Cloud-based applications, supply-chain information systems, social apps, multi-player (serious) games, et cetera are made possible by the participation of humans and machines. Some companies resort to very tight control on the solution and restrict how the participants may behave: all must work in a specific way and only in that way. This may not be the best approach… Over time, the participants are likely to change their work habits and/or their functioning. Especially since humans tend to change their behaviour in reaction to the innovative system! We cannot currently predict exactly how any solution is going to be used in 6 months’ time, let alone in 5 years. Solutions must thus take into account:
- Many participants involved: many users and many machines.
- Participants are heterogeneous: different users and different machines.
- Multiple organisations, legal entities and/or jurisdictions.
- Evolving configuration, usage-pattern, availability and purpose.
- Situated in a changing context.
True user-centered innovation takes as the starting point that all participants ought to have autonomy. Humans have autonomy: They can decide on their own how to prioritise their time and activities. Machines have autonomy: These prioritise on their own which clients to serve at what time with what resources. By recognising that all have autonomy, it becomes natural to design solutions that can easily accommodate many different participants, evolving configurations and changing context.
When working with autonomous participants we need to consider how interactions among these participants create added-value. To be more precise: how the desired added-value of a participant is delivered (or not…) by another participant. The performance of the solution can be expressed as the matches between delivered and desired added-value.
Consider the following example. In a factory, in order to prevent physical injuries to the operator in case of an emergency, a machine has been fitted with a large Red Emergency button. This button cuts off the power and the machine is immediately blocked to a standstill.
In practice, the operators are working under extreme time pressure. In order to reduce the waiting time when they press the ordinary ‘Pause’- or On/Off-buttons, they always use the emergency stop instead. The Pause-button stops the machine turning after some 3 seconds, the On/Off-button takes longer, because all kinds of process data have to be saved.
Frequent use of the Emergency stop causes mechanical damage to various machine parts and loss of valuable historical information about the machine’s functioning.
The factory’s maintenance team are at a loss to explain the frequent repairs that have to be done on the new, state-of-the-art machine. It is only after thorough analysis by the service technician from the machine’s manufacturer that the true cause is unearthed.
This case of a simple man-machine interaction shows (1) that the behaviour of both humans and machines should be considered as a combined solution when designed, and (2) that only after real-life implementation one will discover what factors have been overlooked.