Reading Response 4

The video above was recorded from CCTV.  It is one particular example demonstrate that how people react to a frustrating computer. (A digression: It seems that people tend to attack the monitor whereas the fault actually goes to the HOST COMPUTER. Poor innocent monitor.)

After reading Norman’s Chapter 5: People, Places, and Things. The “computer rage” images cannot get out of my mind. It is such a common phenomenon that office people have witnessed. Even I am not at work yet, how many times I saw my father banging the mouse when he is viewing the stock market trend and the computer seems dead and unresponsive. I know my father is pretty much a quiet “computer rager” when compared to the person in the video or those more extreme ones. Why people have such ridiculous behavior toward an inanimate objects. Norman demonstrates it in an insightful way and indeed gives thought to designer in whatever fields.

He indicates that human being has a tendency to read emotional responses into anything, animate or not and biologically prepared to interact with others (human being, animate objects or inanimate objects). Actually this ability to read and interact with people and things around us has become one of our instincts or biological heritage that we lose a clear view to examine how does this happen. People are born to react, response to the things around them and interact with it. This is how a society works as a organism.

As a designer, whatever type of designer he/she is, should note that, on one hand, if things work smoothly, fulfilling expectations, the affective system responds positively, bringing pleasure to the user, people will like it or even love it; on the other hand, when the things work frustratingly, the operating systems appears to be troublesome and annoying, people will show hatred towards it. What a conspicuous and logical principle. Somehow sometimes designers just simply forget it or ignore it. For example, a piece of oral language practicing software I used when I was in Junior high. It operates as a responsive partner that keeps on a conversation, so we can practice our oral language and develop a sense of western-thinking pattern in every communicating situation. It seems an amazing tool that help students enhance their English oral language but it turns out that did not work at all because it cannot recognize students’ verbal words and keep popping up “ERROR” windows. Does the designer forget students as English Language Learner has different accents? And just simply forget the fact that even the best English oral language speaking student at class might not speak standard English that the broadcast expertise have? If they just take a little thinking of this problem when developing this piece of software may not result in totally failure. As the consequence of the failure, on one hand the learning goal is failed, and on the other hand students’ have negative feelings for similar technology.

This comes to an issue of TRUST in technology. Norman stated that emotional attachment is based on trust that comes from experience. That means in our experience of using things (objects or technologies), we will develop a sense of trust when it performs exactly what we expected time after time and hence we will like it or even love it . I think it is another guideline for designers. Remember that people will definitely have a particular expectation to the product when it comes out. This kind of expectation comes from the advertisements and recommendations that can be interpret as a promise to the customers. Can the product fulfill the promise is essential to the manufacturer as it directly lead to the answer that customers like your product or not. If the manufacturer fails to fulfill their promise, they lose customer’s trust. “Trust has to be earned.”------Norman.