Release Candidate One with Chris Clark

Business cards have never held much fascination for me. They feel like relics of a bygone era where paper mail, rubber stamps, and pogo sticks reigned. They don’t tell you anything Google couldn’t, and they usually end up in a drawer somewhere gathering dust. But they’re prized among our kind as the solution to the conferencegoer’s maladies: mettoomanydamnpeopletodayitis and alcohol induced amnesia.

Which is why I’ve been designing new business cards in the lead up to next month’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. After all, I’m a gin man. I can appreciate relics of bygone eras with the best of them.

Sadly these cards didn’t take twenty-five years to design. They’re clean, a little smaller than a standard American business card (don’t you hate trying to fit them into a wallet built for credit cards?) and black. Or white, depending on the print run. There’s text on the front and a graphic on the back, because it’s gauche to have a single-sided business card in this day and age.

So I wondered, as I sent my files off to the printer for the first round of proofing, about human factors and double sided business cards. I know. I have problems.

There are only two ways to flip a card: over the horizontal edge or over the vertical. Seems pretty simple, but a flip in the wrong direction will make Side B appear upside down, and there’s no way around it but to optimize your printing for the most common flip style. All you need to know is which way that is.

I asked the printer, but he didn’t know. So I asked the fireman, the greengrocer, the butcher, the baker… they didn’t know! But the Twitterverse, they knew. The answer was an overwhelming “top-over-bottom” — the horizontal flip. It makes perfect sense, too. Like turning a key, the horizontal flip rotates through the shortest path the card can offer; so it’s more fun and less effort than the competing flip. Great work, Twitter! Time to call the printer.

But something niggled. I’d asked, but hadn’t tested. And if my dad’s curries were any lesson to me at all as a young boy (“no, it’s not hot at all!”), I’ve learned to ignore what I hear and believe what I see. So I spent a little time this weekend handing out double sided cards at parties. Without saying anything, I watched and waited for the flip. It turns out the overwhelming majority went side-over-side; the exact opposite of what people had told me on Twitter!

Are Internet people different to regular people? Is the technorati’s brain slightly warped compared to the regular folk I encounter in Vancouver? Are they liars? No. It’s just that self-reported data is bunk.

Knowing which way you flip a card is like knowing which shoe you put on first in the morning. You might think you remember, but chances are you don’t. And what you don’t know, you just imagine. I’m left-handed, so I tie my left shoe first. Right. The answers seem plausible, but it’s bad science. People can’t even tell you their height and weight without getting it wrong, let alone describe obscure, subconscious behaviors. So it’s best to ignore the survey responses and go straight to the observations.

Psychologists observe human behavior in blind experiments: experiments where the experimentees have no idea what the experimenters are experimenting with. Slightly cooler psychologists observe other psychologists in double blind experiments. Don’t even ask what the coolest psychologists do, it’s too horrible to mention. But so long as you’re not one of the tiny minority of people who really do flip them top-over-bottom, you won’t have any trouble with my new business cards. So drink up.