Comments on Computer Human Values

Roberto Bolullo — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

Thanks Nathan, as inspiring as usual.

From the article some themes come up to my mind.

1. The article talk about the human values of computers (be aware of themselves, aware of their surroundings and participants, more natural and understandable ways, autonomous…) and the interface (courtesy, understanding and helpfulness, not to mention grace and subtlety).
Making a parallelism with human, computer overall values will be the overall of humankind and computers interface will be the human mind. But what happen with the physical representation of computers? What happen with the body? As we move to a more experience focus design the integration between the two aspects, virtual and physical (mind and body), is very important.
In my opinion physical aspects should also support and empower human values focusing in values such as adaptability to the space, mobility, expressive, choreography of movements, flexibility, agility…

2. Added to the lack of imagination, understanding and courage I will add collaboration. In my opinion understanding others professionals’ space of work is no more enough, a more co-participative relationship is needed to deal with the experience as whole.

3. To design experience as a whole we need to adjust our vision.
In my opinion we need to give a step back to start to see design outcomes as a stories form by the sum of events (or the interaction of components that form events) rather than just stories form by form+ content+ behaviour/ time. This also suggests a change in design methodologies from the study of users and their behaviours to more situation and facts focus.

“the opportunities are boundless for those who are able to step back, adjust their vision and begin to make sense” John Seely, Director Xerox PARC (1997)

Roberto Bolullo
bolullo.com/roberto

fabio sergio — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

What the article’s saying resonates with the whole concept of branding as a relationship and with all Nathan himself has written about interactivity vs reactivity.
The emotional attachment we develop for products and the personality we tend to attribute to the quality of our interactions with them are in the end the most powerful vehicle to carry brand values and make them come to life. Think about MS Word’s infamous “paper clip” and Microsoft’s perceived brand image for example.
Interacting with somebody, weather the other one is a person, an organization or a software product, should be all about creating a “virtuous loop” where the two entities mutually evolve along the lines of the information that’s been shared. If the relationship lasts over time trust is the final outcome.
Most so-called “interactive” products, software or websites, are actually merely “reactive” and stuck in sterile input-output loops. They fail at creating a real dialog with users and leave them repeating time and time again who they are and what they want and how they want it.

But there’s also another aspect to consider.
We are entering a world where interactivity will be channeled through new breeds of mobile connected devices that will be used in social contexts of use, far away from the traditional world of one user sitting alone in front of a computer screen.
The role of the user interface will soon be even more complex as it will need to mediate between the user, the data he/she’s accessing and the context of use itself, other human beings included.
Imagine receiving an MMS, a multimedia message, on your mobile handset, in a crowded bus. How should that message be delivered? How will it feel to look at your girlfriend’s pictures with other people around you? Will you feel more exposed to their judgment than if you were reading a text message nobody else is really able to see?
Or how many times have you been in a meeting only to get interrupted by somebody’s phone ringing? What were your thoughts? “Why didn’t he/she turn the thing off” probably.
I think Nathan’s article is hinting that in the future the phone’s interface should know, it should know where it is and act accordingly because that’s what we expect in a social context from anything we qualify as “intelligent”.
Right now more complexity is imposed over us as WE have to remeber to tell our devices were we are or how we feel and how they should behave.

Nathan has done what he’s always done best, let his ideas float like a kite and leave us running after the string.

Adam Greenfield — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

Mmm, maybe what might have helped that last comment hit home is itself a bit of context.

Yes, of course you are correct: simplification is a tool, clarity is the desired goal.

Nathan — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

Adam,

Careful there, wjat you’re after isn’t usually simplification but clarification. Richard Saul Wurman taught me that a long time ago. Life isn’t simple and when we try to simplify things, we usually destroy any meaning. What people really need is complexity represented clearly rather than deleting important information.

Condiser a map. SImplifying it is to delete everything but the most essential pieces (say, roads to your house). But you take away all of the context then. If someone misses a street or isn’t sure if they’ve passed it, there is no information for them to know if they have. It is the full map that builds the context they need to judge distances, orient themselves, come from another directions, etc.—as long as the map is presented clearly enough for them to parse.

There are times when we need to simplify things but relatively few of them.

Tax Forms are another example. The 1040EZ is simple but this means it can’t do very much (and, therefore, is only usable in the simplist cases). A “flat tax” is extremely simple but seen by many as not “fair” because it can’t represent the richness of tax exemptions and rates we often view as desirable.

Nathan

Adam Greenfield — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

Nathan, in the book I’m writing, I’ve been dealing with a great many of these same themes. I’m arguing that one user need seems to subsume many others in our daily lives, and that need is simplification.

I further argue that an intervention that would go a very long way toward simplification is for interface developers to (voluntarily) adhere to a creed not too dissimilar from those bullet points with which you open your piece. The hope is that we would enter, with no apologies to Ray Kurzweil, an “age of social machines.”

Thanks for your insights; they’re helping me refine and extend my own positions even as I write this.

Oh, and Tad? We’ll keep shouting from the treetops, I’m willing to bet, until a healthy chunk of reality starts to reflect the values we hold so dear, and which you apparently regard as yesterday’s news.

christina — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

Now now, don’t blame Nathan for our flaws. We provide the “large font version” admittedly too small and ill placed; we’ll work on that soon (all long other tweaks that are fairly urgent… always in motion, B&A is). However, I can pretty much blame browser makers for the font resize problems, which as best illustrated here
http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_lesson/fon…

But that’s not what we are here to discuss. Personally, I think the problem is that which we see in both MS and in the earlier comment. people always think there is an easy true answer, and their isn’t. humans are complicated, building for them is very very hard. very few get it right. no one gets it all the way right. But, as I’ve said before, critiquing is easier than making.

Kent Fitch — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

I find it ironic that an article which lays into Microsoft Word for:
“It knows better than you. You specify 10-point Helvetica but it gives you 12-point Times at every opportunity”
is hosted on a web page with hardcoded font sizes so that my attempt to increase the font size in my browser (IE5.5) to make it easier to read is completely ignored.
Physician, heal thyself.

eric bort — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

About Microsoft Word, I used to teach classes on all MS office products.. and to think back, everything I found annoying about Word was when it would try to take over and assume what you wanted next. I found it kinda amazing that after a while of indenting and adding a bullet, typing two letters in bold, then changing to a different font, Word would somehow remember all of this and soon enough I wouldn’t have to do any formatting myself, Word took care of it.

While sometimes annoying, like a little kid who starts off being a pain, then realizes how the world works and is able communicate, some programs are hinting at ways to serve people better.

If any of you played Black and White, you may have seen some interesting AI going on.. I just wonder how long that AI (a loose term) will integrate itself into more traditional applications.

christina — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

Is it happening? I think the earlier comment on microsoft was right on… we should look to Tenner’s “Why things bite back” to understand the nature of the problem. MS thought they were being human centered when they made those godawful menus that hide half the options and are always changing based on use. It sounds user-centered… show items that are used often, and hide those that aren’t. But the reality is that the software program looks extremely arbitrary and unpredicatble to people who can’t remember what they used last, but sure as heck know what they need now and cannot find it. it’s no wonder people think of computers as humans…. they are fickle and unpredictable.

The design problem is determining what predicable and faithful would look like. And it is far more complex than most folks think.

peterme — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

Clifford Nass should definitely be required reading. Here’s a PDF of an essay he wrote with a colleague titled “Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers”
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs147/readings/nass.pdf

And here’s an earlier paper on a similar topic:
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs147/readings/casa/index.html

And here’s an essay Nass and Reeves wrote on Perceptual Bandwidth for Communications of the ACM
http://www.iha.bepr.ethz.ch/pages/leute/zim/emopapers/ree…

I have to credit Andrew Dillon for being the one to first turn me on to Nass and Reeves’ research:
http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~adillon/

Now, all that said, I find Nathan’s essay, while right on, also, um, “well duh.” And I fear that, at least here on B&A, he’s merely preaching to the choir. I don’t think any of us would challenge the notion of better incorporating human values into our work.

And I think interface designers, HCI types, and the like, have been trying to for years. (I just read an essay Alan Kay wrote in 1989 on his work in interface design, which talks about stuff very much like what Nathan’s describing.)

But it’s not happening. And simply saying, “It must happen,” clearly isn’t going to get it to happen. For a whole boatload of reasons, this stuff is hard to implement.

Why?

christina — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

We’re just waiting for you, Tad.
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/about/writeforus.php

Andrew — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

You know, I think that MS really was trying to make Word “context-aware” and “be more autonomous” when it formats consecutive numbers into lists.

I mean, in this article there’s unfortunately not even *one* actual example of an actual product that does any of this stuff successfully and behaves itself. Is it possible that only real-world experiences are able to do it, like the Apple Store example?

Tad Davis — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

This isn’t so much a comment on this article as it is on this site, and the information architecture profession, as a whole.
When are we going to come up with something innovative? I don’t think I’ve read an article at Boxes and Arrows that was really the least bit interesting or even (heaven forbid!) a new idea. Let’s stop evangalizing the same tired message over and over again, and come up with something both new and useful.

Derek R — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

Thank you Nathan

udanium235 — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:21 GMT

Yes! This is exactly what we need to hear—a strong recognition and appraisal of a humanistic approach to designing new technology products. Nathan’s piece confirms that at the heart of digital design is really social interaction, human communication, which should embody fundamental human values, like trust, respect, courtesy, etc., and expressed in the product itself.

Consideration for the totality of the human expereince of a product, beyond isolated tasks, and the values therein, suggests a more promising way to integrate products into our daily lives. So, they become true participants in our lives, not merely annoying things we have to deal with. Apple, Nike, Sony are all great examples, as Nathan pointed out.

A question is, how do we cultivate positive human values within interdiciplinary product development processes, so they become reflected in the products we design?