Too often we have seen products designed that are built on certain user expectations that end up being perceived and used in a completely different way.

Usability has been a fundamental principle of good UX.

Don Norman has a famous quote-

“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible.”

As we build products that are more complex (not just simple dyadic human-system relationships but thinking machines), extra attention must be paid to usability design. All those ML models manifest themselves in the form of products trying to mimic rich human interaction.

Complications in such products:

1. People are forgiven but systems are not.
2. Designing for human sociability: We expect people to interact with products in the same manner they interact with other people.
3. When and where to include humans in the loop?
4. How do we play to the strengths of both humans and machines?

There is a constant struggle to balance human augmentation vs machine delegation.

When designing usability into these systems we can take 2 main approaches:

1. Taking human-human interactions and replacing them with human-machine interactions. This is complicated because one must work through all the ideological, political, and educational palliatives or first-order approximations to arrive at something that even has a chance of being “human-like”.

2. Take inspiration from rich human interaction but highly context dependant on 2 key interaction qualities: Attention (foreground vs background) and System Initiatives (reactive vs proactive). Then solve problems based on:

   Cognitive overload
   Level of user agency
   Flexibility
   Whether it’s in the users best interest?
   The situation itself

This second method is also complicated since we must account for the needs of a single user and their (often unknowing/implicit) delegation to a system to help fulfill a task/goal. Without careful attention to usability design, there are great risks of socio-technical gaps in the solution.

In subsequent posts, I will elucidate how socio-technical gaps affect perception(everything users believe the product can do), reality (everything the product does for the users) and everything in between.