Human-centered design is making us less human… but it doesn’t have to.
Ah, technology. Since man first began banging rocks on other rocks we’ve contemplated the long-lasting affects that technology has on us both as individuals and society as a whole. As technology has advanced further and computers have been adopted into our everyday lives, humans have developed a stronger reliance on our devices maintaining our information for us, and relying on ourselves less and less.
You don’t need to memorize your friend’s birthday because Facebook will remind you. Need to drop off your dry cleaning later? Untie that string around your finger and just tell Siri to remind you! No memory required.
The truth is, our technology does affect our cognitive abilities. In a recent interview by The Age, Professor Michael Saling, neuropsychologist from the University of Melbourne, says:
“I get at least one patient a week who is convinced that forgetting things like car keys or picking up children is the result of a serious brain condition or early Alzheimer’s. The truth is the expansion of the information age has happened so fast, it’s bringing us face to face with our brains’ limitations. Just because our computer devices have perfect memories we think we should too.
“We’ve lost sight of the fact that forgetfulness is a normal and necessary phenomenon. We must keep pushing information out so it can deal with information coming in and if it gets overloaded we become forgetful.”
We can design against this phenomenon by shifting to embrace human error and replicating typical human memory capacity. This is the next step towards truly human-centered design.
The trend has started.
While some companies continue to design products that require less and less of the user, others have started to design against it — intentionally or not.
Google’s DeepMind is designed to mimic how parts of the human brain function and recently created a new speech-generation tool that sounds “indistinguishable” from a real human. Conversations with a bot using this speech tool would require the user to consider the subtle aspects of communication, such as tone and pace, in order to hold a natural conversation.
Apple recently added a feature to their mobile devices that dims the screen to a reddish tone at night. This cuts down on the intense daylight-mimicking blue light that normally comes from our phones, which confuses our biological clocks and affects our sleep quality.
Much like our short-term memories, Snapchat’s entire product is based off of information disappearing after a period of time. Stories disappear after 24 hours and chat conversations erase themselves after the other party has read them. This design pattern forces the user to rely on their memory of conversations to interact with their friends, and is a much more accurate reflection of natural human interactions.
I call this “re-humanizing” design.
Shaping the future.
Recognizing this trend, let’s imagine what the future of mobile interactions will look like.
Scenario: During a recent night out with friends, Jose meets a girl named Brooke at a club and a romance quickly blossomed. In their early conversations, Brooke had told Jose that she was from Brooklyn and that she would be going home in a few weeks and visit her family. Three weeks later, Jose, having forgotten that Brooke was leaving, asks her out to a concert. He had completely forgotten where she was going and why. Uh oh…
Using Facebook Messenger as it is today, our hero could just scroll up and find the conversation where Brooke said where she was going… but that doesn’t help him learn.
Using re-humanizing design, Messenger can intelligently identify portions of the conversation and alter them to an accurate representation of the user’s actual memory of the conversation. As Jose scrolls up to find the conversation where Brooke said where she was going and why, he sees that the conversation has decomposed in the same way his memory has.
Next time Jose will pay have to more attention! Brooke will appreciate it.
We use our phones to remember things for us all the time. Siri is always reminding me to pick something up, grab the laundry, or to call somebody. But by relying on my phone to remember things for me I’m letting my own memory get weaker and only hurting myself.
We can design around this by looking for areas that we can force the user to try to remember on their own. Here, iOS has intelligently hidden the important details of a reminder.
The first portion of the reminder appears with enough information to prime the user’s memory. From here, the user can tap an option on the reminder to reveal the hidden portion if they can’t remember.
If we designed this to be really accurate to human memory, some reminders wouldn’t show up until the user was in bed later that night.
You’ve driven to that mall numerous times and you still rely on GPS to get there? Oh you’re using it to keep up with real-time traffic data, you say? Just use your intuition!
In recent years research has revealed how important sleep is for our health. Meanwhile, the work culture in the US has people sleeping less and less each night. Evidence has shown how detrimental poor sleeping habits are on the brain yet our habits get worse. While there are numerous apps that help users get a better night’s sleep (I’ve even worked on one), we need to identify and correct the source of the problem — being told to wake up in the first place.
Re-humanizing design should suggest the user follow more natural and healthy behaviors.
These are just a few examples of the possibilities that re-humanizing design offers.
By exercising re-humanizing design practices I think we’ll see the return of stronger memory, an increase in social skills, and ultimately a shift back towards more natural human behaviors that we once relied on. As we move into the future, it’s up to designers to be conscientious about the effects that the design of our technology has on human behavior and to always strive to design experiences that make us more human, not less.
