Semiotic Foundations of HCI and UX Design - Cross-Cultural Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience Design - page 15

set of values of the designer and other stakeholders in the production process. Their
values and goals are implicitly encoded in the UI and the documentation, and can
be in conflict with the values of the user. This means the UI directs the user interac-
tion often according to the intent of the designer. This is when both the intentional
and unintentional manipulation of the user starts because he or she is presented with
choices, or even goals, that are incompatible for his or her intent. For the purpose of
unmasking and decoding the inner workings of the UI, we have chosen a semiotics
approach, with the emphasis on pragmatics, as defined above.
Each and every UI is a result of diverse influences during the design process.
Stakeholders in the process have their own goals and expectations that they try to put
into the final product. For example, the sales and marketing department could have
strategic aims of short time-to-market, easy adoption of the product from the users
and gimmicks to strengthen the brand and the product family. The programmers, on
the other hand, might want to incorporate an advanced and clever technology, while
the designers might want to create a simple and good-looking UI. All of these often
conflicting values can have an input into the final product at the cost of the final user
who expects the product to satisfy his or her needs and help achieve his or her goals.
Often, such expectations fall short and the user is forced to become a “detective”
trying to guess the motive of the designer in order to understand how to use the
product in a sensible way (de Souza, 2005). In this light, the user should be aware
as much as possible of the techniques used during the development process, as well
as the prevailing HCI ideologies driving the UI production. Some even argue for a
philosophy of technology:
... when HCI was primarily concerned with issues of usability, the question of what was
a “good design” could be defined clearly; the time it took to complete a task, the error
rate, or the learning curve. ( ... ) To understand what makes a “good user experience,”
HCI will need a philosophy of technology.
(Fallman, 2007, p. 305)
From our standpoint, the UI is an example of a complex language. Consequently,
we can apply different UI language components such as: discrete elements, interac-
tion sentences, narration, rhetorical tropes, and patterns. By analyzing the individual
statements, we can follow an entire argumentation constructed with the help of the
different UI elements. A simple way of doing this is transcribing the “interaction
sentences,” UI language components (Section 3.1), that the user encounters while
performing a certain task. The interaction sentences can be analyzed further in terms
of what goals the designers have and what assumptions they have about his or her
users. By exploring different parts of the system through the UI, we can extract the
inherent values. We argue that when the UI follows the structure of natural language,
it both behaves more user-friendly and conveys the designer's intent more effectively.
According to Sengers (2010), HCI rests upon the modernist tradition, which follow
these ideological themes: “Three themes are key to the way I am framing modernism
here: (1) faith in technoscientific reasoning and expert knowledge as a way to orga-
nize our lives; (2) orientation around means-end thinking, maximizing efficiency and
exerting control as fundamental ground principles to optimize everyday processes;
and (3) closed-world thinking” (Ibid., p. 4).