Notes of all lectures of Human Media Interaction Theory bundled (Fall 2021)
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Course
Human Media Interaction Theory (880009M6)
Institution
Tilburg University (UVT)
This summary includes the notes for all lectures by both Elger and Mincheol. Worked out very extensively, many times I have looked back lectures to make additional notes.
Human media interaction theory = the psychological study of how people interact with media
- It is the interplay between cognition and new media: how can we use principle from cognitive science to inform
new media design? What cognitive functions determine new media use? But also: how does new media impact
cognition (change the way we think)?
Group assignment: Research proposal
On Wednesday we will have a guest lecture wherein someone demonstrates what kind of problems an impaired person
faces on a website (for example visual impairment).
General research question: how can we improve general usability for a website?
Research proposal:
- Literature search on usability in general, and in the context of (visual) impairment specifically
- Select a web feature (theoretically informed but yet untested!) that you predict can enhance usability aspects of
websites for visually impaired users
- Set up an experimental study
- ..
Groups of 4 to 5 students
Register via Canvas: after the 2nd lecture (01/09) but before Sunday September 5!
User Engagement
All different sorts of user engagement (e.g. flow, involvement, absorption, narrative engagement, presence) = being very
actively engaged in what you do (with digital media)
Why would a designer care if his users will be engaged?
- Quick sharing of brand attitude to other users
- You want users to repeat their activity on your website
- Engagement brings enjoyment
- Positive attitudes to the brand, which brings also loyalty to your customers
- Science has demonstrated that higher engagement is associated with higher learning outcomes and higher
performance
- We share more, recommend more, add, like information when we are engaged
User engagement is a relatively new concept in (new) media and concept design.
First it was about usability: assess whether users interface is easy to use and meets requirements (effectiveness, efficiency,
satisfaction).
Later on, designers and researchers care more about User Experience (UX): this goes beyond typical usability concepts. It is
about understanding and using our knowledge of personal experience of the user, what engages them, where goes their
attention to. The goal is to excite people and let them return to the product.
Flow theory
Designers typically strive for the best experience. There is something that we call the optimal experience. Csikszentmihályi
called this flow and created a whole theory about it by taking interviewers with all kinds of people. He saw that
independent of the activity of people, they talked about ‘being in the zone’ or ‘being in the flow’. Since then it is an
important concept in scientific studies. It is the user engagement stage that every designer wants to reach.
Personal definition of Elger: State of a holistic sensation that people feel
when they act with total involvement, feel at their best, perform at their
best – or optimal experience of and engagement to activity.
All your cognitive, affective and physical/motro systems are all dedicated …
→ Not being disturbed by other things, thoughts, etc.
→ You enjoy the task!
E.g.: reading a book and loosing yourself in the narrative and not
mentioning anything around you anymore.
Main feature of flow: a perfect harmony between challenge and skill. When
challenge and skill are in balance, you have the good opportunity to reach
the flow (however, not always).
Flow has to challenge you (so relaxation cannot be flow).
,Only when you have a good amount of skill and you try to form a task that is really challenging for you, both meet and are
in perfect balance, we can talk about flow experience.
Typical flow features:
1. Challenge-skill balance (see above)
2. Clear goals: you need a goal to work towards that is clear
3. Unambiguous/immediate feedback to the task that you are performing (if you are scrolling through a website and
you are using a mouse and the cursor of the screen is delayed, this is annoying and the feedback is not well
arranged and you pop the bubble of the flow)
4. Action-awareness merging: act and awareness are happening at the same moment (like skilled typing). It is
automaticity, effortlessness.
5. Very high level of concentration, tunnel vision of the task, top-down attention (see lecture 2 or 3)
6. Sense of control: not sharing the control with other people, this will lead to uncertainty and pop the flow bubble
7. Loss of self-consciousness (reflection can take you away)
8. Transformation of time: time can go faster or slower
9. Autotelic experience: the task itself has to be intrinsically rewarding experience
Even though a flow experience is really good and brings a lot of joy, you can also do too much of it. Like if you game too
much, it becomes counterproductive.
Difference user engagement and flow: flow is the optimal experience, user engagement is gradual, you can have all kinds of
gradual user engagement.
What do we study when we study flow or user engagement broadly?
Three kinds of studies:
1. The ‘antecedent’ factors of engaging experience
a. What contributes to the likelihood of an optimal experience?
2. The nature of an engaging experience
a. What is an engaging experience (and how can we measure it)?
3. The consequences of an engaging experience
a. Which are the outcomes of engaging experience?
b. What impact does high engagement promise?
1. Antecedent factors: Person-Artefact-Task model (PAT model)
There are features within the person (user), artefact and task if (optimal engagement) is being reached.
- Person
Quite stable traits Personal states that can change/fluctuate over time (in
what moment of time is a person more prone to
engagement?)
Autotelic personality = one’s ability to experience intrinsic Mood
enjoyment. Some people are more moved by intrinsic
motivation than others.
Inherent exploratory behaviour Motivation
Personal innovativeness = willingness to try out new Arousal = physiological excitement of the body
technologies
Cognitive spontaneity = individual’s playfulness with a Focus
computer
Trait of absorption
Media literacy and skills (we need skills to be ready for a
flow experience)
- Artefact (e.g. new media product)
Artefact characteristics that contribute to the likelihood of flow:
- Aesthetics
- Vividness
- Speed of feedback/responsiveness
o Allows to maintain focused attention, concentration (and thus the flow experience). For example when
there is this constant delay in the mouse, this will pop you out of your motivation and thus your flow
bubble.
, - Task
Studying task is challenging due to difficulty of identifying task characteristics.
Task characteristics that may enhance the likelihood of flow:
- Goal-oriented (vs. exploratory) tasks
- Autonomy
- Variety
PAT interactions are important to come to flow. We can think of all kinds of interactions.
Interactions between person and task are quite important for flow (dit stukje even kort terugkijken!).
Person x Task = User Experience
Usability is of interaction between person and artefact.
Let’s take tennis as an example:
To have flow in tennis, you have to feel good with the racket. There has to be a good connection between you and the
racket (person and artefact). To have complete flow (play the game of tennis) there is interaction between person and task
(tennis game). This has to be challenging enough and has to match with your skills set (balance between skills and
challenge). There have to be clear task goals, every game has clear goals (score points/win the match) (clear task goals).
And you have to feel control over the task, for example if you play a double you need to have clear arrangement and
communication with your partner (sense of control).
With person-artefact interaction, the skill has to be very high and the task has to be challenging enough to reach the flow
state.
2. The nature of engaging experience
When designing products, it’s essential to measure and verify each design decision that is made. How can we measure
engagement?
It is quite hard to measure engagement. We cannot directly tap into that state of mind, we can only have measure of things
we think we measure it with.
So to operationalize it, we have to convert (fuzzy) concepts into empirical measures.
When it comes to user engagement, what kind of measures can we use?
In general we can make a distinction between two types:
- Ask people if they are engaged or not = self-report for example with a questionnaire or interview. However, there
are also some problems with this: biases such as ‘social desirability’ and a problem with recall (not remembering
if you liked it or not); we can only measure it after-the-effect, because when we do it during the task we will pop
people out of the engagement/flow bubble.
- Measure people’s behavior = for example reading time on a webpage, amount of clicks of people, etc. These
measurements are proxies: we measure a behavior that is evidence of engagement, rather than the psychological
state itself.
Measuring engagement is the best to do with a theory. That is why the article has been read for today.
Stages of engagement of Oh et al. (2018):
Four stages of engagement
1. Interface assessment = how do people assess and like the interface?
2. Physical interaction = how many clicks/behavioral interaction do people have with the product?
3. Absorption = high levels of user engagement or even flow
4. Digital outreach = how do people share the product with other people?/recommend the product, etc.
1. Interface assessment
Important is:
- Natural mapping ability
o For example: if you are using a joystick to move an avatar, there has to be a natural working way of the
joystick (if you want the avatar to go to the left, this has to happen with a move to the left with the
joystick)
- Intuitiveness
o The product/digital world in which you are engaged has to work in the same way/to the same rules as in
the normal natural world. All the rules have to be the same in the two worlds.
- Ease of use
o It has to be easy to use (after some training)
, How can both ease of use and challenge be important for engagement?
- The challenge doesn’t come from the medium but has to come from the task.
High user engagement is a balance of the skills and challenges of the task, not of the artefact (that has to be easy to use!).
2. Physical interaction
3. Absorption
Absorption is the most difficult to measure, because it is the psychological part of the model. The other three are more
based on behavioral features and thus more easy to measure.
Examples to measure
absorption:
4. Digital outreach
Interaction with content
Behavioral indicators:
- Social transmission
- Content management
- Repeated use
There are coming new ways to measure engagement with (psycho)physiological outcomes.
For example:
- Skin conductance
- Heart rate
- Pupil dilation/eye-tracking
- Electromyography
→ Many of these indicate arousal levels!
There is also a problem with this: they don’t only correlate high with user engagement but also with other features like
stress, frustration etc. So you cannot only use them to measure engagement.
However, you can use the amount of these arousal levels to measure engagement and/or flow.
Thus: optimal experience results from an ‘optimized physiological activation’.
→ See the examples on slide 56 & 57 (the heart rate has to be intermediate).
Zygomaticus major = a muscle in the face while smiling which you can measure with electronical measures. This
can also indicate flow/engagement.
It is still mostly based on self-reported measures. It is difficult to come with objective measures of high engagement.
Overall knowledge gaps that we still have to fill in this field:
- We need in-depth understanding of antecedents and features of flow/engagement (what exactly is flow?)
- We need better metrics for capturing deliberate user actions (that tell us something about users’ engagement
with interface and content)
- We need to complement the subjective measures with ‘online’ (i.e., taken during performance)
behavioral/physiological measures of engagement/flow
Flow is the highest form of engagement. Engagement can have all kinds of levels and flow is really the highest level of
engagement.
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