Humanization is not about form
When I went to talk to the folks at VUI.BR about humanization in voice interfaces, I made some slides with auscultations from ethnography and discourse analysis.
Why do human beings need to humanize what they do for other human beings? What is the use of that word in the production of voice interfaces?
I went as a researcher; but I also went as someone who has the professional experience of designing interactive dialogues.
The current pandemic scenario has made voice agents, now in 2021, the focus of debate, attention, promise and criticism. However, thinking about humanization in general, and even in voice interfaces, has a long history and even mythological bases.
The first uses of the term “humanize” are religious, then medical and, in the last two centuries, economic. In Brazil, around 1700, “humanar” was used. If, around 1850, it was synonymous with compassion for the enslaved, for the workers of the industrial revolution, today, humanizing is in the intention of almost anyone who designs products and services to be experienced.
The slides are scripted:
1) overview,
2) history,
3) usage,
4) implication and
5) reflection.
I started with an anonymous excerpt from a group discussion I found:
In this example above, there are two fundamental points in this discussion. The first was to contextualize what ethnography is. Many people who work in Design are interested in culture as a space for reflection. Now, they want (or are asked to) make user culture work for the products and services they design.
The material culture that is being digitized into the symbolic use of products and processes has chains of actions of various natures: moral, legal, religious, and even idiosyncratic. This chain of actions needs to be taken into account, because it is visible to anyone who comes into contact with these products and processes.
They realize that human behavior has patterns; these patterns follow certain collective traits that people take for granted as their own. Culture is the software they have to run what their design creates.This does not happen in a vacuum.
Every person belongs to a social group. Ethnos (έθνος) is a word from the Greek for the concept of nation, people. It does not mean exotic, traditional, distant, rare, inferior, mystical…Think that our species has an ethnic ecology: a diversity of ways of being human, culture.
Interest in culture is seen as a way to reach the “primal” representations of humans, the mysteries. This often translates into stereotypes of designers where non-Western cultural aspects (housing, clothing, food, gestures, language, etc.) are called “ethnic”. It would be a way to evoke our “subconscious and primal” behavior (and therefore good for sales) because this impulsive, animal side is reflected in these aspects.
Every human being has an ethnic dimension.
Therefore, there is no one who is not born somewhere. Therefore, all societies have this gregarious characteristic of “forming the symbolic and material uniformities” that characterize a culture, an ethnicity.It would be ethically, aesthetically and strategically important for society that all peoples are made up of a cosmology, cosmogony, mythology, rituals and symbols
The second point was that UX is a business. The experience of the person who uses it is the experience of using the service, the product, the service. An ethnography of the activities of this category of professionals shows that it is linked, almost entirely, to commercial activities.
There is undoubtedly a portion of user and usability research professionals in areas such as governments or the non profit organizations, but the vast majority of this activity is carried out by private companies.
Looking at these two points: the ethnographic and the commercial factor, every person can be understood, in some way, by researching their desires, wishes, needs, ambitions, pleasures, fears, etc. Based on this, companies then create the possible business rules to offer “humanized” products and services.
For such a delicate scenario I chose, back in the conversation, an approach known as wicked problems.
Attributing or cultivating inhumane attitudes is a serious act. So delicate that it messes with one’s most intimate status, one’s social identity. Briefly, this approach asks how these “wicked problems” are related, what economic factors have impacts; the quality of the information available, and how opinions complement, differentiate or even contradict each other.
How does anthropology think about these questions?
Sympathetic Rituals
But, if only human beings have industries, economic productions, why do human beings need to humanize? Why do human beings need to humanize what they do for other human beings?We live in a society of different classes, genders, and races. These divisions make it difficult to come closer together when they are perceived as different, rather than diverse.
Therefore, social groups have rituals that compensate for the “differences” by formalizing the way they relate to each other. As ethnologist Arnold van Gennep said:
“The sympathetic rites are those that are based on the belief of the action of like on like, of the opposite on the opposite, of the container on the content and reciprocally, of the part on the whole and reciprocally, of the simulacrum on the object or the real being. and reciprocally, from word to deed.”
Rituals are suspensions of our fluid reality by people.
The freezing of flow for moments of sequencing, modification, agreement and resolution of entities, processes events. When we say a “good morning”, when we “excuse ourselves”, when we ask if “everything is okay”.
These are examples of symbolic marking of what is ongoing in social interaction. van Gennep goes on to say:
“Those actions that make the daily routine, if not bearable or fair, at least invest it with a certain touch of mystery, dignity and elegance.” Thus, we ritualize things to organize them, to fit them into the flow of actions we have to perform in society.
Rituals of various types: the contagious, the sympathetic, the direct, the indirect are all based on the premise that it is necessary to organize, at certain times, and from time to time, social coexistence. This belief is so ingrained that it makes it possible to show, for example, what role each person in the ritual should play.
Verbal rituals are that category of attitudes that we take as part of our contact with others, according to gradations of proximity to the use of words.
From business dialogue to conversations about needs, limits and possibilities. In anthropology, there is a fundamental distinction in social relations: us versus them. The “our” group, the people to which we belong and the “strangers”, the “outsiders”. This internal monocultural vision of the groups has been the problem for thinking and realizing what is intended with humanization.
This is because it disregards the main thing: kinder, more reciprocal relationships, showing the limit between what is familiar and what is strange. Ultimately, treat the distant other as you treat your close ones.Not as a general law, but from an anthropological, discursive point of view, to humanize is to perform rituals of sympathy. In the process of products and services, there is a discrepancy between the parties that demand, and the parties that actually get empathetic treatment.
This difference between what should or should not be humanized is a discussion that companies do not do without looking at other factors, starting with the economic one, the reason for their existence.Based on the history of voice assistants, what has been done to humanize these technologies is the construction of dialogues. More natural, less formal verbal interactions that take into account, linguistically speaking, the “linguistic register” of the user.
Direct, indirect and implied speech
The word dialog almost always implies two people. In business transactions, dialog is humanized when the transactions involved are elided in a functional but informal way. To this end, mannerisms, interjections, slang and a whole range of discourse resources are employed. When there are more than two parties, we have a conversation, when the subject converges, or a discussion, when there is no conclusion.
The constant aspect of this practice has been thinking about the stages of buying and selling relationships, service and support, in dialogic pairs. On one side the customer, on the other, the attendant, the technician, the seller, the supervisor, the manager. Apparently, thinking about this dynamic in pairs has a reason.
This procedure makes understandable the interaction of these people as mirroring the act of commercial acquisition. In doing so, it reduces the user experience to the steps of the process that the company understands it needs to sell products and services.The company is humanized when it involves all the human beings involved in all the processes required for the company’s product or service.
There is nothing to humanize without knowing what is humanized. It is impossible to put the weight of this task on those who design these conversations. Without real research, that sees the transversality that actually makes the process effective, it becomes a fiction to say that humanization exists.
But since UX is a business, the people who design these experiences, for the most part, have the following options when pointing out what needs (or could) be improved:
a) get fired,
b) be criticized,
c) be ignored,
d) be heard,
e) be responsible for implementing what they suggest.
It is necessary to include voices that are not part of the immediate dialogue. Not just direct dialogues, but indirect and implied ones as well. This fails to happen if the user journey does not cover all the stages, or limits them. The thread of conversation that companies believe is the strength of service is not made up of doubles, it is much longer.
The notions of indirect and implied speech here are conceptual artifacts to think of a sequence of steps, and therefore of footprints, of clues… These steps create references (indirect and implied) to previous steps. They are incorporated as purchases, schedules, requests, complaints, and other (dialogic) procedures that include third parties beyond the “immediate” situation of each step.
In each moment, the records made by the people who performed each step, do not disappear, they are indirectly implicated. Not being able to see this is the result of having done little research on how social activities actually occur. Even so, there is a vision that sees as implementable only those steps that characterize what the company understands as its reason for existence: to decrease costs and maximize profits. Humanizing is a process, and to think of this web as separate threads is a mistake.
The research, its materials and its presentations are loose on our hard drives, stored in never-used backups, on never-accessed system screens, in reports and emails.
There are, in fact, signs that this scenario is changing with initiatives from UX research with a Brazilian accent.
Humanized Voice Interfaces
The tendency to believe that pleasant speech is enough to create harmonious verbal situations forgets that dialogue begins with listening. In a situation where there are equal relations, each party hears the other’s speech as if it were a relative. On the other hand, when relationships are unequal (or hierarchical) the loss of this familiarity makes humanization difficult.
References:
GENNEP, Arnold van. Os ritos de passagem. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Cultrix, 1977.
WOYDACK, Johanna. Linguistic Ethnography of a Multilingual Call Center London Calling. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
MAUSS, Marcel. Manual of Ethnography. trans. by Dominique Lussier. [ S. l.]: Durkheim Press, 2007.
