Designing the interactions that matter
Perhaps the greatest disservice that ever befell the UX industry (or Interaction Design or Human Factors or whatever label you prefer) was when the term human-computer interaction was coined. The phrase comes with good intentions. Born in the 1980s, considering how a person interacted with a tool was a fairly novel and useful concept. Poor design at this point was a frequent source of system failure.
But like many things, after years of use and misuse, the term has created an unfortunate mindset that permeates the field to this day. It’s problematic because it suggests that the human and computer are separate entities and the point of design is to create the interaction(s) between the two.
Our users’ goals are not to interact with a computer
In the early days of computing, this basically had to be the relationship given the limited capabilities. Even today, on the surface, it’s clearly true. Our job as designers is to specify these interactions. Yet it’s also a too-narrow focus that misses the point behind human-centered design, which is to help people accomplish goals. Our users’ goals are not to interact with a computer (or any technology). When we myopically focus on these interactions, we miss out on the interactions that matter — the interactions with the world.
We are not merely interacting
Reconsidering our relationship with technology creates a better way to think about the human and machine; as two equal parts within the same system.
Consider a hockey player. The hockey player uses a stick to control, pass, and shoot the puck. From a physical perspective, the hockey stick is just tool. But for great hockey players, the stick is more realistically an extension of themselves. The two physical items (person and hockey stick) are functionally one single thing — a hockey player. The player may be using the stick, but all they are thinking about is the puck and what they want to do with it. Even the language that people use to describe the player reinforce this. If you watch a game on tv, the announcer says that the player shoots the puck, they never say the player uses the stick to shoot the puck.
When we create new technologies, we should be creating both physical and cognitive extensions of ourselves into the world. We aren’t using an app to check our account balance, we are just managing our cash flow even if we are using an app or a website to do so. Everything that impedes that goal from being accomplished is a seam in our designs.
When we create new technologies, we should be creating both physical and cognitive extensions of ourselves into the world.
We have gotten much better over the last hundred years creating physical extension of our bodies (the field of ergonomics has helped solidify this in public consciousness). We need a similar push forward on the cognitive side. This is why learning some cognitive (and perceptual) psychology is so important for designers. We need to understand how people think and make sense of the world so we can apply those lessons to the particular challenge we are designing for to extend our users’ cognition.
People often say that the best interface is no interface, but that is not often realistic — especially for complex systems. When we design, we need to do the next best thing. We need to clearly represent the world through the interface so that our users aren’t thinking about the interface, they are only thinking about the world.
The interactions we create in the interface should help people interact with the world. We need to uncover mental models and capture these within the interface. We need to make clear the goals people are aiming for, their progress towards them, and any limits they face. We need to help people understand the constraints they are operating under, the possible options within this space, and give them the controls to explore in that space. When we design these correctly, we open up the world to our users and they can interact directly with it.
Impact on AI
As we build ‘smart’ technologies (AI, automation,etc…) this concept still holds. For these systems, the point of design is not human-automation interaction, since that assumes the two are operating independently. Rather, our mindset needs to be how the person and technology operate together to complete the shared goals.
Drs. David Woods and Erik Hollnagel describe the unit as a Joint Cognitive System in their books by the same name. The term of measurement is no longer the user, but the man-machine system and how well that performs. Either the system is successful or it is not.
This means our systems cannot operate with black boxes where their human teammates have no idea how that technology came to a result or decision and no way to interject. This creates a trust barrier that is difficult to overcome and generates an over-reliance on the tech to always be right.
We must design as though we were designing for good teammates, two individuals who clearly communicate their status and how they got to a point or result so they can jointly accomplish the system’s or team’s goals. Good teammates look out for each other, jump in and offer help when one is getting overwhelmed, and can take over in a graceful handoff when the other is out of their realm of expertise (which is extremely important when dealing with automation). Good teammates don’t constantly barrage each other with information but have a clear understanding of who needs particular information at any given time.
Think of any tech system you know. How well is it communicating to you? Does it tell you when it nears or hits its rule-based boundary conditions? The user interface should not exist solely as a mechanism for transactions between the human and the computer, yet we often treat it as such.
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The technologies we create are not some other thing that we must work with. They should be part of us, and part of our team that make us better at what we are trying to do already. When we think about it this way, we start changing how we design and even what we design.
We are designing to support interactions, but the meaningful interactions are between user and the world, not the user and the tool.
We need to start changing the mindset away from designers being responsible for the user interface. It places a box around what we can do that comes with built-in, assumed constraints which hinder our ability to deliver good solutions. The technology extends our capabilities in the world. We are together. We are one unit. When we design, we need to think this way too.
Yes, we are designing to support interactions, but the meaningful interactions are between user and the world, not the user and the tool.
Thanks for reading. For more of my UX ramblings, you can follow me on Twitter: @bkenna1 or here on Medium.
