Find the Humans In This Interface
What I tell clients about the power of the human face
One of the reoccurring debates that designers and clients get into is why designers tend to show real, living people — and their faces — in digital contexts. It’s a fair topic, because from a business perspective there are plenty of good reasons not to: privacy concerns, identity theft, tight budgets and general anxiety about the blurring of personal and professional life, just to name a few.
From the other side, the common reaction from designers is confusion because the debate on faces seems settled. Daily use and repetition of the word “interface” reminds us of the strength and efficacy of millions of tiny actions taking place “between faces”. Entire industries such as advertising, telecommunications, and entertainment are pretty much based on showing us ourselves through liberal use and broadcasting of faces. And now, the cultural importance of faces is being demonstrated in real time with Meitu, a Chinese startup specializing in “godly tools for selfies”, who reports hundreds of millions of monthly users focused on one action: fixing their faces.
Faces are ubiquitous and the myriad of ways we use them for art and industry feel like common practice, but I wonder if we really know why.
It turns out the human face is powerful — and good for business — if used in the right way. Designers, engineers, their clients and the software they create together are all increasingly being asked to balance heavy amounts of impersonal data with care and concern for real people. That inherent conflict sometimes means missed opportunity because of expediency, resourcing or a lack of understanding about the human factors that can most improve their collective efforts.
Let’s take a look at some recent research so we can all have better conversations about faces. Then, let’s consider an example where faces should be better utilized and an approach to interrogating interfaces based on how they include or exclude faces.
Note: In cases where there are privacy issues and obvious identity constraints, please protect users by sharing as little about them as possible. A person’s face should be shown only in situations in which the user has both agreed to and is informed of the sharing. Additionally, you always want to give the user the ability to control, limit or hide their face in a reasonably easy way.
Seven steps to understanding faces
“A mask tells us more than a face.”
― Oscar Wilde
In this case, false.
1. Humans are hardwired to respond to faces
It’s largely agreed upon, and studies have shown, that our faces give off massive amounts of information about our internal thoughts and emotional states. Humans have gotten really good at reading faces and letting our faces be read. From an evolutionary perspective, masks would have been just awful — but read on to discover the digital masks that we’re all really comfortable using lately.
“Face recognition is a skill that most people rarely think about, but it is fundamental to successful social interaction … The advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging identified the neural basis of face-selective processes by revealing that the occipital and temporal lobes contain a number of small patches that respond especially strongly to faces (Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997; Duchaine & Yovel, in press).”
http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2015/06/face-recognition.aspx
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050620/full/news050620-7.html
2. Humans respond and adapt themselves to the faces they see
This is also known as a “tell” and it’s super useful. We can’t completely control this behavior because if we did, humans would not be able to quickly detect, negotiate and find balance within complicated situations that are required to do all the things we’ve always done, from hunting and gathering to building floating cities. It’s a feature, not a flaw, because we all need to send signals out to get them back in — like bats with sonar. We’re constantly trading in information this way.
“Studies reveal that when people are exposed to emotional facial expressions, they spontaneously react with distinct facial electromyographic (EMG) reactions in emotion-relevant facial muscles. These reactions reflect, in part, a tendency to mimic the facial stimuli.”
3. Physical reactions in humans cause emotional states to be triggered
Human physiology can not be completely separated from psychology, at least not yet, and the two are always mixing and interacting. It has a lot to do with our biology and internal chemistry but also with how memories are made, recalled and strengthened over time.
“It would appear that the way we feel emotions isn’t just restricted to our brain — there are parts of our bodies that help and reinforce the feelings we’re having,” says Michael Lewis, a co-author of the study. “It’s like a feedback loop.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smile-it-could-make-you-happier/
4. Human emotional states caused by faces vary but the general outcome is a shared connection
The point of all this face-noticing and reacting is to help humans survive longer in an environment where there are a lot of us competing for resources. Recognizing a presence in another human triggers higher-order processing in the mind and physiological changes that produce feelings associated with understanding, closeness and support (or the opposite of competition and single-mindedness). This presence, once established, can be reinforced over time and eventually lead to emotional investment which is one of the deepest connections a human being can make with another living thing.
Presence → Familiarity → Permanence → Trust → Emotional investment
“When we see a face, we are automatically triggered to feel something or to empathize with that person. If we recognize content on a website — such as a problem, dilemma, habit or whatever else — we feel connected and understood.” (Not Just Pretty: Building Emotion Into Your Websites by Sabina Idler)
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/building-emotion-into-your-websites/
“Trust is something usually won over time. One of the ways to help speed up that process is by making an emotional connection.”
http://blog.lemonstand.com/4-reasons-to-use-human-faces-on-your-ecommerce-website/
5. The emotional connection caused by seeing a face can be beneficial to your goals
Simply put, if you want people to have good feelings and ideas in mind when they interact with you, your brand, your product, etc., it’s in your best interest to actively trigger those feelings, usually right before they engage (or better yet, all the time).
“People prefer to say ‘yes’ to individuals and organizations they know and like. Same goes for websites and other user interfaces.”
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/liking-principle-ui-design/
6. Faces can improve other things beyond digital products
General improvements to procedures, systems, policy and human-centric pursuits seem to happen by including human faces. We don’t completely understand why but for now it doesn’t matter as long as we’re not manipulating people. We should always be seeking to help, not harm.
“…when a digital photograph was attached to a patient’s file, radiologists provided longer, more meticulous reports. And they said they felt more connected to the patients, whom they seldom meet face to face.”
7. Faces don’t even need to be human at this point because of how well the brain works
Emoji are brilliant because humans use them instead of showing their own faces (and it turns out they work just as well). These are our new masks because they do the job of signaling for us without loss of intention or great risk of being misunderstood. Although the recent uptick in face and head procedures reported by the ISAPS International Survey on Aesthetic/Cosmetic Procedures seems to suggest that people are now, more than ever, highly motivated to make permanent changes to their real-life signaling equipment, emoji continue to evolve much faster than our faces, providing people with quicker, newer and more flexible ways of expression.
“There is no innate neural response to emoticons that babies are born with. Before 1982 there would be no reason that ‘:-)’ would activate face sensitive areas of the cortex but now it does because we’ve learnt that this represents a face. This is an entirely culturally-created neural response. It’s really quite amazing.”
Okay, now we know something solid about using faces and why it might be a good idea. Nothing really controversial here, and I’ve more or less summarized and provided commentary on what’s already out there.
If this stuff is so obvious and well-accepted then we should see faces in pretty much every type of digital interface that deals with humans (which should be all of them).
Software design says a lot about our priorities
I suggest that you can sometimes informally judge the intent and level of concern for users by simply looking for the presence or absence of human faces.
The next time you see new software ask the creator and yourself: Where are the humans?
I do this with a lot of new software I encounter, especially at technology conferences. The environment at these events isn’t the greatest for a design critique but I think it’s healthy and natural to have a discussion: sometimes these events represent the first (and only) opportunity people have to see the future software that’s going to be influencing their world. Vendors should be expecting some feedback.
SmartCity is an initiative I follow and I make sure to attend as many events as possible. Along with most government technology, software coming out of a SmartCity framework is or should be the most receptive to users and therefore exactly relating to User Experience (my profession).
My methods are informal, but I’ve made the effort to inspect and interact with over a dozen control panel and dashboard-style interfaces currently in use or proposed by various SmartCity vendors.
My observations are regrettably similar: no human faces.
I regularly ask SmartCity vendor representatives: Where are the citizens in this interface? How are citizens expressed in this product? How do you know which exact citizen is being affected by the way you collect and use data? A lot of times citizens aren’t represented by anything other than impersonal avatars and can’t be identified in a friendly, natural manner (outside of a security context), which is the same as being invisible, which is a type of not existing. My working conclusion, albeit a flexible one, is this trend is not an oversight: It’s because the technology is not really for citizens, it’s for someone else. Which begs the question of whom.
The obvious problem with a lot of the interfaces that SmartCity software currently offers is: It’s all data without human faces.
I’m not the first to point this out, it was actually Usman Haque who said it best:
“The people it really speaks to are the city managers who can say, ‘It wasn’t me who made the decision, it was the data.’”
Usman Haque, of the urban consultancy Umbrellium, speaking at “Re.Work Future Cities Summit” in London’s Docklands
Facing the music
We have to remember that there are people on the other end of the software and they are real. Empathy and decisions are affected and outcomes are differently determined — as studies have shown — when you simply add a human face back into your management and control tools. When a major technology initiative lacks this obviously helpful inclusion, or said another way, it prominently features the lack of human faces, it misses out on a lot of benefits. The unintended outcome is the gradual short-circuiting of one of our most ingrained behaviors:
If we could simply see the other person, we would think differently, feel differently and act more responsibly when making decisions that directly affect them.
Put the humans in your interface
Showing faces in software interfaces helps users on both sides of the interaction. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- When you design interfaces, get into the habit of asking yourself: “Where is the human in this flow? In this exchange, action, decision, or communication?” If you can’t find the human on your screen it’s a good bet your user never will.
- If the interface is talking to your user, a human can do it better: Instead of cold system messaging, create situations where feedback seems to come, or actually does come from a real person. Look for opportunities to show a human, prompt your user, and move beyond the call-and-response experience that is still at the core of most websites.
- Make humans part of the content strategy: Who posted that article? Who gave that quote? So much content is simply anonymized because publishing tools don’t make it easy to show degree of ownership and chain of custody. With websites shrinking down to the size of chatbots, there is value in going the other direction and showcasing the people who author and curate web content.
Why the long face… errr, post?
Lately, my research and work has inspired me to take a deep interest in human behavior and the underpinnings of interaction design, especially as it relates to Robotics. If you have ideas on how to use faces in your work or want to discuss any aspect of this post, please feel free to comment or reach out to me!
I’m a User Experience Designer living and working in Singapore.
I write, discuss and photograph as @elbuenob so feel free to follow and reach out to me. I value your thoughts and will do my very best to return your gift of time with a considerable measure of my own. Find me at bschmittling.com and say hello@bschmittling.com.
