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How smart devices and apps can become our best friends
Pushing the concept of “user-friendliness” to its very end.
Since the advent of industrial design in the 1960s, designers have fully learned to adapt their products to the implicit needs of users.
This user-friendliness of machines is now pushed to its very end. As they talk with us, anticipate our mistakes, are polite and empathetic, smart devices and apps have literally become our best friends.
According to Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant in User Friendly, product designers have learned to create a real human-robot connection. However, not without some serious limitations : users have psychological expectations and cultural imaginary that still cannot be broken easily.
Here is how these machines can accommodate a better collaborative relationship with their human users.
Building polite machines
Smart products and technologies such as autonomous cars are increasingly learning how to fit with users expectations. But, whether at Volkswagen or Tesla, the race to build autonomous cars is not only defined by the safety of driving or convenient experience.
It poses a completely different problem: that of the acceptability of users, and the trust they can place in these technologies.
During the 1990s, sociologist Clifford Nass studied not only how users used computers, but also what they felt about their interaction. He tried to see if humans behaved differently with a machine than with another human. And what he found was that strangely enough the user expected as much politeness and friendliness from a machine as from a human. As machines interact with them, they expect them to behave like a human and show reliable communicative cues.
In the same way, autonomous car drivers can only really trust their vehicles if they communicate with them predictably. To be able to trust it, it needs to tell him what it is doing, when it is doing it and why it is doing it. And that’s what designers of autonomous cars have realized in their work. For example, Audi designers have added a screen that tells the driver where and when the car plans to turn right or left. It also gently warns it when…
