Superstitious pigeons: An example of designing for cultural relevance

I found an interesting example of designing for cultural relevance in the most mundane place—paying for parking tickets. I've noticed that since parking lot ticket machines were first introduced into South Africa, a strange practice emerged. This practice is reminiscent of Skinner's superstitious pigeons (see this article for a layman's summary).

Essentially said practice unfolds like this:

1. A South African goes to pay for their parking ticket at the machine

2. They insert coins for the amount specified

3. One or more coins are rejected from the machine for no apparent reason

The superstition part comes in here. South African's believe that scratching the coin against the ticket machine somehow will make the machine accept the coin. So the next part of the process goes something like:

4. The South African rubs the rejected coin against the metal of the machine several times, re-inserts the rejected coin and hopes it gets accepted

5. If it is rejected again, the procedure is to repeat Step 4 until there is success.

Should Step 5 fail, the solution is to find other coins, use notes or in some cases, yell expletives and give up exasperated.

Now this process in itself has mostly just amused me but the other day, I noticed that the ticket machine designers take this superstitious practice very seriously. Case in point, to the left, this is a photo I took of a ticket machine at a major shopping center, Canal Walk, a few days ago. Notice the "Scratch Plate" which looks like it has seen good use and wear from users rubbing the coins, frantically trying to get the machine to accept their money offerings.

What I find fascinating is that this scratch pad serves no functional purpose, and may be totally based on superstition. Or perhaps, rubbing those coins does make the machine gods happy and I'm just not in the know.

In all, this example, warmed my HCI heart to see that sometimes, design really is about fitting the system to the local situation and not only about ease of use.

Qualitative research tools

As a somewhat seasoned qualitative researcher, I am always on the lookout for tools to improve the coding process for going through interview transcripts, particularly since I'm a fan of grounded theory. (As an aside, read this book to find out more about grounded theory or read my advisors take on the theory, noting that the strong-point of this approach is how operationalizable the steps are). I've used everything from MS Excel, to the open source tool Weft QDA to track codes for quotes and for open and axial coding.

Weft QDA was several steps up from Excel, allowing you to digitally annotate documents with codes and categorize them into higher level codes. However, using Weft, all documents have to be converted to plain text and the software is a little buggy. But on the other hand, given the unforgiving graduate student budget, this makes for a good option if you want to manage your codes digitally.

Recently, I started using Atlas.ti with a student licence and I am utterly pleased. The tool allows for easy open coding (or creating new codes), and you can also select from codes you've already created. I'm especially a big fan of the keyboard shortcuts for the coding process. What's better is that you can easily group codes into "Families" for axial coding. The tool also gives you counts of how many times a code has occurred and makes it easy to view quotes associated with a particular code, or family of codes, both in the editor or for printing purposes.

So for me, I'll look no further than Atlas.ti for now and I highly recommend investing in it if you can spare the change and you're a fan of having a digital copy of a qualitative analysis (even though its still nice to shift pieces of paper and post-its around!).