No one is average
Stop designing for the average, it could endanger people’s lives.
To summarise the point, there’s a great story from the podcast above (well worth a listen!), here’s an abridged version:
“Your world has not been designed for you. In large part, it has been designed for the average person. Throughout your education, you’ve been given standardized tests and been graded by how well you perform compared to the average. Building codes, insurance rates, the Dow Jones — all these measurements are based around the concept of an average.
So in 1926 when the Army was designing its first-ever fighter plane cockpit, engineers measured the physical dimensions of hundreds of male pilots and used this data to standardize cockpit dimensions. The size and shape of the seat, the distance to the pedals and the stick, the height of the windshield, even the shape of the flight helmets, were all made to conform to the average male pilot.
Pilots were dying all the time. Even after the world war II ended, just in training, they could not control their planes. It became kind of part of the culture of the Air Force, it’s just really dangerous to fly. After blaming the pilots, the training programs, and the technology, it finally dawns on them what if it’s the cockpit? Maybe it doesn’t fit us anymore.
Of the 4,063 pilots measured, not a single airman was close to average in all of the 10 dimensions. None. And it got even worse. If you just used three dimensions of size, less than 5% of the pilots were average on those.
So if you are designing something for an average pilot, it’s literally designed to fit nobody.
Air force engineers and contractors designed adjustable foot pedals and adjustable helmet straps and flight suits and adjustable seats. Once all the adjustable elements and other design solutions were put into place, pilot performance soared.”
Check your incentives
An example of poor data choices in the car industry
Cars have been designed by men for a long time (since 1888 in fact). Even though many women buy and drive cars (an early land speed record in 1905 was by a women) and in 2002 GM’s market research discovered that women influenced 85% of car purchasing decisions. This lack of diversity in design can have very serious implications for safety.
Lets take the fact that cars tend to be designed around the average size and weight of a man, because this is the way it’s always been done, 8 out of 10 car designers are men and crash test dummies (for which the manufacturer needs to get a good score) is an average man. I’m a man, so I think like a man…
The problem with designing for the average man, is that the average man is just that, a man. He’s not also the average women. By only considering the average man, we’ve accidentally designed a product that is much more dangerous for the average women.
But cars are adjustable. They are not the aircraft of the 1930s-60s. So why would designing them for an average man be such a problem?
The problem is, the measure against which all cars are compared, the incentive for the whole car industry to improve… is a definitive average man. The crash test dummy.
Taken from Caroline Criado Perez’s fabulous book “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” (which should be compulsory reading for everyone) and a great Guardian article by her on the subject:
“When a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seatbelt usage, and crash intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die. And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom.
Women tend to sit further forward when driving… Women are “out of position” drivers. And our wilful deviation from the norm means that we are at greater risk of internal injury on frontal collisions. The angle of our knees and hips as our shorter legs reach for the pedals also makes our legs more vulnerable. Essentially, we’re doing it all wrong.
Women are also at higher risk in rear-end collisions. We have less muscle on our necks and upper torso, which make us more vulnerable to whiplash (by up to three times), and car design has amplified this vulnerability. Swedish research has shown that modern seats are too firm to protect women against whiplash injuries: the seats throw women forward faster than men because the back of the seat doesn’t give way for women’s on average lighter bodies.
The reason this has been allowed to happen is very simple: cars have been designed using car crash-test dummies based on the “average” male.”
So whilst most women have been excluded completely, most men are also at risk. If the test dummy is an average man and the car is designed to keep the test dummy safe. Then by the same logic no one is safe.
Memory is formed at the end.
A person’s lasting memory of an event is defined by how it ends, not by what happens during it.
Daniel Kahneman (the ‘father’ of behaviour economics) has observed in his research that there are two types of thinking, the experience thinking that is only interested in the present and how you are feeling right now. The other is your memory, how you remember the experiences you’ve had.
What’s fascinating is that they are not closely linked. Watch his great TED talk here for a fuller explanation but one aspect that is deeply fascinating for designers is the fact that how something ends is the important part of the event.
In the experiments he talks about, 2 patients underwent the same painful procedure:
Patient 1 had intense pain but only for a short period, the procedure ended quickly and with that the pain disappeared.
Patient 2 had the same intense pain, but instead of the surgeon ending the procedure quickly, they took a few more minutes to finish. In those few extra minutes the patient experienced more pain but at a lower level than at the start.
Asked about their experiences, patient 2 had a better memory of the event and would more likely recommend it to others. Patient 1 had a terrible memory of the procedure even though objectively they suffered less than patient 2.
How do we apply this in design or business?
Let’s suppose we’re designing a package holiday, maybe we should try and build the included visits, tours and events so that we are always ending on a high? “Save the best till last” as the expression goes.
What if a customer is having a bad experience at our restaurant or university program? ;-)
Reducing the pain towards the end even if we cant completely reverse the experience will give us the best chances of a favourable outcome. Free pudding at the end of a meal, more student freedom in their final year, etc…
Something to think about. I’m not sure how this clashes with the idea of “first impressions” and perhaps both are equally important but for different things. A good first impression makes people more forgiving if the reality underdelivers whilst a good last impression sticks in the memory and encourages people to return.