Microsoft Patents Frustration-Detection System

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Microsoft has patented a frustration-detection help system that would monitor your computer use and biometrics to figure out when you were frustrated. It could then offer to pair you up with someone else doing exactly the same thing who might be able to help you out. Interestingly, they don't appear to use speech recognition to detect abnormal levels of swear words, but that could be due to their past difficulties with speech recognition. 'Physical responses aren't the only things that could trigger this event--taking an abnormally long time to complete a task would do so also--but the biometric aspect is certainly the most unusual. Is this patent a harbinger of a dystopian future where computer users' biorhythms will be monitored to increase efficiency? Unlikely. The idea, which was birthed at Microsoft Research, is simply a more advanced version of user focus group testing that Microsoft (and most other software companies) have been doing for years now.'"

Law of Diminishing Returns?

[StressGuy]

They seem to keep wanting to add more features, which take more processing power, which require more powerful computers and more memory just to deal with the overhead.

Instead of continually taxing silicon based computer on the desk, can't we leverage the carbon based computer on the other side of the keyboard?. What if, instead, the focus became on designing the operating system to be as un-obtrusive and intuitive as possible? Instead of contiually adding features to constantly second-guess the user, focus on developing well written documentation and training software.

My guess is the following would happen:

Gamers would love such a system because more resources are available for games

Multi-media users would love it for a similar reason

Businesses would love it because it's easily configured to do what they need

Engineers/Scientist would love it for all the reasons mentioned above

Home users would accept it provided the documentation is easy to understand and it supports whatever they need it to support.

I don't know....

Genius Idea...

[Se7enLC]

So now when my computer goes off the deep end with memory leaks and a bogged cpu and I start rampantly septuple-clicking things while frustratingly waiting for them to start......the computer will take it upon itself to load ANOTHER program that is somehow going to make it better?

Typical "bandaid" approach

[dpbsmith]

Don't fix anything, just apply bandaids.

People can't figure your OS out because the menu commands keep moving into new menus with each release and the toolbar icons are too small to represent anything? Add context-sensitive help.

The context-sensitive help requires you to work through a clumsy twenty-step process to achieve something? Add "wizards" which force you through the twenty-step process, one slow, painful step at a time. (Converting Xerox Alto's "modeless" paradigm into a good old IBM 704 paradigm...)

People can't figure out how to pop up the "wizards?" Add wizards that pop up by themselves (Clippy).

People get frustrated? Add an automatic frustration detector.

How the heck can you satirize Microsoft when they do such a good job of satirizing themselves?

What they are attempting is not possible

[hey!]

You stayed up late arguing with your wife, who says you are spending too much time at work. The worst thing is you know she's right: it's not fair for her to put in a full day at work then handle all the work at home because you haven't got home until 9 or 10PM for the last several weeks.

The kids were cranky this morning and wouldn't get dressed for school on time so you had to drive them. This made you late for your emergency 9:00AM meeting, at which your boss publicly dressed you down for not be conscientious enough. Of course he's stressed out (along with everyone else) because three of the five projects your group is late. He gives you the job of figuring out how to maximize the number of milestones we hit this quarter on the late projects.

You sit down at your PC with a cup of coffee, and take a deep breath. "I can only do the best I can with the situation I've been given," you tell yourself. "There is no sense worrying about trying to do the impossible."

So you start to crunch the numbers, and a wave of anger washes over you. Nobody could have made these work; some higher up decided he'd promise things he had no idea whether they could be done. That guy is going to blame your boss, and your boss is going to blame you. You're the one toiling sixty hours a week and neglecting your health and family obligations, and for middling pay because as a "professional" you are expected to work overtime for free. You'd quit except that your daughter has had leukemia (now in remission) and there is no way you could get her covered under new insurance.

"You seem to be having trouble with pivot tables," chimes in Mr. Clippy, "would you like to be put in contact with a user who isn't a useless piece of shit like you? Or shall I bring up the home page of the Jack Kevorkian Institute, which three out of five users in your situation find helpful?"

Therein lies the problem. You can't interpret biological stress markers without knowing the situation the person is experiencing. The answer to the problem of software that users can't use is to detect this in usability tests before you release it, not to make ill advised attempts to magically fix the problem. And note the implicit definition of the problem: the users don't know how to operate the software. This certainly is one way to define the problem, but another would be the software isn't easy enough for users to learn and/or use.

Computers are too dumb for this

[Nerdposeur]

So let's get this straight. I'm the rational being, frustrated with this machine because it doesn't respond helpfully to my requests. So they want the computer to be able to recognize my frustration and... do what? Start working? Play soothing music?

If the thing is smart enough to know WHY I'm frustrated, it would be smart enough to fix the problem. More likely, it will guess wrong and frustrate me further. "Dangit, stop formatting this paragraph as a bulleted list," I say, and up pops Clippy. "I see that you're frustrated. Are you trying to make a bulleted list?" Cue explosion noises.

Also more likely is that the computer will waste computing power running its frustration-detection algorithm, bog down, and - surprise - frustrate the user.

Hey, how about just making computers that work better?

How about fixing the real problem?

[HomerNet]

While this is a nifty keen toy to play with (Skipper!), how about simply making the software so it's not frustrating? That may seem like an oversimplification, but seriously, that's all you really need to do. Microsoft is sinking tons of money into what will essentially become a social network of bandaids and hacks to kludgy software. This not only becomes a problem on the front line, (User is trying to connect to a network share the sysadmin had purposely locked down to just Systems Support personal, Clippy 2.0 - Return of Clippy detects this and connects the user with a script kiddy who shows them exactly what to do to compromise network security to get to files the user didn't need any access to whatsoever) it's a money loser from end-to-end. Microsoft is paying for it's development and support, OEMs and companies are paying to purchase it as part of the OS/Office software, end users are paying for not just the add-on value to the base price of the software they're purchasing, but also the support costs when the thing breaks.