This article serves as a summary of the final paper I wrote for my Capstone Seminar in Cognitive Science at Brown University in 2013. The original article, entitled "Human-Computer Interaction in Human Computer Interaction: A Case for Interaction Aesthetics", focused largely on the genealogy of the field of UX research. The list here derives from the research I reviewed for that paper.
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In Episode 6 of AMC's Halt and Catch Fire, Cameron gleefully exclaimed to Gordon that:
Our computer's going to have a personality!
which, given the era in which the show is set, seems novel when compared to the massive calculators that were IBM's computers. Even though our computers have since left Cardiff Electric's vision of the PCs in the dust, the vision of Samantha in Spike Jonzes' (2013) Her is still pretty much out of reach.
Still, we have come a long way in fulfilling the vision of "Hello World" by embedding modern computers with increasingly human-like personalities. Siri, Google Now and a plethora of computational tactics (largely in the realm of Computational Linguistics) are pushing the boundaries to attain the ultimate goal that is the Turing Test.
With web browsing and mobile app use now becoming the most prevalent use of the Internet, the User Experience industry has moved away from solely focusing on metrics of pure usability to less tangible measures such as delight, enjoyment and surprise. Research outlining strategies for mimicking a computer's personality has taken the past decade to arrive at a set of heuristics for designing delightful systems, and it is no coincidence that this has ushered in the era which we have now termed The Internet of Things.
In this post, we explore a particular set of these heuristics put forth by professor of Human-Computer Interaction Mads Bødker in a position paper for the 2004 Nordic Conference for Human Computer Interaction. I was recently in a talk entitled "Designing for Emotion", and it seemed that the designers and researchers in the panel were all echoing Bødker's 10-year-old set of heuristics--an "aesthetic logic"--for ubiquitous computing:
1: Design for interaction, not for use.1: Design for interaction, not for use.
Bødker terms this embodiment, noting that people interact physically. Be it with each other socially, or with a website through a mouse and monitor, people interact in very specific physical contexts ("situations", if you are phenomenologically inclined). Simply designing for a user to accomplish a task without considering the context in which they do so is merely designing for use, not for interaction.
This means that in order for you to use a website, it needs to be designed and developed it in a manner that allows you to interact with it. Whether you do so via mouse, keyboard or screen reader, a website needs to provide you with the information you want in a manner that makes sense for you.
Because interaction with computer occurs at much lower fidelity than human-to-human interaction, websites and mobile apps needs to embellish the interaction to make up for the loss of sensory cues. Design metaphors, skeuomorphism and animations are used to replicate the continuousness of reality, and principles of interaction design (delay, speed, depth, colour etc.) help establish the computer as a subject in the interaction.
2: Delight the user unexpectedly.2: Delight the user unexpectedly.
Now that we have an embodied system, let's give it sentience. Because electronic systems are deterministic, randomness--or its illusion--can be delightful since users do not expect the system to independently interact with them. Bødker suggests such unexpected acts of user-directed communication punctuate the interaction between human and computer, allowing the user a space for reflection and even enjoyment.
Microsoft Office's infamous "Clippy" the paperclip did exactly this, prompting users with suggestions for completing tasks. While Clippy was ahead of its time, it also suffered from having separate embodiment than the software itself: Microsoft Word was not helping me accomplish a task; Clippy was interrupting my interaction with Microsoft Word by asking me a bunch of irrelevant questions:
A good example of unexpected delight is OkCupid's ad blocker message, which though an obvious upsell, displays an understanding of its user base as technically inclined. Even the language it uses suggests it's aware of the general age group of its users as well as the cultural canons relevant to that group.
It's embodiment as an "ad" makes it that much more delightful. Because we're so used to seeing ads in that particular space (or, ignoring them as the case may be), having a non-ad ad pokes fun at exactly that. The fact that it's just text and fits into the overall design scheme of OkCupid makes its discovery that much more surprising.
3: Invite yourself into the user's life.3: Invite yourself into the user's life.
Each of these heuristics depends on the previous, and when a technology has both embodiment and sentience, it becomes a prime candidate to becoming a key part of our lives. Consider how so many of us are now slaves to our smartphones--it is both something that we can hold and carry around, and can hail us at will.
Presence is the ability of something to become a featured object in our lives. The object is not merely a thing that we encounter as we go about our days, but one that has become tightly interwoven into how we live our lives. Because the digital world can be so decoupled with our realities, systems that can bridge the gap "in real life" (irl) tend to fair better. Through its embodiment and punctuation, it can assert its presence as necessary, and, at times, even remind us of it.
There's a slight chance I might be biased, but I think LinkedIn does this fairly well. We recently launched the new Connected app to be the Gary to your Selina Meyer (watch Veep on HBO if you haven't already). Much like Clippy, Connected wants to help you be better and more efficient at performing a task. Unlike, Clippy though, Connected is aware of its presence, and knows exactly when to tell you what. The only way to become a featured object is to know when to show up and when not to--the line between being present and being annoying is a fine one--and it is in that crucial second part that Connected excels where Clippy failed. While Connected will probably never fully replace a human personal assistant, it most certainly wants to try.
4: Make good mistakes.4: Make good mistakes.
This is pretty much a platitude by now, but recognise that your humanity will cause you to fail, and remember that it is possible to do so gracefully. Our apps and websites will be buggy no matter how hard we try, and there will be times when certain types of inputs can lead to unexpected behaviours. During these times, it's important to embrace that uncertainty--Bødker refers to them as a system's "quirks"--and realise that friction can help personalise a user's experience.
He makes the distinction, though, between pesky and designed quirks, with the latter more recoverable than the former. By introducing tiny road bumps in a user's experience that they can quickly resolve using workarounds, users actually gain a sense of trust with the system. It is as if they have a secret handshake that makes the system that much more fun to use.
My favorite examples of this are customised File Not Found or Server Overloaded errors, many of which have spawned their own memes and followings. Don't underestimate the resistance of web users to failure, as well as their ability to recover from failure. By using the space to poke fun at yourself, or even better, at your users, your website may just have established its own little secret handshake.
Whether or not Cameron finally gets her "Personal Computer", I hope designers and developers increasingly build present software that is both sentient and embodied. And maybe in these systems there will be just the right amount of friction to interrupt the interaction with a tiny problem solving task. When (not if) that happens, let's just pray that there's a tiny wink or at least a cute cat photo to help save the day.