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Buzzkill
Alternate dimensions
An Insurgency of Quality
Awww…I need to shut down now.
It seems that language in software is on the mind of interaction designers. A few bright folks over at UX Matters have thought about whether software should speak to users from a first person or second person perspective. I have been thinking about similar issues after a client recently asked me about whether a piece of software should ever refer to itself. “If we already think about computers as other people, why wouldn’t we?”
What’s he talking about? For those unfamiliar with The Media Equation, in 2003 Stanford professors Reeves and Nass published a series of experiments they conducted which show that humans essentially treat computers as if they were other humans. 
From Publishers Weekly:
"People are polite to computers, respond to praise from them and view them as teammates. They like computers with personalities similar to their own, find masculine-sounding computers extroverted, driven and intelligent while they judge feminine-sounding computers knowledgeable about love and relationships."
So if this is the case, my client asked, why shouldn’t the computer talk to us like it’s another human? The answer is a little nuanced so I thought I’d write it down.
The first and easiest-to-realize thing to realize is that The Media Equation doesn’t really say that we treat computers exactly like other humans. We don’t worry that they’re hungry, need a haircut, or expect them to say “gesundheit ” when we sneeze. The research shows that we treat computers more like humans than we might imagine—given that they’re hunks of plastic and metal shuttling bits back and forth. They influence our opinions and behaviors subtly, because they appear to use language, symbol processing, and exhibit some complex behavior—all very human attributes. But we don’t think of them as actually human.
The second and more nuanced question-under-the-question is whether software should refer to itself with the first person singular, “I?” Imagine when a piece of desktop software expects to connect to the Internet and fails. The user needs to be informed. What should it say? It could speak in the first person and say something like:
“I’m having trouble connecting to the internet.”
Certainly this is clear, there’s little ambiguity to what is meant, and it’s pretty concise. Warm, even. But this takes us, as so many things do, to Clippy. Clippy was the default character in Microsoft’s reviled Office Assistant. Though probably well-intentioned, the implementation of the office assistant felt invasive, pandering, and annoying as all get out.
I’ll posit that another reason Clippy rubbed most everyone the wrong way is because it overpromised. Anthropomorphic embodiment changes the way we think about something. It’s no longer a complex machine, but a person, and we have much higher functional expectations of people: human-like language and reasoning, an ability to seamlessly recognize the context of any utterance or action, the ability to recognize a user by sight, and even understand human intentions. Software isn’t anywhere near this sophisticated yet. (We’re getting quite close in parts, and science fiction is setting our expectations that we'll probably talk to them one day, like with HAL, but the next version of your operating system probably still won’t understand your sarcasm or know what to do with it.)
What about first person plural?
First person plural, i.e. "we," should only be used to speak for the organization behind the software, not the software itself. This is OK for informative websites, but not for applications. After all, people think of applications as single things, and if a collection of programs started speaking as a plurality, it would imply not only personhood, with all of the improper implications mentioned above, but a super creepy 
Village-of-the-Damned hive mind.
What about "the computer"?
The computer is a complex machine with many interconnected programs and functions. Trying to wrap it up in a single abstract noun like "the computer" is too vague. What part of the computer can't connect to the internet? The user needs this information to know what to do with it. If it's the OS, you'll need to do something different than if it's the software. ("I" has this problem of ambiguity, too.) You don't want to be too specific, because the user doesn't care that it was a function in the sys/socket.h library. Applications are the "things" that users think about, and knowing the application that is telling them something gives it a meaningful and actionable context.
So avoid the trappings of anthropomorphism and ambiguity by having software refer to itself only in the third person, by name, such as:
“SavingsPro is having trouble connecting to the internet.”
This may force you into some complex linguistic circumstances every now and then as you try and avoid it, but in the end the result will feel more professional and more respectful to your users. More importantly, should also keep their expectations in line with what software can actually do.
Filed under: Communicating design
Chris Noessel is a senior consultant at Cooper. His industry experience ranges from owning a small, museum-focused company in Houston to working with Microsoft's futures prototyping group in Seattle. For marchFIRST he was Director of Information Architecture, conducting research and design for notable web sites such as Apple, SEGA, and Harmon Kardon. He was one of the founding graduates of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. He teaches interaction design at the California College of the Arts.
More entries by Chris
Comments
You're quite right, Bruno. In this case, the thing performing the action is the company behind the software, and "we" is appropriate. Even if in truth it's the _server_ responding to the software, the friendly brand of basecamp fits the use of first person plural much better.
Hi Chris,
What a great post! Definitely agree with your conclusion for self-references when communicating with users. I've also been grappling with computer anthropomorphism recently, although more from the perspective of how we talk about it behind the scenes in design specifications and suchlike. As the systems we design grow more complex in their behaviors and become more capable of sophisticated responses, we're really dealing with an entity that deserves more of an identity. We're not to HAL territory yet, but it starts to seem like an impolite simplification to refer to, um, the system as just "the system" or "the software" or "the application". Some of the terms that came to light as I pinged friends & the Twitterverse about this topic included:
agent
co-actor
android
avatar
concomitant
but finally, my favorite:
thingamabob
We're talking about "Thingamabob" -- "Bob"! Can we get a hand for the "Bob"? Are we veering too close to Clippy-land if we try to talk about Bob, our friendly neighborhood interactive system? :)
Cheers,
Liz
If we're going to head down a path that would accept "concomitant" I'd also like to submit "interlocutor" to the suggestion list, Liz.
P.S. Someone's camping on thingamabob.com, but it's still "free." :)
I usually like the somewhat ambiguous 1st person "Unable to connect to the Internet.", "Unable to add new entry (duplicate key)" There's an implied "I am", but I don't know that specifics always help.
Tangentially related, an apocryphal but amusing story I once heard describes one particular mainframe application reporting its increasingly dire circumstances with distinguished gravity, until finally, the last message... "Shut her down Clancy, for she's a pumpin' mud!"
I treat a computer most like a person (e.g., addressing it as “you”) when it is failing to work for me (except I’d never say what follows “you” to a real person). For me, seeing the computer as sentient is a pathology, and indication of a breakdown in a healthy relationship. Anthropomorphisizing a computer places an intermediary between the user and the work, which necessarily dilutes the connection. When everything is working fine, the computer no longer exists for me as an entity at all. There’s just my work.
I liked this post and come across this problem in my design and as well as many commercial software/websites. Here is the most annoying message I get from Bank of America online banking website whenever I click on any link more than once:
Please be patient while your request is being processed...
The message is not polite but more like scolding the user for childish behavior. In instance the computer is more like a parent figure. Also there is no visible feedback of my first click and apparently the response from the site is slow allowing the second click. Also the message takes me out of the context of my navigation.
(Ed.: Link fixed).
PS: Preview before post would be helpful.
(Ed.: Link fixed above, and thanks for the suggestion! We'll see what we can do).
That's a very thorough consideration on the matter, which certainly will prove useful and quite determining in my future word choices.
But there's another situation where I've seen 'we' being used in quite successful ways, such as in Basecamp's login form:
"Please log in first and then we'll send you right along."
Perhaps in web-apps, in certain situations (probably not low level error messages as in your example), using this form is appropriate. It can be warm, welcoming and hardly ambiguous—when it does not affect consistency, of course.
What do you think of these, Chris?