Increasingly, our lives are being filled by interruptions – SMS messages, emails, calls, internet chat conversations, Twitter updates and RSS feeds, to name but a few. Things are only likely to get worse when your new robotic vacuum cleaner demands to have its bag changed and your car starts moaning at you to change its oil.
With all these noises and flashing lights constantly competing for our attention, it’s no wonder that many people get stressed by technology. So how can we aim to reduce this stress when designing software and devices?
Firstly, don’t ask unless you have to. If the decision is predictable, trivial or reversible, it’s not necessary to trouble the user – just do it and let the user change it if they notice something’s wrong.
If some action does need to be taken, present the message to the user in a non-stressful way. Beeps, pings and flashing lights are necessary when the user must take immediate action to avoid impending disaster – but they are so often misused.
Critically, the notification should be ignorable – not just that it is not so distracting as to completely derail the user’s train of thought, but also that there’s no real penalty to ignoring it. Usually this means that the message must be repeated at an appropriate interval. Of course, the “appropriate interval” is not easy to define and will be affected by the user’s preferences and situation. This is an opportunity for creative UI design and perhaps a little Artificial Intelligence.
Let’s take the example of text messages. When my phone receives an SMS, it vibrates and makes a sound. If I’m in the middle of something, I’ll ignore it. If I’m in the middle of a conversation, I’ll ignore it but the conversation will often be interrupted anyway when the my interlocutor kindly points out that I received a message. The trouble is that by the time I’ve done what I’m doing, I’ve often forgotten I received a message and I only re-discover it some hours later when I happen to use my phone.
How could this type of interaction be redesigned to be more ignorable? First, my phone should know if it’s in my pocket or not – in my case, just detecting if it’s dark would do the trick. If it’s in my pocket, it should only vibrate. If I ignore the message, it should vibrate again every few minutes. If this is distracting, I can give the phone a sharp tap and it won’t bother me again for another 15 minutes. Even if I read the message, I should be able to indicate that I will reply later, in which case it should periodically remind me to do that.
It might seem that having more notifications would increase stress, not reduce it – but I’d argue that by making the notifications gentle and ignorable, the fact that I’m not forced to pay attention significantly reduces their annoyingness.
Designing a product to be ignored is a distinctly unsatisfying goal, but it’s one that I think is becoming increasingly important. To preserve our sanity in an increasingly computerised, networked world, both software and intelligent devices need to be designed to disappear.
This post was inspired by my hob. In our era of global telecommunications and private space travel, you’d think somebody could design a machine to simmer a pan of water without it boiling over.