Conversation analysis and the user experience

We provide two case studies in the application of ideas drawn from conversation analysis to the design of technologies that enhance the experience of human conversation. We first present a case study of the design of an electronic guidebook, focusing on how conversation analytic principles played a role in the design process. We then discuss how the guidebook project has inspired our continuing work in social, mobile audio spaces. In particular, we describe some as yet unrealized concepts for adaptive audio spaces. INTRODUCTION The sociological discipline of conversation analysis [9] (hereafter CA) has long held a significant position in user experience design. The idea that ethnomethodology, and CA in particular, can have direct application to design is widely credited to Suchman [12], who not only proposed their methodological use in the study of human-machine interaction but also observed that an awareness of human social practices of (e.g.) conversational repair can itself serve as a resource for design. Since then – even leaving aside studies of technology use that apply conversation analytic methods – a number of attempts have been made to apply CA to HCI in a very direct way; we briefly discuss some of these in [15]. Given this history, which is nearly as long as that of the SIGCHI conference itself, it may seem odd to speak of CA as anything but a traditional methodological source for experience design. “Tradition” in the sense of history, however, does not imply “traditional” in the more common sense of customary or characteristic use. Most popular design methods, such as contextual design, are broadly applicable and can be learned from courses or textbooks. By contrast, CA focuses on human-human interaction, and a professional level of proficiency in CA methods is best attained through long practical apprenticeship. As a result, researchers often find it difficult to apply CA to design in ways that are both productive and consistent with its sociological outlook. Nevertheless, CA can be very helpful in system design, most clearly for systems that involve spoken language. We base this claim on our own experience – for several years, we have been drawing on CA to inform the design of computing technologies that are intended to facilitate aspects of human-human interaction. In a previous paper [15], we attempted to illustrate these uses and provide “how to” instructions for incorporating a trained conversation analyst into the iterative design process. We continue that discussion here, showing how CA has led us into new research areas. Our story consists of two interrelated narratives. After a brief description of CA, we discuss our project on the design of an electronic guidebook for historic houses that facilitates social interaction between visitors. This is mature research, largely conducted during 1999-2002; the discussion demonstrates the use of CA to identify conversational structures that are important in facilitating users’ social goals. We then turn to a description of an ongoing project on the design of mobile audio communication systems. The idea is to provide communication technologies that actively facilitate social interaction by monitoring spoken conversation in a mediated communication channel, recognizing the presence of specific conversational structures, and then changing specific properties of the communication channel to support the social goals implicit in the use of these structures. This is research that has resulted in some early prototypes but is still very much in-progress. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS Conversation analysis, the most visible and influential form of ethnomethodological research, is concerned with describing the methods by which the members of a culture engage in social interaction [9]. A key goal of CA is to examine social interaction to reveal organized practices or patterns of actions, under the fundamental assumption that interaction is structurally organized. Social actions include talk, gesture, and use of objects. While ethnomethodology and CA share this concern for how actions are organized, the goal of CA is to describe both how sequences of action are organized and situated in a particular instance of activity, as well as to abstract features that generalize across a collection of similar instances. A conversation analytic research program involves analyzing a collection of interactive encounters. The analysis is twofold. First, the analyst makes a moment-bymoment, turn-by-turn transcript of the actions in each encounter. Second, the analyst examines these encounters