The Funny Maps | Two Researchers Attend Graduate School to Become Joke Writers for Robots.
Part 2 of “The Funny Maps” series
Cracking ourselves up
We began this project by thinking up seven of our best ideas for ways to integrate humor into Google Maps. There were a number of ways to approach this: is it a one-time interaction (at launch only) or sustained (turn-by-turn navigation)? What type of humor should we employ? We came up with seven ideas, falling under two broad groups of UIs:
Visual:
Alternate, silly modes of transport: see how long it takes to skip, crawl, or jet-pack to your destination.
Pirate theme: see how long it takes to walk there with a peg-leg, plus on-theme icons and labels.
Inappropriate route shapes: draw a penis, poop emoji, or middle finger shape with your route.
Sarcastic public transit route options: take the stinkiest route, or the route that’s never on time.
Auditory:
Navigation voice with road rage, yelling at other drivers on your behalf:
“Nice signal, moron…”
“Hey, watch it!”
“Look at this jerk.”
Best friend navigation voice with colloquial directions and commentary:
“I’m so glad we’re finally going here.”
“Coming up on the left pretty soon…”
“Woohoo! Road trip!”
Sassy navigation voice with sarcastic/rude directions and commentary:
“Why are we going so slow?”
“Ooh let’s go to McDonalds!… Aw man.”
“I’ve heard it’s lame here… But whatever.”
We showed the sketches to people of different ages and backgrounds, trying to gauge what different people thought were funny. Now I know what you’re thinking — we’re obviously hilarious, why even bother checking with other people? Believe me, we agree, but it’s just the right thing to do.
Everyone is a snowflake
Our results made it clear that — surprise! — everyone has a different sense of humor:
Our middle-aged crowd was not a fan of the vulgar emoji routes, while some of our younger participants loved it as a way to goof around with friends. Some people thought the road rage voice would be hilarious and fun in the torture of commute traffic, while others felt it would be unpleasant and unnecessary. The public transit routes rated very highly with some, while others felt like it wasn’t funny but instead more helpful, imagining its utility for avoiding poor route options. Some were charmed by the alternate modes of transport and pirate theme, while other people thought they were boring, or more playful than funny. Similarly, many people said they would like to have the friendly navigation because it would be refreshing, not really because it was funny.
With all these scattered results, we decided to try iterating on a couple ideas based on feedback and running it by more people.
We split the ideas into three navigation audio ideas (sassy, friendly, road rage), and three route option ideas (public transit, silly modes, route shapes), sadly leaving the pirate theme behind for now, since our data on that idea was pretty uniform. We recorded some audio clips in the three voices to reduce the amount of imagination required by our testers, and altered the route shapes to be innocuous emojis instead of inappropriate ones to try and eliminate that factor as a confounding variable.
Just pick one already
After testing these ideas by a few people, we needed to select one concept to turn into a proper pilot study. One of the most favorably rated concepts was the road rage nav, but we knew that we would have to test people walking, not driving (think of the safety concerns), and hearing navigation yell at cars when you’re walking doesn’t really jive. Also, a key value of an experiment was that we’d learn about their reactions after engaging with this interface for a certain period of time — thus eliminating the pursuit of any of the one-off interactions, like seeing the silly modes of transport or the sarcastic public transit routes. Another notable element to consider was the difficulty of mocking up a new visual interface, as opposed to the presumed ease (more on that later) of just altering the navigation audio while the regular app runs.
All these factors made it pretty easy to settle on the sassy navigation audio concept. This idea received mixed-high ratings, with many mentioning that it would depend on how it was executed and what it was really like when they tried it, making it a prime concept to test with users in a real use-case environment.
Rooting back to the literature, this would be a great way to test users’ reactions to engaging with humor in a traditionally utilitarian, task-oriented application. Would they appreciate the surprise, novelty, and lightheartedness? Or would they shy away from any feature that would take away from their immediate goal they were pursuing when opening this application in the first place? Finally, could engaging with this humorous interface induce other positive effects of humor, like creativity?
We decided to find out.
Check out the next article in this series to read about our pilot study, its findings, and the many misadventures that we encountered along the way.
