[ExI] The Field of HCI

[Mike Dougherty]

On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 7:26 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> I think a key skill is being able to critique designs. To actually take
> something, play around with it, and then not just tell whether it feels good
> or bad (useful/useless, easy/hard, whatever) but to articulate *what* makes
> it feel like that. This is not just good for feedback and commentary, but

Maybe it's not all the way to rare, but certainly an uncommon skill.
A majority of project planning is getting enough detail from the
customer/consumer to know what they're actually requesting.  When I
find users who clearly describe as-is and to-be, I give them top
priority as a reward.  You might expect this to catch-on, but it
doesn't.

> program itself allows you to do something highly motivating. The work on
> gamification (and MacGonigals work on ARGs) suggests to me that if you make
> the interfaces motivate users in the right way the strangest interface will
> be learnable. So maybe the core issue is not to fix the epistemic/perceptual
> aspects but the emotional and motivational: if your software has the right
> built in motivators (and demotivators) it will drive the right kind of
> learning and use. But whether there is a good theory for this yet, I do not
> know. Maybe the game design literature is worth a glance.

I wish I had more to add than "+1" or "like" but those signals are the
basic vote-mechanism of social media.  So on this sentiment:  Yes!

> (Hmm, having an active wordcount in the lower border of a window might
> actually be a simple gamification of writing, rewarding me with "points" for
> writing... maybe it should also list the number of misspellings -
> wordprocessing as a game!)

What would that do to the quality/content of the actual writing?