Design for Conversation
by Tanya Rabourn
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The popularity of social media focuses our attention on designing for conversations. Increasingly we create social digital spaces that are instant, ambient, and ubiquitous. What are the conversational ...
The popularity of social media focuses our attention on designing for conversations. Increasingly we create social digital spaces that are instant, ambient, and ubiquitous. What are the conversational resources that we use in offline conversation that we need to take into account when designing these spaces? What is the difference between an online and offline conversation, if any? These are some of the questions we will consider as I review what ethnomethodologists know about how people converse in person and in technologically mediated contexts.
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Rohit Mehta
How many of you are familiar with conversation analysis?
Have any of you used it for design?
Ethnographically informed design instead considers the situation and how it shapes interaction. Conversation analysis is yet another way that we may consider situated actions in designing the user experience.
Conversation analysis is aligned with the program of theory and research known as ethnomethodology. Ethnomethodology examines the "nature and origins of social order. It rejects ‘top-down’ theories that attribute the organization of everyday life to cultural or social structural phenomena understood as standing outside of the flow of ordinary events. Instead it makes use of a 'bottom-up' approach, and seeks to “recover social organization as an emergent achievement that results from the concerted efforts of societal members acting within local situations" (Maynard & Clayman, 2003). Social order does not proceed from a set of stable facts; instead, social action is achieved every day by independent individuals acting in concert.
It considers practical reasoning and everyday common sense as an object of study. Specifically, ethnomethodology articulates the “taken-for-granted” rules of order that people use when negotiating everyday matters; the sorts of things that seem obvious to the actual participants in the situation. Ethnomethodology began in the mid part of the twentieth century through the work of sociologists who then began the program of study known as Conversation Analysis.
Recordings are important because people vary words with pitch rises and falls, etc. The history of conversation analysis is tightly tied with technology. It wasn't until audio and video recording became common that researchers were able to inspect natural conversation closely.
Despite the early attention to recordings of phone calls, Conversation Analysis includes both linguistic and paralinguistic features of conversation such as speech, gesture and gaze. It's the study of talk-in-interaction and asserts that talk is used for something, it is functional. Talk performs work. Talk makes things happen and by using conversation analysis, we begin to uncover how.
Importantly this sort of analysis involves only what the participants themselves can see and hear without addressing inner feelings or motivations.
The meaning of a conversation is not found in language rules and dictionary definitions or as something that exists within the individuals; instead, it is actively negotiated among participants.
It is the person who takes the next turn at talk who determines what interactional meaning the prior statement or “utterance” has. It’s a fundamental CA principle that interactions are structured as sequences in which each move incorporates the participants interpretation of the immediately preceding move (Wasson, 2000).
Before we move on to how to apply conversation analysis to design I’m going to spend just a few minutes showing you what the typical output of CA research looks like to make sure we all a good understanding of it.
Continuing with the idea of repairing misunderstandings, here is a brief exchange between two sisters: Agnes and Portia on the phone. Portia starts the close of the conversation but it is taken by Agnes as a complaint about her not having time to see her sister.
Portia utters the repair-initiating component “Oh” which is followed by an acceptance of Agnes’s excuse for not visiting.
Portia: Well, honey? I'll probably see you one of these daysAgnes: Oh god yeah, I just couldn’t get down there.Portia: Oh- Oh I know. I'm not asking you to come down.
In analyzing this bit of talk we note how Agnes received Portia statement but even more importantly we can see how Agnes reacted to Portia’s reception of her original statement. We can see the unfolding of shared understanding or “intersubjectivity.”
So for conversation analysts such a brief conversation is rich with data about how we perform work with talk.
Other HCI researchers have suggested that conversation analysis provides a rigorous method for analyzing usability sessions (Douglas, 1995; Nieminen, Karjalainen, Riihiaho, & Mannonen, 2009).
What exactly goes on between the facilitator and the user who is supposed to articulate what they are thinking as they attempt a task? Some researchers suggest that CA gives us a way to analyze this conversation and note the trouble spots.
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. It’s a snarky comment by programmer Jamie Zawinski about software bloat. But there’s a reason that mail is what these programs eventually incorporate. People don’t want to talk with computers they want to talk with other people.
Some of you may be familiar with Walter Ong and his assertion that we’re entering a secondary orality made possible through these new means of communication. However, online conversation differs from ordinary conversation in a number of ways. Ordinary conversation relies on the allocation of turns. Online conversation does not have overlaps or interruptions (Werry, 1996, p. 51). Instead, conversational participants construct each utterance in isolation. They send each of them to the system that then posts them in the order received.
For example, you might think that if your users repeatedly ask other users for some bit of information, then it makes sense to add a feature that makes that information available. However, their asking might be doing other work than just eliciting information. Without thoughtful consideration of what interactional work that question is doing you risk robbing them of that conversational resource.
One early enhancement to text-based chat was providing users a way to set up a public profile where they could enter their age, sex and location. However, researchers found that the most common question in the chat continued to be “what is your age, sex or location?” Or sometimes a variation that revealed they had viewed that person’s profile, but they asked are you really in “Florida?” or whatever the user’s location was. Those questions were conversation starters.
In designing for conversation, it’s important to observe the interactional work occurring, not just the lexical meaning. Don’t treat conversation as a pure exchange of information.
The project was a descriptive audio system for a museum and they were particularly interested in fostering a social experience for visitors.
An initial prototype used a speaker system so the experience could be shared. Afterward, they learned from user interviews that visitors valued both the shared experience with their friends and being able to move at their own pace. So the design challenge was to satisfy two conflicting goals. The conversation analyst was able to analyze the interaction with the first prototype to inform the design of the second. Specifically she learned that visitors allocated the audio a turn making it a conversational partner with themselves. Understanding how visitors to the museum integrated the audio into their personal conversations with the person who accompanied them was key to developing the second more sophisticated prototype that actually allowed visitors to
•independently listen to the audio narration
•listen in on what their friend was currently listening to
•and talk with their friend, even over the audio
This next iteration was successful and met the conflicting design goals. It was the nuanced understanding of interaction that allowed them to make appropriate design decisions. They analyzed the organization of talk with the second prototype and noted that users fluidly went back and forth between independent and social experiences continuing to incorporate the audio as if it were an interactional partner in the conversation.
In the paper, Beyond Microblogging, the authors discuss user appropriation of Twitter for conversation. They ask "[h]ow well does Twitter support user-to-user exchanges?" In particular they consider the function of the @ sign as a marker of addressivity. In their data they found that there was "short, dyadic exchanges relatively often, along with some longer conversations with multiple participants that are surprisingly coherent. These conversations are facilitated in large measure by use of the @ sign as a marker of addressivity (i.e., to direct a tweet to a specific user) and the ability to “follow” other users, which aid users in tracking conversations."
The speaker can designate the next speaker through direct address, or gaze or a number of other actions depending on local practice. So in multiparty conversation a lot of work must be performed to maintain coherence and continually build the participation framework.
Shared attention.
On Twitter we lack many of these conversational resources which is why the researchers described finding multiparty conversations on Twitter “surprisingly coherent.”
In one example from a six person conversation over several turns, the participants used both topicality and addressivity.
Goffman introduced the footing concept in order to explore the nature of involvement and participation in social interaction (Clayman, 1995). Speakers can use interactional resources to show that their words are not entirely their own. For example, a journalist might explicitly say to a politician “your political opponent suggests that you’re soft on crime.” However, journalists also conduct interviews where they articulate a question that suggests a notion not their own without attribution, such as “Mr. President, will the health care bill place an undue burden on small businesses?” In the course of an interview, a journalist may shift footing several times, animating his own words and then articulating those of others’ to display provocative viewpoints. Participants on twitter may echo or paraphrase others’ tweets by attributing them using RT or via and the original author’s username. However, when giving voice to statements outside of Twitter, shifts in footing lead to confusion.
Just to sum up the event, people in Tehran were calling in to a Persian radio station to report a possible strike in the bazaar, a Twitter user was listening...translating the statements into English and posting them on Twitter. It was over a period of a few hours. Those who came late had missed any explicit attribution for the claims being made and questioned him, accusing him of being the author of these statements and not just the animator.
So we’ve discussed the history of CA and how it’s traditionally done. We’ve also briefly gone over how to use it in iterative design. I’ll just leave you with three things to think about as you observe conversations in the systems you design.
•Notice user “workarounds.” We discuss this a lot, often calling it desire lanes or paving the cow paths.
•Observe the interactional work occurring, not just the lexical meaning.
•Don’t treat conversation as a pure exchange of information.