Adaptive Path Blog

The star of this morning’s Ubicomp’s domestic paper presentation session was given by Ja-Young Sung of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Ja-Young’s paper was titled “My Roomba is Rambo”: Intimate Home Appliances. The paper was based on a research study about how people built affection and love for their Roomba, and what we can learn from the example.

I’ve seen the Roomba in action – my friend and AP colleague Kate Rutter owns one and gave me an in-home demonstration recently. They are pretty fun, and I love how this paper broke down some of the reasons why.

Ja-Young and her team conducted a study of phone and email interviews with people who own Roombas in the US, Finland, UK and Austria. They mined the data for evidence of emotional attachment.

They defined emotional attachment as something that causes changes in mood, feelings, intentions, and behaviors. Here are some of the interesting points I jotted down:

Emotional attachment to an object/technology can change people’s attitudes:
“… Roomba changed how I felt about vacuuming… it went from a chore of drudgery to one of fun.”

Emotional attachment can causes people to create life-like associations with an object/technology:
21 or 30 participants in the study gave names to their Roomba
“I can’t imagine not having him any longer. He’s my baby… I just like him, I call him roomba baby. He’s a sweetie.”

Emotional attachment can cause promotion:
People in the study wanted to demonstrate their Roomba to guests and promote the technology.
“My parents ended up buying 2… their next door neighbor bought one, and my aunt bought one…”

Emotional attachment can cause protection of an object/technology:
“When I visited my parents so they could see if they wanted one, I ended up being very protective of it since there were a lot of thing in their house that it could get choked on or stuck on.”

People change aspects of their environment to optimize the object/technology:
Many participants “Roomba-ized” their homes in order to optimize it – moving furniture, hiding cords, etc..

One participant in the study bought a new refrigerator so that the Roomba could move more easily in the kitchen.

One participant bought a new rug so that the Roomba would work.

One participant with long hair ended up cutting her hair because the Roomba was getting clogged up with her long hair.

What characteristics of the Roomba’s design caused people to have these emotional attachments and responses?

High Visibility: Users can feel the presence of the object. You can see it.

Ambiguity: Where will it go? What will it do? The uncertainty of what will a happen triggers curiosity.

Accountability: The Roomba has similar features to the Dyson vacuum cleaner in that you can see where the dirt and dust goes – which helps users see how well it works. People can appreciate and feel grateful for the technology.

Practicality: Everybody needs to clean – so the Roomba fills a very practical need. There is immediate benefit - it improves my life!

Ja-Young then posed the important question: Why do we need to care about emotional attachment when we design objects and technology?

Roomba was released in 2002 as a relatively flawed product — but as of 2006, 2 million units have been sold. People adopted it into their lives and clearly, from this study, have loyalty to the product. What the user experience and ubiquitous computing community can learn from the Roomba is this:

Emotional attachment helps people establish a long-term relationship with technology.
“I will always have one until I die. When this one breaks, I will buy a new one.”

Emotional attachment helps manage the unreliability of the design or technology. As evidenced by the Roomba — technology doesn’t have to function seamlessly or “be perfect.”

Emotional attachment can increase device adoption. Emotional attachments can cause people to change their routine to accommodate technology and it won’t be perceived as a burden. If people forge these emotional attachments, they are willing to adapt their lives to make the technology work.

What I loved most about this presentation was that it underscored the benefits of understanding the mysteries of emotion. Capturing the hearts of your users can go a long way in forgiving the imperfections of your product.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 4:57 am and is filed under Conference Commentary, Experience Design, Product Design, User Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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