Elf Sternberg

The Muse Headband has a dark behaviorist pattern hidden in its app, and I'm pissed

2019-02-01T17:31:01Z

Last night, while meditating with my Muse headband, I encountered one of those Dark Behaviorist Patterns that are, to my thinking, one of the worst problems we have with apps and our networked world today.

The Muse Headband is gamified. I have no problem with gamification in general; I think it's an excellent documentation pattern, and done well is one of the best ways to get people to use your product effectively. But "done well" means done with the user's interests in mind; "done well" means executed with kindness and compassion for the user's time and patience.

The gamification pattern for Muse is straightforward. While using it, it categorizes your brain state into one of four ranges: agitated, neutral, calm, and deep calm. There's a main score, and for that score it gives you 1 point for every second you're "neutral" and 3 points for every second you're "calm." It also has a score for how many times you transition out of "agitated," and another for how much time you spend in "deep calm," but that main score is the big deal. Depending on various scores, you get badges, like any gamified environment.

Since I usually meditate for 25 minutes (booking a half hour, with setup and teardown), my theoretical high score is 25⨯60⨯3 or 4500. Yesterday I hit 4400.

I got three familiar badges: "Marathon" (meditated for more than 20 minutes, which I get pretty much every day), "Lucidity," (calm for more than 20 minutes), "Birds of Eden" (persistent deep calm). I've gotten other badges, including the one labeled "Perfect Timing," which is awarded when you meditate for 10 minutes or more, but experience less than 60 seconds of "calm," and "Wanderlust," which happens when your mind starts to become agitated late in the session, indicating boredom and a lack of focus.

But I got one unfamiliar badge: "Precision Shooter." I looked up the description: "Your score was exactly 4400." I went and looked back in my history; I'd received this score once before, for a score of 2900. "Precision Shooter" is awarded when your score is evenly divisible by 100.

That's not just a terrible metric, it's a psychologically manipulative one. Nobody's going to train their brain for that kind of precision. It's not just a meaningless badge, it's one that's awarded out of sheer luck.

When psychology students do the rat behavior reinforcement experiment, they divide the rats into three groups: continuous reinforcement, fixed ratio reinforcement, and variable reinforcement. The first get a food pellet every time they press a button; the second get a food pellet every fifth press; the third set get a food pellet after a random number of presses. It could be two in a row, or it could take fifteen or more presses until the food comes out.

Then the researcher turn off the levers.

The first group of rats gives up pretty quickly. It worked, and now it doesn't. The second group gives up after a little while longer. The third group never gives up. Never. The behavior pattern lingers for months. The rats' brains have become addicted to the reward system itself and they'll keep slamming that lever even when they're not hungry.

"Precision Shooter" is a variable reinforcement mechanism. It only happens at random intervals because you meditate. It's meaningless in terms of one's progress (whatever "progress" means to Muse), but it is a form of manipulation meant to make you to come back and try again. And because it's tied to an observable metric, it feels like an "achievement," so the initial hook is powerful, even if that metric isn't one over which you can exert any actual control.

"Precision Shooter" is a Dark Behaviorist Pattern, and Muse should remove it from the product.

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Terrible Industrial Design: An Example

2014-07-25T04:01:23Z

What you're seeing here is the console of my car, a Subaru Outback 2014, directly above my left knee. There are two buttons side by side.

The one on the left is called Hill Holder, and it's a lifesaver for Seattle drivers. I have a manual transmission, and on Seattle's hills a manual transmission should be a nightmare, but hill holder makes hills simple: whenever the car is being driven on an upward slope and comes to a complete stop, hill holder automatically applies the brakes, and when I apply the gas it releases the brakes in a smooth transition to driving. It's a freaking miracle of modern science.

The one on the right is the ordinary parking brake. You know, the brake you leave applied whenever you park your car and leave it. It's essential that the button be available for manual cars because hill holder doesn't detect downward slopes, nor slopes too gradual to be problematic.

We have two buttons, side-by-side, down in an obscure, out-of-the-way corner of your dashboard. One of them you press every time you drive your car. The other you should never, ever have to press. The button's only purpose for being there is to deactivate hill-holder should you need to tow the car.

I am now in the habit of having to check, every time I start the car, to make sure I have not accidentally deactivated hill-holder. I should not have to make that check. But I do, because some engineer at Subaru didn't think far enough ahead about this incredibly useful feature.

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The Logitech Bluetooth Keyboard: A design lesson mislearned.

2013-01-14T13:04:26Z

One of the things that I've been paying a lot of attention to recently is the design of everything things that I use. One thing that I've been using a lot, recently, is the Logitech Bluetooth Keyboard for the Apple iPad. And one thing that I've noticed is that there is one piece of very poor design on an otherwise excellent product: that poor design is the power indicator.

The keyboard has exactly one LED on it to tell you when it's in use. This tiny little green light, barely the size of a period on this page, highlights when you turn the device on and then fades away when it pairs with the iPad. When I separate the keyboard from the tablet the light doesn't come back on, but the keyboard keeps draining its battery. This is a design failure.

I was watching a documentary about Johnny Ive, the famous designer who works at Apple, and he was talking about the light on the side of their laptops that glows when the machine is in sleep mode, but fades out when you open the laptop. "That light," he said, "is only there when it's indicating something to the user." It indicates whether or not the laptop is ready to use, and nothing else. If you're using the laptop, there's no question of its readiness, so the light fades away.

The Logitech people saw only that the light faded away when you started using the laptop, and made the wrong assumption: The light fades out to indicate you're using the product..

The problem with this then becomes obvious: the keyboard has no alternative indicator. The power switch is cleverly hidden low on the right side of the keyboard. There is no way, looking at the keyboard itself in its normal orientation, to know if you're draining the battery. The indicator is failing in its duty: to indicate to the user information the user really needs.

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