I recently discovered UXpod which features an excellent interview with Google’s User Experience Research Manager, Patrick Larvie. Hearing his story and research approach I can see how Google has been able to move use of the Internet forward in so many ways. Not to give him more credit than he deserves for what happens there, but if he fits in as a part of the leadership then it says a lot about what is valued at Google.
My sense is that Patrick’s approach to user experience is compatible with Distributed Cognition in some rather important ways. Distributed Cognition is an approach to studying cognition in which the traditional boundaries between individuals and the material world are dissolved at the outset of an analysis. The focus is on how information is represented and processed across people and materials, rather than just inside of people. It was initially developed by Ed Hutchins as a means to more tightly integrate culture into the analysis of cognitive activity, more recently it has been picked up in segments of HCI and the Learning Sciences as an approach to the design and analysis of technology in use.
Using Google is a cognitive process centered on organizing information. At the beginning of the interview, Patrick (PL) discussed Google’s attempt to organize the world’s information. He explained that user experience at Google is more than the clean interface and very much includes work that goes on behind the scenes.
PL: That we regard that simple interface as the epitome of a usable elegant design really speaks to the fact that we’ve become accustom to a more radically different approach to organizing information and that’s what Google is really about. Search is a new way of thinking not just about how to organize things but how to retrieve things, how to remember where they are.
Focusing narrowly on what happens inside a user’s head misses important aspects of what Google’s technology is doing and may inappropriately relegate things the technology does to the user. Patrick responded to Gerry Gaffney’s (the interviewer) description of how his son uses Google in a way that exemplifies how the user and the technology form a cognitive system that tackles basic processes like spelling.
GG: It’s had a very interesting effect on the teenagers that I encounter. You know my older son Brian, he doesn’t bother spelling anything. He just types it in sort of some radom quazi spelled fashion and the assumption is oh Google will fix it.PL: Right. Well um, I hope that that’s true. That points to an interesting user problem and one of the things that I’ve learned in my career is that you must pay attention sometimes to the most basic problems or most basic challenges that we encounter. One of the problems with a search interface, and this is very different from say directy structers, is that people have to be proficient at imput. And English shares I think in common with many other languages that its spelling is not intuitive. So spelling is a real barrier. For search to be effective, one of the things that has to happen is that we have to account for the fact that lots of words aren’t very easy to spell and there are lots of varients for the same word. So we will continue to try to make sure Brian doesn’t have to know how to spell everything on his own.GG: [Google has] had a very interesting effect on the teenagers that I encounter. You know my older son Brian, he doesn’t bother spelling anything. He just types it in sort of some radom quasi-spelled fashion and the assumption is, ‘oh Google will fix it’.
PL: Right. Well um, I hope that that’s true. That points to an interesting user problem and one of the things that I’ve learned in my career is that you must pay attention sometimes to the most basic problems or most basic challenges that we encounter. One of the problems with a search interface, and this is very different from say directory structers, is that people have to be proficient at input. And English shares I think in common with many other languages that its spelling is not intuitive. So spelling is a real barrier. For search to be effective, one of the things that has to happen is that we have to account for the fact that lots of words aren’t very easy to spell and there are lots of varients for the same word. So we will continue to try to make sure that Brian doesn’t have to know how to spell everything on his own.
What is important to note about Patrick’s response is that he implicitly recognized that finding information is a joint effort between the user and Google. This effort is contingent upon resolving problems that keep the two parties from communicating with each other, such as barriers created by non-intuitive aspects of the English language (i.e. spelling). Google has taken up the task of translating mispellings so that the barrier does not get in the way of the user finding the information he is seeking. I have emphasized the last sentence because Patrick demarcates a very specific cognitive role for Google’s technology, spelling non-intuitive words that the user incorrectly inputs. The user does need to get the spelling somewhat close to the proper form, however what might be considered an individual thought process is one that actually occurs as a collaboration between the user and Google according to this description. What is interesting is that not only does Patrick recognize this, but he seems to indicate that this is the intended design.
Memory is another important part of how Google can be thought of as a cognitive artifact. Not only does Google hold a great deal of information, but it does so in a way that extends what we are able to remember by doing essential aspects of the process. Here is another instance in which Patrick discusses Google taking over aspects of a cognitive task that was at one time relegated to humans: remember where an email message is stored.
PL: We would like for people to think about email much as they think about other things. So they can retreive the message they want by entering some keywords that might remind them of the conversation, or the person, or the theme. But they don’t necessarly have to keep track of exactly where that message is, that’s no longer necessary.
For Google, this is about dislodging how we remember things. It is important to note that Google here is not an aide that helps the user draw from his or her memory where something is stored, instead Google actually does the work of remembering where the item is held. What the user has to do is recall some aspect of the item that Google can use to find it.
PL: If you think about things like Google Docs or the desktop search function. What’s important there is the idea that you don’t have to remember that you stored a particular document in a particular folder and its on your hard drive. Or remember which email account you were in when you wrote a message about a reservation that you wanted at a restaurant. The idea is that you should be able to use simple search function to organize all of that. And once you have dislodged place as a key aspect of organizing and finding information it’s also possible to sort of push at other aspects of finding and organizing information such as who created it or to whom does it belong. And that’s something that we are working on with Google Docs … They encourage collaboration. So not only do I not have to remember what’s on my hard drive, I don’t necessarly have to remember if I created the document because if it’s shared with me I might be able to find it some other way.
The discussion ended on the importance of culture to HCI and user experience. Patrick was rather critical of how the community approached the concept and shared some ideas on how a more contemporary view of culture, common in other disciplines, could really help the field.
PL: We need to see the fact that we use computing machinary and networks as a part of the material and social culture of which we’re a part. And in many ways these objects, these machines, the sort of metaphors that are behind their use are part of a culture that in many ways brings people closer together than they might be otherwise apart. One the one hand, I want to examine the kind of connectedness that computing offers people of radically different circumstance. On the other hand, I don’t want to erase the fact that are very different forms of social organization that surround the use of computing machinary, the computing infrastructure. There are are radically different material, social, and political circumstances around the availability of that infrastructure and what it means. So, I would like to see more critical and more matuculous engagenment of what culture actually means.
Culture is an important aspect of Distributed Cognition. In Cognition in the Wild, Hutchins argues in a similar way for thinking of culture as a process. (Because I do not have my copy of the book accessible I will quote from Cole, pg. 129.)
Culture, according to Hutchins, should be thought of as a process, not as “any collection of things, whether tangible or abstract.” Culture “is a process and the ‘things’ that appear on list-like definitions of culture are residua of the process. Culture is an adaptive process that accumulates the partial solutions to frequently encountered problems.” (Hutchins, p. 354).
At the end of the interview, Patrick discussed an ethnographic account of karaoke that demonstrated how something like performance with a technology can have strikingly different meanings across cultures. Could the same be true of organizing and finding information? Or remembering where an item is held? Two things that Patrick touched on as important to how Google approaches user experience.
