Last week I had the opportunity to visit the Body Worlds exhibit at the Museum of Science & Industry. My friend (who is a grad student in Computer Science) and I decided to skip the accompanying audio tour and just wander through on our own, but we quickly noticed how popular the audio tour was.
(note: the audio tour used handsets a lot like these [link has sound])
After we'd been walking around for a bit, we noticed an interesting phenomenon. As we looked at displays, people with the audio handsets would kind of float into our personal space, sometimes going so far as to bump into us without realizing it! Not an "Oh, I'm sorry" bump -- these were "I'm totally engrossed in my own world and I don't even notice hitting you" bumps.
So the easy assumption is that these people are just inconsiderate, right? Well, interaction designers know better! My theory on this, which (as with all things HCI) I was quite happy to share with my CS friend, is that these awkward encounters are simply artifacts of poor design.
Specifically, the audio handsets were dominating users' selective attention to the point where they lost track of their spatial surroundings. My old HCI 450 book lists four factors that determine which sensory channels are attended: effort, expectancy, value, and salience.
In this audio tour example, the effort required to get full meaning from the audio tour is probably high. This is especially true since audio feedback relies more heavily on working memory than does written text. The expectancy of the audio channel is high, since the user presumably triggers the handset when they arrive at a new display. The value is also high, since the user is presumably learning a lot of interesting information about the display. And finally, the book indicates that auditory stimuli are particularly salient. All four factors are so high in this situation that the users slip into inattentional blindness and begin to perform actions that they normally would not (bumping into people without noticing).
In this case, the problem isn't too critical - we just chuckle at the "rude" person and step out of their way. But it's not hard to imagine situations where selective attention can cause more serious errors. My two-cent advice here is to remember that we have the power to shape the users' selective attention via our design choices, and that may be just as important as graphics, menu design, or anything else.
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4 comments:
I think that you see this too with cell phones in cars. By moving to a hands free device, the driver can have two hands on the wheel but it does nothing for attention. The reasources that the driver would be spending on driving, are being dirverted to not only listen to the conversation, but also interact.
The failure to see this makes me laugh when Chicago passes a law that requires you to use a hands free device in a car ... well great, but people are still not focusing on driving.
Absolutely -- the cell phone thing is dead on, and it's another great example of what I love pointing out to my CS friend: a lot more goes into designing optimum interactions than just common sense!
I still think there's an element of rudeness to it, like 'oh look at me, I paid to get this audio tour thing and it says to walk up to the guy with his muscles splayed out like a scary peacock so I damn well better get up there to see it, other (cheap) non-audio-tour people be damned!'
like sometimes when I'm on my cell phone in public and enjoying a conversation I might get loud for a moment to make a point but then I quickly realize 'hey, you're in public, keep it down' and hold back. but a lot of people don't do that.
anyway, i think you're right, but people also need to learn to adjust their attention/volume/etc if they want to be good multitaskers. i imagine this will be a very slow evolutionary process and interaction designers will do what we can to smooth the disconnect in the meantime ;)
It's an interesting post. Back as an undergrad, trips to museums were mandatory for some of the classes and I used to be seriously annoyed by all of the noise, so I grabbed a headset just to actually block everything out and eventually space out. If you think that Museum of Science and Industry is bad, you should try the MCA. My friend who used to work there said that at last two, three times a day someone would fall asleep with their headphones on. I guess the artwork was very interesting ;)
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