The Design of Implicit Interactions: Making Interactive Systems Less Obnoxious

Introduction Imagine, for a second, a doorman who behaves as automatic doors do. He does not acknowledge you when you approach or pass by. He gives no hint which door can or will open—until you wander within six feet of the door, whereupon he flings the door wide open. If you arrived after hours, you might stand in front of the doors for awhile before you realize that the doors are locked, because the doorman’s blank stare gives no clue. If you met such a doorman, you might suspect psychosis. And yet this behavior is typical of our day-to-day interactions not only with automatic doors, but any number of interactive devices. Our cell phones ring loudly, even though we are clearly in a movie theatre. Our alarm clocks forget to go off if we do not set them to, even if we’ve been getting up at the same time for years. Our computers interrupt presentations to let everyone know that a software update is available. The infiltration of computer technologies into everyday life has brought these interaction crises to a head. As Neil Gershenfeld observes, “There’s a very real sense in which the things around us are infringing a new kind of right that has not needed protection until now. We’re spending more and more time responding to the demands of machines.”1 These problematic interactions are symptoms of our as-yet lack of sophistication in designing interactions that do not constantly demand the input or attention of the user. “Implicit interactions”— those that occur without the explicit behest or awareness of the user—will become increasingly important as human-computer interactions extend beyond the desktop computer into new arenas; arenas such as the automobile, where the driver is physically, socially, or cognitively engaged. Traditional HCI—that involving a commandbased or graphical user interface-based paradigm—has focused on the realm of “explicit interactions,” where the use of computers and interactive products relies on explicit input and output. The values and principles that govern good desktop computing interactions may not apply when we apply computing to the products that populate the rest of our lives. 1 Neil Gershenfeld, When Things Start to Think (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 102.