If you’ve read even a handful of product-related posts on ChairNerd, this isn’t news to you: at SeatGeek, user experience is king. It’s why we’re intensely focused on continually improving the quality of our seating charts, which should be the ultimate source of context in the process of purchasing a ticket.

Recently, we’ve enhanced the accuracy of the playing surfaces within our NFL, NBA, and NHL maps. But with spring comes the perfect opportunity to spruce up our MLB ballparks, which are perhaps the most individualized set of major sports venues in the U.S.

The goals for these enhancements went beyond the aesthetic. We wanted to make our maps as true to reality as possible, which is why we went to the official rulebook to draw the regulation lines and markings of an MLB diamond:

Before & After: Yankee Stadium (NY Yankees)

Before

After

Satellite image

Before & After: Progressive Field (Cleveland Indians)

Before

After

Satellite image

But there’s more to groundskeeping than abiding by the rules of 90 feet and 60 feet, 6 inches. Each ballpark’s infield, outfield and on deck areas are unique, and we’ve incorporated those custom designs into the maps of all 30 MLB venues.

Custom infields

The cut of the grass is just one variable when it comes to an infield – even the shape of the dirt varies from ballpark to ballpark. Fenway has its historic fungo circles; Comerica Park is one of a few parks with a dirt path between home plate and the pitcher’s mound; Rogers Centre has the greenest infield in the big leagues, but no grass. Here are a few of my personal favorite infield renderings:

Boston Red Sox (Fenway Park)	Cleveland Indians (Progressive Field)	Detroit Tigers (Comerica Park)
Houston Astros (Minute Maid Park)	New York Yankees (Yankee Stadium)	Toronto Blue Jays (Rogers Centre)

Custom grass designs

Over time, the grass at MLB ballparks has increasingly become an artistic outlet for head groundskeepers:

• “Groundskeepers use parks as canvases”, USA Today, 27 Jun 2001
• “From Outfields to Art, One Blade at a Time”, The New York Times, 17 Jul 2001

David R. Mellor, director of grounds for the Boston Red Sox, has in fact written an authoritative textbook on the subject:

Groundskeepers typically alternate designs throughout the season, but the following are frequently used in each of the 30 MLB parks:

Arizona Diamondbacks (Chase Field)	Atlanta Braves (Turner Field)	Baltimore Orioles (Camden Yards)
Boston Red Sox (Fenway Park)	Chicago Cubs (Wrigley Field)	Chicago White Sox (US Cellular Field)
Cincinnati Reds (Great American Ball Park)	Cleveland Indians (Progressive Field)	Colorado Rockies (Coors Field)
Detroit Tigers (Comerica Park)	Houston Astros (Minute Maid Park)	Kansas City Royals (Kauffman Stadium)
Los Angeles Angels (Angel Stadium)	Los Angeles Dodgers (Dodger Stadium)	Miami Marlins (Marlins Park)
Milwaukee Brewers (Miller Park)	Minnesota Twins (Target Field)	New York Mets (Citi Field)
New York Yankees (Yankee Stadium)	Oakland A’s (Oakland Coliseum)	Philadelphia Phillies (Citizens Bank Park)
Pittsburgh Pirates (PNC Park)	San Diego Padres (Petco Park)	San Francisco Giants (AT&T Park)
Seattle Mariners (Safeco Field)	St. Louis Cardinals (Busch Stadium)	Tampa Bay Rays (Tropicana Field)
Texas Rangers (Globe Life Park)	Toronto Blue Jays (Rogers Centre)	Washington Nationals (Nationals Park)

This project is just one small part of our mission to create the best seating charts in the world by redefining the interpretation and visualization of architectural and geographical data. If you have a background in architecture, design, or art and want to help us, perhaps you’re our next Digital Architect!

seatgeek open sourced seatgeek/conductor

A data-backed adwords campaign bidder

Adwords is great, but its built-in tools don’t always allow you to solve problems unique to your business. I was recently inspired by this post on Search Engine Land to build something similar off the Google Ads API.

There were a few problems on our account that couldn’t be solved by the Brainlabs solution.

1. Because of the way our checkout process is structured, Adwords doesn’t know about our transactions. Until recently, this hadn’t been a problem; we have an approximation for transactions set up in Google Analytics, and the main KPIs for most of our campaigns are app downloads and email collection (things Adwords is aware of). But I wanted to use real-time transactional information to inform our bidding.
2. I didn’t want to set up different scripts or bid modifier charts for each of our campaigns. People behave differently when buying Broadway tickets than they do when buying NBA tickets, and I wanted something that would calculate modifiers on the fly for each campaign.
3. Finally, the major sports teams are spread out across three time zones. The “right time” to bid up a campaign for the Los Angeles Dodgers is different than for the New York Yankees, so I needed something that could handle those differences as well.

A few months back, we had our quarterly Hackathon and I decided to explore the Adwords API, which is pretty easy to sign up for.

There are several Google Ads API client libraries, like PHP, Ruby, Java, etc. I settled on the Python Libary because I hadn’t ever built anything in Python. This will become abundantly clear when you dive into my code.

You can find the script and instructions on how to set it up here. There are three major components of the script.

1. Pulling transactions or whatever KPI you’re interested in from your database
   • We use Amazon Redshift, so my script uses the Psycopg2 package to connect to and query our database. If you’re running off MySQL, you can follow the instructions here in order to connect to your DB.
   • Make sure that any reporting you do is in the same time zone as your Adwords account. For example, our database records timestamps in UTC, but our Adwords account runs everything on EST.
2. Working with the Adwords API
   • This file, adwords_api.py, contains every Adwords API-related call, from getting spend reports to modifying keyword bids.
   • This whole operation only runs on campaigns with a specific label. There are instructions here on how to find your label IDs, or how to modify the script so it runs on every campaign on your account.
3. Modifying bids
   • This file, create_bids.py, actually calculates the bid modifier for each hour based on an ROI or CPA goal defined by you.

What will future versions do?

• I’d like to write versions that work on the adgroup and keyword level. Currently, the script only calculates modifiers on the campaign level and then attaches them to every keyword in said campaign.
• Right now, this script doesn’t take day of week into account. While conversion rate from SEM doesn’t change much day to day, I understand that day of week could be meaningful for some businesses. For SeatGeek’s purposes in particular, a future version that integrates time-to-next-event for each team would be a big improvement.

While this is certainly a work in progress, I hope this script can act as a jumping-off point for others to build something that works for their needs.

Name: Tiffany Hu

Role: Web Engineer / Data Scientist

Hometown: Diamond Bar, CA

Hypothetical SeatGeek talent show performance: Dance! It’s my main hobby. Also, I never did the whole middle school talent show ‘do a group dance routine to Spice Girls / NSYNC’ thing, so I think that would be hilarious and really fun to choreograph.

Twitter handle: @tfnyhu

SGFL (SeatGeek Foosball League) Ranking: Like… 10th? There are about a dozen who regularly play, so. I do alright when I’m teamed up with Dallas or Ben Clark.

What was your path to SeatGeek?

I graduated from the University of Chicago, where I studied economics and biology. I loved the classes and research I did, and when I finished school I was definitely still itching to explore and learn. I worked at a tech consulting company in Chicago for two years, where I was a part of two teams that focused mainly on different types of text / language analysis and predictive modeling for clients in a range of domains. I was able to pursue independent research projects that gave me leeway to do a lot of programming, and I became hooked. I knew I wanted a role where I could work on both the implementation of data products as well as the exploration and analysis, and I was ecstatic to find that perfect blend at SeatGeek (Steve, head honcho data scientist, dubs it ‘full stack data science’).

What’s the most interesting project you’ve worked on since joining?

Customer coalescence, which is basically looking at all the different combinations of identifiers we might see in actions taken across each platform and collapsing them so they’re associated with various customer “blobs.” Among other things, this gives us a more complete picture of a user’s entire activity history and a more accurate way to attribute user spend. Some of the fun bits were figuring how to best implement this within our ETL pipeline, keeping the processing within Redshift for speed, and using Python to manage the recursive logic that Redshift doesn’t natively support.

What do you want to work on next?

Customer experience is a big focus for SeatGeek right now, and as part of that I’m excited to look more into user behavior, particularly session activity and geolocation. We’re working hard right now to make the user activity data we have more consolidated and accessible for analysis, so that will definitely make it easier for us to tackle those topics soon.

What’s your favorite SeatGeek experience?

Being at SeatGeek has definitely upped the number of events I attend regularly, but I maintain that Slipknot and Korn at Izod Center in December was the best experience I’ve had by far. First off, I’m not a metalhead by any means — in fact, I’d never been to a metal concert before that event. Zack and Rick, two way-more-into-metal SeatGeek devs, made this really enthusiastic effort to get a bunch of the SeatGeek crew to go to this concert, and I was the only one clueless enough to take them up on it.

But it ended up being awesome. I’m not sure what part was best — there were a lot of absurd / great moments. The music I actually ended up loving. The show itself was fantastic (pyrotechnics! midair drumming!). The fans (typically the part that can ruin a show for me) were really nice. At one point, we were kind of this peninsula in a giant mosh pit and a guy next to me asked if I wanted to mosh — I politely declined; it was all very courteous. And then hanging out afterwards, still amped up from the show, was a blast.

What’s your top NYC recommendation — food, fun, neighborhood, etc.?

Xi’an Famous Foods, a fast-casual chain that serves stellar food from western China like cumin lamb ‘burgers’ and spicy hand pulled noodles. I grew up eating Chinese food, so authentic Chinese fast food — especially from a lesser-known region — is a dream come true.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve read recently?

I came across Dear Data recently. It’s a site where two designers who live across the world from each other put up postcards they send each other every week that contain hand-drawn data visualizations about events they experience in their daily lives. They have a different theme each week, like ‘people’ or ‘time’, and it’s interesting to read why they chose the theme, how they collected their data, and how each of them decided to visualize the data. The results often end up looking nothing alike, so it’s really cool to see how their individual aesthetic styles manifest themselves. And I love that everything is hand-drawn.

What’s been your favorite SeatGeek team event?

Workation last summer, because it started just days after I’d joined SeatGeek and was such an amazing way to get to meet my new coworkers. I definitely lucked out timing-wise! There’s nothing like living under the same roof to get people to bond (and that we were in the Hamptons definitely didn’t hurt).

Push notifications are one of the most direct tools we have at our disposal for communicating with our users and keeping them engaged. If we’re smart about how we send pushes, each notification serves as an opportunity to inform users and find out what they care about (and hopefully drive some revenue).

Automated Push Notifications

Automated pushes are really valuable for targeting users based on how long they’ve had the app and their level of engagement since they’ve installed it. Intuitively, the messages that we send to new users should be very different from the messages that we send to people who have had the app for a while and bought tickets before. If we notice patterns in users’ behavior, then we can send them information about events they’re likely to find of interest. With new users, though, we don’t have the accumulated data that’s necessary to know what they like. Instead of accepting the risk that we may be sending them irrelevant information in a push, we target our absence of knowledge.

One of our more successful automated push campaigns is sent to users who have had the app for a few days but haven’t tracked any artists or events. We tested out several different versions of the message, and found that this version performed best:

The copy is informal, but it encourages the user to re-engage with the platform while simultaneously serving as a reminder of our value proposition: SeatGeek can help you find the best deals on tickets. Compared to a control group, this push more than doubled the number of users who tracked events.

One-Off Push Notifications

Sometimes it’s more effective to send one-off push notifications rather than set up a campaign. Major sporting events, like the Super Bowl or NCAA Tournament, occur annually but typically have different participants each year, so it’s not practical to set up recurring campaigns. Instead, we’ll generate a custom list of users we can reasonably assume are interested in the event because of prior purchase or tracking behavior.

For example, if we wanted to send a push notification about tickets for Opening Day at Wrigley Field, we would want to send it to users who have:

• Purchased a ticket to a Cubs game
• Clicked out on a ticket to a Cubs game
• Tracked the Cubs or a Cubs game

We would also be interested in sending the push notification to users who live within a few miles of Wrigley Field, just to be thorough. To pull this list, we would run a query on our internal database that looks similar to the following:

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SELECT u."id" FROM users u

-- users within a 15 mile radius of Wrigley Field
WHERE acos((sin(radians(41.9483))*sin(radians(u.lat)))
      +(cos(radians(41.9483))*cos(radians(u.lat))
      *cos(radians(u.lon+87.6556))))*3959 <= 15

      -- users with full accounts
      AND u.can_send_email = 1
      AND n.announce = 1

UNION

SELECT u."id"
FROM (

  -- users that have tracked the Cubs
  SELECT DISTINCT up.user_id
  FROM user_preferences up
  LEFT JOIN performers p ON p."id" = up.performer_id
  WHERE p."id" = 11

  UNION

  -- users that have tracked Cubs games
  SELECT DISTINCT n.user_id
  FROM update_notifications n
  LEFT JOIN events e ON e.id = n.event_id
  WHERE e.home_team = 11

  UNION

  -- users that have clicked out on/purchased tickets to Cubs games
  SELECT DISTINCT c.user_id
  FROM clicks c
  LEFT JOIN events e ON e.id = c.event_id
  WHERE c.user_id IS NOT NULL
    AND e.home_team = 11
) AS x

LEFT JOIN users u ON u.id = x.user_id
LEFT JOIN newsletter_signups AS n ON n.user_id = u.id

-- users with full accounts
WHERE u.email IS NOT NULL
    AND u.can_send_email = 1
    AND n.announce = 1
;

These push notifications tend to be much more transactional and are independent of our automated pushes. Generally, we try to communicate three main things with our one-off pushes: excitement through targeting, urgency through copy and timing, and accessibility by showing low ticket prices to the event. The result is a push that looks like this:

This directs the user to the Cubs Opening Day event page in the SeatGeek app.

While we’re on the topic of pushing things, let me say that the marketing team at SeatGeek is currently hiring! If you’re excited about keeping users happy, active, and engaged, then check out the Marketing Analyst: Retention Specialist position.

March Madness is one of the biggest ticketing events of the year, but with 68 teams competing across 14 cities over a period of nearly three weeks, wading through dozens of games and ticket packages to find the right seats is an exercise in tedium. Just about every site you could buy an NCAA Tournament ticket from displays these various packages as one big, ugly list, but we decided there had to be a better way.

Designing a new experience

The objective of this project was to reduce the friction of purchasing tournament tickets, and to do this, we needed to make the experience as streamlined and simple as possible. For March Madness, it seemed obvious that a bracket would offer the most intuitive experience.

But there was plenty of nuance to consider in the design of the bracket. Every decision about spacing, colors, size, information density, and interactivity affects its usability, and with so many events on the page at once, making the wrong design choice could throw off the balance and make it difficult to follow.

To keep this balance, only the absolute minimum amount of information is shown at any given time. Dates and locations are only shown for upcoming games, losing teams are grayed out to make it easier to scan through, and the “Tickets” calls to action are subtle yet clear.

Prototyping

From the very beginning, I knew that I wanted this bracket to be interactive in some way. I built a simple proof of concept to test out designs and interactions, as well as the underlying technology.

The games are set in place using CSS3’s new flexbox model. This makes the code much simpler, since it can automatically handle vertical centering and evenly distributed spacing of elements. But more importantly, it also allows the bracket to be responsive right out of the box, so it can work well on a variety of screen sizes without additional code or markup.

The connecting lines are drawn using Canvas, which offers a simple and high-performance way of rendering lines and polygons. This posed an interesting challenge and was the most difficult part to get right. Drawing lines and bezier curves is easy, but combining them in a way that is responsive is harder.

The S-curves between the round of 64 and the round of 32, for example, require four lines and two bezier curves. The points for each line segment and curve are calculated based on the position of each team. This example demonstrates how the connectors are drawn.

Iterating

Even though it worked well in that demo, the prototype still had several issues. Aside from messy code that’s difficult to maintain, the interactions (based entirely on jQuery) are bad for performance when scaling up to 63 games for a total of 126 teams rendered. Every time an element on a page is updated to, say, add a hover effect, it requires an expensive DOM update that slows down the page. This is difficult to optimize using just jQuery selectors and events.

Resolving this issue was easy thanks to React, Facebook’s reactive UI framework. React’s virtual document object model means that we can limit the number of times that a DOM update has to happen. That can even allow us to build complex interactive elements like this graphic in a relatively high-performance way without sacrificing usability.

Take a look at the live version of the bracket here.

Name: Dallas Gutauckis

Role: Lead Android Engineer

Hometown: Port Orange, FL

Hypothetical SeatGeek talent show performance: Balancing things… such as a barstool on my finger, a hockey stick on my foot, etc.

Twitter handle: @dallasgutauckis

SGFL (SeatGeek Foosball League) Ranking: 2, 3? Either way, behind the undeniable king of foosball and sobriety, Ben Clark.

What was your path to SeatGeek?

This morning? ​I took the L train into 14 St/Union Square as I often do​ and then walked the few blocks uptown to the office; sometimes, I ride my bike. It’s a cool 7-mile ride.

I grew up programming. I started around age 9 with Visual Basic (whooo! … just kidding) and switched to web development combined with some basic C muddling. I was doing things like modifying game servers to be able to provide user scores to forum software and link accounts (in-game username being the same as the forum username, shared auth, credentials, etc.). From there I focused more on full-stack web development, doing contract work during high school and my first year of college. I dropped out of college to work at a startup in 2007 at a company called myYearbook. I worked on full-stack web development there for about 3½ years.

In 2010 I was attending Google I/O. That was the year they sent all of the attendees a Motorola Droid ahead of the conference and suggested they work on something and come with questions and whatnot to bring to the conference. So, with that, I made my first Android app. I essentially made Words with Friends for Android before it existed. (If you don’t know Words with Friends, think online multiplayer Boggle.) After that, my manager noticed I was doing Android development a lot in my spare time and asked if I’d be interested in working on the myYearbook Android app full-time. I obliged and ended up really loving it.

Our company was acquired in 2011. I stuck around for a while. Then, in late 2013/early 2014, Alex Blum and Jack Groetzinger both reached out to me from SeatGeek asking if I wanted to lead the Android team. It was really a perfectly awesome fit for me. I wanted to move to New York City, and I wanted some new things to work on. I couldn’t be happier with the decision I made to move.

What’s the most interesting project you’ve worked on since joining?

It’s not out yet, but we’re working on adding SeatGeek Checkout to the Android app. SeatGeek Checkout greatly simplifies the purchasing process for users by allowing them to save and re-use their payment information across many different ticket sellers. It’s an obvious win for users, and it’s also an obvious win for us. Checkout presents some exciting technical hurdles for us, especially as we’re working with new technologies like RxJava as well as ensuring we have solid test coverage for Checkout (something we really don’t want to break). We also have some fun new design and UX concepts we’re introducing to the app, so I just can’t wait to see it being used, and — we hope — loved!

What do you want to work on next?

I have really big ideas for revamping our search user experience and would really like to have a refined experience there. I’m hoping we’ll be able to do some design sprint work there as well — a process we haven’t tried out yet.

What’s your favorite SeatGeek experience?

As pretty much everyone at SeatGeek knows (it’s in my onboarding presentation​, as well as in every product presentation I give), I’m a huge fan of the Philadelphia Flyers. I really enjoyed going to the playoff games last year at Madison Square Garden against the Rangers; even after the Flyers lost to the Rangers and the Rangers were playing the Canadiens, I still went to those games with a colleague and had a blast. So, in summary, I’d say that the general experience of going to hockey games with our ticket perk is my favorite SeatGeek experience.

What’s your top NYC recommendation — food, fun, neighborhood, etc.?

I’m a huge fan of breakfast foods and sandwiches, but particularly breakfast sandwiches. Tompkins Square Bagels is one of my favorite places in the city. Mighty Quinn’s Barbeque gets a solid second. Any time a friend is visiting from out of town, I’m sure to take them to both.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve read recently?

I read The Martian by Andy Weir recently. This book has definitely made the rounds in the tech/science fields, but also in general society (or so I’m told). I really liked the book. I didn’t actually read it, I listened to it on the L train. It’s a bit hard to follow when you’re listening to him rattle off numbers and equations, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Apparently, there’s also a film scheduled for release in November of this year.

What’s been your favorite SeatGeek team event?

No offense to “Batsu!”, which we went to recently and had an awesome time at, but I enjoyed the hell out of the Arcade Fire concert we went to. The crowd was great, the band was great, the show was great, and hanging out with SeatGeeks was great. What more can I say?

Miami Music Week is just around the corner, which makes it a perfect time for us to announce our partnership with Wantickets as their official mobile app partner. Electronic fans are undoubtedly familiar with Wantickets; for over 15 years, they have been a leading dance music ticketer.

One of the best features of the Wantickets purchase experience on SeatGeek — and this will remain true for all future market integrations — is that users don’t have to leave the app in order to buy tickets. You can store your credit card with us, and then in a few taps, buy a ticket. In the future, we’ll deliver the ticket right to your phone, and you’ll be able to use your device to scan into the event.

Electronic is among our fastest-growing categories, and this unique inventory from Wantickets will only add fuel to the fire. Through this partnership, we now ticket events featuring some of the most popular DJs in the world including Avicii, Skrillex, and Diplo.

This is relatively new ground for SeatGeek. Prior to our Telecharge partnership, we hadn’t integrated primary inventory alongside tickets from the secondary market. Be on the lookout as we continue to add more ticketing partners, expanding SeatGeek’s breadth and utility.

Part 1 of this series defined heuristics and cognitive biases and established that everyone is subject to them, whether they know it or not. In Part 2, we’ll diagnose four specific biases that commonly plague interviewers.

Halo effect

A friend of yours recently started dating someone named Amy. You’ve met her a few times, she’s been friendly, and you’ve enjoyed her company. Later you hear that Amy applied for a job at your work. The hiring manager asks you questions about whether she’d be a good fit for the role:

• Is she smart?
• Is she hard-working?
• Is she good with numbers?

You probably don’t know any concrete facts that would inform an educated answer to those questions (e.g. Amy’s test scores, work habits, or her math skills). Nevertheless, you’re more likely than not to answer “yes” to each question. Your general positive attitude toward Amy bleeds into your evaluation of her specific traits, even those about which we objectively know nothing.

This is called the halo effect, because it inclines us to judge other people as all-good (or all-bad, in which case it is sometimes called the “devil,” or “horns” effect).

This bias was named by Edward Thorndike. In 1920, he published a study demonstrating that one flight commander, when asked to rate his cadets across many different dimensions, was likely to give ratings with an unduly high correlation between fundamentally independent attributes. For example, cadets rated as having an exceptional physique were also excessively likely to earn high ratings for intelligence.

In interviews, this poses an obvious risk: A candidate impresses us in one particular regard. Perhaps they are an outstanding culture fit. In reflecting on the interview, we might consequently overestimate their qualification for other, unrelated requirements of the role, like their aptitude with spreadsheets.

First impressions

The halo effect can also arise from baseless, ephemeral judgments. All it takes is a friendly greeting, a firm handshake, or the sight of a face to form a first impression.

Like the halo effect, first impressions are self-fulfilling. Even when we encounter evidence that contradicts our impression, it’s cognitively easier to excuse a conflicting observation and to continue believing in our impression than to change our position. Here’s how that might go in our head:

This guy is great!… Wait, what did he just say?… Eh, that’s an easy mistake. Maybe I misheard. I’m sure what he really meant was this…

In experiments repeated globally, Alex Todorov and others have demonstrated the influence of first impressions with evidence that research subjects can correctly predict the outcome of political elections with 70% accuracy by evaluating the competency of candidates after only viewing their campaign portraits… for as little as a tenth of a second.

If large public elections can be detectably influenced by the glimpse of a face, then it’s alarmingly easy to imagine how that or something equally as trivial – a person’s height, a good hair day, or nice perfume – might contaminate a single interviewer’s decision.

Peak-end rule

Whereas our judgment of other people may be biased heavily by our first impressions, when we remember events, beginnings have relatively little influence. Our overall impression of any experience – how much pleasure or pain we feel during a brief incident, a vacation, or even an entire lifetime – depends on our recollection of a subset of snapshots drawn from the experience.

The peak-end rule posits that we’re very lazy rememberers. By default we’ll most heavily – or, really, only – consider the two easiest-to-recall snapshots. We most easily recall:

1. the high- (or low-) light of the experience (the “peak”)
2. the last part of the experience (the “end”)

Psychologists have demonstrated the peak-end rule by inflicting mild pain on subjects using the cold pressor test. They administer the test three times. Each time the trial starts with a 60-second wrist-deep soak in icy water. In one case, the trial ends right after the first 60 seconds have elapsed. In another case, the hand remains in for an extra 30 seconds while the experimenter slowly mixes in warmer water, ever-so-slightly relieving the subject’s pain. In both cases, at the end of time, the subject removes her hand and receives a warm towel. After her second soak, the subject is asked to choose which version of the test she prefers to receive for her third trial.

Subjects should unambiguously prefer the shorter trial (Trial A). The total amount of pain they’ve endured (i.e. the area under the line) is absolutely, unequivocally less in the shorter, 60-second trial. But the majority of subjects choose the longer trial (Trial B), because their memory of the experience is biased by the relief they feel as the warmer water is mixed in – a more pleasant end.

According to the peak-end rule, our recap of an interview is predisposed to be dominated by one or two memorable moments, with less consideration for the events in between. For example, maybe a candidate knocks out of the park a particularly tough, arcane question in the middle of the interview, and finishes with some strong closing arguments. We’d be likely to construct a positive memory of her performance, even if she also gave several subpar, less remarkable answers.

Illusion of validity

Whereas the danger of the previous biases arises from making decisions based on too little real information, surplus evidence can be problematic too. The illusion of validity predisposes us to believe that having more observations always equates to a surer decision.

In a fairly benign case, maybe we have duplicative evidence. We review a resume for an entry-level candidate who earned a high SAT score and also attended a prestigious university. Both are (arguably) positive signals, but in combination neither fact provides much more usable, independent information than the other. (A high SAT score is a prerequisite to get into a good university.) Still, we feel like we have twice as many important signals, and therefore have more confidence in our impression.

In the worst case, the illusion of validity tricks us into making confident decisions even when the signals are totally meaningless. Daniel Kahneman, the godfather of cognitive bias research, cites his experience performing Israeli army officer evaluations as an example of what can go wrong.

Kahneman placed candidates in groups and subjected them to an elaborate physical obstacle course. His team of interviewers (some of whom were also psychologists) observed closely and took diligent notes to distinguish the leaders in the group from the followers. Their rigorous methods and the realistic setting led them to the natural conclusion that a leader identified in the test was sure to be a leader of tomorrow, and thus a strong candidate for army officer.

The observers were so confident in their method that for years, they didn’t bother to validate their predictions by analyzing later performance reviews of the candidates whom they’d promoted. When they did, their predictions turned out to be hardly more useful than a coin flip.

Most strikingly, even after Kahneman’s team learned these results, the obstacle course remained a feature of the screening process longer still, because the method seemed so productive that the team made excuses and tried to discredit the evidence of its futility.

If an elaborate experiment conceived of by professional psychologists can fail this spectacularly at producing meaningful signals, then we should be very skeptical of our own interview questions – even if they feel targeted and productive.

Overconfidence and the bias blind spot

Cognitive biases lead us to make poor decisions. We go to great lengths to gather meaningless data. We discard perfectly good information. We invent sometimes baseless narratives to fill in the gaps. In spite of these intuitive flaws, we plow ahead confidently. This act – failing to recognize the holes in our logic and the low reliability of our decisions – is a symptom of yet another bias: the overconfidence effect.

Cruelest of all, even when we think we might have mastered this, we’re wrong. Emily Pronin, coiner of the phrase “bias blind spot,” has demonstrated that learning about cognitive biases only helps us diagnose them in other people’s behavior. Subjects who’ve been instructed about a bias – even immediately before being put to the test – are still no less likely to succumb to the bias and overrate the objectivity of their thought process.

This would be a pretty hopeless place to end this series: concluding that have we no control over the systematically bad decisions that we make. Though eliminating the influence of bias in our decisions in certain situations might be next-to-impossible, re-engineering – or, better, completely avoiding – those situations is not. In Part 3 (coming soon), we’ll see how this idea applies to interview decisions.

Links

Want to learn more about biases? Here’s some reading material:

• Edward Thorndike’s A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Amazon)
• Scholarly publications of:
  • Daniel Kahneman
  • Alex Todorov
  • Emily Pronin
• List of Cognitive Biases on Wikipedia
  • Halo effect
  • First impression (psychology)
  • Peak-end rule
  • Overconfidence effect
  • Bias blind spot

Name: Zach Sherman

Role: UI Engineer

Hometown: Bedford, NY

Hypothetical SeatGeek talent show performance: Eating a ghost pepper

Twitter handle: @zshrm

SGTTL (SeatGeek Table Tennis League) Ranking: 2

What was your path to SeatGeek?

I’ve always loved the web, started learning to design/code in high school and freelanced all the way through college. I’ve worked with a lot of cool companies over the years and even started a few of my own. I studied economics at Vanderbilt and graduated in 2014, took a quick pit stop in Japan and headed right for SeatGeek.

What’s the most interesting project you’ve worked on since joining?

I’ve worked on a lot of cool things from the Living Social partnership to implementing SeatGeek checkout on mobile, but my favorite project so far was probably the redesign of our General Admission pages.

What do you want to work on next?

I would really love to work on the next release of Sixpack, our a/b testing framework. I think it could be made even more accessible, allowing anyone at the company to run a/b tests by clicking a few buttons and pasting in some custom code.

What’s your favorite SeatGeek experience?

Sylvan Esso at Bowery Ballroom. Hands down.

What’s your top NYC recommendation – food, fun, neighborhood, etc.?

Porto Rico is my favorite coffee shop in NYC. They have dozens of burlap sacks filled with beans from around the world – the smells are heavenly. There’s also a fantastic Filipino restaurant I love in the East Village called Jeepney. I know it sounds weird, but try the banana ketchup ribs.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve read recently?

Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better

What’s been your favorite SeatGeek team event?

Workation in the Hamptons.

It’s exciting for me to be able to write about our new partnership with LivingSocial. In a way, it’s been 5+ years in the making – I first met Alex Michael, Head of National Sales and GM of Entertainment at LivingSocial, when he was running business development at Madison Square Garden in late 2009 – but it actually wasn’t until the fall of 2013 that Alex and I had the first of many conversations that would eventually lead to offers like this on LivingSocial:

One of LivingSocial’s best-performing categories of late has been live events. Their platform surfaces deals that provide not only discounted experiences, but premium entertainment experiences as well, making a SeatGeek-LivingSocial partnership a perfect fit; LivingSocial has millions of users looking for great live-event experiences, and SeatGeek offers the best technology to find great ticket deals to hundreds of thousands of them.

We launched the partnership in mid-February, and it’s already been immensely successful. LivingSocial users now have access via SeatGeek to the best deals on hundreds of live events across the country, and they’ve already purchased thousands of tickets in the first few weeks of the integration.

You can find these deals on LivingSocial’s site and mobile apps, and it’s the full SeatGeek experience: an interactive map of the venue, Deal Score, view-from-seat images, the whole nine yards. Here’s what it looks like in the LivingSocial Android app:

While Alex and I may have started the beginnings of this relationship over five years ago, there are many people from LivingSocial and SeatGeek, both on the tech and business side, who contributed tremendously to this partnership. Look for even more SeatGeek-powered deals to come to LivingSocial in the weeks and months ahead!