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30 April 2011

pitching vs. thinking about what it is like to live with a system

One of the other things to come out in my visit to Malcolm’s class is an awareness of a certain difference in styles between School of Information, HCI/user-centered-design project presentations and architecture project presentations. Basically, teams of SI students or mostly-SI students presented projects as a bit of a “pitch” — this is why our idea is great and should be pursued — while teams with students from architecture tended to present projects ideas as a bit less positive, including at least one presentation of an idea as leading to a very dystopian world. One of the other visitors, an architect, reflected at the end on how strange it felt to have had three hours of mostly back-to-back pitches rather than discussions about what it would be like to “live with” a system.

This prompted some reactions from the SI folks, some of which got posted to Twitter, e.g., “shouldn’t a concept have a compelling use- or who would use it, and why?” and “there was an arch guy who was shocked by the idea of considering users.” I can understand these reactions, but as someone with less skin in the game (no project to pitch), I think I had a more moderated reaction. After reflecting a bit, I want to write down some thoughts about this difference and start a discussion.

The difference that I saw in the presentations was that the “pitches” showed use cases with no downsides, or only technical obstacles. The “live with” presentations showed a vision that was more rounded and showed pros as well as some very serious cons, particularly for people who would be affected by but may not choose to use the system. In comparison to the “live with” presentations, the pitches seemed a bit naïve or even dishonest, while the “live with” presentations felt incomplete: given such obvious problems, why not change the idea?

So, where does this difference come from? Of course architects consider the people who will be affected by their creations — and not just the “users” — so it’s not that. And of course things should have a compelling use. Something that has a compelling use for some people, though, may still create a less than pleasant experience for others who it affects. This is particularly true for architecture projects — everyone in a neighborhood has to live with a building, not just its occupants — so I can see how that would lead to a certain style of presentation or discussion of a proposal. This is not, however, unique to buildings; groupware and social software certainly affect people who may not opt in, and some persuasive technology is designed specifically to influence people who do not opt in, and so maybe it would be good for some HCI presentations to take a bit more of a humble tone that acknowledges potential downsides.

On the other hand, it’s also often fairly easy to prototype and even do large-scale test deployments of software (i.e., try living with) in a way that simply isn’t possible with large buildings or urban development projects. These prototypes and field tests often let designers learn many of the unintended consequences. (Of course, you only learn about the group you test the app with.)

This assuredness of early feedback on software products, as well as the ability to iterate rapidly after deployment to correct for problems or take advantage of newfound opportunities, makes many software presentations more about why something is worth starting this process of building, releasing, and refining, rather than a discussion about building and living with fairly immutable and durable creation, and I think that motivates a lot of the difference in styles. I’m not completely sure that software designers can continue with this attitude as software becomes more social and hooking up system A to system B can lead to information disclosures with long lasting effects.

Other thoughts?

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20 April 2011

Mindful Technology vs. Persuasive Technology

On Monday, I had the pleasure of visiting Malcolm McCullough’s Architecture 531 – Networked Cities for final presentations. Many of the students in the class are from SI, where we talk a lot about incentive-centered design, choice architecture, and persuasive technology, which seems to have resulted in many of the projects having a persuasive technology angle. As projects were pitched as “extracting behavior” or “compelling” people to do things, it was interesting to watch the discomfort in the reactions from students and faculty who don’t frame problems in this way.1

Thinking about this afterwards brought me back to a series of conversations at Persuasive this past summer. A prominent persuasive technology researcher said something along the lines of “I’m really only focusing on people who already want to change their behavior.” This caused a lot of discussion, with major themes being: Is this a cop-out, shouldn’t we be worried about the people who aren’t trying? Is this just a neat way of skirting the ethical issues of persuasive (read: “manipulative”) technology?

I’m starting to think that there may be an important distinction that may help address these questions, one between technology that pushes people to do something without them knowing it and technology that supports people in achieving a behavior change they desire. The first category might be persuasive technology, and for now, I’ll call the second category mindful technology.

Persuasive Technology

I’ll call systems that push people who interact with them to behave in certain ways, without those people choosing the behavior change as an explicit goal, Persuasive Technology. This is a big category, and I believe that most systems are persuasive systems in that their design and defaults will favor certain behaviors over others (this is a Nudge inspired argument: whether or not it is the designer’s intent, any environment in which people make choices is inherently persuasive).

Mindful Technology

For now, I’ll call technology that helps people reflect on their behavior, whether or not people have goals and whether or not the system is aware of those goals, mindful technology. I’d put apps like Last.fm and Dopplr in this category, as well as a lot of tools that might be more commonly classified as persuasive technology, such as UbiFit, LoseIt, and other trackers. While designers of persuasive technology are steering users toward a goal that the designers’ have in mind, the designers of mindful technology give users the ability to better know their own behavior to support reflection and/or self-regulation in pursuit of goals that the users have chosen for themselves.

Others working in the broad persuasive tech space have also been struggling with the issue of persuasion versus support for behaviors an individual chooses, and I’m far from the first to start thinking of this work as being more about mindfulness. Mindfulness is, however, a somewhat loaded term with its own meaning, and that may or may not be helpful. If I were to go with the tradition of “support systems” naming, I might call applications in this category “reflection support systems,” “goal support systems,” or “self-regulation support systems.”

Where I try to do my work

I don’t quite think that this is the right distinction yet, but it’s a start, and I think these are two different types of problems (that may happen to share many characteristics) with different sets of ethical considerations.

Even though my thinking is still a bit rough, I’m finding this idea useful in thinking through some of the current projects in our lab. For example, among the team members on AffectCheck, a tool to help people see the emotional content of their tweets, we’ve been having a healthy debate about how prescriptive the system should be. Some team members prefer something more prescriptive – guiding people to tweet more positively, for example, or tweeting in ways that are likely to increase their follower and reply counts – while I lean toward something more reflective – some information about the tweet currently being authored, how the user’s tweets have changed over time, here is how they stack up against the user’s followers’ tweets or the rest of Twitter. While even comparisons with friends or others offer evidence of a norm and can be incredibly persuasive, the latter design still seems to be more about mindfulness than about persuasion.

This is also more of a spectrum than a dichotomy, and, as I said above, all systems, by nature of being a designed, constrained environment, will have persuasive elements. (Sorry, there’s no way of dodging the related ethical issues!) For example, users of Steps, our Facebook application to promote walking (and other activity that registers on a pedometer), have opted in to the app to maintain or increase their current activity level. They can set their own daily goals, but the app’s goal recommender will push them to the fairly widely accepted recommendation of 10,000 steps per day. Other tools such as Adidas’s MiCoach or Nike+ have both tracking and coaching features. Even if people are opting into specific goals, the mere limited menu of available coaching programs is a bit persuasive, as it constrains people’s choices.

Overall, my preference when designing is to focus on helping people reflect on their behavior, set their own goals, and track progress toward them, rather than to nudge people toward goals that I have in mind. This is partly because I’m a data junkie, and I love systems that help me learn more about my behavior is without telling me what it should be. It is also partly because I don’t trust myself to persuade people toward the right goal at all times. Systems have a long history of handling exceptions quite poorly. I don’t want to build the system that makes someone feel bad or publicly shames them for using hotter water or a second rinse after a kid throws up in bed, or that takes someone to task for driving more after an injury.

I also often eschew gamification (for many reasons), and to the extent that my apps show rankings or leaderboards, I often like to leave it to the viewer to decide whether it is good to be at the top of the leaderboard or the bottom. To see how too much gamification can prevent interfere with people working toward their own goals, consider the leaderboards on TripIt and similar sites. One person may want to have the fewest trips or miles, because they are trying to reduce their environmental impact or because they are trying to spend more time at home with family and friends, while another may be trying to maximize their trips. Designs that simply reveal data can support both goals, while designs that use terms like “winning” or that award trophies or badges to the person with the most trips start to shout: this is what you should do.

Thoughts?

What do you think? Useful distinction? Cluttering of terms? Have a missed an existing, better framework for thinking about this?

1Some of the discomfort was related to some of the projects’ use punishment (a “worst wasters” leaderboard or similar). This would be a good time to repeat Sunny Consolvo’s guideline that technology for persuasive technology range from neutral to positive (Consolvo 2009), especially, in my opinion, in discretionary use situations – because otherwise people will probably just opt-out.

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16 February 2010

some thoughts on Facebook’s recent changes, from the perspective of an application designer

There’s a lot to like about the recent changes to Facebook, but, as an application developer, many of the changes are a mixed bag. Changes to navigation and to interaction points between Facebook and applications are problematic, while new application privacy features are a good start but seem incomplete.

Navigation to Apps
Formerly, the application dock made it easy to access an application from anywhere in Facebook. One click to get to a bookmarked application; two clicks (without waiting for page loads) to get to other applications. In the new homepage, this has been removed.

Not so with the new design. If an application doesn’t have a tab on your profile page, the only way to access it is from the home page. From my profile or someone else’s profile, this means: click to the Facebook home page, wait for the page to load, click the app icon (or, if the application is not one of your top three book marks, click more and then click the app icon). Yes, this is only one more click, but it requires waiting for an entire page load, and it’s worse for non-bookmarked apps: one click to the home page, wait for it to load, one click to the application dashboard, wait for it to load, one click for “see all of your applications,” wait for that to load, and finally click on the application.

One possible remedy might be to add an “applications” drop-down next to the new notifications, requests, and messages icons.

Notifications
At the end of the month, Facebook will turn off the ability of applications to send notifications. This is a method I’ve been using to send reminders in Three Good Things, for both automatically generated reminders and user-to-user reminders.

3GT Notifications

3GT Notifications. Left: system generated reminder. Right: user-to-user reminder.

I like that the notifications are less invasive than email reminders. Some 3GT users appreciated their subtlety, though they may have been a little too subtle, at least when they appeared at the bottom of the screen, as many of 3GT users we interviewed never noticed the notifications they received. More importantly, they allowed notifications at the right time. Rather than sending someone a reminder to post — a reminder that might interrupt their other activity or would at least require them to visit the website — the notifications appeared when a 3GT participant was already logged into Facebook, when it was likely convenient for them to post a “good thing” in our application. B.J. Fogg, a champion of persuasive technology, calls this right-time, right-place notification kairos.

I understand that notifications have gotten a lot more intrusive with the addition of push notifications to the iPhone app, and that some app developers have used them more than some Facebook users would prefer. Facebook has also added additional integration points. On the balance, though, I think notifications are going to be an unfortunate integration point to lose.

Application Privacy
Along with some others building health and wellness applications for the Facebook platform, I’ve felt fairly strongly that Facebook needs to give users and developers enhanced privacy controls for applications. At a minimum, this should include the ability to hide one’s use of an application from friends (i.e., not appearing under “friends using this application” in the application’s profile page).

With the recent updates Facebook’s designers and developers appear to have recognized some of these concerns. Application developers are able to set an application as “private,” causing one’s use to not appear in the new application dashboard. This is a good start, but it feels incomplete for a number of reasons. First, users, not developers, should have control of privacy. What’s to stop a developer from later reverting to a more public setting, instantly and completely changing what user activity is revealed? Currently, users do not have any way to remove this information once it appears, either.

Second, this level of privacy does not extend far enough. Friends who use private applications still appear on the application’s profile page under “friends using this application.” Furthermore, the model of application use and content being either private or public is insufficient. In health and wellness applications, for example, participants may benefit from sharing and interacting with other participants in the intervention as well as their friends or family members on Facebook, while also wanting to keep their activity private from coworkers.

This is something that Facebook has already discovered and addressed with the newsfeed (now stream) content, but application content does not enjoy the same privacy controls. To share with only a subset of one’s friends within an application, however, application developers must implement their own social graph features and users must built a second network within the application. Enabling privacy controls similar to those for the newsfeed for application content and use could help people to feel more comfortable using health wellness applications on Facebook while creating more possibilities for designers. A user could only allow an application to be aware of relationships in one or more friend lists or networks, or to select some to exclude from the application while allowing the other connections to remain visible. Assuming a user had created the necessary friend lists or that their privacy preferences mapped to their networks, this would allow someone to filter out their coworkers or to allow only close friends to see their participation.

Update: As of 17 February, Facebook has added a privacy argument to calls for publishing methods (e.g. Stream.publish that gives applications much more control over shared content.

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7 January 2008

social sites repurposing contacts

A month or so ago, Cory Doctorow wrote a column about how your “creepy ex-co-workers will kill Facebook,” and introduced what he calls “boyd’s law:”

Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.

I think there’s an important corollary: adding more features and content types to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.

Recent concerns about Beacon are one example. Yes, the privacy issues of an opt-out tool that follows you around from site to site recording your behavior are huge. But there’s also the issue of having this content added to the Facebook at all. Even among my close friends, I don’t want a list of their recent purchases. It’s not something we do in person, and it’s not something I want to do online. A site, though, can cause the same problem by adding content that I share with some people, but not necessarily my current friends. Facebook users presumably friend each other based on the norms for sharing the content that existed on Facebook at the time, adding more content or just changing how Facebook shares the content already there can cause some problems. Some of the content Beacon tried to so forcefully share isn’t that much different than if LinkedIn suddenly started sharing relationship status: you don’t want software deciding to re-purpose one set of social ties into another. For now, Facebook is handling this challenge with extremely fine-grained privacy controls, but that’s a lot of overhead.

The de-placing of facebook
When Facebook was smaller and the bounds were clearer, users had less need of the privacy settings. Two years ago, I had a pretty clear distinction in my head. Facebook was for some social communication and sharing among my college friends and some friends from high school. It had a clear identity, and felt either like a place or very connected to my school as place. I knew who I would “run into” on Facebook, and I knew that the content would be related to college students’ self-expression, communication, and socialization. Within the bounds, it was possible to identify a fairly consistent set of behaviors and information that members were willing to share with each other. Not so anymore. As Facebook adds users and features, it undermines this sense of place. Anyone, including the creepy ex-coworker, might show up. With new features and new applications, I am also less able to anticipate Facebook’s content.

I’m not necessarily criticizing Facebook’s decision to reduce their placiness. Its leadership has decided to trade some of the sense of place for growth, instead becoming an application platform and contact/identity management system. That’s their gamble to take, but I am critical that they seem to be moving in this direction without clearly thinking through some of the consequences for their members.

Other examples of repurposing contacts
Facebook isn’t the only company that has recently re-purposed existing social network information to share additional content. This December, if you use Google Reader and GTalk, Google decided to share all of your shared RSS feed items with all of your GTalk contacts. Your GTalk contacts were already being added to from people you email, so for many users, this exposed their shared items to many people they’d emailed a few times. This decision seems to be based on the incredibly naïve assumption that if you share content with some people, you want to share it with everyone you email. One user reported that this “ruined Christmas.”

Unforunately, as Google and Yahoo increasingly leverage our inboxes to compete with Facebook, we can probably look forward to more of the missteps.

Pursuit of places
I do think it’s possible to grow while keeping a distinct sense of place. After purchasing Flickr, del.icio.us, and upcoming, Yahoo! kept their contact lists separate and retained the identity of each property. Some would probably criticize Yahoo! for not integrating their brand, but I think that time will show they’ve made the right choice. It’s also true that managing the separate contact lists is very similar to the overhead of Facebook’s privacy settings, but there are a some key differences: managing your Flickr contacts does not interfere with the sense of Flickr as a bounded place, and you can (at least currently) be reasonably comfortable that Flickr is not going to repurpose your Flickr contacts outside of the social norms for Flickr users.

This also makes me believe that social startups like dopplr and others can succeed by creating a clear identity as a place. Even if Facebook offered better features (and perhaps more convenience) for sharing my travel status and tips with others, I’d still seek out Dopplr for its characteristics as a space — it’s a much more pleasant experience.

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30 November 2007

citizen-centered design and regulation in cabin design

This is a quick and very late heads up about Ken Erickson’s participation in a panel organized by Dori Tunstall at AAA this morning. The below description is cribbed from Dori’s blog:

Anthropologist Ken Erickson explores the world of FAA and Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) regulations in the design of Boeing airplanes accessible to people with physical disabilities. He addresses how interdisciplinary teams handle the conflicts between the ethos of citizen-centered designing and formal government regulation.

Ken’s company, Pacific Ethnography, did some work with my group on universal cabin design.

On a mostly unrelated note, a profile of my workgroup appeared in this month’s Frontiers (pdf).

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29 April 2007

walkon – a networked cities project

For my final project in Network Cities (ARCH531), I worked with Garin Fons and Amy Grude to explore urban flows. We propose a system that enables sidewalks to respond to you and the people who came before you. As you walk through a city, the ground underfoot glows. Intense, extended glows show the most common direction people in your place next went, while weaker illuminations indicate less popular directions.

Specific numbers of people, dates, and times are never shown. These features would increase the cognitive load on pedestrians, while we intend this service – once people become accustomed to it – to blend into the background and become a moving, changing part of the cityscape. Our goal is not to guide people to a specific path, but to highlight flows at a pedestrian’s given location. In doing so, we restore the idea of “the beaten path” to urban landscapes – something that has largely been lost with permanent, paved pedestrian ways. It is up to you to decide whether to stick with the crowds or see what lies in less frequented areas.

Explore the WalkOn presentation (Flash). The other projects in the class are worth a look too.

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26 March 2007

just for fun: people markup

For one of our Networked Cities projects, we were asked to explore urban markup. While looking at existing projects, my teammate David Hutchful and I got the feeling that tagging spaces is a pretty crowded space. Tagging or otherwise marking people with the intent of learning more about them or feeling more connected to them appeared similarly crowded.

Inspired loosely by Steven Johnson’s work Everything Bad is Good for You, we began thinking about intermixing the ideas of place and people markup with play. This led to imagining a game in which you tag other people. If tag from two strangers match, aside from some stopwords, within a certain range of time and place, each player might get points.

The idea of being tagged by strangers ultimately feeds into peoples’ curiosity of what others think about them. This became our focus for the project, which we are calling Mirror. We built in anticipation (you can only check how you’ve been tagged once per day) and ambiguity (tags, for you, are only localized to the resolution of a cell tower). You can only be tagged by people who are not in your social network.

These tags also build identities for places. Imagine a space that displays the way people currently in it have been tagged — reflecting its current occupants. Browse a map that shows the way people have been tagged in a neighborhood. We also imagine games, such as scavenger hunts in which the goal is to go out and get tagged in certain ways.

Storyboard

We tell show some of the possibilities in the above storyboard. There is another write up on the project’s page, as well as (an admittedly hand-wavy) tech/design explanation (pdf).

We actually believe that such a product could be bad for both you and community in general, but that doesn’t stop it from being fun to think about.

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15 March 2007

together alone

The phrase “alone together” came up in a couple of different contexts this week. In both instances it was expressed as being physical with other people participating in a solitary activity: checking email at Starbucks, flying without talking with your seatmates, and the like. This is not unlike Ducheneaut’s use of the phrase alone together (paper) in reporting that the social activity in the game World of Warcraft was less than had previously been estimated. Within this umbrella there are some distinctions that I’ve been mulling over.

As Ducheneaut observes, the café is a lot like the WoW experience. People are surrounded by background chatter and social interaction, even if they choose not to participate. The person who checks email at Starbucks did not attribute his behavior to seeking an environment, but instead to seeking serendipitous social interaction even though he does not actually experience this interaction when he goes to Starbucks. I am curious about how broadly this applies, and if it is generalizable to experiences like WoW.

There is also another potential distinction linked to the split between what the person says he is seeking (social interaction) and what he gets (a social environment). For most visitors (or is it most locations?), Starbucks does not meet Oldenburg’s criteria for a third space. In a “true” third space, the person’s expectation of serendipitous social interaction would not be unreasonable. Working backwards through the analogies (perhaps more than is reasonable), Ducheneaut et al’s work on the limits of sociability in WoW may bound or even push back against Steinkuehler and Williams’s persuasive argument that WoW is a third space.

The inside of an airplane is not the same and currently has more in common with Marc Augé’s description of non-spaces. People are not transiting airports and flying for the experience of being confined with 300 neighbors. Yet the people environment is similar, as are many of the things that people do in cafés and airplanes: read, consume beverages and small amounts of food, watch movies, listen to music, and catch up on work on paper or on laptops. In the economy section of an airplane, the people are too close, while in the coffee house people seek out others’ presence.

The media, though, is being used in part for different reasons. At Starbucks, it might be to relax or to get things done. This is true on the plane, sure, but it is also an escape from the environment. This is not a new observation, but bears repeating. Both sorts experiences suggest, though, that virtual realities are no more likely than truly virtual communities — more and more day to day situations are becoming intermingled, hybrid experiences. As hybrid environments become more prevalent and in more mundane settings, the design possibilities start to get exciting.

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