Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

Chapter 3
INTERFACE DESIGNS ARE THE FACIAL
EXPRESSIONS OF DIGITAL PRODUCTS
In his brilliantly titled book Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles,
published in 1993, Donald Norman lamented how unattuned the design of so many
products is to human desires and needs, illuminating how good design can give any object,
from refrigerators to the directional signals of cars, personality, sensitivity, and
engagement. Everyone understood the emotional appeal of a well-designed automobile
(my favorite being the 1983 Porsche 911), but how many had thought about all the little
interactions we have with cars as a form of conversation? Product design has come a long
way in the decades since Norman made his case, and meanwhile computer technology has
ushered in an era of machines that truly do converse with us, some more enjoyably than
others.
Those German drivers mentioned in chapter 1 aren’t the only ones for whom
electronic voices have raised hackles. Who hasn’t been annoyed now and then at that
overly insistent TomTom or Garmin telling us to “Turn left at the fork. Turn LEFT at the
fork.” And when the machine says it’s “recalibrating,” it’s almost as though we hear it
mumbling to itself, “You feebleminded human, I told you to turn left.”
But our ability to make machines speak to us and interact with us in more natural and
pleasing ways is evolving at a remarkable rate. Some machines now even have body
language. The personal assistant robots mentioned in chapter 1 evoked a wide range of
emotional responses, and a whole new breed of robots is being crafted that will be much
more evocative. The design of some humanoid robots has already become so sophisticated
that they really can make us feel that they’re actually alive. Scientists at MIT have
developed a group of small, humanlike robots with the foot size of a three-year-old, whose
“facial” expressions are extraordinarily rich with emotion, as shown in the next figure.
(Courtesy of Humanoid Robotics Group)
Software designers, too, have been rapidly developing an incredible repertoire of