Inconvenient Interactions: An Alternative Design Approach to Enrich our Lives

While most traditional user interfaces are designed to pursue convenience by eliminating user operations and by automating tasks, some new categories of HCI, such as health support, may require explicit human participation and effort to achieve long-term benefits. For these areas, interfaces that require interactions that force users to perform activities, rather than interfaces that solely perform tasks on behalf of users, are becoming increasingly important. We refer to these new interactions as “inconvenient interactions”. In this note we discuss why carefully designed inconveniences can enrich our lives, and provide some preliminary but concrete examples. We also explain our initial guidelines for the design of these interactions.