I wanted to give my boyfriend a Kanken backpack as a gift. I know he always wanted one, so it should be a very safe gift. But what color? When asked, he said he wasn’t sure.
Could I help? I asked myself.
What can I do to help him make a decision of the color of this Kanken backpack without rushing him, and more importantly, while making him that he knew it was his own decision?
I thought of what I learned in a psychology class, a psyc of crime course actually. In one part of the course, we learned about methods that could reduce the false identification rate of eye-witnesses. You might know that in some police practices, the police would layout images of five to six suspects and ask the eye witness to choose one, while some other police practices show the eyewitnesses images of suspects one image, asks the eyewitness if that is the violater, and then show the eyewitness the next photo.
One of the criminal justice theories back at the time indicated that when the eyewitnesses were shown images at the same time (in a simultaneous lineup), it was much more likely for them to false-identify — meaning picking someone who was innocent and sending them to jail: in a lot of cases, the perpetrator wasn’t even in the lineup! And the eyewitness felt “compelled” to choose one from the simultaneous pile. To reduce such false convictions, the police practices moved to sequential lineups, where witnesses see one image after another instead of “choosing one from a pile which might not even include the real perpetrator.” However, researchers in studies later found that — although the false conviction rate dropped — the correct identification rate also lowered. They asked the question if the lowering of one had to come with another. It turned out not to be the case. I’ll reveal the conclusion here: both could be better-managed:
- When witnesses are shown a collection of images at the same time (in a simultaneous lineup), their ability to compare and discern facial characters is better-activated. This effect is explained by a study titled “Diagnostic feature-detection hypothesis” (Wixted & Mickes, 2014).
- What about this “pressure” that eye-witnesses receive that they “have to pick one” from the pile? This could be easily reduced when the police practitioners emphasize to the witnesses, that “the real perpetrator may not be in this lineup. You don’t have to pick someone from these images if you are not ___% sure” (the threshold — aka the amount of pressure given to the witness could be set for different purposes).
With all that seemingly unrelated (and overwhelming) information, I wanted to be able to at least incorporate my understanding of how this simultaneous presentation could help people make decisions, to some degree.
Currently, on Kanken’s website (like many other e-commerce sites), you see a list of colors for the same item.
However, you could only click on one of the colors one by one to see how it’d look like (on the left). To me, this is like a sequential lineup. Each time I see a backpack in a given color, I have to ask myself: Do I like this color? Instead of its current presentation, what if I could help multiple backpacks in different colors present at the same time to compare and make decisions?
From a study on people choosing food, more than 100 participants were asked to choose between three different foods that changed over multiple rounds. Evidence suggested that people did not distribute their attention equally, but “increasingly focused on the two options that they found most promising,” which led to faster decision-making. I decided to create a tool that’d help my boyfriend pick out a color — by comparing two backpacks at a time and ultimately, the path could take him to one backpack. Like how a tennis game picks out the best player — the elimination system.
Here is how the logic of this tool looks like. Let’s suppose that there are 5 backpacks in total. Since not all backpacks could be put in pairs with this odd number, one of the colors could directly enter round two. Another way to do this is to always compare the winner of the preceding pair with the next color in line.
To program this tool, I picked something I was familiar with — Qualtrics. As a survey platform, Qualtrics allows me to set up logic and rules that could lead my user (the boyfriend) to his final desired pick of color.
First, the system would ask him to pick out his preference from several pairs.
After pairs of images of plain colors were all shown and selected, he’d come to a point where he could choose to conclude the session or continue (to see more backpacks, usually with mismatched color blocks).
He’d then have the chance to see the other color-patterned backpacks at a glance and decide if they’d like to proceed. If so, he’d come to do things similar to what he had done earlier.
Unless he chose “I don’t like these as much as the ones I saw earlier,” he’d be taken down the path of comparing these backpacks with each other. Finally, the winner of this series would be compared to the one from the previous series.
Ultimately, a final choice would be delivered to him.
What do you think of this tool? I asked him.
“I always knew I wanted a plain, black one.”
