the onda

IEEE Spectrum has a fascinating piece on the failure of automated systems that use sensors, actuators, and software to drive all sorts of transportation equipment on behalf of the humans who become simply passive "gauge watchers." The piece is great for airplane junkies, but it makes a much more fundamental point about the way that supposedly foolproof systems are designed incorrectly, often because the engineers involved forget to take into account the human nature of the operators:

”We draw a system’s boundary in the wrong place,” Thomas states. ”There is an assumption that the system boundary that the engineer should be interested in [sits] at the boundary of the sensors and actuators of the box that is being designed by the engineers. The humans who are interrelating with these systems are outside it. Whether they are operators, pilots, controllers, or clinicians, they are not part of the system.

The part of the piece I found more applicable to general product design for regular people comes at the end though:

Parasuraman explains that ”if you deliberately engineer anomalies into the automation, people rely less on it and will perform a little bit better in monitoring the system. For example, if the system is 90 percent reliable, operators will be better at picking up the 10 percent of the errors than if the system is 99 percent reliable.”

[Sort of like Desmond on Lost pushing the button, right?]

Something about this statement made me think about driving engagement with users in web applications. It's not often the apps that are most completely baked— nor, as is the conventional wisdom today, those that are as simple as Google to use, that spark the imagination or win the hearts and minds of users. Instead the web apps that users seem to really engage deeply with, are the ones that do just enough to make a task easier or more enjoyable, but leave enough fuzziness in their design so as to make the operator want to lean forward and explore the space of possibilities.

A concrete example: the first generation photo sites (Shutterfly, Ofoto) were completely baked to make people slip down the 4x6 slide of print ordering, with each of the experience flows targeted at the handful of tasks that supposedly would lead to more of that. Along came Flickr with its dead-dumb simple metaphor of "one photo in a stream" and drove mass adoption of photo sharing by a group of folks who previously had little interest in photos online. In the third phase, when we set out to improve on that at Tabblo, we gave people a half-formed page editor to create stories in a fairly open-ended way that combined photos and words with a little bit of software assist. The concept was harder to grasp than the previous two iterations, but its open-ended nature led to some pretty engaged, "lean forward" types of users.

The piece just continues to remind me that the future of computing is really all about cyborgs— or the intelligent design of systems that use both machines and humans (with our flawed and sloppy analog brains) to obtain results which neither can achieve alone. Or, more succinctly put, the future belongs to the giant Human Computing Platform that the Internet is helping to create.