r/userexperience • u/ElkAdvanced7563 • 22d ago
Interaction Design When should an assistant interrupt you? I'm testing a "wait for hesitation" rule
Earlier testers said anything under ~5 seconds felt "too early", so I raised the threshold and added a 10-second grace period at the start. I'd like to know if that fixed it.
Prototype (1 min, no signup): https://quiet-hci.pages.dev/?src=ux
Does it match how you'd want a tool to behave, or is "wait for hesitation" the wrong signal?
4
u/Hoihe 22d ago
Give an obvious FAQ or help button somewhwre non intrusive and leave it that.
Software that tries to harrass me gets abandoned unless i am desperate for its product.
1
u/ElkAdvanced7563 22d ago
Fair. A help button is the baseline I should be beating. Do you think there's any situation where something proactive would be welcome, or is it always a no for you?
3
u/karls1969 22d ago
A assistant should almost never interrupt you.m, but unless there is something urgent to attend to
You don’t know why someone has hesitated: has someone dropped by their desk and asked a question? Have they dropped something off their desk, and they’re picking it up? Are they looking for a tissue before they sneeze all over the screen? Are they looking for a screen wipe after sneezing all over the screen? Are they just looking off into space and day dreaming of a world without poorly thought out products?
If you don’t know why they’ve “hesitated”, if you don’t know what their intention is, you’ll just annoy them and get in the way.
The only thing someone needs after a random and unknowable hesitation, is how to get back on track quickly. If you can accurately predict what they were about to do, it might be helpful…
1
u/ElkAdvanced7563 22d ago
This is the best critique so far. If the signal is ambiguous, would you accept something that doesn't interrupt at all, like a faint hint you can ignore, or is even that too much?
1
u/AbleInvestment2866 20d ago
Too much Claude, at least try to move out from the default options of typography and color, now all websites look the same, which creates a massive cognitive load. I'd actually use your page to test that level of cognitive load.
Also, it doesn't work , at least not in my MacBook Pro using Firefox
1
u/ElkAdvanced7563 20d ago
Fair point on the design, it wasn't a goal for this prototype, so I left the defaults in. The research question is about when an assistant should intervene, not how the page looks. That said, the sameness is a real issue, and a more distinctive look could even affect the results, so I'll keep it in mind for a next iteration.
On the Firefox/MacBook bug: thanks for flagging it. Could you tell me what exactly fails (blank page, the popup never showing, an error in the console)? That would help me fix it quickly.
1
u/AbleInvestment2866 20d ago
it does nothing. I mean, the page works like a normal page, no interruption at all
EDIT: I found it, it doesn't work with ad blockers
1
u/iheartvelma 10d ago
Presuming you mean a conversational flow,
it would first have to have a very deep data set of human conversation “turn-taking” signaling conventions, including “right, m-hm” and other acknowledgment speech markers, breath intake as preparation to speak, and visual cues like hand signals, emotional markers, body language etc.
Layered on top of that would be conversational conventions based off of contextual, situational and cultural roles. Levels of formality, vocabulary, verbosity, appropriate humor / familiarity, and who to use which combination with.
You speak differently to your peers than to your boss, or your parents, or your children; you definitely speak differently to a judge in court than you would to a pal at a sports bar.
All these conversations would be different again depending if they take place in New York, Montreal, Paris, or Tokyo.
In some cultures we call everyone “you.” Others have a formal You (like “vous” vs “tu”), and others have over a dozen fine-grained ways to address someone in the second person via honorifics.
How you interrupt someone, then, depends not just on an arbitrary number but on a whole matrix of factors — do people expect the assistant to be a silent order-taker, a secretary, a trusted colleague, a peer?
2
u/ElkAdvanced7563 9d ago
This is a really helpful framing, thanks. The turn-taking angle makes me think that the question isn’t just “how long to wait” but “where is the person in their task”: interrupting at a natural breakpoint (just finished a step) vs. mid-action. That’s probably the software equivalent of not cutting someone off mid-sentence.
Your last point is the one I’m most curious about. If you imagine an assistant inside a tool you use every day, which role would you want it to have: silent order-taker, secretary, colleague? And would that change depending on the task?
1
u/iheartvelma 8d ago
My pleasure. To your point, it really depends on the task, the tool, and the amount of time expected to be engaged with the tool.
Simple transactional or functional tasks can be silent or quiet, but tasks requiring nuanced / sophisticated parsing, understanding and execution are more “high touch” and thus conversational.
1
u/geoffreybyers 12d ago
The signal is broken by design. A grace period does not fix the delay, it hides the fact that the user is checking if the tool is listening. People hesitate when they do not trust the tool, not when they think. You are measuring the wrong thing.
1
20d ago
1
u/ElkAdvanced7563 20d ago
Thanks, that's exactly the reasoning behind it. An assistant that interrupts before you've even oriented yourself feels like it hasn't been paying attention, so the grace period is there to let you get your bearings first.
I'm still unsure whether a fixed 10 seconds is the right call. It might make more sense to key it to a first sign of activity, like a scroll or a click, rather than to a timer. Did the 10 seconds feel about right when you tried it, or did it drag?
6
u/thaeli 22d ago
This is Clippy all over again. The best advice I can give is to go back and look at why people HATED Clippy so much back in the day.