Paper Reading #7: Hard-To-Use Interfaces Considered Beneficial (Some of the Time)

Commentary

See what I have to say about ___'s and ___'s work.

References

Riche, Y., et al. (2010). Hard-to-use interfaces considered beneficial (some of the time). Proceeding of the Acm conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2705-2714). Atlanta: http://www.sigchi.org/chi2010/.

Article Summary

This group of researchers took an entirely novel approach to evaluating their systems for usability. They examine how something that would initially have been considered a bug or a barrier to usability from their perspective and instead treated it as a feature.

Image courtesy of The Geek Whisperer.

In their first study, the researchers placed a group of computer scientists in a collaborative design environment, who discovered a bug that linked their interaction with the interface to each other's actions. The solution that the group implemented themselves was to increase social interaction outside of the system, e.g. waiting for someone else to finish a task before beginning their own, or asking the group to pause so that they could complete their task. The results of this collaboration is that this group that had to deal with the "bug" had a higher ratio of satisfaction with the system because interacting allowed them to make fewer errors related to each other's actions.

In the second study, the researcher questioned a group of older individuals to gauge their satisfaction with new interfaces that are designed to make interacting with technology easier. The results of this examination, however, proved that the group did not value correspondence that was generating with the help of technology as much as they valued the same that was generated by hand. For this group, apparent effort equated to higher value. The researchers' proposed solution to this problem was to make an interface explicitly harder to use to increase the explicit value of messages generated by the interface.

Discussion

I was really excited to see the evaluation of this specific issue, a "bug" becoming a "feature" instead of being immediately fixed. It obviously worked out well in these cases, and speaks volumes about our ability as a species to overcome adversity. I know that sounds really cheesy, but it's true. Our society is all about instant gratification: I want this and I want it now! Things like this force us to take a step back and actually embrace our humanity rather than push it to the wayside. For some definition of the word "humanity," that is... Now this isn't to say that I don't appreciate the fast response of Google or the wide knowledge base the something like Netflix or Pandora utilizes to generate content and so on. I like those services for what they are: tools. Knowing that they exist, would I be disappointed if I couldn't use them anymore? Yeah, I would. Would I mourn their loss like the loss of a friend? Absolutely not. I don't know if there's anyone out there who would freely admit that they would, but take a look at how "constantly connected" we are to our technology. If you've ever done it, you know how nice it is to unplug every once in a while.

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