Why psychological knowledge might make your life a whole lot easier

Written by Sarah & Yeasmin (Lecture 1)

Psychology is nice. It can help us understand people, technology, even ourselves better.

It can also make us better engineers. Understanding the needs and expectations of a user is not just helpful because it will make the device easier to use, it will most likely also make more people buy whatever it is you’re selling. Finding the typical usage patterns means the device’s design can be optimized so to support its usage. Nobody wants to use a phone where you have to press a thousand buttons and search through a dozen menus just to call someone.

Have you ever changed operating systems and decided to switch back after stumbling around and not finding anything for a week? Changed from an Apple phone to an Android one? Had your grandma use a smartphone for the first time? If so, you may have come to appreciate intuitive design and well-thought-out interfaces. They tend to make using an unfamiliar device or interface more time-efficient and pleasant. At the heart of it, phones are always just phones and laptops are always just laptops, so they should be similar enough to use. You’d think.

Using technology gives users expectations - according to whichever device they used before and are switching to, those expectations may or may not be met. Considering those expectations and their implications will improve usability and keep it intuitive.

Technology affects how people interact with each other.

Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/four-people-holding-mobile-phones-1083622/

Technological advancements can have ethical aspects, as well as side-effects - psychological knowledge can help anticipate them. Have you heard enough of technology making people antisocial? Being aware of psychological aspects can help in making technology more interactive and bring people together. Make a game that forces people to go outside. There, no more complaints about children sitting inside with their phones. Now they sit outside. Success!

Knowing about psychology can help you in your personal life as well. It may make you more aware of the things you do and how they affect your surroundings. When people with different views are brought together, psychology can help navigate conversations in everyday life.

For more information on the topic, you can find links to further reading on this site: https://numerons.wordpress.com/paper-ii/application-of-psychology-in-information-technology-and-mass-media/

Are there any other ways you think psychological knowledge can help in day-to-day life? Are we talking nonsense and you disagree with everything we’ve written? Let us know what you think!

Sarah & Yeasmin

Human-centered designing - for humans

Written by Katri and Mathieu (topic from Lecture 1)

The process of human centered design starts with the people. It is important to deeply understand the group of people you are designing for: to learn their mindsets and their needs and to use that information to create a solution that is tailored to suit them just right.

Ways to research and understand human behavior were discussed on the first lecture of the course “Psychology of Pervasive Computing” in TUT.

Possibly the cheapest and the easiest way to study human behavior is self-observation and observation about the behaviour of different kind of groups of people. We think this is a good way to study human behavior when wanting to know how people react in certain types of situations.

The most objective results can be reached with experimental method. This includes for example psychological tests that are conducted under controlled conditions.  However, it may be hard to create natural-like conditions in a laboratory and people may act differently than they normally would and this may affect the results of the experiment.  

Interviews are also a good method to get qualitative information on people’s opinions and to get ideas from them. On the other hand, with quantitative surveys you can get the general statistics of certain group’s opinions. There are also other methods, such as storytelling, focus group workshops and diaries.

These methods are useful to identify the different groups of people and their behaviour. The crucial point  in human-centered designing is to find the needs of the targeted group of people. The phases of human centered designing are presented in the following video.

For example, young adults and elderly people may have very different needs when it comes to technological solutions. Our generation has practically born with mobile phones and laptops in our hands, but for older people, it gets harder and harder to keep up with the development and to adopt new technologies. (This is also a neuro-psychological phenomenon but let’s not get into that.) So, when designing something, it is important to know to whom you are actually designing and what are their needs.

An example of successful human-centered design for a specific group of people are Doro Easy mobile phones. They are especially designed for senior people’s use. They’re easy to use and there are no additional features that old people don’t need. We think that it is important to have mobile phones for all kinds of people. In a world of smartphones, it is easy forget about the people that don’t want to use them, but by studying the needs of different groups of people, we can come up with products suited for the targeted groups.

Sources:

• https://www.doro.co.uk/mobile-devices/easy-phones.html
• http://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design
• http://www.psychologydiscussion.net/behaviour/7-methods-of-studying-human-behaviour/540
• Aino Ahtinen and Aparajita Chowhury, “Psychology of Pervasive Computing, Lecture 1”, 27.8.2017, Tampere University of Technology.

Building a connection between Pepper robot and new students

Written by Aparajita Chowdhury, the course assistant of Psychology of Pervasive Computing 2018

Hello everyone,

Recently, I have conducted an interesting field study related to my master’s thesis, which was to find out the experience of new students with the social robot Pepper and the tasks they preferred to perform with Pepper. Pepper has been living with us for about a year now and had several emotional impact on us. However, this time we wanted to study what emotional and psychological impact this little guy leaves on the new students.

Peers waiting for the participant to interact with Pepper.

When Pepper was first taken to the field trial, I could observe different kind of emotions among the crowd. These emotions mostly engage non-verbal cues. For example, there were many new students where Pepper was located. Initially, they would stare at Pepper for a while and the next moment they would disconnect the eye contact. Some would just observe from a distance and smile. When they were asked if they want to interact with Pepper, they would hesitantly agree. These nonverbal cues reflect curiosity and anxiety. On the other hand, many excited participants approached Pepper saying, “Wow what a cool robot!” According to the lecture slide “Motivation and emotion”, emotions often drive people to make decisions, which was clearly reflected in the field study. From the survey questionnaire, people were motivated to interact with Pepper because they were excited. However, some people declined to participate in the beginning, but they were motivated to participate when my fellow colleague said, “Please participate for science”. Moreover, some people waited to interact with Pepper because they study Robotics and AI and their motivation was to know what projects were going on related to their major studies. Therefore, according to lecture 6 “intrinsic motivation” drove most of the participants to participate in the study.

Can I hug you?

One more interesting psychological factor influenced the new students, which was peer pressure. De Graaf et.al mentioned that technology acceptance depends on social factors when they are voluntary. Most of the students were with their tutor group and preferred to be in the group rather than interacting with Pepper. On the other hand, the whole group would wait if one person wanted to interact with Pepper. This seemed to be the undefined social norms, which the tutor group followed during their campus tour. Many interesting things happened during the interaction phase. Some interacted in groups and tried to ask funny questions to Pepper. Pepper would randomly ask participants to give them a hug and they would smile at it.

Social robots are new compared to other technologies and have not been seen commonly yet. Therefore, there is a wow-factor, which emotionally drives and motivates people to interact with it. Onchi et.al talks about how a direction-showing robot IOmi is warmly accepted over a paper map. This is an indication that, people tend to accept interactive and new technologies. Also, in my study, participants would comment like “Screens are boring and robot is more interactive and personal”. One participant also said, “It is better to ask a robot because it will not judge me”.  Overall it was a nice experience to understand the psychological needs and drives of the international students to interact with Pepper.