples considered to show good and bad human fit (students were limited to a paragraph on each example).  The third a list of products considered good  by the students of last year's class, and the fourth a list of the those displaying bad human fit by them.    I include last year's because I have not yet compiled the overall lists for the 2012 class.

Of course, I would expect different populations to submit different types of products.  Perhaps home owners would nominate more appliances, pieces of furniture, and yard equipment, and older people might have more concern for comfort and more difficulty in seeing tiny print from a distance and folding their bodies into small volumes.  And incidentally, we told last year's class not to include Apple products, and software of any sort, because they are so central to the life of students that they would have dominated the lists. Of course some of them disobeyed us.

The reason for these exercises is to cause the students to do some hard thinking about issues of quality—in particular to practice applying the material in the book and other readings, and that they have picked up by interacting with the lecturers.

 

Perceived Product Quality, Pricing, Sales, and Discounts

In Chapter 3 of  my Good Products, Bad Products book,  I argued that high quality products should not be insulted by the “40% off for a limited time”, or “buy one, get one free” mentality that seems to be so wide spread in the U.S.  Perhaps this mentality, that apparently causes people to line up outside stores on “Black Friday” and other such "sale" days well before the store opens, may be beginning to ebb.  J.C. Penney, a store that has had hundreds of sales per year for the past few years (590 last year), has just announced that it is going to lower all of its prices by 40 %, and offer only “monthly value” discounts on selected merchandise each month, and clearance deals called “best price” the first and third Friday of each month.  Obviously, the every-day low prices at competitors such as Walmart have hurt them, and although some shoppers seem to love the “oh boy” nature of constant sales, others (me) find this approach to shopping a real pain.  And of course, one always wonders where stores get the “full price” from which they cut.  Apparently, last year approximately 70% of Penney’s revenue came from merchandise that was discounted by 50% or more.

I for one, am delighted to see this move at Penney’s happen, whether it works or not.  It is time to experiment with rational, constant, and simpler pricing (I am also tired of prices ending in 99 cents).

But Penny’s is certainly not the only merchandiser in this “sale” mode.  The last time I bought a vehicle, I had found what I wanted, which although relatively low cost, had the high reliability, decent fuel mileage, and lack of feature creep that I wanted.  To me the quality for the price was high. Armed with all the pricing information I could glean from various sources, and awareness of all of the strange and arguable fees that appear on window stickers, I approached a sales person at a dealer that had been recommended to me.  He was, in fact, both knowledgeable and reasonable, and after dealing with the questionable nature of invoice prices, installed extras I did not want, and various items that were actually kick backs to the dealer, we  arrived at a price I thought reasonable. I did not want to finance the vehicle, so I would have happily paid the amount and left with the vehicle.  But, at that point, after telling me that it was too bad that I had just missed a sale which would have lowered the price $1500, he told me he could give me that “discount” if I financed the vehicle.  I told him again that I did not want to finance it, but now I was not as happy with the price, even though I know that much of the profit in the automobile business is from financing, so it was not surprising that they were trying to talk me into financing the purchase.

 He then told me that if I financed it for the minimum loan (also $1500) there was no charge, and I could go right home and send in a check for $1500 and pay off my loan, thus saving $1500 on the vehicle  At that point I realized that the U.S. approach to sales was going to triumph, even though the vehicle was a foreign brand .  I filled out the forms for a $1500 loan, went home and mailed in my check, and soon got many e-mail messages from many levels of the company thanking me for paying off my loan, buying from them, etc.  But a month or so later I started getting letters from banks informing me that I did not qualify for the loan. 

After many phone calls and e-mail messages I found out that the company was seeking to sell my loan at a lower rate than I was to pay (standard procedure) and somehow the letters that were supposed to go to the company refusing to buy the loan at the terms the company was proposing were coming to me.

Obviously the negotiation between the company and various banks did not affect me much, since I had already “paid off” the loan. It was due to lags in communication within the system, obviously acceptable if I had taken years to pay off the loan, and confusion between my name and address and that of the dealer.  But after I purchased the vehicle, I was also overwhelmed by a tsunami of obviously automatic e-mail messages from the dealer and many levels of the company thanking me for my purchase, asking me to use their service and parts centers,  asking me to fill out detailed questionnaires on my satisfaction with my treatment while buying the car and with the car itself, and attempting to sell me more cars. 

Did this behavior decrease my perception of the quality of the product?  Sure.  It took my time and tried my patience. And despite the excellent work of the sales person,  I felt that if the dealer and company were playing this strange game with apparent, but not real financing, were unable to channel letters from banks to the right parties, and were unable to do a reasonable job of controlling their promotional e-mail, maybe there might be something wrong with the vehicle also.

  Fortunately, it is behaving well.  Thankfully, the people who design and manufacture the vehicles have different DNA from those who try to talk you into financing, can't control their correspondence,  and send you automatic and unwanted love letters that add to your e-mail load.

 

Global Quality

Pardon my lack of posts, but I have been helping my publisher make people aware of the Good Products, Bad Products book and drowning in the examples of good and bad products flooding in from the students.  In a few days  I will hopefully be in control and begin forwarding some to you.

But I  have just had another indication of active searching for quality from abroad.  Since I am not one of the population that includes names like Danielle Steel and Jim Collins, my books take a while to become known.  My publisher (and I) are just now working on this problem.  It used to be that publishers did all of the work, but now that there is so much information on the internet,  so many self-published and other types of "books" available, and perhaps less tendency to read books anyway, publishers are asking for all the help they can get.  But a couple of weeks ago, shortly after the book hit the stores and while I was still feeling that no one had noticed yet,  I received notification that a Korean publisher had bought the rights to it in Korea.

When people in the U.S. began to accept the fact that Japan was beginning to produce higher quality products than equivalent ones from some U.S. companies, that were a large number of reasons given, including the influence of W. Edwards Deming, and Joseph M. Juran.  Obviously the fine hand of U.S. citizens at work.  When we read of the high quality of Apple products designed in China, we visualize U.S. Apple employees closely overseeing the workers and the process. But what are we to make of the products of Samsung, Kia, and Hyundai?  More difficult to give credit for their rapidly improving and often excellent quality to U.S. people.  To me the evidence is overwhelming that the understanding of the importance of high overall product quality is global, and companies in all countries who are spending more thought and effort towards achieving it will win.  But I admit to being biased.