Ann's Rant: Warming Up to a Heated Response

What have Morenian theory and the Yahoo website got to do with each other? You are about to find out.

JL Moreno was a Viennese psychologist who developed Role Theory ('a role is the functioning form the individual assumes in the specific moment s/he reacts to a specific situation in which other persons or objects are involved') and Spontaneity Theory ('a spontaneity state is necessary for a new response').

With the business of developing new responses and with them, new roles, comes the significant concept of 'warming up'. This is the matter of moving someone from cold to warm by purposefully offering them relevant experiences. It leads the individual into a mental space where they can react with interest and commitment to the stimuli that follow. So, if I were to ask you 'Have you seen any good films lately?', by getting you to reflect on films, I might be warming you up to a discussion of movies, or to then asking you to come with me to see a particularly fine one. Sometimes, it is also possible to warm people up to something inadvertently.

Now I have always been interested in interaction design. That's the sequencing of exchanges to some end: you navigate through the form and I get the information, you find the product and I get the money...

I'm also interested, but less certain of, experience design. How can I design your experience? Ideally I'd like you to find the product, give me your money, and then tell all your friends what a fantastic interface I offered, how much pleasure you took in interacting through it and what a jolly fine service I must be.

But such enthusiasm starts slowly. Maybe you've never heard of the service, or tried to buy a product before. Maybe you're in a filthy mood and the last thing you feel like doing is wrestling with a Web interface to buy a present for someone you don't even care about.

What I have to do is provide an appropriate warm-up. And so interaction design can have a linear dimension and an energy dimension. And, as someone pushes on through the sequence of exchanges, so they should be reaching new and higher positive energy states: warming up.

Now, let me step out of role as interaction designer and turn to my other role as website user. Let me turn to my experience of Yahoo the other day. It’s no problem to remember – it's the most exasperating experience I've had in recent times. I was trying to join a new group. John Rosbottom of the University of Portsmouth had just set up an HCI curriculum development group for the BHCIG and invited me to participate. I took two hours to get there.

In that time, I was taken from away from my chosen page about groups and chucked back on a page called 'My Yahoo' with no reference to groups at all, all because I'd had a little trouble remembering my password.

I was denied entry three times, issued with two new passwords, made to enter those passwords a total of 23 times as part of security checks and finally offered extra words to type in because I'd failed my password test so often. I'd had to wait around while, having answered the hint question they offered me wrong, I forfeited any direct access to my password and they sent a new password to me by email.

When I decided to try and customise my 'My Yahoo', I was presented with a confirmation page identical to the page I'd started with before making changes. This seemed to be confirmation of no changes at all, so I tried again. I took out most fields, but still returned to a page containing them. Had I done anything I intended to or not?

Now, a keen usability expert will read through this story of mayhem and disaster and recognise that only some of this is the site's problem. Much of it was mine; either forgetting, mistyping the second call for my new password so that it did not match the preceding one, missing the small links at the bottom of the page and daring to have a model of Yahoo as a community site, rather than a news provider.

However, let's look at what I was warmed up to? Well, I was cooled down to using the site. I joined the group only because it was a small team of people I knew and I really wanted to be on it. I wouldn't have joined anything out of general interest.

I was warmed up to thinking about passwords, their use, their value and what we can do to help people like me, who missed the 'Save this password' function at some crucial time and have lived to regret it.

I'm warmed up to hating 'My Yahoo', where I don't know and have ceased to care whether I got rid of the sports scores and the entertainment news as the first thing I see.

I'm warmed up to using my privilege as editor here to have a good moan about online interaction design. Why didn't someone pick up on my distress and come and sort me out? In most shops, community centres and libraries, during those two hours, I would have been a target for unsolicited help.

Instead, I went, fairly spontaneously, from a role of 'neutral investigator' to 'indignant journalist', 'frustrated participant' and 'humiliated user' with just a machine to guide me.

My 'My Yahoo' horoscope that day said: "Discussions with others could result in new plans and opportunities for advancing yourself on any level that you wish - career, financial, social. ..."

I say: 'At what price?'

But I did enjoy the news from the principal holder of my discussion forums that discussion was set to improve my fortunes. I can't access the other eleven star signs through 'My Yahoo' without creating further IDs. Would anyone who isn't born between June 21st and July 22nd please let me know if this is a standard Yahoo ruse?

Perhaps it's Yahoo's way of warming me up to a cheerful use of John's new group, when the technology has just left me stony faced and mutinous.

Associated Link: Who is this woman?

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