The Psychology of User Interfaces
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This section examines human factors and describes how social psychologists regard interactions between humans and computer systems.
Personality—What Is It?
Personality is a term that social psychologists use to capture the essence of a person's social behavior. There are a number of approaches for mapping personality traits across various dimensions as a way of quantifying different personality types: Friendly, Dominant, Judging, Sensing. The designers' challenge is to create an appropriate, consistent, believable personality with which users can interact.
Personalities can embody the brand image of the company, product or service. They can be predictable, but that does not mean that they are clichés (although that is sometimes the case). It means personalities are predictable because they make sense as people. They are believable. They have an internal logic. Making personalities predictable allows for the effective disclosure and management of personality during an interaction, just as it does in fiction or film.
Judicious use of stereotyping can make personalities predictable (in the good sense). Overuse of stereotyping can cause the reverse effect.
What Dimensions Define Personality
We often assume personalities are unique and complicated but this assumption is misleading. Based on a large body of psychological research, personality has been organized into five basic groups of traits or dimensions: dominance, friendliness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness. Although all five dimensions are important, in the context of a task-oriented interaction, friendliness and dominance are the critical dimensions of personality.
Other personality attributes to consider include:
- Competence
- Age
- Intelligence
- Level of education
- Ethnicity
Implications for Automated Interactions
Because research demonstrates that the psychological rules of human-to-human interaction apply to human-to-computer interactions, particularly when anthropomorphic elements such as speech are used, a designer's understanding of these psychological dimensions plays a significant role in creating an effective design.
The designer, however, is not trying to fool the caller into believing the system is a real person, but rather taking advantage of natural conversational dialog to help the user complete a task.