AM+A has more than 30 years as a leading firm in user-interface development (planning, research, design, implementation, evaluation, documentation, and training) for Web, mobile, vehicle, and desktop applications in consumer and professional products/services.
Aaron Marcus lectures around the world on critical issues, best practices, and future trends in user-interface design. AM+A serves the mobile, vehicle, finance, medical, travel, and music industries among others. AM+A builds solutions that let people experience the full usability, usefulness, and appeal of products/services through intelligent design. Visit Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc., at its Website: www.AMandA.com
Aaron is my guest next week on the podcast and we discussed one of his latest ventures the Machine Project
Podcast excerpt:
Joe: Tell me a little bit more about the machine project. Can you explain what they are and how they work.
Aaron Marcus: I was very much moved by attending a conference that BJ Fogg at Stanford happened to be running in 2008 or 2009 called Persuasive Technologies I believe. I was introduced to a number of projects for desktop computers and mobile phones etc. as platforms to help change behavior of people to get them to lose weight or to stop smoking or to take their medicines when they’re supposed to. I became quite intrigued with this idea and felt that mobile devices – phones primarily at that time – would be an excellent way to help change people’s behavior. Reading through Fogg’s theories and Robert Cialdini’s theories on the science of persuasion as well as Abraham Maslow’s theories on basic human needs, we put together a concept for helping to change people’s energy conservation behavior.
We tried to do some competitive analysis of current products at the time which were mostly oriented to the PC – not to mobiles phones – and envisioned an architecture mental model for the functions and the kind of data that it would have that would bring about this change of behavior. Now one of the key things about all of our machine concepts – and we’ve done now ten of them – is that they all embody five fundamental components I’ll call them. One of them is a dashboard to understand where you are in a journey, in this case to save energy or to tell more stories or to be more innovative. So a dashboard is one thing. The second thing is a roadmap or a world view that tells you or reminds you about where you came from and where you’re going. The dashboard tells you “how am I doing on the road.” The third aspect is focused social networks. Not all 500 or 5,000 of your Facebook or LinkedIn friends, but who are the five to ten people – family members, personal friends – who really care about your journey and can contribute support or specific information. The fourth component we call just-in-time knowledge. It’s again not the results of all possible internet searches on a particular topic but what is really useful to me to know right now where I am on my journey, whatever the subject matter is. And the fifth component and very, very important is incentives. That means all the rewards, awards, games, nostalgia shocks, workshops, whatever it takes to keep people motivated and interested.
For each of the different subject matters we have developed these five components and embodied them in specific screen designs which we’ve published. These are conceptual designs. They are not commercial products. We try to interest clients in the subject matter and see if they would like us to work with them to bring one of these products into being. This worked well with SAP Enterprise Software Company that saw our Green Machine project, brought us in-house, and we worked with them for a quarter of a year to create further more advanced prototypes oriented to enterprise users, not to home energy savers. We consulted with them on the incorporation of persuasion design and sustainability into enterprise software. So from our point of view that worked pretty well. We have been trying to since then find other clients for some of the other topics.
For example, we did a Health Machine to try to change people’s behavior about exercise and nutrition to avoid obesity and type 2 diabetes. We did a Money Machine that helped retiring baby boomers save and spend money appropriately for the rest of their lives. We did the Story Machine which I mentioned to increase storytelling from grandparents to parents to children. We did a Travel Machine which helped turn routine leisure and business tourists into cultured tourists to better understand the people they’re actually with. We’ve done The Leaning Machine to improve online education. We’ve done The Driving Machine to improve driver safety and also sustainability. We recently worked on The Happiness Machine which is making people happier through mobile devices. We’ve just finished, probably the final one for a while, called The Marriage Machine which is really intended for all kinds of committed couples to improve the relationships between people.
In each of these different subject matters we investigate the relevant subject matter theory, we combine it with information design and visualization and also persuasion design to put together very specific screens, example screens that show quite specifically how this would all function. Now I’ve got to admit they’re fakes. They’re not functioning prototypes. But they show any team of people what could be done and suggest the benefits of doing something like this. Those are the ten machines, and I’m in the process of putting together a book that summarizes all of our work over the past five years on these machine projects.
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