What the art and science of chicken sexing can teach us about product thinking
Implicit vs. intentional learning
Commercial egg farms need to distinguish between male and female chickens as soon as possible.
Poultry farms want to divert resources to female chickens early to increase egg production. Poultry owners once had to wait until chicks were 5 to 6 weeks old, when adult feathers started to come in, before they could separate the chickens. Then, in the 1920s, the art of chicken sexing was invented in Japan.
Expert chicken sexers can look at a 1-day-old chick and identify its gender instantly. It was the free 2-day shipping of the early agriculture era. They can categorize 800 to 1,200 chicks per day with 99% accuracy. Ask them how they can tell, and they say, “I don’t know.”
How can they do this? How does one learn such a skill?
The training is simple. At the Zen-Nippon chicken sexing school (imagine graduating high school and telling your parents your post-grad plan was that), trainees are shown chicks, make a guess, then get told if they’re right or wrong. They do this several times in a tight feedback loop.
Over time, their accuracy improves. They aren’t sure why.
We can learn to pick up on decision points, even if we don’t know what they are.
Subconsciously, our minds use heuristics to make decisions, even when we aren’t aware of what the heuristics are or what they judge.
We can learn to discriminate between objects and form categorizations from exposure to instances. The more features you build and the more you see, the more likely you’ll “just know” a solution to a problem when one comes up in a meeting, even if you don’t know how you reached that conclusion.
These processes are known as implicit learning. Times when learning takes place in the absence of awareness, and without access to what has been learned. While this knowledge is not available via introspection, it can be enhanced with intentional learning. When you learn intentionally, you are applying examination to the work.
Designers may look like or even feel they’re shifting and nudging as they iterate on an interface. In reality, they process a high level of decision points on some level: they consider more lines, edges, colors, interactions, and features than they could articulate. That’s not to say there isn’t reasoning, or that designers cannot reason. But they don’t have to.
The more proficiency you gain understanding and recognizing quality product, the less time and energy you spend making these decisions.
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book on product thinking for engineers. Sign up to be notified when it is available for purchase.