Experts in Communication

Take a VCR, for instance. Someone rents a movie, sticks it into the player, hits a button-switches off brain, sits on couch, stays home, gets isolated and alienated. In that abbreviated tale there are elements of the machine, the service, and the society. Or take a microwave-you won't need to adjust the scenario all that much. The familiar buttons are on the panel, and the pizza delivery service is a phone call away. Within the phenomenon of warming up prepared food may lurk culturally significant meanings: perhaps a demarcation line between men's and women's household responsibilities (she cooks food, he heats it) or perhaps an assumption about what kids of a certain age can be trusted to do.

Figure I.1: The path of reasoning from portability to user understanding.

With communication products the overlapping interaction layers of machine, service, and society are, we claim, more salient, transparent, and integrated than with most other products or technologies. Is this an appropriate hour to call someone? If I call today, am I being too pushy? Should I wait for her to call me instead? Maybe it would be better to send an email. Should I call her friend first? If I delete her number from my overpacked contact directory, am I abandoning her?

Communication-that motley mix of approaching others, getting to the point, wrapping it nicely with a suitable amount of small talk, giving a blunt response, hinting at your meaning without spelling it out, or pointedly ignoring something that was said or should have been-is an area where human skills are very advanced and very much culturally colored. There are strong conventions concerning what is acceptable for subordinates in an office to say, or for children to do. Men communicating to women, women to men, people in my trusted primary groups, total strangers-for all these situations, there are behavioral codes. To be accepted as a means of communications, technology must adapt to those codes. On the other hand, it appears that technology itself influences the codes and changes them.

The complexity of these phenomena makes task-oriented design difficult. Can you task-analyze social bonding? Taping a championship match with a VCR is a task that can be isolated and analyzed, and so is nuking a slice of pizza; but apologizing, negotiating, and reassuring are not so easily reducible to tasks. They are design challenges that call for core usability skills, debate on the social level of interaction, and understanding of the user's contextual and cultural position relative to that person's interlocutor.