Ten Objectives and Ten Rules for Designing Automations in Interaction Techniques, User Interfaces and Interactive Systems

Abstract

Automation, as a design goal, focusses mainly on the migration of tasks from a human operator to a mechanical or digital system. Designing automation thus usually consists in removing tasks or activities from that operator and in designing systems that will be able to perform them. When these automations are not adequately designed (or correctly understood by the operator), they may result in so called automation surprises [1], [2] that degrade, instead of enhance, the overall performance of the couple (operator, system). Usually, these tasks are considered at a high level of abstraction (related to work and work objectives) leaving unconsidered low-level, repetitive tasks. This paper proposes a decomposition of automation for interactive systems highlighting the diverse objectives it may target at. Beyond, multiple complementary views of automation for interactive systems design are presented to better define the multiform concept of automation. It provides numerous concrete examples illustrating each view and identifies ten rules for designing interactive systems embedding automations.