Ron Schmelzer, president and founder of ZapThink, used to work at ChannelWave with me. At the time he was given the title Apostle of Partners. He would go out to talk to real people who were the target users for the application and would ask them what they would like. The answer was "Make everything work in email".

Now I had agreed that I too prefer things to work through email. I like to get an evite, an email response, I want to carry them around. I check them constantly. Now I was thinking about it just today why email is so important to me and why I would prefer to have an application operate within Microsoft Outlook rather than have to exit Outlook and go into another application no matter how useful the application is. I think I have found the reason why: Operant Conditioning.

The basics behind Operant Conditioning were clearly explained to me once while I was watching a walrus do tricks and again when I went to train my dog. The system for conditioning animals based on operant conditioning is "Clicker Training". While there are a lot of details to it the basics are that the nervous system and learning systems for most animals including fish, dogs, and humans use a simple mechanism for learning behaviors. When a behavior generates a positive response for the animal the animal associates the behavior with the positive response and will repeat the behavior. Behaviors then grow or shrink in terms of their frequency once the response is known. The best way to reinforce a behavior is actually not a constant positive response for the behavior. If the response is always expected and positive then the behavior only is executed when the response is needed and tends to become an operation as a component of a task. What works well is if the reinforcement is random and slowly reduces in it's frequency.

My favorite example of a behavior that takes advantage of operant conditioning is the slot machine. When you first use it if you may win. If this does happen then you will continue to use it. Periodically you win small amounts of money and most people associate winning small amounts of money as a positive result. So they keep trying to operate the machine to achieve the win result. But because the slot machine is random they don't get it every time. So they keep using it for hours until their entire savings for retirement is depleted or they need to go to do something more interesting like a show.

So what does this have to do with email and why should it matter to anyone? Email is an ideal operant conditioning tool. Included in each email that appears in the user's inbox is either positive or negative. The emails themselves appear in random time intervals and orders. Spam doesn't distinguish the behavior to check for email rather it helps reinforce it. The user of the email system wants to check their email, a totally normal behavior, and then continues to check it over and over again throughout the day. Because this is a task that most people who work in front of a computer do potentially a thousand times per day they are essentially addicted to the habit of working within their email environment. So creating an application that takes them out of this environment will create a discomfort for them and they will have difficulty learning the new behavior. Because of this I believe that it is important for any application that integrates into an email application within the user's expected environment has the potential to be included as an extension of this behavior.

So the idea that partners speaking to Ron would like to do as much as possible through email is a great piece of feedback as well as a clue for many application developers on how to make their applications necessary. If you would like to become detoxed from email I'd recommend finding another behavior that you find equally rewarding that also generates a similar training pattern to clicker training. Slot machines could work if you are ready to retire.