Thesis 46

Users will tend to blame themselves for defaults in everyware.

When ubiquitous systems break down, as they surely must from time to time, how will we react?

We've seen that it may be difficult to determine the origin of a problem, given a densely interwoven mesh of systems both local and remotethat emergent behavior arising in such a mesh means that there mightn't even be a single point of failure, in the classical sense.

We've also seen that users are likely to understand their interactions with everyware as primarily social in nature. Reeves and Nass tell us, further, that we generally treat informatic systems as though they had personalities, complete with agencyin other words, that we'll routinely fail to see through a system to the choices of its designers. As a consequence, we show a marked reluctance to ascribe blame to the systems themselves when things go wrong: we don't want to hurt their feelings (!). Even in the depths of this narcissistic age, we're still, apparently, gracious and forgiving in our dealings with information technology.

Given these two boundary constraints, the most obvious option remaining open is for users to blame themselves. We can expect that this will in fact be the most frequent user response to defaults in the ubiquitous and pervasive systems around them.

I can only cite my own experiences in support of this idea. As an information architect and user-experience consultant, I've helped to develop more than fifty enterprise-scale Web sites over the last seven years, as well as a smaller number of kiosk-based and mobile-phone interfaces. My work frequently involves the assessment of a client's existing siteobserving real users in their interactions with it and attending closely to their subjective responses. And one thing that I've seen with a fair, if disheartening, degree of regularity in this work is that users blame themselves when they can't get a site to work properlyand this is more true the less technically sophisticated the user is.

This very much despite the fact that the site in question may simply be wretchedly designed. People will say "I can't figure this out," "I'm too stupid," or "I get confused so easily," far more often than they'll venture an opinion that the site's designers or developers have done an incompetent job. Especially as everyware subtends an ever-larger population of nonspecialistseveryday people without any particular interest in the workings of the information technology they rely onwe can expect to see similar responses grow more and more common in reaction to breakdowns and defaults.

And this is the ultimate "next larger context" for our considerations of everyware. If we wish to design ubiquitous systems to support people in all the richness and idiosyncrasy of their lives, that address the complications of those lives without introducing new ones, we should bear in mind how crushingly often our mistakes will come to haunt not us but the people on whose behalf we're supposed to be acting.

But who, really, is this mysterious "we" I keep talking about? Up until this point, I've spoken as though responsibility for determining the shape of the ubiquitous future is general in the world and in the audience for these words as wellbut surely not everyone reading this book will be able to exert an identical amount of influence on that shape. As we head into the next chapter, then, we'll consider these questions with a greater degree of rigor: Who gets to speak for users? And just who will decide what kind of everyware we're to be furnished with?