Evidence-Based Design

Yesterday, I snarked on food diary websites who could make money with their data.

In terms of determining the “average American diet,” like NPD food diary findings strive to do, diet websites like The Daily Plate won’t be useful. People who use those sites are Internet-savvy dieters. They almost certainly aren’t representative.

However, it’d be fascinating to compare the average eating habits of said Internet-savvy dieters over time — did Michael Pollan and friends really encourage a significant number of people to start eating “food, not too much, mostly plants,” the way that NYT article suggested? They could undermine the NPD there. Muahaha.

Companies like Weight Watchers could benefit tremendously from analyzing their database. The Weight Watchers program depends on social reinforcement, where group leaders are pushing company policy on “the right foods to eat” and (to a lesser extent) consumption of Weight Watchers products. If a significant percentage of Weight Watchers members use the website to track their diets — and track reliably — the company can see how effective those money-making policies are, and can see whether or not it makes a difference, since users regularly track their weight. (Of course, they need to take a shame factor into account — you know, since stuff you eat while you’re standing doesn’t count, and that weight can’t be right, because I drank a glass of water before I went to bed, etc. etc.)

Is Weight Watchers taking advantage of their database? They charge an extra fee for access, so I doubt it. Additionally, they say that group members who use those tools lose more weight; the small print says “weight loss data based on 12 week study comparing people who were instructed to attend Weight Watchers meetings and use eTools to people who were instructed to attend Weight Watchers meetings alone.” If local Weight Watchers groups send data home — I don’t know if they do — they could have gotten that data for free.

To bring it back to games, Magic the Gathering presents a similar case. Wizards of the Coast pushes a huge amount of content out to a public that plays in game stores. Tournament play is regulated to some extent, but (to the best of my knowledge), deck composition is not tracked. Lots of people talk about the leetest decks on the boards, but there’s no real way to tell how popular they are aside from community manager-style gut feel.

Magic the Gathering Online should allow WotC incredible insight into the way that people play their game, access to data that they’ve never had before. However, the old version of MTGO saved decks on the client. You could save “net decks” to the server, but if I remember correctly, it defaulted to local storage. Data on the client does you no good.

I’d write a witty conclusion, but comparing Weight Watchers to Magic the Gathering is probably enough levity for tonight.