Incidental Users

Posted: July 22nd, 2009 | Author: Alex | Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

The current issue of ACM’s Interactions Magazine features The Incidental User by Ohad Inbar and Noam Tractinsky:

Traditionally, the focus of HCI has been designing for people who actively use applications or interactive products. These individuals, commonly referred to as users, may be bank tellers operating a banking application, pilots setting parameters of an autopilot system, or customers using ATM machines. This viewpoint neglects a vast number of cases in which human interactions with computerized systems are less active and often unplanned, yet still meaningful. People’s needs are routinely ignored in these situations and the effects of information systems on their lives often go unnoticed. We term these people “incidental users.”

Examples include the customer at the checkout lane in the grocery store, who cannot make sense of the quickly scrolling item list on the screen (if that is visible at all) or airplane passengers, who realistically have no good idea about the state of their luggage or the condition of the plane.

The Web is full of incidental users and scenarios of incidental use, too. Here are some examples.

• If a document is published online, it will likely be picked up by search engines. Furthermore, people may link to it, make copies, etc. Most publishers will have no good idea, what services access their document or how they use it.
• URL shortening services have gained importance in real-time messaging services, such as Twitter. Every character counts, so it can make sense for the sender to conserve space by shortening URLs. The receiver of the message however has to determine whether the URL is trustworthy. Software plugins that expand the shortened URL are available which simplify the problem just a bit. More on this here.
• Personalization is an important feature of many modern websites, particularly e-commerce sites. Personalization is achieved based on usage patterns as well as the user’s value judgments, such as product ratings. That process often ends up being less than transparent to the user.
• The general public have become passive users of Google Map’s Street View.

Important lessons can be learned by examining whether one may be the incidental user of a service (or services) at a given time. Only being able to see the back side of a computer display may be a good indicator, but other cases are probably more subtle. Check out Ohad Inbar’s blog for more examples.

It is also noteworthy that some businesses profit by using scarcity of information as competitive advantage. The Web has served as a platform for companies that break into those industries and make previously scare information more openly available. The Redfin story comes to mind here as an instructive example.

---