There\u2019s a new buzzword in computer design circles every year. This year, the buzzword is without question bots.
As with anything we build, we give bots names. It\u2019s something most of us don\u2019t even question. They come pre-personified and ready for us to start that human-computer relationship, just like HAL 9000 or Her : there\u2019s Siri in our iPhones, Alexa in Amazon\u2019s Echo and there\u2019s even Facebook Messenger\u2019s PSL (Pumpkin Spice Latte) Bot.
A name can be a way of expressing trust in an object \u2014 or expressing control over it. In design terms, a name is a kind of affordance \u2014 a handle we can hold onto.
As the resident language expert on our product design team, naming things is part of my job. When we began iterating on a bot within our messaging product, I was prepared to brainstorm hundreds of names. Gendered, non-gendered, functional, etc.
But first, we did some testing with actual end users to understand their relationship with bots, language and names. We learned that giving a bot an identity isn\u2019t always for the best. Calling a bot Siri does not necessarily have the same relationship-building effect as calling your car Bessie or Old Faithful.
In a voice-activated bot, names are pretty functional: saying \u201cSiri,\u201d \u201cAlexa\u201d or \u201cOK Google\u201d is the conversational equivalent of opening Google and entering a search term. When you see a search bar, your brain leaps from idea \u2014 there\u2019s something I want to find \u2014 to action. We do this so often \u2014 more than 40,000 times a second \u2014 that we don\u2019t think of it as conversing with the system, though we are asking a question and expecting a response.
But names don\u2019t trigger an action in text-based bots, or chatbots. Even Slackbot, the tool built into the popular work messaging platform Slack, doesn\u2019t need you to type \u201cHey Slackbot\u201d in order to retrieve a pre-programmed response.
Speaking our searches out loud serves a function, but it also draws our attention to the interaction. This can have both good and bad effects. Voice is fundamentally more \u201chumanizing\u201d than text. A study released in August showed that when we hear something versus when we read the same thing, we are more likely to attribute the spoken word to a human \u201ccreator.\u201d
But what is humanizing can also be irritating. We may find it far more exhausting, as humans, to say \u201cOK Google\u201d 75 times a day than to silently open a laptop and search.
From a design perspective, bots are aligned with the whole concept of messaging-as-a-platform \u2014 we could build a bot right into our own messenger using the same simple elements we\u2019d already designed for human-to-human conversation.
So when we experimented with building a bot, we wanted to use those simple elements to communicate. We gave our test bot a name and let it introduce itself like a real person would: \u201cHi, I\u2019m Bot, Intercom\u2019s digital assistant.\u201d
What we found was surprising. People hated this bot \u2014 found it off-putting and annoying. It was interrupting them, getting in the way of what they wanted (to talk to a real person), even though its interactions were very lightweight.
We tried different things: alternate voices, so that the bot was sometimes friendly and sometimes reserved and functional. But we didn\u2019t see much change.
It was only when we removed the name and took away the first person pronoun and the introduction that things started to improve. The name, more than any other factor, caused friction.
We\u2019ve been telling ourselves scary stories about robots for more than a century, stories in which we simultaneously pity and mistrust them. When we name the tools we use, we assert control over them; we do that because we want to be the ones having the interaction, doing the job.
The digital tools we make live in a completely different psychological landscape to the real world. We can\u2019t get a handle on them, literally. There is no straight line from a tradesman\u2019s hammer he can repair himself to a chatbot designed and built by a design team somewhere in California (or in Dublin, in our case).
Unlike most writers in my company, my work does its job best when it\u2019s barely noticed. Control is incredibly important in designing digital tools \u2014 most language we see and experience in a product is about affording control and understanding to you, the person using the product \u2014 not me, the writer. To be understood intuitively is the goal \u2014 the words on the screen are the handle of the hammer.
Names and identity lift the tools on the screen to a level above intuition. They make us see the tool in all its virtual glory, and place it in an entirely different context to the person using it \u2014 and not always a relationship that person asks for or appreciates.
This might be because of novelty \u2014 we might become more comfortable with the virtual, more trusting of it (though this year\u2019s headlines haven\u2019t given us much to trust). But despite the hundreds of movies we\u2019ve made and books we\u2019ve written about robots, introducing personality into technology might not be the way we become more comfortable.
There\u2019s another school of thought in design, one that describes it as almost invisible. Siri and Alexa might have been thought of as examples of this type: you can\u2019t really \u201csee\u201d them, and so they disappear into the background. But that\u2019s not necessarily true.
As humans, we\u2019re visual people \u2014 we respond to what we see. But even more than that, we\u2019re social \u2014 we respond to the things we can speak to. It\u2019s why we name our possessions, and why we fear the pretend humans we\u2019ve been imagining for so long.
The real measure of success for today\u2019s designers is making technology disappear so that it becomes a true tool for humans. The true measure of success for a designer who deals in words is making tools quieter to use, so we can use them more intuitively.<\/p>\n