Product Bias: What You Buy May Not Be For You

Here’s something to think about the next time you make a purchase.

For me, it started as an innocent observation. I was looking into buying a planner when I noticed that the full, page-sized planners were commonly in pink shades or floral patterns. What statement are the makers of these planners trying to make?

I started to do some digging and found examples of product bias. Product bias results from items made for a specific group of people, with little to no research done to ensure that the product is meant for a larger group of users. For example, products made for right-handed people, or equipment designed for men, but used by any person. 

The following are just some examples of product bias.

Right-Handed Products for Left-Handed People

Products designed for right-handed people can cause inconveniences for left-handed people. For example:

  • Almost all doors are designed to open using the right hand and hand rails are usually on the right side.
  • The measurements on a measuring cup will need to be read upside down or backward if you are left-handed. 
  • The buttons on watches are on an inconvenient side of the watch.
  • People at your dinner table are likely right-handed so all the tableware is set up for right-handed diners. Left-handed diners need to remember which side their cutlery and glasses are on.
  • Jobs are likely to supply you with a right-handed mouse. 

Biased Design

Everyday things are designed in a biased manner, from seatbelts to voice assistants.

  • Period tracking apps are pink. Just search “period tracking apps” and you will see pink logos and pink designs.
  • Seatbelts (until recently) were tested using crash test dummies with body shapes similar to the average male body, so female drivers are more likely to be killed or injured in car crashes.
  • Voice assistants such as Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana & Apple’s Siri have female names and voices. These products are described as “helpful,” “supportive,” and “humble” by the company.

“Shrink It and Pink It”

The saying “shrink it and pink it” refers to products that were originally designed for men and later made in a smaller size for women. In other words, those products were not originally designed for women (or for use by all adults).

  • Running shoes were designed to fit the typical shape of a man’s foot and later made in a smaller size to fit a woman’s foot.
  • Personal protective equipment (PPE) that fits women properly is hard to find. In healthcare, women deal with gowns that are too long. They wear masks that are too big to fit their face properly. 
  • “Women represent over half of the global population and in the US, they influence nearly 90% of all purchasing decisions. Yet only 19% of practicing industrial designers, also known as product designers, are women.”

Racial Face Misidentification 

Products designed for light-skinned faces encountered unexpected issues when the products were used with a wider range of human subjects. Some specific stories:

  • Mr. Alciné, a software engineer, used an A.I. in a Google online photo service six years ago to organize his photos into topics such as “birthday.” He noticed a folder labeled “gorillas.” Curious, he opened the folder and “found more than 80 photos he had taken nearly a year earlier of a friend during a concert in nearby Prospect Park. That friend was Black.” The photos had been mistagged. 
  • An Amazon facial recognition technology service had difficulty identifying the sex of female and darker-skinned faces. “According to the study, the service mistook women for men 19 percent of the time and misidentified darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. For lighter-skinned males, the error rate was zero.”

Key Takeaways

Biases exist in the design of products designed specifically for one group of people, but sold to a wider group. For example, products designed for men and then marketed for use by all people. 

What is your experience with products? Have you bought a product that you felt was biased?

Halloween Humor and Celebrations

All aboard! To go where? It depends. So many people think of Halloween as the perfect time of year to scare others and to be scared. However, Halloween is more than that. It is a time for everyone. Here’s why.

You can visit so many Halloween-themed displays, such as the train above which has temporarily been commandeered by skeletal pirates. Or check out how well people have decorated their houses.

If the freaky and spooky aren’t for you, and you’re the cheerful type, you can enjoy  some Halloween workplace humor:

How do ghosts send letters? Through the ghost office.

Why don’t mummies take time off? They’re afraid to unwind.

Why do vampires not want to become investment bankers? They hate stakeholders.

What is the mummy’s holiday job? Gift wrapper.

Why did the ghost leave his job? He hated the graveyard shift.

What did the mummy film director say? That’s a wrap.

What do skeletons order at a restaurant? Spare ribs.

Credit for the humor: source unknown.

Children and adults can dress up in costumes and have a little fun trick-or-treating or going to a Halloween party. You can enter a pumpkin in a pumpkin carving contest.

And for those who like history and aren’t into all the costumes and dress up, the origins of Halloween may have more appeal. It is a night when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest. For those who have lost friends or family members, Halloween is a time to reflect and reconnect with loved ones from our past.

Photo credits: Alex Fotos, Jill Wellington (Pixabay)

Scary and Creepy Jobs: Want to Try?

It’s that time of year when it’s normal to switch identities by wearing masks and dressing up in costumes. Some people become superheroes, movie and book characters, robots, monsters, or people from various professions.

So, in keeping with this frightful time of year, let’s take a closer look at some scary and creepy jobs. Would you want to try any of these jobs for a day? Have you ever dressed up as one of these professions for Halloween?

Bomb technician

The job is highly stressful and you need to be level headed or you could have a really bad day and not make it home. The job includes deactivating explosives, explosive devices, and explosive chemicals.

High-rise window washer

This job isn’t for those who are afraid of heights. You’re responsible for cleaning the windows of tall skyscrapers that are several storeys high. When you look down, it can be a long way down.

Miner

Miners work in dark and damp settings in confined spaces if they work underground and face exposure to weather conditions if they work above ground. They work long days, doing repetitive and backbreaking labor. The work is definitely not for those who are afraid of possible cave-ins, explosions, or toxic air.

Clinical trial subject

Participants who are part of a clinical trial have the opportunity to experience an experimental drug, surgical procedure, or medical device. Because a drug is part of a clinical trial, there is less information about the safety and risk of the drug. The treatment may not be effective. Or the test subjects could have mild to severe side effects.

Crab fisherman

Crab fishermen face freezing, icy, weather conditions, strong waves that can cause heavy crab pots to slide or fall on the deck and cause injuries to the crew, or drowning or hypothermia from falling overboard or the boat capsizing. The US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found that mortality rates are “26 times higher (80%) than those of the average worker.”

Psychiatric ward attendant/psychiatric aide

Psychiatric ward attendants assist those in psychiatric wards with daily needs, such as serving meals, grooming, and administering medication. Risks of the job include effects on mental health from exposure to aggressive behavior or violence from patients on a regular basis, and possibly physical harm from the patients.

Crime scene cleaner

Crime scene cleaners clean up and sanitize the area where a crime, suicide, or accident has occurred. They may encounter blood, body fluids, broken glass, or needles. If you don’t wear the correct personal protective equipment, you risk contracting a disease.

Forensic entomologist

An entomologist is considered one of the creepiest jobs. On the downside, entomologists identify maggots collected from corpses. They must be comfortable getting dirty. They go to crime scenes to collect bug specimens to determine the cause of death or go out at night to study the behavior of moths.

Mortician

Morticians plan and manage tasks related to upcoming funerals. For this job, you will be handling corpses and risking infection or disease if you disregard safety training. You are around death on a regular basis, hearing stories about death and loss. This environment can be emotionally draining.

Security guards

Depending on the type of work, the job can be low risk to high risk. It can be physically demanding if giving chase or dealing with rowdy crowds. In extreme cases, there can be injury or death. As an extra note, in horror movies, they are one of the first to meet the bad guy, and depending on the type of movie, the antagonist can be a crazy person, zombie, or supernatural entity.

Which of these jobs would you want to try? Are there any scary or creepy jobs that you would like to add to this list?

Read Bad Books with Bad Writing

“Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”  – Stephen King, a.k.a. “The King of Horror”

Today we have a few words of wisdom to share with you, someone who reads and writes. Yes, you are “someone who reads and writes.” Not specifically a reader or a writer, because usually we think of readers as people who like to read books and writers as people who write for a living or as a hobby. Here we mean anyone who reads anything and writes anything.

If you text your friends or write emails for work. If you read your friend’s texts, restaurant menus, or read emails at work. Anyone who reads or writes.

Take a moment to read some bad writing. Read an email full of grammar mistakes. Read a book that shouldn’t have been published. Why? Because you can learn a lot from reading something that is poorly written. Bad books can have just as important lessons to teach as good books.

Good communication is vital for everyone. If you write clearly, you can avoid misunderstandings from bad texts. If you write well, you are a good communicator. And that’s just the beginning.

Read a lot, and don’t just read the good stuff. When you read bad prose, you learn what not to write. If you want to write well, for blog posts or for your novel, then read a lot. Read good books and bad books. Be a critical reader and take lessons about what makes a piece of writing good, and what makes it bad. As author Stephen King once said, each book you read has valuable lessons to offer.

What lessons have you learned from something you’ve read?

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Helpful or Harmful to Jobs?

Is artificial intelligence (AI) harmful or helpful to our jobs? Will we lose our jobs to AI? Many already have faced the answers to those questions. People have lost work to AI and certain jobs will disappear completely. On the upside, AI has enhanced our work by eliminating our repetitive tasks. AI can also reduce the time it takes to complete tasks. Most importantly, AI will create new jobs. Let’s dive into this topic further.

Will AI replace jobs?

At first, artificial intelligence (AI) was helping us to do jobs better and faster by completing repetitive tasks. Having someone (or something) complete all the boring tasks is a good time saver. But AI will continue to improve to the point of replacing jobs and people. Here are some examples. 

In customer service, bots answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) from customers, so staff are free to answer infrequent or more complex questions. Robot waiters can take dishes and drinks to customer’s tables. AI can use existing examples of writing and art to create stories and artwork similar to an existing style.

Can AI help us to do our jobs better?

AI is already helping us to do our jobs better and faster. It can help us to find errors in our writing. It can also learn from our writing style and remind us to use a spelling or word specific to our company or industry.

It can act as a personal assistant to schedule meetings with clients and coworkers. It can generate automatic email responses so that customers will receive generated, immediate responses to their messages. Chatbots can handle frequently asked questions and common issues, handle inquiries and decide when a more complex situation needs to be passed to a human support agent.

How can we foolproof ourselves from losing jobs to AI?

AI will replace jobs in the future. It has already replaced jobs. If AI hasn’t replaced your job, chances are, your job will be affected by AI in some way, such as automating part of your job or changing the way you do your job.

Jobs that AI won’t replace are those that require human interaction. For example, although AI can be used to teach in the classroom, it cannot replace the trust and close relationships that teachers have with their students. Teachers can intervene if there are arguments between students or help a student who is having personal issues at home. 

AI cannot listen to a person’s problems and help a person through a mental health crisis. Similarly, it does not have the sensitivity to deal with a sudden job layoff, or answer a question about health benefit coverage that will have a severe impact on a person’s family.

Why is AI beneficial for society?

AI helps us to complete repetitive tasks more efficiently, freeing us to do other things. Instead of marking the same test a hundred times, AI can score all the tests in a matter of minutes, saving a human one to several hours of boring work.

AI can also help people to improve their skills. For example, it can suggest ways for bad writers to improve their writing by identifying their spelling mistakes and suggesting better ways to write their sentences. This is not the same as replacing professional writers. People who need to write reports or emails at work aren’t going to invest in a professional writer to write an internal report. But they will appreciate having something to check their grammar before the report goes to their supervisor.

Similarly, people will value a robot vacuum cleaner, pool cleaner, or pet food dispenser to help with chores around the house. One day, a robot may even be able to do all the basic housecleaning that people dislike. 

However, technology cannot replace all tasks, especially those that require special skills. People who can afford it will want to hire writers to produce a piece of writing exactly to their specifications. People with expensive heirlooms or valuables will want the human touch to do the job right when they need a thorough cleaning of their homes.

Key Takeaways

As with any advancement in technology, jobs will disappear and jobs will be created. Jobs that require a human element will be the hardest for AI to replace. But AI will also provide us with many benefits, such as replacing boring and time-consuming tasks. Jobs will also be created that are related to the creation and maintenance of AI. 

What do you think? How has AI affected your work?