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Computers That Feel our Mood
Roland Piquepaille writes "It certainly happened to you to be so frustrated by the 'reactions' of your computer that you wanted to break it. And the computer industry has noticed, trying to build hardware and software as user-friendly as possible. Still, it would be a good idea for your computer to guess when you're about to become mad at it. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are working on computers that estimate our emotions. Their solution involves cameras and image analysis, but also special gloves equipped with sensors to record your heartbeat and breathing rate, your blood pressure or your skin temperature. And even if it's difficult to train a computer to interpret emotions, they have enough confidence in their system to demonstrate it at the next CeBIT in March 2006."
Because you can kick'em when they piss you off.
You seem depressed Dave, perhaps you would like to look at some porn?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
...the OS could simply determine when dialogs and other interface features are unresponive, giving the feeling that the system has gone off into lala land. (find and offer to suspend the offending process(s)) I'm sure THIS is the root of most rage against the computer.
Disclaimer: Haven't had time read the article yet - perhaps these folks are targeting this - if so, bravo!)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
A large part of things that frustrate users are easily fixable.
For example, how about an online help system that doesn't suck? I've pretty much given up on most help systems, since they are never updated and rarely answer any question more complex than "what is the hotkey combination to copy/paste"? (e.g. search for 'hotkeys' or 'copy paste' or 'keyboard shortcuts').
The people who maintain large, complex software packages (e.g. Windows, MS Word, OpenOffice.org) should constantly monitor the relevant newsgroups, bug report systems, and customer service lines, adding any and every pertinent question users have to the help system. Sure, this might involve making online help systems truly "online", having them query from a database on some server somewhere-- but doesn't MS Office's help system already do that?
Capsule example: I have a MS Word document in which, for no apparent reason, the computer has decided to increase the spacing below the Header, but only on the last few pages of a given section. Adding or removing text from those pages further alters this spacing. I suspect that this is a bug and/or that my document is ever-so-mildly corrupted. I can virtually guarantee you that somewhere, deep within the bowels of the MS bug-reporting/customer service system, is a document pertaining to this particular situation. But I can also virtually guarantee you that, if I hit F1 and entered "header spacing changing", or "header spacing bug", or any other query which should turn up information on this situation, I won't find squat.
If MS knows about a question a user has had, a problem a user has reported, or a known bug they have found in their software, the online help system should know about it too. Furthermore, it should be well-indexed, under every possible synonym a user might realistically use to search for it. (e.g. "header, heading, space, spacing, after, bug, changing, altering, alter, change, corrupt, document, corrupted, unfixable, mysterious, etc."), and a well-chosen "expert system" algorithm should be used to figure out the most likely thing(s) the user is asking for help on. (e.g. "Are you: * Asking about a bug where header spacing changes as you add or remove text?").
Another example of things that badly need changing: Greyed-out menu items. I cannot tell you how many times I've gotten incredibly frustrated at greyed-out menu items. Why are they greyed out? How can I get them un-greyed out? I've said for a long while that there should be a UI standard whereby, if a user hovers their mouse cursor over a greyed-out control (or if a blind user tabs over to a given greyed-out control and leaves it there for a few seconds), the computer should tell you why said item is greyed out. This would save people from countless hours of combined aggravation.
But no one does it.
Also, whenever online help systems refer to "the such-and-such button", or "the such-and-such tab", or even "the such-and-such menu", hovering over (or clicking on) the name (e.g. "the Accessories tab" on a printer setup dialog, which I had to dig around to find; despite being referred to in the context-sensitive help accessed from the printer-specific 'Properties' dialog accessed from 'File, Print', it turned out to be completely inaccessible from said dialog, and to find it one had to actually go to the Printers control panel, right-click on the printer's icon, and go to Properties there) should provide you with [A] a screenshot of said item, with an arrow pointing to it, and [B] sample instructions on how to find it.
We don't need Counselor Troi algorithms telling us when they're "sensing great anger". We need Commander Data algorithms that actually answer our fucking questions.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
In my humble opinion, this research is a total waste of time until AI is so fully developed that a computer can understand context.
Clippy says upon that detection condition:
You seem aroused. Would you like to:
-Look at porn?
-Shut down computer to sleep with wife?
-Suggest online dating sites to find a girlfriend?
-Display Margaret Thatcher to continue working?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
If the machine can somehow behave in a way that doesn't piss people off, why not put it in that mode all the time?
.NET well, forces him to look at a man page every time he wants to do something, and doesn't warn him before he does something potentially damaging.
Because the desired behavior, the behavior that each person wants, differs from person to person.
I get really irritated when I have to use a Windows box. From my standpoint, it lacks major functionality that I use on a daily basis, performs like a cow, forces every minor action to be confirmed, and generally isn't very capable of being configured to work the way I like. And a lot of the software for it *really* sucks.
A Windows programmer that I work with really hates having to use Linux. To him, Linux is cryptic, lacks dedicated help lines to call if he runs into problems, has a ton of different distributions, doesn't currently support
Now, each of us has a different set of knowledge, and while each of us is competent in our own areas, both of us have a different set of things that set us off. He doesn't want to see command lines or man pages, and I don't want to see wizards or popup balloons.
For a while, websites tried incorporating this sort of thing: "Help us improve: Was this page helpful to you?" The problem is, no user is going to waste time doing work for a company that then just owns his work, without getting something back for it.
A stress monitor would provide continuous background feedback. Some software (Microsoft Office is particularly notable here) tries using heuristics to guess what a user wants. As you're probably aware, this hasn't worked very well in the past. One possible fix would be to incorporate more data -- every time Clippy shows up, your irritation level rises? You don't see Clippy any more.
I'd say that this is a long way from being useful in the general workplace -- there are a lot of social barriers to wearing stuff like this, and there are some costs that I'm not sure are being taken into account (use of heuristics to guess what the user wants just makes them feel *less* in control of their computer -- something that my parents acutely suffer from.) However, one thing that could be done would be to have it hooked up to testers for usability testing. Instead of having bugs based on misbehavior, file bugs based on the number of times a user gets pissed off at a particular dialog or window.
So here are things you can do:
* Identify (though maybe not fix) problem areas for user frusteration.
* When the user is searching documentation, play hot-and-cold with what the user wants.
On the other hand, if there's a way to telepath "Skip the wizards and guides, just give me all the options" into the machine, I'll take that. Let it smell newbies coming and dumb the interface down for them.
The problem is that a simple split between "newbies" and "experts" isn't really all that useful.
Okay, I've been using GUIs for a number of years, and I'm familiar with many of their conventions. I know where (of several places) to go looking if I want to change the setting of a program. I know how to close a program. I know how to copy-and-paste in Windows, even if a program doesn't allow use of the contextual menu. However, I'm not sure that that immediately qualifies me as an expert in the area of 3d modelling, say.
Secondly, I strongly oppose the use of newbie/expert interfaces (where the "newbie interface" is often called a "wizard" under Windows). The problem with such an interface is that the wizard is generally quite different from the expert interface. This means that, as a newbie gains familiarity with a program, he only learns to operate the wizard interface. He does not gain any skills that transfer over into making him a "serious" user of the program.
I've certainly fallen prey to this. For example, when I first used Excel, I remember trying to create a chart. I could create *almost* wha
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.