i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I recently wrote (with Karen Nomorosa, Ischool 2010 grad) a  paper called "Substituting Information for Interaction" that some of you have talked to me about so I thought I'd share it with everyone.  (The paper has some relevance to the "tradeoffs" we've talked about a lot in 202 but is more relevant to the other course I teach this semester on "Information Systems and Service Design.")  The big idea in the paper is to reframe a lot of design decisions in information systems and services as tradeoffs between interacting with a user/customer to obtain needed information or using stored, inferred, or computed information instead. In domains like education, healthcare, business travel, retail sales and consulting the value for the user or customer increases as the service provider accumulates information about his needs through repeated interactions with him. So by analyzing the information residues of previous customer encounters and transactions, the provider can infer preferences and discover patterns and then give customers what they want without having to ask them.

We are not proposing that substituting information for interaction is an end in itself. The goal should always be to create value that meets customer expectations both in the level of quality and in the manner by which it is produced. But the substitution principles and design patterns we propose highlight the range of design choices and encourage a careful evaluation of whether an interaction creates or undermines value. For every customer who prefers a lazy chatty conversation with a bank teller or hotel front desk clerk there is surely one who views these interactions as nuisances and who wants a minimalist information-driven experience. Similarly, Amazon’s “one click buying” that lets customers use saved payment and shipping information to avoid filling out a check-out form exploits the strong customer preference to avoid a tedious and error-prone interaction.

The paper is at http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~glushko/202/SubstitutingInformationF...