Looking Forward to UX Speakeasy - Whither Psychology?

This weekend I will be attending the first UX Speakeasy conference - a San Diego based conference for User Experience (UX) enthusiasts. The conference has come together in a few months through the effort of a group of highly dedicated people in UX here in the San Diego area, many of whom did not know each other 8 months ago. They have managed to pull together an exciting group of speakers and workshop presenters. I can't wait for Saturday.

There are many things to look forward to and one of them for me, in particular, will be watching to see how much attention is given to psychology in UX. Why? Some surprising conversations on LinkedIn is why. Last year there was a fairly lengthy conversation on several UX LinkedIn groups about what role, if any, psychology should play in UX.

I was a bit flabbergasted. "If any"? The "X" in UX stands for "Experience" and experience is a holistic term based in great part upon how someone feels. What emotions they have - using more precise terminology, their "affect". In addition, their cognitive interpretations of the technology are critically important (since we are talking computing topics here I'll stick to the digital world of UX). Psychology provides the basis for understanding cognition and affect.

Affect + Cognition = The vast part of Experience. How can you evaluate/observe/comment on User Experience without reference to the psychological aspects of the interplay between user and technology?

Many of the LinkedIn group conversations revolve around technical issues - how tos, best practices, resource identification etc. Incredibly useful information and I learn from reading these posts. Thus my surprise to discover that when someone brought up the question of psychology in UX work, many (many) respondents took this as new information, a new perspective, something they had not thought of before. Happily, most posters were very excited by the idea of incorporating psychology (in one or more of its various forms) into their work.

Computing is always both a technical and social activity. In some situations this is more obvious than in others. In UX work, psychological considerations should be front and center if you want to really understand what is going on with your website/app/software/device. Think about it. If you are frustrated and pissed off, are you going to be efficient and productive? Will you come back (assuming you have a choice in the matter)? Will you go the extra mile to do more with the technology? Compare your answers to the same questions if you are pleased with your interactions.

We can count keystrokes, perform eye tracking, monitor time on page (etc) all we want, and these tasks provide valuable information. But without incorporating affect and cognition into the equation you have only part of the story.

Thus, this weekend I will be keeping all my senses attuned to monitor my full range of experiences, others' full range of experiences, and the speakers' full incorporation of experiences in their presentations. I will of course provide a report here.

Charles Babbage the Interactive Auto GPS

Oddly enough, just 2 posts after I wrote about the development of s/w to recognize emotions that started out with a discussion of (imo) annoying auto GPSs, I find a short article and video about a British researcher named Peter Robinson who is developing a quite sophisticated auto GPS system (full story here). The video starts out by echoing my sentiment of how annoying and sometimes inaccurate a car GPS can be, and he actually tosses one in the back seat! I LOVED that moment. And he does it with such poise and non-violence. Just flips it behind him.

Then he discusses why it would be useful to have an interactive conversation with a computer - the computer can read your facial and bodily expressions, determine your emotional state and respond with its own emotion inflected conversation. That is both technically interesting and potentially useful in many areas of society.  I bet you can think of a few areas where this technology could be used productively?

But then he proceeds to discuss how he is testing the system on an auto GPS. Why oh why the fascination with the auto GPS??? Ok I accede to this as a useful example of holding a conversation, where important decisions have to be made on short notice, and there are unpredictable behaviors and circumstances to be dealt with. The creepy part is when Robinson pulls out a custom made head of Charles Babbage (looks a bit rubbery) and props it up at head level in the passenger seat of a car in a driving simulator. The two, Robinson and Babbage, carry on a very polite conversation about road conditions. Robinson ends by saying "Charles, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship".

I have mixed feelings about the idea of driving down the road talking to a life size rubber head with wires coming out the back of it.

Technical information is included in the short video, and there is an interesting bit about how it all works. There are definitely compelling issues of emotional intelligence, neuroscience, psychology, and physiology here to explore. Robinson sees this development as the future of how we will interact with computers. Maybe AI has a not too distant future in realistically simulating life? That would be great progress indeed after years of inching along.

But the rubber head... I don't know about the rubber head. If it made mistakes and the driver got irritated, and tossed it in the backseat, would it start complaining from its disembodied self face down on the seat?