People tend to attach human emotions/feelings/belief/ motivations to animals and inanimate objects; this is called anthropomorphism. If everything works smoothly, fulfilling the expectations, users would experience pleasure. However, when a computer fails deliver the ideal result from a user, the user would experience frustration, disappointment, confusion or even rage and blame the product. As a result, to design pleasurable, effective interactions between product and human, designers need to firstly understand and relate the interactions between individuals as they are the very same ones. Once the computer fails, the trust fails.
To establish users’ trust on an item, it needs reliance, confidence and integrity. In other word, we expect the systems to perform precisely according to expectations. The expectations come from multiple sources: advertisements, recommendations, the reliability being performed since we got it, and most importantly, to our conceptual models…
Trust has to be earned, while living in an untrustworthy world seems to be tricky.
The very attributes that make us effective, cooperative, creative workers, able to adapt to the unexpected and to provide assistance to others, make us vulnerable to those who would take advantage of us.
We become more and more indifferent towards the tragedies happening around us for we don’t want to bear the possibility to be cheated or frauded. In order to improve this situation, the whole system needs change such as simplifying unnecessary security procedures, and rise the recognition for real security alerts (see graph below).
graph 1
Nowadays, we are always connected but always distracted due to continuous phone calls, instant messages, and various other ways of interacting online interrupting physical conversation. When I am focused on replying an instant message from afar, I feel fulfilled and busy while in the meantime, the other person in front of me tends to feel neglected and this period of time is empty for this person, so this person is also like to pick up the phone and browsing, the communication is thus interrupted between you two.
It is already so hard to stay concentrated due to human’s nature, as we need to shift attention every 10 seconds to keep us from any potential danger. Maintaining normal attention span is hard, with the advent of modern distractions, and to keep a private and uninterrupted time with the person in front of us becomes even harder. Therefore, the future of design is really about eliminating interruption in a face-to-face situation by optimizing our virtual connection to the smartest.
With the improvement of both technological and manner-wise design, companies can then shift the love-hate relationship that customers hold for a product into a pure love relationship. This may take long for the society to digest and take it as a common sense, but it will happen one day.
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