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Adam Griffin,
John Book,
Nick Harris
Summary:
This book describes how when people interact with computers they apply some of the social concepts used when dealing with humans. It includes everything from social norms such as being polite to object recognition to teamwork. It seems to cover more on how humans interact with their environment more than with computers in particular.
Discussion:
This book's usefulness can be broken down by chapters. Certain chapters such as as the ability to recall images seems very common knowledge in that we remember objects that are larger better than objects that are further. It points out things that I already knew such as that you can use perspective techniques to make objects appears further away even in a two dimensional image. Other chapters such as teamwork and labels were more of a surprise and could be used to enhance usability in computers. The ideas would take time to implement and may not be straightforward, but if done right it could be a revolution. As for furthering or applying his work, you need to be careful. Things like praising a user could easily become mundane or even an annoyance to a user who is trying to do something. I think it is important to take away that making a computer look more human like is not necessarily the answer to everything. You can see in 3D animations of humans that we never seem to get certain parts right such as the hands and eyes. This causes some people to be even more turned off to the median. It may be better to get of the basics down first before moving on.
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I think praising the user could be done correctly. Interrupting the user would be the incorrect way to praise. However, if the standard messages that would appear anyways were just turned into a more positive message that praises the user, I think the user would appreciate it to a certain extent.
ReplyDeleteYeah, pop-ups that say, "Good Job!!" would probably get annoying really fast. There are more subtle ways of doing it, I would think. Most programs have some sort of small status bar somewhere in the interface which might be used to occasionally display a positive message of sorts. Of course, for the users who are distracted/annoyed by that, there would probably need to be a, "I know I'm awesome, stop reminding me" option.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I think the type of praise and timing of the praise should vary depending on the task at hand. I think most programmers understand the concept of "being in the zone" when programming and any interruption of that greatly hinders the programmers productivity. The idea of "being in the zone" can easily be applied to other tasks, like using a word processor for example. So not interrupting the user and subtlety need to be kept in mind when attempting to humanize media via various forms of praise of the user.
ReplyDeleteI agree that not every computer should be more human like. After all, the book talks about how humans already treat computers as people, so why do they need to make them more human like. Many attempts at this have failed, and caused more annoyance than usefulness.
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