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Dave Darville, David Hignett
MPR Teltech Ltd. Stentor Resource Center, Inc.
Burnaby, BC Ottawa, Ontario
Canada,V5A 4B5 Canada, K1G 3J4
Communication services, personal assistants, interactions, personal
agents.
In general, user interface development has been concerned primarily with the reaction of the user to a particular technological solution or arrangement rather than with how the technological arrangement might allow users to express an extension of themselves as a social participants. The role of interfaces as mediators and facilitators of social communication has often been neglected.
These mediation and facilitation roles of the user interface become more complicated when there is a wish to include non-human personal agents in the communicative interaction. This paper is a report of how consumer interface requirements can be based on a different perspective; one that begins with an understanding of the roles of existing human personal assistants and the needs of human communications.
The idea of a personal agent, available to help a user perform
various tasks, has generated a lot of recent interest. How to
incorporate such agents into the telecommunications domain is
the topic of this paper. Specifically, what are some of the issues
related to the human factors of the design and use of such agents
that will assist users in their communications with others.
Plain old telephone service (POTS) has evolved from a communication service that used crank telephones to connect users to a human operator, who then helped make the necessary connections to other subscribers, to the current touch pad telephones that connect users to a dial tone and thus to the automatic telephone switching network. Enhanced services, such as those that allow users to know when another caller is trying to reach them while they are talking on the telephone or that allow a caller to leave a message when the user's phone is busy or not answered, provide new ways of using the telecommunications network to communicate with others.
Unfortunately, these enhanced services have not been as successful with customers as was anticipated. Individually, the enhanced services may make sense to the user; they may even be quite usable at a basic level. But, in combination, they often become less comprehensible and more difficult to remember how to use. Furthermore, similar services provided by different suppliers, such as cellular and land line phone service providers, often have somewhat different procedures for accessing and using similar, but not identical, services. Users who have both services suffer the problem of having to remember these two similar but different methods of operation. Adding a personal assistant to the telephone service has been proposed as a means of helping the user to overcome the complexity of new enhanced services.
A common approach to designing new enhanced services is what we have called a building block metaphor. For example, the service definition for a personal assistant service might be depicted as a personal assistant platform with a voice activation block and other feature blocks, such as call answering, etc., associated with the base platform. This approach often involves the re-packaging of existing services or slightly modified versions of existing services to provide the new service definition. The contents of these packages are often based on information, comments, likes, dislikes and choices provided by marketing focus groups involving the expected customer group. Such re-packaging, however, can result in complexities and inconsistencies that make once understandable services no longer usable.
A functional, user-centered, holistic approach to developing a new enhanced service definition, including one with a personal assistant, would have a different focus. Such an approach begins with the study of the tasks and roles of actual human personal assistants as well as the needs of those they are assisting. This information is then mapped onto the needs and requirements of a relevant subscriber segment. Information gathered during these processes is used to develop the definition of the new service. This service must meet the subscribers' needs and ensure that the users can have an integrated, understandable, usable interaction with the system. In this manner, for example, the requirements for a telecommunications personal assistant would be related to how an existing human personal assistant meets those needs.
Once the new service definition has been created, the impact of it on the existing technology and the impact of the available technology on it can be determined. Any required modifications to existing telecommunication functions can then be evaluated.
Following is a brief report of two studies that have been conducted
to gather necessary information about the roles of human personal
assistants. The information gathered has been used to define a
functional, user-centered, holistic telecommunication service
that will incorporate an automated voice interactive
personal assistant.
In order to better understand the potential interaction between an automated personal agent and a telecommunications user, a study was undertaken of the roles, responsibilities, requirements and problems of people who provide such personal services to others. An attempt was made to recruit personal service providers, such as butlers, concierge, personal assistants and executive secretaries, for a concept group discussion of their professional activities. No butlers were recruited, those approached felt that they could not discuss their roles without violating the confidentiality of their positions, but nine other personal service providers participated in the concept group: four executive assistants, two hotel Chef de Concierge, one corporate concierge, and two domestic service providers. The concept group differs from a traditional focus group in that the goal is to explore and expand on a given concept rather than focus on a given product or idea. Sample comments from the concept group participants are presented below.
Generally the participants described their duties as including anything within reason. Most duties included a blend of business and personal tasks; for example, arranging meetings and trips, providing information and human contact, message management and gatekeeping, and conducting various financial transactions. Whereas the executive assistants developed a continuing relationship with one person, the concierge and domestic service providers dealt briefly with many clients. The latter needed to be able to determine the mood and style of their many clients and to react appropriately. All participants mentioned that the rules of the game were not always clearly understood by both sides. For example, clients or employers were often tentative about expressing their needs or perhaps were uncertain about whether a request was acceptable, unreasonable or even within the normal bounds of the person's role.
Four tactics were proposed by the participants as ways to meet the needs of their employers/clients. These were (1) anticipating the needs of the person being offered the service and being prepared with a solution before being asked, (2) personalizing the delivery of the service to meet the specific needs of the person, (3) reminding the person of scheduled events, appointments, constraints, etc., and (4) protecting the person from unnecessary or unwanted demands by others. Feedback was deemed to be an essential part of any interaction between assistant and employer/client; it serves to reinforce the pleasure or gratitude of the person, demonstrates that the service has been provided, and helps to shape the interaction for future tasks.
The participants then were asked to create a job description for the role of a personal assistant, based on their own experiences and on what they had discussed during the session. This job description included a listing of the information, skills, and personality required to fulfill the role of a personal assistant.
A second concept group of potential users of a personal assistant
service was asked to consider the role of a personal assistant
from the perspective of the service user. They were asked to create
a second job description based on their explorations of the possible
role of a personal assistant in an enhanced telephone answering
service that might be used by clients such as themselves.
Consumers are becoming more aware and are beginning to express
sophisticated integrated value propositions with respect to the
array of features and services that they are being offered to
manage their communications needs. Their interest is less in the
features, per se, than in how the service being offered will help
them meet their communications needs. The role of the user interface
designer will be to understand the human factors involved, i.e.,
what is needed and expected by the users, what is possible with
the technology, and how to merge all of this information to provide
an interface that will support the user's social communications
needs in a manner that is as simple, understandable, useful and
usable as possible.