unknown unknowns

Choice architecture and public transport etiquette

Problem: many people - men in particular - fear offering up a seat on the tube/subway/metro for fear of confusing a pregnant lady with a non-pregnant fat lady. The result is that it's prefereable to be inconsiderate to the expectant mother than risk offending the merely overweight. 

Solution: London Underground came up with this genius bit of choice architecture to help us all: a button badge that broadcasts your status as mum-to-be. If I know you're definitely pregnant, I can offer my seat risk-free.

PPP

The data of dating

Really interesting post from the blog of dating site, OkCupid, about what makes a successful profile picture (HT @bud_caddell). They're beginning to get a name for themselves for this kind of thoughtful analysis (you might have seen "Exactly what to say in a first message". It's more amusing than it sounds. Honest.) Apparently, "We do a lot of math on OkCupid—most of it to help people get dates."

Amongst a pile of charts that confound The Four Myths of Profile Pictures, they reveal that the following pictures' owners received far more responses than average, despite having unremarkable profiles and despite not showing their faces:

As they say: "The pictures do all the work: in different ways, they pique the viewer’s curiosity and say a lot about who the subject is (or wants to be)." Which is another way of saying, it pays to be interesting.

The other point of note is that in performing the analysis, the site actually used human judgement. Alongside a slew of data analysis, 7140 profile pictures were tagged by hand. And rechecked before running the analysis. Impressive. It implies what feels correct: that automated data crunching alone will only get you part of the picture. No pun intended.

Looking forward to the next piece of dating data mining.

Learning by doing: CSS

Please excuse the somewhat idiosyncratic design elements, here and next door at unknown unknowns. I'm still getting my head around CSS. And Typepad formatting has some sort of AI that means it is very good at imposing its own opinions.

At least, that's the story I'm sticking to.

Normal service will established. One day.

Now in 3D

Not a lot to say about this, really.

It's a 3D map of Golden Lane Estate.