99% Invisible - 369- Wait Wait...Tell Me!

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

Waiting is something that we all do every day, but our experience of waiting, varies radically depending on the context. And it turns out that design can completely change whether a five minute wait feels reasonable or completely unbearable. Transparency is key. Wait Wait...Tell Me!

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Today, there are thousands of vacant homes all throughout Detroit. The motor city has been shrinking since the 1950s, but many of these vacancies stem from a decade ago when the financial crisis devastated the city. As I drove around, I'd seen abandoned home on almost every block. That's reporter Angus Chen, who we recently sent to Detroit. Many of these houses are still in good enough condition for someone to fix up and turn into a home. But a lot of them are damaged beyond repair.

Without caretakers, they're roof-sacked in and their foundations crumbled, and their walls turned black from fire. And so, in 2014, Detroit started a city-wide demolition program to take down the houses that couldn't be fixed. The city estimated they had about 40,000 homes to demolish. Orlando Bailey is a community organizer from the east side of Detroit and he says the program's rollout was chaotic. They were really building the plan as they fly and I'm quoting a city official who said something like that at the time. Houses were coming down all over the city, but for a lot of residents they couldn't come down fast enough.

Orlando says people in his neighborhood were pulling their hair out, hoping that the house next door would get demolished sometime soon. And what made it worse was they couldn't get any information from the city, explaining when it was going to happen. It was an acute level of frustration. Frustration with really just not being armed with the knowledge of how something that is affecting everybody in the city is working. And when the city struggled to provide information to residents, they would come to Orlando with questions. I remember my phone ringing on the hood all the time.

Can you say some of those questions? There's this house on my block, it's been vacant for years. Is it coming down? So if the house is torn down, next to me, can I buy the lot? I don't know if you can buy the lot yet. I don't know. I can't really imagine how mad I am, you must have felt.

Being in limbo, and it's a tough place to be. It was a crazy time. The residents of Orlando's neighborhood were experiencing a lot of anxiety about the economic situation in the city generally, and the fact that so many of the houses on their blocks were empty and falling apart. But the thing that was getting people to pick up the phone in Colorado was the act of waiting itself.

The sentiment that I hear over and over again is how long must I wait? Waiting is something that we all do every day. We wait for our food to come and our operating systems to update. We wait for our food to come and our operating systems to update. We wait for our friends to call and our crushes to text us back. Our experience of waiting and how we feel about it varies radically depending on the context. And it turns out that design can completely change whether a five minute wait feels reasonable

or completely unbearable. For the Detroit residents waiting for abandoned houses to come down, the experience was pretty unbearable. For the Detroit residents waiting for abandoned houses to come down, the experience was pretty unbearable. And so the city set out to design a solution for them. And to do that, they turned to a body of research that offers insights into the strange psychology of waiting. The research didn't come from studying city government. It came from studying the particular frustration that people feel when they're waiting for a computer to load.

Push a button and the words and images you see on the screen appear on paper. Oh, thank you. You know Fred, I think everybody on the road should see this. In the early 1980s, computers were just becoming popular in offices for the first time. And companies like Xerox were making work faster. Push another button, and the information is sent electronically to similar units around the corner or around the world. And in 1981, Xerox came out with its latest, quickest, top-of-the-line machine, an office computer called the Xerox Star. The Star was one of the first machines that allowed people to connect and share files

and do things at a speed that they really hadn't done before. The star was one of the first machines that allowed people to connect and share files and do things at a speed that they really hadn't done before. This is Jason Farman. He's a professor at the University of Maryland, and he wrote a book about waiting called the lead response. And he says that even though the star was one of the fastest computers of its time, it didn't feel fast. Overwhelmingly people felt that it was a slow machine. Overwhelmingly, the

sentiment was that it took forever, it took forever to load, it took forever to exchange files. And that perception of slowness may have had something to do with the design of loading icons. These early computers like the Star were the first to use them. On the Star, the mouse cursor would turn into a static hourglass icon. Macintosh's from the same time had a wristwatch icon that was stuck on 9 o'clock. Every single time you saw the hourglass or the wristwatch, you knew you had to wait again. So you get the busy watch, but you don't know if it's actually making progress or not? That's Brad Myers. He's a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University,

and he says that the problem with the watch was it gave you no sense of how long you would be waiting for. It might finish soon, it might not finish at all. And remember, you can't use the computer for other things. So really, the only option is to sit there and watch nothing happen or the cursor blink. I mean, that's to me, that sounds terrible. Exactly. Eventually, computer programmers started animating

loading icons to try to reassure the user that something was going on inside that mystery box. Apple introduced a spinning black and white pinwheel. Eventually, there were wristwatches with hands that moved and hourglasses with little falling pixels of sand. These new loading icons may have been more interesting to look at, but Jason Farman says

they didn't fix the underlying problem. Here I'm trying to use my time well, but I can't control that because I'm waiting. Somebody is making me wait or a system is making me wait and I don't know when it's going to end. It is this deep feeling of powerlessness, I think. Around this time, Brad Myers had just finished his bachelor's degree at MIT, and he was working at a tech company. While he was struggling with these new loading icons, he remembered that older computers from the 1970s had a very simple way to let users know that the computer was working.

Dots. Not unusual for programs in the 70s to print out a dot on the screen every now and then, so you would know that it's at least making progress. And the dots came at regular intervals, like one every seconds. So it would go dot dot dot right. And so then you'd say oh well must be making progress I keep seeing dots. And eventually you might have a sense for well, must be making progress, I keep seeing dots. And eventually, you might have a sense for, well, this is a fairly long program I'm expecting three rows of dots, or this will be a whole screen full of dots.

Myers says that having that little bit of information about the progress the computer was making made the experience of waiting much more bearable. So he reasoned that new computers needed a way to let the user know how long something might take. A progress bar. We're all familiar with this. The bar fills up as the computer works, showing how much of the task is completed. And Maya says the first progress bars were a huge improvement. Just by seeing how quickly the bar filled up, users could guess how long the computer would take to finish the job.

You can say, okay, well, it the computer would take to finish the job. Myers started programming progress bars into everything he did. Then when he went back to graduate school to get his PhD, he actually studied progress bars and found that people really liked them. They made people less anxious. Myers published his findings in 1985 and people took notice. Progress bars started remove the worry. Maya's published his findings in 1985, and people took notice. Progress bars started popping up everywhere. People were so enthusiastic about this, because they finally got some feedback in a way that

this hourglass didn't give them. But there was one scenario where the progress bar failed, when the computer was stalled right at the very end. Progress bars gave users an accurate depiction of how much a task had been completed at any given time. And so, if the first 10% loaded in 10 seconds, then well, you'd think, well, the whole thing should be over in about 100 seconds, except it didn't always take 100 seconds. Sometimes the computer would slow down over some computational speed bump.

The progress bar would be sailing along and stall at 99% and you'd end up feeling completely betrayed. You leave the experience much more frustrated than you would if you just had this opaque buffering icon spinning in your browser. That revealed something really key about the psychology of waiting. Why things often feel slower than they really are? It's all about our expectations. And this is true on our computers and it's true at lines at Disneyland You look at it. It tells you how long it's gonna take and you set an expectation and when you get to the front of the line

Faster than you thought you were going to or when that particular piece of software loads faster than you thought it was going to, you leave the encounter feeling positive. That realization about expectations led designers to a new idea. A loading bar that had nothing to do with how much work the computer had done. Instead, it was designed just to make the weight feel better. It would always start off slow to set your expectations for a fairly long weight and then speed up at the end, so that the user ends up feeling pleasantly surprised. So that's one way that designers have given people

a sense of beating expectation and they leave the encounter feeling good about the experience. Wow, that was fast. This front loaded loading bar tricked you into feeling like you were waiting for less time than you actually were. And in the 21st century, that idea of trying to manipulate the user's experience of time really took off, especially with big online retail companies whose profits depended on

keeping customers on their website. Amazon had done a study that showed that if customers on average are forced to wait a tenth of a second they could lose up to 1% of their revenue. When you've got that many people feeling frustrated enough to leave your site because of the delays that are there, you're just talking a massive amount of money. Companies like Google and Amazon started pouring millions of dollars into speeding up their websites and engineering them so they would run faster.

And as things got faster, we expected them to always be that fast. That made us notice more and more minute delays. And so, people running websites were basically locked into this constant race of trying to make those weights smaller and smaller, or at least feel smaller and smaller. But there were some companies that just couldn't keep up with the internet's rapidly accelerating pace.

Travel websites, for example, needed their customers to wait several seconds while they searched for tickets. That might not sound long, but a few seconds can feel like an eternity online. For comparison, search engines like Google were loading results in less than a second. But one travel website designed a solution to waiting that would have impacts outside the digital world and would eventually find its way into the offices of the city government of Detroit. I came across this company, Kayak, right? Which is an online travel search engine

that I think many people will be very familiar with. This is Ryan Buel, a professor at the Harvard Business School. He says that Kayak couldn't avoid making its customers' weight. They actually have to do a fresh query every time a customer wants to find a ticket, which meant that it was inevitable that Kayak would have to make its customers wait,

as all travel search engines do. Kayak was trying to figure out what they could show their customers while they waited, and Bill says that the solution they came up with completely changed the way he understood waiting. They just said, hey, look, you know, why don't we just show them what we're doing? Instead of a progress bar, kayak designed an animation that showed the user not only what percentage of the job had been completed, but exactly what the search algorithm was doing

as it was doing it. Now we're searching United Airlines. Now we're searching American Airlines and you can watch the prices fall as tickets come in that have better rates. This was the first time that I had ever seen an organization really deliberately design a window into the operation. This little animation gave the user something that none of the other loading designs could. Radical transparency. When we make the process transparent to people, when we show people the work that's going on behind the scenes, it completely changes the way that we think about the weight in general.

Instead of thinking of waiting as robbing you of your time, suddenly you are spending your time on something worthwhile. In this case, users could see all the work that Kayak's algorithm was doing, and they could imagine that if they tried to do all that work themselves and check every single one of those airlines on their own individual site, it would take forever. And that causes them to appreciate and value the service more. And so Bill began a series of experiments to test that idea. In one, he and his team created a fake travel

search engine and had participants wait different amounts of time for their search results. In one scenario, they saw just a progress bar while they waited. In the other, they got a progress bar plus an animation that showed them what was happening behind the scenes. They got transparency. No matter how long people waited for service, they always perceived the service to be more valuable when it was operationally transparent. In fact, people who waited 55 seconds with transparency were as satisfied as users who got instant results. 55 seconds is an eternity on the internet. When we can see the head and work that's going on to serve us, it makes us less sensitive to the time that we're spending waiting. Kayak.com doesn't look like this anymore, but Biel says he now sees examples of this kind of

transparency everywhere. I mean, I noticed examples of this now all the time in my life, right? So anytime I take a lift or an Uber anywhere, you know, you get to see where the driver is. The Domino's Pizza Tracker is one of my favorite examples of this. You can actually watch and you can see your pizza going through the process. Beowulf found that radical transparency doesn't just impact how people experience waiting on our computers or our cell phones. It can have interesting, surprising psychological effects on how people wait in the real, physical world.

For example, he conducted an experiment in a Harvard dining hall where he set up cameras so that students waiting for their food could see the chefs who were cooking it and vice-versa. And it turned out that scene behind the scenes not only made the weight more tolerable, but the food tasted better. Now the customers tell us that the food is 22% better and the chefs are working 19% faster. That's weird. It is kind of weird, but be aware that there is something really important going on. There are so many instances where we wait and think what the hell is happening,

but with this kind of transparency, we see people's efforts and we appreciate them more. We see why we're waiting and waiting becomes less of a chore. And that's true whether you're waiting for someone to cook you a meal, or for a website to load, or for a city government to come and knock down the abandoned house next door. Ryan Beale had been publishing his research on transparency for a few years when it found its way into the hands of a man named Brian Farcus, Farcus is the director of special projects at the Detroit Building Authority. The agency responsible for managing the city's demolition program.

He started a job in 2014, and he says that at the time, residents were constantly calling the city with the same question. How long am I going to have to wait for the city to demolish this abandoned home on my block? One is this burnt out house coming down. One is this house coming down. It's been there for five years. And in the early days, we didn't have the information to be able to respond to them.

Marcus's job was to communicate with the public and answer these questions, except there was no system to actually get that information to people, and no way to explain why things were taking so long. He says Detroit residents would get really upset on the phone, and it quickly became a burden for his department. I mean, the hours that were spent

and just responding to basic calls like that, was extremely tough and extremely labor intensive. But then one day, Farcus stumbled upon Ryan Buell's research about transparency, and he thought, we need something like this for Detroit. And so he wrote Buell an email, and Buell immediately wrote back. The next day he responded, saying he grew up just outside

of Flint, and was very interested in this process. And he's, in a sense, been the mentor of myself and this program. With Buell's mentorship, Farcus began working on something he caused the neighborhood improvement tracker. It would be a window into all the work that was going into the city's demolition program. And a way for people to track which houses were going to come down and win. One of the first people he reached out to was Orlando Bailey, the community organizer

from the beginning of the story. He wanted Orlando to help him test the tracker and make sure that he was working. So my reaction was one of joy. And so it was, because we would finally have something that can track things in real time, where I can, something that was readily accessible for when my phone rang and it rang a lot back then,

I can go to and have answers. Farcas showed up to community meetings every month to answer people's questions and show mock-ups of the neighborhood improvement tracker. People gave him feedback. The residents there were all for it and began to tell Farcas, this is what needs to be on the tracker. Mm-hmm. Ha-ha-ha. Orlando says it felt like the city

was finally being honest with them and showing that they were committed to making the demolition program transparent. The tracker launched in 2016. It's basically an interactive map of Detroit. All over the map are different colored pens that show houses that are scheduled to be demolished. You can type in your address and the map

zooms in to your house and you can turn on what are the completed demolitions, what are the contracted demolitions, what are the planned demolitions. For demos that have already been contracted, the tracker shows an estimate for when that house will come down. If a date hasn't been set yet, it will give other information. You can see we're the sidelines for sale. We're a home is being sold. We're building permits being pulled. The torturers who don't have internet access can get all the same information by texting

a phone number. Orlando says the tracker didn't always give people the answer they were hoping for, but it was a relief just to have any information at all. Whether they like the answer or not, they had the answer. So it's like, oh, well, all right, thanks. I spoke with one resident named Barb Matinee. Barb is a lifelong Detroiter who stayed through all of the foreclosures.

We met outside her house, except for a set of wind chimes, it's quiet in her neighborhood. God, there's a lot of pride in Detroit. I think all in all of your hurts here, you know, it's always gonna be here. I mean, this is always home. This is always going to be home. Unless it's been really difficult to see Detroit go through some of those changes over the last few decades. It's almost like it happened overnight.

You know, it's like we woke up one day and opened up our blinds and all this devastation in empty houses is what we saw. Barb had a vacant house next door that couldn't be fixed. She used to mow the house as long while she waited for the demolition. And before the tracker went live, it felt like the house would never come down.

Yeah, after you see it sitting there in the same condition and falling in for two years, you've seen the things sometimes that you're just, it's never going to go away. It'll go away the day that it falls in on itself. You know, but like I said, things aren't, things aren't really like that anymore. With the tracker, Barb says those feelings changed because she could see the demolition program progressing. It's like, oh, finally. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a good feeling. You know, a big sigh of relief because you know it's going to be soon. And then the day that they show up, you're like throwing a fiesta. You've got the balloons and party poppers and you're out here going live. Oh, it's finally happy. Occasionally, Barbara says she runs into problems that the tracker can't explain. The cause for delays don't always show up, for example. But she says she's been able to call the city

and get that information. And it's been easier to get answers from them ever since the tracker went live. I can look in there myself, or I can just call our district manager, and within a short period of time, she usually gets back with me and lets me know what's going on with it. And knowing what's going on with it. And knowing what's going on can be really powerful.

Knowing when the abandoned house in her neighborhood was going to be demolished, allowed Barbara and her neighbors to make plans for what to do with that land. When the house finally came down, Barbara bought that lot and built a community garden. So now we currently have over 40 raised beds. We have a solar greenhouse. So now we currently have over 40 raised beds. We have a solar greenhouse. And then back over here is an orchard. Yes, it's a great place to be. Yeah.

No, it's, I mean, it's a beautiful garden. You're really, really is. Detroit's demolition program hasn't been perfect. Lots of people wanted demolitions to happen faster, and there have also been concerns that the program has moved too quickly and caused environmental contamination, and some people felt that the program

wasn't prioritizing the right houses. A lot of people I talk to just don't trust the city, and while the tracker certainly isn't going to fix everything, Ryan Beals says it's a good first step towards building a better, more transparent dynamic between the city government and its residents. I have to believe the city is better off for having made that decision. And having said, we're going to make this commitment to be transparent with residents. And by revealing the progress

and revealing the hidden work that's going on, perhaps that will give people the confidence, you know, that they need to also invest in their homes, in their properties, and trying to make the city help bring the city back to life. Transparency can be messy. Sometimes it can reveal mistakes in the process that make you feel frustrated. But Buehl says that radical transparency

also means giving space for constructive feedback and dialogue. Right, we're all in this thing together. And the provision of transparency just ensures that we all have access to that information. And if we have access to that information, then we have the opportunity to engage in the process. And if we can do that, then we get to better places than we can without. And dual hopes that others can learn from Detroit and Kayak and design little windows into the processes that are so often opaque to the people who depend on them. Because we all depend on companies and governments and other institutions

just live our lives every day. We're all waiting for something. We have another really fascinating story about waiting, but you have to wait just a little bit longer. Stay with us. All right, so I'm in the studio. I'm talking with Angus Chen who reported that piece. And one of the things I was thinking about is that even though there has been this innovation

and evolution and more transparency when it comes to loading icons, some of them are still pretty opaque and pretty awful. Right, I mean, we still have things like loading spinners, including the most reviled loading icon of all time, the spinning wheel of death, or, as I like to call it, the candy land toilet of time. Oh god, that one's the worst.

I hate it. Yeah, I hate it too. And the reason why everybody hates it is, because this is the most opaque loading icon that you could probably possibly design. It just doesn't tell you anything. The only information it seems to convey to me is that nothing you want to have happen

is going to happen ever again on this computer until you shut it all down, basically. Yeah, I mean, for me, it's like there's nothing that you can do. You're just stuck here. And that's actually exactly what Ryan Buell said, who we heard from in the show. The spinning wheel of death just reminds you in kind of a painful, stabby kind of way that you're just waiting and you're kind of stuck. And it's interesting because I think that there are lots of experiences that we have in life that are more like the spinning wheel of death.

And then there are some instances in life that are maybe more thoughtfully designed. So there's one particular example of a really thoughtful, transparent design that Bill told me about. It's from Japan where they have one of the best train systems in the world, the Shinkansen bullet train system. It's really amazing. They've had basically no injuries in like 40 years of operation and it goes like 200 miles an hour. They're super clean and they almost always

arrive within six seconds of schedule. How are they able to pull all that off? So part of it is this whole routine they have worked out where the trains sit at the platform for 12 minutes before they leave the station again. It takes about 5 minutes for passengers to get on and off, which leaves only about 7 minutes for a cleaning company called Tesset to prep the train for the next trip. 7 minutes for a team of 22 people to clean a thousand seats. That's incredibly fast, but I can imagine if you're standing on the train platform and the doors are closed and you can't get into your train because they're cleaning it, that

that seven minutes could really feel like a long time. Yeah, I mean, especially if you don't know why exactly you're waiting there. And I think that was turning a really bad dynamic because you have these disgruntled, unhappy workers who feel like they're doing a really difficult job. And then you have impatient travelers who are standing there not really understanding why they can't get into the train. That's the right in front of them. So, Tess, I needed to find a way to fix this somehow. And in 2005, they brought in a new leader, a guy named Taruo Yabe.

And he changed a bunch of things, but there was one thing in particular that had a really big impact. He instituted transparency between the passengers and the people cleaning the train. And the way that he did it, it seems really subtle, but it was really effective. He changed the color of their uniforms from a pale blue, which blended into the body of many of these trains to a vibrant red, which stood out just much, much more on the platform. So it was transparency by just making the workers

more visible. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you think about how the uniforms look before, the workers were supposed to just be invisible, right? You, as a passenger, are standing there, you're waiting around, you don't see what's happening exactly, and you don't know why you're waiting. But when the uniforms make the workers pop, you can suddenly see that, like, oh, I'm waiting here because there's people cleaning the train that I'm about to ride.

Test-hated workers don't always wear red anymore. A lot of time cleaning crews on the Shinkansen train system were a low-husher, so they wear something like a bright flower in the hat. But the idea is basically the same. They want to stand out. They want to be as visible as possible. Because if you make it as visible as possible, people appreciate it, and therefore they don't mind waiting, right?

Yeah, and that's kind of the idea, is they can suddenly see why they're waiting, right? They know that they're not just like waiting around for no reason. They're waiting for something that will improve their travel experience. And the other thing that Yabe did was he let the cleaners speak with the passengers, which was forbidden under the previous leader. So we provided transparency from the passengers to the employees and from the employees back to the passengers. And it completely changed the experience of working at TSA, but it also completely changed the experience of waiting for service on the shinkansen.

And it fundamentally changed the dynamics of those interactions. So in what ways did it actually change? So, well, for one, the trains are actually getting cleaned on time. So the system was working better overall. But test day workers were struggling a lot less to do their job. And that's probably because passengers were cleaning up after themselves a lot more.

They could see one, there are people who are doing this work and then made them more conscientious about their environment and what they were doing. But it also sort of flipped this experience of waiting totally on its head. People started to ride the shinkansen so they could watch Tessa crews performing their work. In Japan, they call this the seven-minute miracle. Sometimes they call it shinkansen theater. So at the end of every cleaning, the crew does a bow and passengers applaud. So it isn't just we make the waiting process transparent and therefore easier to handle.

It also just like the transparency makes people realize that everyone's working really hard and everyone wants to take pride in this train that they're on and it makes the world just better place in general when we recognize that people are doing hard work around this. I think that's a beautiful story. Well, thank you, Angus. Thanks, Roman. 99% invisible was produced this week by Angus Chen, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald. Mixed in tech production by Sriviusif, music by Sean Rihall. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstad is the digital director. Thresda team is Avery Truffleman, Joe Rosenberg, Delaney Hall,

Chris Perrubay, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klotzger, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco in produced, Unradio Row, in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI Orc, on Instagram and Reddit too. The day I'm recording this right now is the show's ninth birthday. So thank you for listening.

Thanks for all you've done for the show. If you want to give us a review on iTunes or share a favorite episode, that would be a great way to celebrate. You can peruse the entire archive and pick out your favorite episode on at nipi.org. Radio tapio. From PRX.