Lights out for a minute all right.
Well, that was pretty uncomfortable. If you're interested in how technologies can make us feel
uncomfortable or, perhaps creep us out, then maybe you'd be interested to listen to this talk where
I talk about our paper on creepy technology. In in this work, we looked into how we can measure
what creepy technologies are and we investigated how we can understand creepiness and technologies.
This work is motivated by our previous works where we worked with body-worn sensors and other
body-oriented technologies and they made some users pretty uncomfortable. We wanted
to understand more about that. So, as tradition indicates, we first
looked into literature and we looked into notions of creepiness in past papers.
Based on that, we created three factors that contribute to creepiness: desirability,
implied malice and unpredictability. Based on these factors, we generated more than 100 items
that formed the base of a questionnaire which would enable us to measure creepiness in
technologies and specifically prototypes of new technologies. We then exposed the users
to a number of technologies that were potentially creepy and asked them to
fill in a questionnaire with initial items.These included a finger that you attach to your mobile
phone and a mouse operated bottom wiper so a device that uses used server motors
to wipe one's bottom in the desired way. These examples were sourced from past papers from the
HCI community. These systems enabled us to refine our questionnaire into eight items
that we could later use to to check their validity and propose them as a way to measure
creepiness in technologies. We then established the validity of those items by doing what's
called a comparison between known groups where we compared two methods of logging into a computer:
using EEG or using a keyboard. As we expected, the EEG method turned out to be more creepy.
Next, we also wanted to check if our questionnaire worked over time, so we we exposed participants to
this particular walking robot toy spider and we did this at a two-week interval. We asked them
to rate how creepy the spider was at a given time and then we asked them about the same thing
two weeks later. Based on the analysis, we were able to conclude that the scale was indeed stable
in time and enabled us to measure creepiness in a reliable way. So, how can you use our scale? How
can you, hopefully ,use it in your research? Well, these are the eight items that you can
use to estimate how creepy a given prototype is. Of course those of you who are familiar
with scales and statistics will ask: how come you have three dimensions but eight items? Well,
as you can see in the paper the maths tell us that indeed for one of the dimensions we had two items.
How to use it? Well, it's pretty simple. It's a seven-item Likert scale. You show your users those
items you ask them to rank them on a sseven-item Likert scale and this enables you to get a quick
and effective and validated assessment of how creepy a given prototype is. Hopefully, you can
use this later in your design process. I've conducted this work together with Jakob,
Florian, Caroline. Johannes, Yvonne and Jasmine.
We are from Utrecht, Munich, Bremen and London. We do hope that you not only enjoyed this talk,
but also that our scale will enable you to study more creepy technologies.