Do you care if a computer says sorry? I didn’t think I did until I read this…

This week I chose to read ‘Do you Care if a Computer Says Sorry? User Experience Design through Affective Messages’ by Park et al, 2012. This paper grabbed my attention as it focused on something which I had always wondered about myself as well as exemplifying and testing a long standing example of user experience design which has been embedded into all systems and interfaces.  The paper itself looks at how popup messages in user notification can aid user satisfaction by improving usability, accessibility and pleasure provided to the user of the system. The study took a total of 30 people and gathered their emotional perceptions of using the same system with a range of user notifications that were designed to twist the user’s perception of trust, frustration, aesthetics and usability.

The study itself found that users trust was positively affected by systems that offered more apologetic user notifications whereas systems that were non-apologetic increased frustration. Notifications that were apologetic tended to be perceived as being more aesthetically pleasing as well as useable to the users in a post-study questionnaire. User notifications which were ‘mechanical’ or threatening tended to cause users to become more anxious, which led to subsequent failures and increased frustration. So what does all this mean? It demonstrates that people, even though they are interacting with a computer system, prefer to be treat with equal mannerisms as if they were communicating with another person. General politeness, helpfulness and thoughtfulness still apply even if it is known to be artificial.

One finding within the paper outlined how people perceived the aesthetics of the computer system as being ‘better’ with apologetic system notifications. Although this cannot be generalised for a wider range of situations and scenarios, it is still interesting because it suggests that the physical look and layout of the UI, even though the same in each case, are perceived differently depending on how apologetic the notifications are. This would mean that we should not just consider the physical layout of the UI but put equal importance on designing systems to respond sympathetically to user’s actions.

There is also an interesting underlying argument here which outlines how apology can be used to strengthen relationships between system and user by bolstering the perception of trust, which in itself is a difficult emotion to define. So, as the authors state within the title; ‘Do you care if a computer says sorry?’ – You may have thought it was trivial however as this paper exemplifies, it puts forward a convincing argument stating the important of maintaining the user-computer relationship.