Time & Interaction Design

Sam Ladner

Notes originally by JayGoldman. If I missed your name (or mis-spelt it!) correct it below. I attributed some comments to ?. Also, come and introduce yourself so I know who you are next time!

• Monochronic Time is a linear progression of time from A to B
• Polychronic Time is all over the place
  • North American culture used to be very monochronic but is becoming increasingly polychronic as we split our attention into lots of streams
• What is the temporal impact of technology?
  • Change in duration
    • How long does a task take?
  • Temporal location
    • When in time is something expected to happen
  • Sequence
    • The order in which tasks happen
    • Expectation of the order in which things happen when we do things like filling in forms
  • Deadline
    • When is the task due?
  • Cycle
    • The period between first and second tasks
  • Rhythm
• Mortgage underwriters used to have to physically take mortgages to the Escalation Officer and then physically mail back to the broker but the technology has changed the sequence of those interactions.
• Temporal impact on creativity
  • Time orientation - some people tend to be monochronic and like to finish one task at a time. Others are polychronic.
  • Monochronic people who are forced to be polychronic tend to have reduced creative output
  • Polychronic people do very well with task rotation
  • Jon Lax: is that a cognitive bias?
    • Somewhat, but social pressures also transform you. You will build new neural pathways when forced into a different enviroment
• We tend to start our IxD from our own time orientation and assume that users will comply
  • We don't talk about users having to comply
• What's the impact for IxD?
  • Temporal disruption for users
  • We don't think about the time experience
    • Are users expected to be intensely focused throughout the interaction?
    • Are they expected to complete a task within a time requirement or on a deadline?
  • Not thinking about this induces stress and cognitive dissonance and reduces usability
• Interorganizational Temporal Issues
  • Agencies have temporal issues vs. their client's expectations
  • Agile has temporal expectations that differ from waterfall models
  • It's like walking into a restaurant where you're not sure if you should seat yourself or pay first or where to order
    • We lack the same set of expectations with our clients
  • How polychronic is your organization?
    • Some clients are monochronic and some agencies are polychronic
• Jay Goldman: how does this fit into Jon Lax's V=pr equation
  • Jon: It's part of the value of the company. How does a monochronic person exist in a polychronic organization?
• ?: Is one more efficient? Would a monochronic person with five tasks finish later than a polychronic?
  • There's a case study of radiologists and technicians. Technicians were very monochronic because their process was very monochronic. They got a file, examined it, completed it, pushed it along to the radiologists, rinse and repeat. There were fewer radiologists than technicians so they had beepers and were always responding to requests and they didn't have set office hours. There was a big disconnect and both found it very stressful to find each other. The technicians had less control over their process and their work and they were stressed out at having to find radiologists. Polychronic people at the top of the org chart have a much easier time at setting an organizational agenda to polychronism whereas monochronic people at the top have to impose it in every proces.
  • James McNab: I'm in the middle of an organization which has a highly polychronic CEO and a very monochronic staff and they're driving each other crazy.
• Jon Lax: Does polychronic scale well? If you're trying to do a bunch of things at once to scale up an org is it hard to do it polychronically?
  • ?: Doesn't it depend on the work? If you're doing something highly scientific or based on deduction that you have to move in the right order.
  • Jon Lax: There's a limit to the number of things you can do simultaneously. If I work on more than five clients at the same time then they all lose out. If I want to scale, I need to find another me.
• These are ideal types. Organizations today are much more flexible and innovative than they were in the past. But often they are disjointed and fragmented and there are less opportunties for glue.
  • We look back at the Ford production line and it was rational, modern, and predictive but it was very staid and resistent to change. Not much recognition of multiplicities.
  • New organizations are postmodern, flexible, and innovative.
  • There are sets of survey questions to determine mono vs. poly chronic behaviour
    • You can interview based on them or survey your own organization
    • You could do this with clients, but maybe issuing them a survey instrument isn't the best approach
• Look at your own time practices for you as an individual and as an organization
  • Interactive agencies tend to use monochronic systems which aren't in line with how people work and are tracked, and clients are billed
  • ?: How many percent complete are you on a task is a question that comes up all the time but has no relevant answer.
    • That comes from the dominant focus on predictive control
  • Mark ?: Some tasks at an agency are best done monochronically. Thinking time tasks are but doing stuff tasks aren't.
    • Monochronicity is the dominant time reckoning system but isn't respected as a mode of working in agency life. I couldn't do my disertation and my job at the same time because it's totally monochronic. There is a system of tech that doesn't support monochronic thinking and working within agencies.
    • Mark ?: You work in a polychronic environment where you're expected to answer questions within fifteen minutes and people have to shut down Outlook to get any work done
    • ?: This becomes the practical question of how to do we design systems based on chronicity? We often conceive of our products being used monochronically but they rarely are
• Jon Lax: Can you talk about rhythm? It sounds like it would be really important
  • Rhythm can be engineered in several ways:
    • There are symbolic queues given within organizations face-to-face about what rhythm is expected
      • People with headphones on and madly typing gives a completely different cue than people wandering around and chatting
  • How do you give a cue about rhythm in interaction? Progress bars, how quickly do status indicators move, animation
  • Mark ?: If you have a security application that can't be left, you should give a rhythm cue that it will take 10 minutes
  • Jon Lax: Is rhythm larger than just status indication? Isn't it how it feels? What's the pace of the interaction? Form design can be split into multiple pages or one page and that affects it.
    • Perception of time is key. Something feels like it drags forever. Time is a subjective experience, not numbers on a clock. It is intensely experienced or not at all. This gets engineered into every interaction we have.
• ?: From the perspective of TV commercials, if you can selectively blend a process which should be really fast and make it feel slow, like an XBox commercial of a shooter game paired with slow music, it changes the perception. Make it feel like the answers to a form are going faster but build it to slow down the reading and pacing.
• How many people are more than 50% mono or poly chronic?
  • Room seemed to be split
  • ?: Depends on my task. If I'm doing HTML, don't bug me. If I'm doing Facebook, come on in.
  • ?: I'm forced into being polychronic because of my environment.
  • ?: There's a great article on flow that I'll post to the wiki. If you're in the zone and you get a lot of work done in an hour, you feel like you did a lot. When you have IM and email on, you don't get the same. Time passes much faster in the zone.
    • This is "Flow" state. Flow is the sense of timelessness. A sense of mastery and deep engagement with what you're doing. Tunnel vision to everything else. There's a cognitive experience to flow. Replace usability with this. People only care if your product is engaging.
• Jay and Madhava: We worked at IBM on DB2 and spent a lot of time measuring things like time on task as an assessment of performance. IBM is very predictive-based and so improving time on task was viewed as a big win, whereas something more abstract like user satisfaction was harder to value. They're a very monochronic organization within each group (if you're a DB2 dev, you're responsible for security dialogs and that's all you do forever more), but polychronic within the organization as a whole.
• The Australian aborginal culture is very different than the European culture. They have no real concept of future and past or even cause and effect. Meetings focus on building consensus around issues. Just down the street you have Australian companies having board meetings which are all about cause and effect. They value wayfinding and gestalt. Time exists in their head instead of in historical records
• Jon Lax: As our world becomes more connected and complex, are monochronic people more subjected to stress?
  • There was a study done that suggested that monochronic people would be better time managers and that turned out not to be true but polychronic people thought they were