Andrew Patrick

I hate waiting in lines. If I go to a restaurant that has anything more than 5 people waiting, I leave. The thought of queuing up outside a store for one of those big holiday sales is completely foreign to me. I often arrange my daily schedule to avoid waiting in lines: I drive in off-peak hours, eat when others are working, and avoid crowded shopping centers in favor of small locations.

The one thing more frustrating that waiting in a line is waiting in a bad line. You know, those lines that are poorly designed, without clear guidance about where to wait, or what you are waiting for. Or lines where it is clear that there are not enough services at the end (cashiers, clerks, or kiosks) to handle the number of people waiting.

What makes this so frustrating is that waiting lines don’t have to be so terrible. There is a science of waiting lines, and if organizations follow the science they can make their lines more efficient and more pleasant. Waiting times are a necessary evil. Having some form of a queue is often the best way to ensure that a system or service works as efficiently as it can. Queues make sure that each resource, be it a cashier or a customs official, never goes idle waiting for the next customer. Queues that are too long can drive customers away, but queues of the right length can increase efficiency and save money.

Donald Norman, a popular usability guru, has recently outlined some valuable design principles for making good waiting lines. Many of these are common sense, but when they are not followed the effects are usually obvious, and unpleasant.

One of the most important principles is that human emotions dominate the experience of waiting in lines, and that emotions are affected by context. Setting a pleasant context for a wait in a line can make all the difference. A location that is warm, bright, cheerful, and welcoming will be far better tolerated. This Disney theme parks, which are synonymous with long lines, are very good at setting a good context for a waiting line, often having costumed characters entertain people while they wait.

My son, who has more patience than me, recently got into one of those multi-hour waiting lines for a Boxing Day sale at an electronics store. The store did many things to make the wait as pleasant as possible: they gave out coffee and snacks, they gave people a number so they could take a break and return to the line, and they held raffles for free merchandise. This is also a good example of a related design principle: keep people occupied. Peoples’ perceptions of time and space are influenced by their surroundings. Many service environments, such as waiting rooms, now have TV’s and advertising displays to keep people occupied.

Emotions spread from person to person. So, in managing a good waiting line, it is important to watch for and address any negative emotions. This means paying attention to the most upset customers so that their negative emotions do not spread to the other people waiting in the line.

Another design principle is to eliminate confusion by making it clear and unambiguous where the line starts, where it ends, and how it works. Perhaps the worst waiting experience is finding out you have been waiting in the wrong line. Some of the best lines I have seen at airports are where one employee at the head of lines provides reassurance that people are entering the correct queue.

Providing feedback on how the line is progressing is also important. Nira Munichor and Anat Rafaeli from Isreal recently conducted a study of telephone waiting lines. They had participants either listen to music while they waited for a telephone service, or the people heard music and one of two spoken messages. The first message apologized for the wait and asked people to remain on the line. The second message provided information about where the person was in the line (e.g., “You are currently third in line”). Call abandonment rates (the frequency by which callers hang up) were 50% lower with the informative position information than with the music or apology conditions, and the customer experience was described as much better. It is possible to design good waiting lines, even for the telephone.

Waiting lines also need to be appropriate: long waits for trivial reasons or trivial goals won’t make any sense. Waits also have to seem fair. If there are a lot of people waiting and yet only a few service locations open, such as at a bank, then this appears to be unfair.

A lot can also be done to improve the waiting line experience by changing the way the line works. Certain kinds of layouts can make lines more efficient, faster, and therefor more pleasant. You may have seen cashier stations at cafeterias, for example, that have two sides for serving customers on the left and the right. This is because the process of cashing out a customer can be inefficient, with time spent while the customer puts items on the counter, finds money, packs up the items again, etc. While a customer is busy doing those things on one side, the cashier can serve another customer on the other side. For situations like this, this kind of arrangement makes the lines work much better.

Another example of changing the way a line works can be seen in drive-through restaurant windows. These restaurants often have one place for giving a food order, another place for paying for the food, and a third place for picking up the food. And, these windows are often far apart. This physical distance means that, as long as there are a few customers, there are built-in delays in the process. This is important because preparing the food takes time, but by designing the line in this way customers are seldom left waiting for their food to be prepared — by the time they have visited all the windows the food is ready.

Another design decision is having multiple servers with multiple lines, as is usually done in super markets, or multiple servers and one line, as is usually done in banks. One line can appear to move faster and appear more fair, and a single waiting line automatically adapts if one of the servers is slow or encounters an unusual circumstance (one of those people with dozens of coupons).

Of course, sometimes the best design is to avoid the line in the first place. Reservations are a method of avoiding waiting lines. I recently traveled to Europe and visited a number of museums and art galleries. I did a lot of research to make as many reservations as I could, even if it cost more, to avoid the lines. Even though every guide book I read explained how to do this, I was amazed at the thousands of people who ignored the advice and waited in line after line. If you get to Rome and want the visit the Vatican museum, make a reservation for one of their wonderful guided tours and don’t wait in the infamous lines (and don’t miss the Borghese Gallery, where you have to have a reservation).

Resources

Donald Norman, D. (2008.) The Psychology of waiting lines. http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/the_psychology_of_waiting_lines.html

Munichor, N. & Rafaeli, A. (2007). Numbers or apologies? Customer reactions to telephone waiting time fillers. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92 (2), 511–518.

My favorite comedian, John Pinette, also hates waiting in lines:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUlf1F05gTA

Here is a new video from James (“The Amazing”) Randi on the role that the media plays in supporting nonsensical beliefs. In this clip Randi retells the story of The Carlos Hoax, where an actor posed as a psychic channeler and was able to garner all kinds of attention and free publicity from the Australian media. The story is important because it exposes the ease with which the media can be influenced to support unsubstantiated claims, frauds, or hoaxes as long as the story is interesting enough.

Here is a description of the impact from The Skeptic’s Dictionary:

For Alvarez, the creation of the character “Carlos” was a performance/experiment to see how far he could take his creation, but his purpose was not to make people look foolish. He hoped to liberate them from a false belief. However, the result of the performance seemed to demonstrate how easy it is to create a cult from scratch and how, even when the truth is revealed to them, some still refuse to accept it. The “Carlos” hoax also demonstrated how gullible and uncritical the mass media are when covering paranormal or supernatural topics. Rather than having an interest in exposing the truth, the members of the media were obsessed with “Carlos” the phenomenon and transformed his character from a hoax to a myth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0hgP3ioAeA

In the latest round of the Canadian net neutrality fight, a number of Internet service providers have formally applied to have a Canadian Radio‐television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) decision overthrown. This decision allowed Bell Canada to continue to throttle the speed of certain Internet traffic, most notably peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic used by applications such as Bittorrent. One of the notable aspects of the issue is that Bell is not only throttling its own customers, but also the customers of alternative Internet providers who lease Bell’s DSL infrastructure.

A group that includes the Consumer’s Association of Canada, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP), and a group of independent Internet providers have filed a lengthy document that outlines what they claim are major errors of fact and law in the previous decision.

One of the main points in the filing is that while the CRTC ruled that Bell could continue to throttle certain kinds of Internet traffic, on the same day they opened a new proceeding examining the same issues raised in the throttling case. The suggestion is that the CRTC clearly felt they did not have enough information about these issues, and yet they decided in Bell’s favour regardless. The applicants suggest that this was a wrong decision and, in fact, more information has become available as a result of the new proceeding that provides further light on the throttling issue. They want the throttle decision to be reversed until a full examination can be conducted.

Further points raised by the applicants include:

(1) a failure by Bell to show that P2P applications were causing undue congestion on the networks, or that the throttling they were using was a necessary solution if there was a problem,

(2) that CRTC erred in believing Bell when it said it did not examine the content of Internet packets when it made a throttling decision,

(3) that by examining the content of Internet traffic, Bell is going beyond its role as a neutral common carrier,

(4) that there is no other method available to Bell to manage their network traffic,

(5) that the CRTC only considered the impact on Bell’s and alternative Internet provider’s customers and not on the providers and consumers of content services that rely on P2P protocols (and other protocols, such as encrypted virtual private networks, being throttled as a side effect),

(6) that the CRTC failed to adequately consider the privacy and freedom of expression considerations of its decision.

These points, and others raised in the application, are very interesting and important. There are fundamental issues at stake here, including fair business practices, content control, privacy protection, and freedom to choose service providers. Canadians should be following this issue closely.

Copies of the application and a discussion forum on the issue can be found at

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,22421119

This is an interesting video showing how ATM fraud can be done. In one sequence a “card skimmer” and camera is added to the front of an ATM machine. In another sequence distraction is used to steal a customer’s bank card.

Many people don’t realize how easy it is to get scammed when using these machines, and what to look for when trying to be safe.

Cash Machine Hustle on truTV.com Video

A con artist’s hi-tech gadget or simple distraction at the ATM can leave you with insufficient funds.

Watch more people get scammed on the streets of Manhattan as they lose their money, possessions and even identity–on The Real Hustle.

Cormac Herley, Paul van Oorschot and I recently led a panel discussion session at the Financial Cryptography and Data Security conference. The topic was passwords, which everyone agrees are problematic forms of authentication, but nobody seems to be doing much about it. We wrote up a summary of the issues and discussion at the conference and the paper is now available. Here is the Abstract:

While a lot has changed in Internet security in the last 10 years, a lot has stayed the same — such as the use of alphanumeric passwords. Passwords remain the dominant means of authentication on the Internet, even in the face of significant problems related to password forgetting and theft. In fact, despite large numbers of proposed alternatives, we must remember more passwords than ever before. Why is this? Will alphanumeric passwords still be ubiquitous in 2019, or will adoption of alternative proposals be commonplace? What must happen in order to move beyond passwords? This note pursues these questions, following a panel discussion at Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2009.

Citation: C. Herley, P.C. van Oorschot, A.S. Patrick. Passwords: If We’re So Smart, Why Are We Still Using Them? Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2009), 13th International Conference, Rockley, Christ Church, Barbados, Feb. 2009 (post-proceedings to appear, Springer LNCS).

Here is a report from Australia of an opinion survey about using passwords for authentication. Just over 200 people were surveyed and about half of them felt that their password could be guessed. Moreover, personal information that is often used to confirm an identity (such as the infamous “mother’s maiden name” question) were felt to be unsafe by 67% of the participants. Perhaps of most interest, 75% of the people said they would be prepared to deal with more complex authentication procedures if it increased security.

Consumers Lack Faith In the Security of Passwords

Australian consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about issues of security and the methods organisations use to verify their identity, according to a new study by Sydney-based research company, callcentres.net.

The 2009 Salmat VeCommerce Identity Verification Study highlights consumers’ fears that traditional PINs and passwords do not provide adequate protection of their personal information, with 67 per cent of consumers reporting that they believe their security details are at risk.

Just over half (51 per cent) felt that someone else may be able to accurately guess their password, PIN or security details for interactions over the phone, while 59 per cent said they believe someone else may actually know these details.

This article from researchers at the University of Notre Dame discusses some of the limitations of iris biometric systems. Pupil dilation, for example, is found to affect the accuracy of iris recognition, especially if the amount of dilation is different at enrollment than at verification. Wearing contact lenses, especially cosmetic lenses designed to change the color and appearance of the eye, can also decrease recognition rates. The researchers also find that the false rejection rate increases over the four-year time span they have tested.

This is important because iris-based systems are often considered the most accurate and stable forms of biometric identification. Clearly, more research into the limitations is needed.

Toward the next generation of iris biometrics science

Many factors complicate the use of iris biometrics, such as differences in pupil dilation, the presence of contact lenses, and the eye’s natural aging.