Yu Centrik

In the design of social media, our task is to provide a medium and context for human interaction.  With this power, the behaviour of our interfaces can be interpreted as the behaviour of our human colleagues, friends and family.  Considering this fact, we run the risk of creating unnatural, awkward or even hurtful social situations for our users - in other words, a terrible experience.

An example.  I was recently conducting business out of town when a peer and I agreed to keep contact via text-messaging.  At the time, I hadn’t yet realized that my network provider was not stable in this part of the world.  As it turns out, everytime I tried to send a text message, my phone was sending numerous duplicates.  Not only was the service assaulting the receipient with messages, but it was also giving me errors saying that it couldn’t complete message delivery.  So there I was, trying to re-send a message which had actually already been delivered twice; my recipient ended up receiving almost 10 identical text messages.  Needless to say, she was frustrated and annoyed, but most importantly, she was attributing the technical errors to me and drawing social conclusions (when we discussed this error later, she said I had seemed overeager and tactless).

As another example, consider a recent addition to Facebook which displays those friends you haven’t interacted with lately, reminding you to send them a message.  Unfortunately, this feature has been the target of a recent wave of complaints from users who automatically recevied such requests from recently deceased friends or family.  This is a clear example of an emotionally hurtful user experience directly resulting from Facebook’s attempt to socially-integrate their interface.

Embodying an interface within human social norms also allows users to understand and interact as if it were a social being.  If you’ve ever used voice response systems which attempt to use human language to engage in a natural conversation (”at the tone, please tell me what you’re calling about”), then you’ve likely felt a little frustrated, uncomfortable or confused.  In some cases, these interfaces greatly simplify the process, yet in others they are frustrating and strange.  In such novel interfaces, we move closer to the re-emergence of a principle introduced in the field of robotics by Masahiro Mori known as the “uncanny valley”.  Mori used early philosophical work on the ‘uncanny’ to demonstrate that overly realistic robots can result in a negative reaction from human observers.  The implication here is that while modest social embodiment of our interfaces can improve the user experience, we should be careful in more extreme applications of this principle, as we run the risk of making our users feel uneasy.

Considering the social role of your technological designs is a valuable technique.  However, designing for a more intimate realm of human experience also introduces new risks.  Our penetration into the emotional lives of our users has also opened possibilities for increasingly detrimental consequences of design errors.  Any designer should take heed of the lessons learned within these examples and consider the added risks when working on socially embodied technology.

Engaging with socially-powered technology for the past decade, I’ve noticed the slow, natural formation of ‘digital etiquette’.  In the same way that researchers have found information-seeking behaviour to be akin to animalistic ‘foraging’ behaviour, it seems that our typical social behaviour manifests itself on the web as well.  As online tools are appropriated by real users in a social context, we are starting to see the natural development of online ‘politeness’.  Some examples…

Re-Tweeting and Sharing Posts
When finding an interesting link posted by another user, it is polite to credit them when sharing it with your own network.  Twitter users accomplished this by creating and following the convention of re-tweeting (which is now being integrated formally into the system by twitter).  Along the same vein, Facebook has recently added a share feature which allows you to auto-distribute any post to your own network. However, Facebook’s system does not automatically include any information about the original poster with a user’s “re-post”.  This can result in a reaction from users; unless you mention whose post you’re sharing, you’re likely to receive a friendly “hey, you stole my post!”.

Multiplayer Gaming Conventions
Since their inception, multi-player games have been steeped in their own customs, language and culture.  Upon the release and adoption of a new game, its player community naturally tends to form rules and customs surrounding the freedoms and limitations of the game.  Starcraft, a classic strategy game from Blizzard, became extremely popular due to its balanced and engaging gameplay.  After an online community of players developed, a weakness of the game was revealed: advanced players could bypass an involved war by rapidly training a few troops to kill off beginners before they even get a chance to start playing.  The process was named rushing and an abundance of players started hosting games with “no rush” in the title, resulting in civil games based solely on players’ trust that fellow players would show politeness.

Selective Photo Tagging
Photo tagging is a useful feature on Facebook.  Users are able to tag the people in a photograph, automatically notifying them and attaching the photograph to their profile.  This creates a delicate situation, as anyone has the power to add pictures to your profile.  At first, users would tag every picture added to the network.  As users become more and more aware of this phenomenon, they have started tagging only the best pictures.  This creates an environment where all photos are accessible, but only the best are attached to a users’ profile.  Selective tagging is a clear display of respect and politeness for fellow users of the service.

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There are many more examples of online politeness.  As social technology becomes more central, the trend is not likely to slow down.  What does this mean for designers?  We should take note of this trend and improve the user experience of any socially-driven system by considering and accomodating digital etiquette in our designs.

Let’s quickly review why, and under what conditions, these questions are used. Secret questions (security questions) are most often used when a user has forgotten his account password. This device ensures that the person renewing the password is in fact the person he says he is. Of course no system is infallible, but this one considerably reduces the risks.

Here’s the general idea: whenever you create a new account - especially with services where you have to provide sensitive personal information (the bank, email, etc…) - you will be asked to choose one or several security questions to which only you will know the answer. These questions must be as secure as a password without being “encrypted”. Therein lies the rub!

Fig. 1 - Example of a security question used by Paypal

At any point in the future, any user wishing to update his password will be required to provide the correct response to the security questions he selected. And of course, to “simplify” things, the different services to which he subscribes won’t necessarily offer the same set of questions!

1- Which questions just don’t work?

There are two main problems with security questions: Either the question is too easy, and someone from the user’s entourage can find the answer and play a dirty trick… or the question is too general and it’s hard to remember the answer.

The question should therefore provide enough hints for the user to remember, yet still be general enough. Finding a happy medium is the greatest challenge in developing these questions.

Example of non-secure specific questions:

• In what city were you born?
• What is your favourite movie?
• What brand was your first vehicle?
• What’s your favourite colour?

The answer to these questions can be found with a minimum of research. For example, it’s easy to find a list of the top 100 movies of all time, and there are only about one hundred names for colours (even including things like cream…).

Example of broad questions that are hard to recall:

• What’s your favourite video game?
• Who is your favourite historical character?
• Who is your favourite actor, musician or artist?

Why is it that, in the case of the latter questions, recall is difficult despite the questions being very specific? Let’s reflect for a moment on how memory works; particularly the phenomena of remembering and forgetting.

Benton J. Underwood (1957) and others have demonstrated the existence of a phenomenon that can cause interference with memory and lead to forgetting. In our daily lives, two sources of interference combine to cause us to forget names, dates, forms, etc…

On the one hand, the theory of Retroactive Interference suggests that what we forget of what we’re now retaining increases as a function of similarity to future learning. On the other hand, Proactive Interference suggests that the first memory interferes with the second. For example, words previously remembered may be included in the recall of new information.

But all is not lost ; ) Tulving and Psotka (1971) have demonstrated that interference is eliminated if recovery hints are provided. This is good news for our ability to remember. There are also several types of hints: associative (tools - hammer), phonetic (rhyme), or even visual. However, using hints is still a weak recall method when compared to recognition.

Example of recall versus recognition in a list of 6 words:

• What six words did you learn yesterday?
• In this list of 30 words, what six words did you learn yesterday?

Many experiments have demonstrated that the second case generated much better results (Bahrick et Wittlinger, 1975). In our case of the security question asking “what’s your favourite video game?“, the answer can evolve over time. When the time comes for the user to change his password, his favourite video game is likely to have changed; he’s probably played many more games and amassed a great deal of information on the subject. Ten years later, the same person will almost certainly have forgotten the game.
In this case, forgetting is very hard to undo. The game was neither a sustainable event, nor a significant moment, and any change in context alters the user’s perception of the hints, which affect his ability to recall.

2- How do I create a good question?

It is therefore crucial that any hints refer to something significant and, if possible, to something that won’t change over time. An important moment in the person’s life would be a good example. The question should apply to the great majority, relate to a significant experience and be hard to predict.

Naturally, by proposing a number of questions, the user can choose the one that is best suited to the situation and the least ambiguous. You should also realize that it’s not easy to create a good list of questions. Finally, we think that letting the user create his own question (like google mail does) is a risky proposition.

Example of questions we would recommend:

• What is your first love’s first name?
• What is your favourite grade school teacher’s family name?
• What is your maternal great-grandmother’s first name?
• What is the name of the city where your parents met?
• When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

It is also worth noting that experiments on recovery of information stored in long-term memory have shown that images are more effective than words. What other tools could we use to help the user recall a specific context (a photo of the environment in which the response was provided, a short clip of the music that was playing, etc…), in order to improve recall abilities and allow for “weaker” questions?

Have you ever had to create security questions? What are your thoughts on the subject?

Updated :

Here’s an interesting fact that confirms the importance of a good security question and the awareness that users must have of the subject. Today, the media announced that Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email address was hacked. It would seem that the hacker found the response to the security question and got into the Republic candidate’s email inbox.

For more information, see this TIME ARTICLE.

Target has issued a series of ads in the New York subway system for a live album by singer John Legend.  The ads feature a headphone jack where you can plug-in and listen while you wait for the next train.  Check it out:

Taking advantage of the user’s situation (bored, waiting, and likely having headphones in his pocket) is a beautiful example of contextual design.  My only concern is that if I have headphones, then I likely have an mp3 player as well.  If I’m already listening to music I like - why would I switch?  The design banks on human curiousity, counting on people to opt-in to the novelty of the idea.  I’d love to run some tests and see how well it works.

So, where do I start?  If you’ve been following my Twitter @jayvidyarthi, you know that last week I experienced an overload of knowledge transfer at the annual CHI conference in Boston.  I wanted to write a blog updating all of you on some of the fantastic methodologies, processes and technologies on the fringe of our field.  First, let me tell you a little about my read on the main theme of the conference.

Tying directly into the Closing Plenary delivered by Kees Overbeeke from Eindhoven, I observed the underlying theme of HCI and design today as focusing on the humanization of technology.  Computer systems no longer have to be cold and digital.  Instead, they can behave more organically, installing themselves into our lives in a natural way.  Kees described how our relationships with technology can even go beyond such seamless integration.  He presented a lamp which gradually loses power.  As one pets the lamp, as if it were a cat or dog, it comes back to life.  This was an example of technology which can appeal to our emotions and connect with our users in a more profound way (while also being environmentally friendly!).  The tradeoffs between a practical and useful lamp and a “pet” lamp are still to be explored, but Kees’ point of view undoubtedly inspires questions about the future directions of human-computer interaction.

Although not every researcher is ‘dreaming of the impossible’ like Kees, a broad survey of projects from various angles at CHI 2009 show that seamless integration is the underlying theme of our technological future.  I decided to summarize a few interesting projects for you to check out, but by no means is this a comprehensive summary.  Check out the official CHI program summary to get many more descriptions and references on the fringe of HCI.

Some Highlights

• Eric Gilbert’s work on building a predictive model for social networks allowing a system such as Facebook to automatically distinguish your close friends from your distant acquaintances based on your behaviour with the system.  A short summary on Eric’s blog
• John Zimmerman is building a strong design philosophy centered around creating products which promote self-identity.  An application of product attachment theory to design specifically for role transition and self enhancement.  Really fantastic stuff for the creative theorist.  John’s Research Description
• Sunny Consolvo is working on the Ubifit Garden, a wallpaper for your mobile phone which measures how much time you spend sedentary, walking, running, biking, etc., and grows flowers and plants to indicate your physical exertion.  The system serves as a subtle ambient measure of your own exercise which creates a motivating factor within your cellphone.  A Poster Describing the Ubitfit Garden
• Tovi Grossman et. al. at Autodesk are designing and testing a new approach to measure the learnability of an interface: the Question-Suggestion model.  By having a coach directly interact with users, the method extracts specific problems and provides a more precise measure of interface learnability.  Extremely valuable for any kind of longitudinal usability testing of complex interfaces.  Description of the Paper @ ACM
• David Geerts from Leuven presented well-justified heuristics for the implementation of social functionality in interactive TV systems.  Hopefully I’ll hear more from David when I head to Euro ITV 2009 in Belgium to present Yu Centrik’s interactive TV research findings.  David’s Presentation Slides (jump to slide 33)
• Sarah Diefenbach and Mark Hassenzahl presented a thought-provoking piece on the interaction of Beauty and Usability on consumer product choice.  The paper served as a launching point for an intense panel discussion including a tirade on the definition of beauty from Bill Buxton.  Very engaging stuff.  Sarah and Mark’s Thought-Provoking Paper
• Leanne Hirshfield from Robert Jacob’s lab at Tufts University presented some early work on using fNIR brain imaging to get a read on human syntactic and semantic workload.  The eventual fruits of this work could lead to interfaces which can adapt to the users’ cognitive load by reading bloodflow in the brain.  If this project starts to fly, interfaces could get very interesting.  A Description of the Adaptive Interfaces using fNIR Project
• Alexander Hoffman is working on TypeRight, a keyboard which uses language dictionaries to adjust the resistance of keys on the keyboard based on the probability of each letter being pressed.  I tried using the keyboard and barring some minor technical issues, it seems to have potential to help us avoid type-os and increase our overall typing speed.  The TypeRight Project
• David Frolich presented a case study of StoryBank, a mobile-phone and touch-screen based system allowing children in rural India to develop narrated slideshow videos.  Being a kind of “local, embodied youtube”, the interfaces involved no language, enabling use by illiterate children in the village.  The findings were quite surprising, and the videos made were very powerful.  David was intent on stressing how our technology can help the developing world.  The StoryBankHomepage

Again, if you enjoy this type of work, check out the CHI program summary for more quick descriptions!  If you want details and have access to ACM’s digital library, check out the full proceedings.

Being a simultaneous programmer, interface designer, songwriter, musician and sound engineer has led me to draw an interesting parallel which I thought I would share with the bloggers out there.

Much of the defining literature in our field clearly distinguishes design from development (see ‘The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” by Alan Cooper for a good example).  I suppose the assertion is based on psychological bias.  It is inevitable that the hard programmers will bring their ‘utopian’ designs down to earth by considering technical implications too early.  The inverse is also true, as designers will tend to target main use cases with a higher risk of ignoring fringe cases.  An effective design-development relationship with two independent minds seems to be the ideal path to a technological solution.  From my experiences working in usability and design, it’s clear to me that this is actually the case.

This has all been written before, so why do I repeat it?  The startling insight here is the parallel that can be drawn to the music recording process.  Being both a musician and a sound engineer, I have produced many of my own creations from the creative to the technical side: writing, arranging, performing, recording, mixing and mastering.  I have also served each of these roles individually with other musicians and producers on various projects within the music scene here in Montreal.  As is true for design and development, the best results seem to come from keeping creative and technical aspects of the process localized to independent minds.  The songwriter dreams of utopia while the sound engineer works to make it happen, just as the designer creates ideal solutions while the developer considers technical feasibility.

For example, a songwriter might be sure that a particular song needs a banjo; he shouldn’t be dissuaded by the fact that he doesn’t have one.  Leave it to the sound engineer to consider performance, time and budget when deciding whether to rent one or simulate one on a high-end synthesizer!  Dialogues between these creative and technical forces serve to push the project to its optimum.  On top of this logical parallel, similarities between the feelings associated with either role in either context are uncanny.  I wanted to suggest that this ‘tug of war’ makes both a great recording and a great technological solution.

Have you seen this same creative vs. technical tug of war work in any other contexts?