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146 Chapter 5 Understanding how interfaces affect users

Figure 5.5 "At home with Bob" software.

of their Windows '98 operating environment.' The agents typically appear at the
bottom of the screen whenever the system "thinks" the user needs help carrying
out a particular task. They, too, are depicted as cartoon characters, with friendly
warm personalities. As mentioned in Chapter 2, one of the problems of using
agents in this more general context is that some users do not like them. More expe-
rienced users who have developed a reasonably good mental model of the system
often find such agent helpers very trying and quickly find them annoying intrusions,
especially when they distract them from their work. (We return to anthropomor-
phism and the design of interface agents later in Section 5.5).
Users themselves have also been inventive in expressing their emotions at the
computer interface. One well-known method is the use of emoticons. These are
keyboard symbols that are combined in various ways to convey feelings and emo-
tions by siqulating facial expressions like smiling, winking, and frowning on the
screen. The meaning of an emoticon depends on the content of the message and
where it is placed in the message. For example, a smiley face placed at the end of a
message can mean that the sender is happy about a piece of news she has just writ-
ten about. Alternatively, if it is placed at the end of a comment in the body of the
message, it usually indicates that this comment is not intended to be taken seri-
ously. Most emoticons are designed to be interpreted with the viewer's head tilted
over to the left (a result of the way the symbols are represented on the screen).
Some of the best known ones are presented in Table 5.1. A recently created short-
hand language, used primarily by teenagers when online chatting or texting is the
use of abbreviated words. These are formed by keying in various numbers and let-

'on the Mac version of Microsoft's Office 2001, Clippy was replaced by an anthropomorphized Mac
computer with big feet and a hand that conveys various gestures and moods.