The Human Interface
Chris Fahley
http://graphpaper.com
@chrisfahley
- Cyborg: embedding or attaching technology to our bodies to make us better
- contacts, glasses, jotting things down to remember them
- The history of humanity is the history of becoming cyborgs
- This isn’t always a good thing, sometimes the technology falls short
- The Uncanny Valley (Masahiro Mori)
- Two dimensions: how comfortable humans are around robots, and how closely the robots mimic humans
- Lessons So Far
- Don’t replace humans
- Don’t replicate humans
- What childhood experiences brought you into design?
- Take things apart to see how they work
- Fixing broken things
- Creating Little Worlds
- Lots of design stuff is not new. Example of multitouch display from 25 years ago, of Apple pad demo video from 25 years ago that’s like an iPad with AI
- Jef Raskin: “An interface is humane if it is responsible to human needs and is considerate of human frailties”
- Alan Cooper: If we want users to like our software, we should design it like a likeable human being
- We make better products when we think of them as human beings
- Future
- We’ll see a return to command line interfaces: not necessarily arcane commands, but typing or saying what we want, rather than pointing and clicking
- We’ll see more physicality of user interfaces
- Not merely mimicking human behavior but reflects it.
- Software that mirrors behavior:
- Chat and IM reflect the immediacy of face to face community
- Social networks mirroring the structure of the special primacy we give our close friends.
- The Human Interface
- is about persausion and seduction
- is smart and has awareness
- is empathetic and feeling
- is physical and embodied
- is linguistic, poetic, and narrative (creates compelling stories about our interactions)
- has a name and an identity
- has a personality
- Paul Dourish: Where the Action Is
- Embodied Interaction: the intersection of ubiquitous computing, tangible computing, and social computing.
- Reeves and Nass: The Media Equation
- Experiments they did on users and machines to figure out how we perceive them
- We tend to personify the interfaces we interact with
- Ergonomics of the mind
- Cups designed by the other Masahiro Mori, such that they each have their own personality
- Human-ness
- Christopher Alexander: The Quality Withou a Name aka The Phenomenon of Life
- Fifteen properties of Living Structures
- http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/fifteen.htm
- Examples:
- level of scale
- strong centers
- thick boundaries
- Katherine Isbister: Better Game Characters by Design
- external characteristics of personhood: bodies, faces, vices
- internal: …
- The Three Qualia of the Human Interface
- Sentience
- Intimacy
- Personality
- Sentience
- The system is about to collect robust sensory data from the world and make sense of that data
- voice recognition: e.g. google voice recognition mobile apps
- image and face recognition: e.g. google picasa
- touch and gestures: touching a screen, moving a controller
- Not always that great… fitbit counts how many steps you take. It’s not perfect, but they can discover a lot about your motion and activity.
- Microsoft Project Natal: just observes your body.
- Artificial Intelligences
- all of these things have artificial intelligence in them
- the difference between these and HAL is that they are not trying to do it all at once.
- (they are no danger of falling into the uncanny valley)
- Even simple things can be unnerving:
- e.g. search results that are uncannily good.
- Search that pops up microsoft bing advertisement with search term prepopulated
- Intimacy
- Emotional Intelligence
- Proximity
- Presence
- Social Web
- Personal Informatics
- Multiplayer Games
- Real Time Web
- Conversations
- Examples:
- We noticed you haven’t called your mother later.
- Your email is using more stressed words this month than last month
- Status indicators shows people where we are and what we’re doing
- Big Ben Clock on twitter
- Conversations…
- Efficient and fast? Or elegant and graceful?
- For a long time, the answer was that interfaces should be efficient. But maybe elegant is the new efficient.
- Politeness is something all people do, but not machines…
- Don’t reject
- Don’t interrupt
- Say hello and goodbye
- Use people’s names
- Praise people
- Example: spell checker that praises people for writing difficult words correctly, or writing an error free emails. Yes, it takes longer, but people come away feeling more satisfied with their experience.
- Personality
- The system has a distinctive character, with recognizable cultures and habits
- Interpersonal Circumplex
- Example:
- Max Train comes to a station. How to let people know which doors will be opening when the passengers could be facing forward or back: “The doors will be opening on my right”
- Culture
- Casting – Role they are in (copilot who is subservient vs. engineer)
- Names – People associate meaning with names
- Things to try
- Use pronouns for your product: he, she
- Give your application a name
- Do more visceral prototypes
- If we don’t humanize our products, then our products will mechanize us.