UNDERSTANDING HOW INTERFACES AFFECT USERS

The Overview:
5.1 Introduction
5.2 What are affective aspects?
5.3 Expressive interfaces
5.4 User frustration
5.5 A debate: the application of anthropomorphism to interaction design
5.6 Virtual characters: agents
5.6.1 Kinds of agents
5.6.2 General design concerns: believability of virtual characters
Introduction:
The central goal of interaction design is to develop interactive systems that Elicit positive responses
from users, such as feeling at ease, being comfortable, and enjoying the experience of using them. More
recently, designers have become interested in how to design interactive products that elicit specific
kinds of emotional responses in users, motivating them to learn, play, be creative, and be social. In this
chapter we look at how and why the design of computer systems cause certain kinds of emotional
responses in users. We begin by looking in general at expressive interfaces, examining the role of an
interface's appearance on users and how it affects usability. Finally, we examine the range of virtual
characters designed to motivate people to learn, buy, listen, etc., and consider how useful and
appropriate they are.
Main aspects of this Chapter are to:
Explain what expressive interfaces are and the Effects they can have on People.
Outline the problems of user frustration and how to reduce them.
Debate the pros and cons of applying anthropomorphism in interaction Design.
Assess the believability of different kinds of agents and virtual characters.
Enable you to critique the persuasive impact of e-commerce agents on customers.
5.2 What are affective aspects?
In general, the term "affective" refers to producing an emotional response. For example, when people
are happy they smile. Affective behavior can also cause an emotional response in others. So, for
example, when someone smiles it can cause others to feel good and smile back. Emotional skills,
especially the ability to express and recognize emotions, are central to human communication. Most of
us are highly skilled at detecting when someone is angry, happy, sad, or bored by recognizing their facial
expressions, way of speaking, and other body signals. We are also very good at knowing what emotions
to express in given situations. For example, when someone has just heard they have failed an exam we
know it is not a good time to smile and be happy. Instead we try to empathize. Our concern in this
chapter takes a different approach: how can interactive systems be designed (both deliberately and
inadvertently) to make people respond in certain ways?
5.3 Expressive interfaces
A well-known approach to designing affective interfaces is to use expressive icons and other graphical
elements to convey emotional states. These are typically used to indicate the current state of a
computer. For example, a hallmark of the Apple computer is the icon of a smiling Mac that appears on
the screen when the machine is first started. The smiling icon conveys a sense of friendliness, inviting
the user to feel at ease and even smile back. The appearance of the icon on the screen can also be very
reassuring to users, indicating that their computer is working fine. This is especially useful when they
have just rebooted the computer after it has crashed and where previous attempts to reboot have failed
(usually indicated by a sad icon face)
Other ways of conveying the status of a system are through the use of:
dynamic icons, e.g. a recycle bin expanding when a file is placed into it.
Cont..
animations, e.g.,
the windows XP search dog
flipping pages of a book
indicating a file search.
spoken messages, using various kinds of voices, telling the user what needs to be done.
various sounds indicating
actions and events
e.g. a virus being detected
by an anti virus
Benefits of these kinds of expressive embellishments is that they provide reassuring feedback to the
user that can be both informative and fun. The style of an interface, in terms of the shapes, fonts, colors,
and graphical elements that are used and the way they are combined, influences how pleasurable it is to
interact with. The more effective the use of imagery at the interface, the more engaging and enjoyable it
can be.
(check comparison diagram on next slide)


Conversely, if little thought is given to the appearance of an interface, it can turn out to be looking
useless and boring. Expressive forms like emoticons, sounds, icons, and interface agents have been
primarily used to

Some commonly used emoticons
(i) convey emotional states and/or
(ii) elicit certain kinds of emotional responses in users, such as feeling at ease, comfort, and
happiness.
54 User frustration
Everyone at some time or other gets frustrated when using a computer. The effect ranges from feeling
mildly amused to extremely angry. There are many reasons why such emotional responses occur:
When an application doesn't work properly or crashes.
When a system doesn't do what the user wants it to do.
When a user's expectations are not met.
when a system does not provide sufficient information to let the user know what to do.
Continuation.
Often user frustration is also caused by bad design, no design, inadvertent design, or ill-thought-out
design. It is rarely caused deliberately. However, its impact on users can be quite drastic and make them
abandon the application or tool. Here, we present some examples of classic user-frustration provokers
that could be avoided or reduced by putting more thought into the design of the conceptual model.
Continuation.
1. Gimmicks
Cause: When a users' expectations are not met and they are instead presented with a gimmicky display.
This can happen when clicking on a link to a website only to discover that it is still "under
construction." It can be still more annoying when the website displays a road-sign icon of "men
at work". Although the website owner may think such signs amusing, it serves to underscore the
viewer's frustration at having made the effort to go to the website only to be told that it is
incomplete (or not even started in some cases). Clicking on links that don't work is also
frustrating.
Continuation
How to avoid or help reduce the frustration:
By far the best strategy is to avoid using gimmicks to cover up the real crime. In this example it is
much better to put material live on the web only when it is complete and working properly.
People very rarely return to sites when they see icons.
2. Error Messages
Causes: When a system or application crashes and provides an "unexpected" error message.
E.g.





Error messages have a long history in computer interface design, and are notorious for their
incomprehensibility.
When the appearance of an interface is too noisy, garish, gimmicky, or patronizing.
When a system requires users to carry out many steps to perform a task, only to discover a
mistake was made somewhere along the line and they need to start all over again.
For example, Nielsen (1993) describes an early system that was developed that allowed only for
one line of error messages. Whenever the error message was too long, the system truncated it
to fit on the line, which the users would spend ages trying to decipher. The full message was
available only by pressing the PF1 (help key) function key.
While this may have seemed like a natural design solution to the developers, it was not at all obvious to
the users.
A much better design solution would have been to use the one line of the screen to indicate
how to find more information about the current error ("press the PF1 key for explanation"). The
use of cryptic language and developer's jargon in error messages is a major contributing factor
in user frustration. It is one thing to have to cope when something goes wrong but it is another
to have to try to understand an obscure message that pops up by way of explanation.
How to avoid or help reduce the frustration:
Ideally, error messages should be treated as how-to-fix-it messages. Instead of explicating what
has happened, they should state the cause of the problem and what the user needs to do to fix
it.
More helpful error message
The requested page /help me is not available on the web server.
If you followed a link or bookmark to get to this page, please let us know, so that we can fix the
problem. Please include the URL of the referring page as well as the URL of the missing page.
Otherwise check that you have typed the address of the web page correctly.
The Web site you seek
Cannot be located, but
Countless more exist.
Shneidermans guidelines for error messages include:
avoid using terms like FATAL, INVALID, BAD
Audio warnings
Avoid UPPERCASE and long code numbers
Messages should be precise rather than vague
Provide context-sensitive help
3. Overburdening the user
Cause: Upgrading software so that users are required to carry out excessive housekeeping tasks.
Another pervasive frustrating user experience is upgrading a piece of software. It is now common for
users to have to go through this housekeeping task on a regular basis, especially if they run a number of
applications. More often than not it tends to be a real chore, being very time-consuming and requiring
the user to do a whole range of things, like resetting preferences, sorting out extensions, checking other
configurations, and learning new ways of doing things. Often, problems can develop that are not
detected till some time later, when a user tries an operation that worked fine before but mysteriously
now fails.
How to avoid or help reduce the frustration:
Users should not have to spend large amounts of time on housekeeping tasks.
Upgrading should be an effortless and largely automatic process. Designers need to think
carefully about the tradeoffs incurred when introducing upgrades,
especially the amount of relearning required. E.g the upgrading process can always run in the
background while the program is being used.
Plug-ins that users have to search for, download, and set up themselves should be phased out
and replaced with more powerful browsers that automatically download the right plug-ins and
place them in the appropriate desktop folder reliably, or, better still, interpret the different file
types themselves.
4. Appearance
Cause: When the appearance of an interface is unpleasant
As mentioned earlier, the appearance of an interface can affect its usability. Users get annoyed
by:
websites that are overloaded with text and graphics, making it difficult to find the information
desired and slow to access
flashing animations, especially banner adverts, which are very distracting, the copious use of
sound effects and Music especially when selecting options, carrying out actions, starting up CD-
ROMs, running tutorials, or watching website demos
Continuation
an excessive number of operations, represented at the interface as banks of icons or cascading
menus
childish designs that keep popping up on the screen, such as certain kinds of helper agents
Poorly laid out keyboards, pads, control panels, and other input devices that cause the user to
press the wrong keys or buttons when trying to do something else.

How to avoid or help reduce the frustration:
Interfaces should be designed to be simple, perceptually salient, and elegant and to adhere to
usability design principles, well-thought-out graphic design principles, and ergonomic guidelines.
5.3.1 Dealing with user frustration
One way of coping with computer-induced frustration is to vent and take it out on the computer
or other users. As mentioned in Chapter 3, a typical response to seeing the cursor freeze on the
screen is repeatedly to bash every key on the keyboard.
Error messages (phrased as "how-to-fix-it" advice) should be provided that explain what the
user needs to do.