Of Robots and Men: applying Asimov’s laws of robotics to user experience design

How using sci-fi author’s robotic rules can help set up the right framework to design effect and user-friendly products, services and more.

Animator game development by Chaosamran Studio

If you are reading this you are have probably heard of Human-Centred Design, a methodology used to solve problems that put the user, in this case, human beings in the centre of the issue, and validates every finding, hypothesis and concept with them.

Trying to aim for a solution that only solves every user’s problem is more likely to end up being an impossible mission, but as user experience designers is our task to ensure that no matter how it ends up implemented and what constrains and limitations we face in the process, the user’s problem is covered as wide as possible. This includes not only on the execution but setting the expectations and the before and after interacting with whatever product or feature you have to work on.

But what does this has to do with robots? — you might be asking.

The truth is: not much. Unless you analyse the design and creation of robots within the framework of human-centred design. And how creating and programming robots, machines dedicated to performing human tasks, has so much to do with user experience in general.

And here’s where Issac Asimov came up with a set of rules that followed by all robots, will ensure its good behaving around their creators and users. Asimov’s three laws of robotics appeared in his book Runaround, published in 1942, but they quickly became the framework to any autonomous machine created to improve human’s lives.

Breaking down the laws and applying them to UX

You might be wondering what does this has to do with user experience at all, and the truth is that to be able to build good user-friendly products we need to always work around a framework that ensures the success of it. And this is where taking basic design principles cannot be enough to fulfil our users need, and where the set of a basic set of laws that work together can help us define better experiences.

Without diving into the details of science fiction or the work of Isaac Asimov, he came up a long time ago with three laws that, like the thee, Newton’s laws of motion, would define in this case the way robots are programmed to behave. The three laws of Robotics from Isaac Asimov are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Robots are machines that help humans, and in most of our cases, simulate their looks and ways of behaving, and therefore, why not extrapolate those laws to what real humans use and how applying those to building user experiences could make the creation of those more humane.

In the next few lines, I’m gonna break down each of the laws and adapt them to the design of user experiences.

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm

This first law is a direct rule that defines that robots need to be programmed to not harm humans, as clear as that. In a similar way that, the direct correlation with user experience design is that: user experiences shouldn’t harm users or, in terms of UX design, generate more pain-points than the ones we are trying to solve. In order to overcome this, and make sure this law is followed in our designs, there are a few techniques we can follow:

• Make sure we understand the problem and you work towards solving it: There are a lot of things involved in coming up with the ideal solution, however, having a clear vision of the main need of our users should ensure that the proposed design is as straightforward as possible.
• Keep the journey as simple as possible: In a similar way to coming up with the solution that solves the issue in a harmless way, the less miss-leading options or alternatives in the journey to achieve it the more efficient and safe for the users the proposed solution will be.
• Measure and keep track of the usage: Observing the users after proposing the solution is as important as asking them for what they want at the beginning, making sure they are successfully achieving their goals through your design ensure that they are not creating additional pain-points, and if that was the case, also helps react quicker and iterate to solve them.

A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law

The second law gives robots the right to do only what humans order them to do, in the same way, that for user experience design, it could be translated as: user experiences should always provide the expected input for users unless it means that the outcome of it will interfere with a seamless experience for the user.

In other words, when using products, users should always be informed and prompted with the information or interaction the expect to see, unless the expected outcome generates a pain-point to their experience. There are multiple techniques or principles to follow in order to be compliant with this law, but some of them are:

• Always manage user’s expectation: When designing something, it’s important that the outcome of it is always controlled and under the rules of the user, and whatever happens by using it is also an expected outcome.
• Apply accessibility rules: This ensures that the user experience will be usable by everyone or the vast majority of the users, therefore the outcome of using it will always be as manageable as possible.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law

The last of the laws aim for self-protection and in terms of user experience, it could be interpreted as: user experiences must be bullet-proof and allow them to be locked down so that its own use doesn’t make the experience break.

When it comes to making sure that user experiences don’t harm themselves, it’s important to understand every single use case and bottleneck and have a clear overview of the whole flow. Some ways of making sure that this law is followed are:

• Map out the whole user experience: In order to ensure that the user experience is bullet-proof and there’s little to no room for mistakes or confusing bottlenecks, it’s always useful to map every single step in the process and the different flows and highlight the endpoints and what’s the expected behaviour with them is.
• Understand how things might not work: We usually design for the ideal case and we only consider errors when there’s a “thoughtful” move that might trigger the error, but it’s good to validate concepts with users regularly and consider those errors are part of the journey. This will also help
• Apply closure principles: As one of the Gestalt principles, the principle of closure explains that some incomplete shapes can be perceived as complete given the reception of its surrounding and the inverse shapes around it. The law of closure can be used to achieve visual effects that guide users to complete tasks based on how relevant the content around the main action happens, and in the same way, when completing tasks that can be based on what’s happening around the main trigger of the action.

While user experience design it’s something that keeps evolving and there’s no settled framework to follow other than a set of industry-defined principles, it’s always good to find other ways to approach the design of a product. And in this case, the three main rules according to my interpretation of the three rules of robotic by Asimov are: user experiences shouldn’t harm users or, in terms of UX design, generate more pain-points than the ones we are trying to solve, user experiences should always provide the expected input for users unless it means that the outcome of it will interfere with a seamless experience for the user and user experiences must be bullet-proof and allow them to be locked down so that its own use doesn’t make the experience break

I encourage everyone to find ways to look for other frameworks that help you define your designs according to principles and rules already defined.

And that’s all — hope you found this article interesting and helped you find new ways of thinking how to approach the design of new products and services.

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