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THE INTERACTIVE LOOP

6
Interactivity moves information in a loop between the
two actors. Better information flow through the loop
usually indicates better interaction.
My definition of interactivity calls it a “cyclic process in which each actor
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alternately listens, thinks, and speaks.” Now that we have closely examined listen-
ing, thinking, and speaking, we can step back and look at the “cyclic process.”
What exactly is the stuff that’s cycling through the interactive loop? My
answer is perhaps overly academic: information. It may strike you as cold-
blooded to describe a conversation as a loop through which information flows,
but I do not ask you to accept this description as comprising the totality of con-
versation; I ask only that you play this academic game along with me so that we
might arrive at some useful understanding of the process of interactivity.
I therefore ask you to think of a conversation as a loop through which infor-
mation flows, changing its content and character with each pass through the
loop. Imagine the intense brainstorming conversations you have had with a
close colleague, a comrade in thought, who can finish your sentences for you.
An idea floats murkily between the two of you; your first attempt to describe it
fails badly. Your comrade stands on the shoulders of your attempt and takes her
own stab at it; again, she fails to capture its essence, but her contribution shows
you the idea from a different angle, suggesting a new approach. Together, the
two of you build on each other’s thinking, passing the idea back and forth

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between you as you each chisel away some portion of the matrix of confusion in
which it is embedded. The information content of your interactive loop
increases with each cycle, until after much effort you have exposed the idea with
complete clarity. This is the most compelling example of what I mean by infor-
mation flowing through a loop.
Of course, this isn’t a typical conversation; most conversations are more
mundane:
“How was work, honey?”
“Lousy. The boss yelled at me again for being too slow.”
“That’s a shame, honey. What would you like for dinner?”
“How about spaghetti?”
“Did you stop by the store and pick up some milk like I asked?”
“Oh damn! Sorry, I had so many other things on my mind.…”
While this conversation may not match the intensity of the intellectual
bolero described above, it’s still an information loop, albeit an asymmetric one.
The husband cyclically requests information that the wife provides. That such
loops can be lopsided does not deny their underlying architecture; they’re still
information loops, just lopsided ones.
Indeed, the symmetry of information contribution to the conversation is
one of our unstated criteria for successful conversation. My impressively aca-
demic phrase “symmetry of information contribution” is expressed just as
clearly (albeit reversed) in the phrase “hogging the conversation.” A good con-
versation is a balanced cycle to which each speaker contributes an equal share. I
am only rewording a truth you already understand, but this rewording sheds
light on the interactive process.
The concept of symmetry of information contribution can be applied by the
interactivity designer. We can use this concept to evaluate design concepts. For
example, the dark shadow of suspicion immediately falls on those “reference
CDs” that put encyclopedic information at your fingertips. These are worthy
applications, to be sure, but we all know that they haven’t set the world on fire.
Copyright © 2002. No Starch Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

People buy computers to get on the Internet, or to process words, or to crunch

budget numbers; they don’t buy computers to accelerate the process of flipping
through an encyclopedia. If you’ve ever wondered why software encyclopedias
haven’t added much more than a few shingles to Bill Gates’ metropohouse, you
now have your answer: software reference works offer lopsided interactivity.
That’s nowhere near as much fun as, say, fiddling around with the latest budget
numbers on your spreadsheet, or adding just the right turn of phrase to your
letter to your father- in-law, or blasting monsters in a dungeon.
Of course, sucking in information without gurgitating any in return is a com-
mon and necessary part of our lives, so interactivity designers should certainly
investigate better methods of doing so. The trick is to keep in mind the impor-
tance of symmetry of information flow through the interactive loop. Most design-
ers who have a large mass of information to make available start on the wrong
foot by focusing on the information itself: how can it be organized, categorized,
and hyperlinked? The better way to start is by focusing on the user: what ques-
tions will prompt the user to approach this mass of information? How can it be

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arranged so as to most conveniently answer those questions? Four methods are

available to the designer: keyword search, database query, browsing by structure,
and convergent iteration. I shall explore these in the context of the most com-
mon problem of mass information handling: search engines on the web.

Searching by Keywords
Keyword searches are most often used at the beginning of a search. First you
cast your net with a keyword search; then you scan through the results looking
for a likely page. Going to that page, you begin browsing from there. The prob-
lem here is twofold: search engines have different algorithms for collecting the
background data, and you often get far more matches than you can scan.
Keyword searching is not good enough for most people, but we hobble along
with it as the best we have.
Let’s follow an example of a web search problem. Suppose that you’re an
engineer wishing to find out how to use the latest generation of charge- coupled
devices (CCDs). You’ve just been told that these third-generation devices are
exquisitely sensitive, and you’d like to learn about their sensitivities. So you start
with the keyword CCD. Bad move: you just got 15,238,916 matching pages. You
forgot about all those retail sites selling CCD cameras. Okay, so you narrow the
search with CCD AND sensitivity. This is much better: you’ve eliminated 99.9 per-
cent of the matches. Unfortunately, this leaves you with 15,237 matches. You scan
through the match list looking for the pages that are cluttering you up. There are
still plenty of retail sites; you jump to one and realize that the sales blurb boasts
about the sensitivity of the camera. Damn! So you make it CCD AND sensitivity
AND third generation. This drops you down to just eight sites, but you quickly dis-
cover that all of them are retail sites trying to sell you expensive scientific equip-
ment using third-generation CCD technology. You give up at this point.

Browsing by Hyperlink
Copyright © 2002. No Starch Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The web brought this approach to the fore, although it was in use much earlier.
This method is simple, direct, easily adapted to almost any system, infinitely
extensible, and all sorts of other great things—that’s why it’s so popular. There’s
one little catch: all those links have to be set up by hand. Sure, there are plenty
of mechanized links on the web, but those tend to take all the fun out of brows-
ing. Generally speaking, you browse through hand- crafted links; you search
through manufactured links. And with the explosion of web pages, browsing is
less practical until you get very close to your destination.
Returning to our example search for CCD specifications, perhaps you could
get closer to your goal if you found your way to a site that might be close and
then browsed from there. So you search for CCD AND specifications AND techni-
cal and get a healthy 350 sites. Sampling a few, you browse, looking for anything
that might get you closer. Lo and behold, you’ve struck it rich: here’s a page that
lists hundreds of pages of specifications of all sorts of CCDs. Unfortunately, it’s
not sorted by generation, so you have to plow through the whole list to find the
few that you want. There’s gotta be a better way.

The Interactive Loop

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Database Querying
Sometimes it is possible to search using numerical tests. The keyword search
considers only text; a database query system allows you to constrain your search
by some numerical trait. For example, bibliofind.com, a purveyor of used books,
allows you to specify the maximum price in any search; only the books that cost
less than your maximum will be presented. Full-scale database query systems
permit all kinds of complicated specifications (for example, “Computer, show
me all available women under 35 whose height in centimeters divided by weight
in kilograms exceeds 3.2 inches). These systems give you a better handle on the
search problem. In the CCD example, you could narrow the search even further
by looking for any CCD with sensitivity less than 0.01 lux. That would get you to
your goal. Unfortunately, database queries work best in numerically organized
problems. If you want to know why the sky is blue, a database query won’t help.

Convergent Iteration
There’s a fourth method, though, that I think would be faster than any of the
preceding ones, although it would take much more work on the part of the
designer. The key observation here is that each of the search systems is designed
to be a single-shot proposition: you enter your search specification or click a link
and off you go to one or more answers. The search specification for such a
jump must be onerously precise. Why couldn’t the process be designed to be
interactive, with an expectation that multiple steps are required to reach the
goal? In practice, all searches are multi-step processes, with the user honing the
search procedure based on results of previous searches. Why couldn’t we build
this concept into our search engines?
As it happens, the concept is already in operation at NorthernLight.com. Its
search engine is even smarter than the one in my description. When I tried my
CCD example on NorthernLight.com, I first used the simple keyword CCD. This
Copyright © 2002. No Starch Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

yielded 417,779 hits organized into a dozen categories, one of which was
Telescopes. This led me to 9,174 items with another dozen subcategories. I
chose the Questions and Answers subcategory, which led me to 72 items, many
of which looked just right for my needs.
This system is superior to conventional search engines because it is more
interactive. Rather than ask the user to divine the ideal set of keywords, this
scheme permits the user to enter one broad keyword, which the system uses to
look up a huge set of possibilities. At this point, the scheme does two things that
conventional keyword searches don’t do: it thinks, and it speaks back to the user.
Specifically, it analyzes the set of web pages that fit the initial keyword and fig-
ures out the secondary keywords that most efficiently divide up those web pages
into neat subcategories. It then tells these secondary keywords to the user, who
can then select the most likely keyword for additional searching.
Technical people might object that this scheme requires too many cycles
and too much background storage. But who’s supposed to do all the work here:
computers or people?

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Measuring Information Flow

As with many other areas of interactivity design, games best demonstrate the
importance of information flow. Of course, the information flowing through
the loop of a videogame is simple: where you are, what’s coming at you, and so
forth. Nevertheless, videogames derive much of their power from the amount of
information racing through their loops. We can actually measure the informa-
tion flowing in a videogame by asking two questions: how much information on
the screen is changing, and how much information is the player transmitting to
the computer? In a standard 3D shoot-‘em-up game, the screen image is con-
stantly in motion; the amount of visual information transmitted through the
screen is at least 10 MB per second. By contrast, my word processor presents me
with a fairly static image that changes only by small increments as I type; it’s giv-
ing me perhaps a few kilobytes per second. Looking at the input side, though,
the information flow is lopsided the opposite way. A kid frantically punching at
his joypad at, say, two moves a second transmits about one byte every second. I
can readily type four to six bytes per second. Even so, note the extreme disparity
between how much information the computer transmits and how much informa-
tion the human transmits. Let’s face it: fingers were never designed to move
information at high bit rates.
But raw information flow, measured in bits, is not a reasonable assessment
of the value of the information flow through the loop. I could write a program
that would dump the contents of the New York City telephone directory onto
your screen in 4.73 seconds, but that doesn’t mean that this program is some-
how better than my word processor. We must take into consideration the value
of each of those bits of information moving around— an entirely subjective deci-
sion. The pearls of wisdom flowing through my fingertips into the keyboard as I
sit here writing this book—who is to say that they are more valuable bits than
the jerky movement orders coming out of a kid’s video-game joypad?
There is another means of assigning relative values to the bits that flow
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through the loop of any human-to- computer interaction: how much processing
does the information trigger inside the human brain? If computer thinking is
the delivered value of a piece of software, is not the human thinking that this
stimulates a measure of the received value of the software? This point of view
remains subjective, of course. A kid playing a video game might evaluate the
oncoming monsters and decide to duck around a corner; how does this decision
making compare to my mulling over the structure of this sentence as I use this
word processor?
While these considerations of information flow are unquantifiable, they do
provide the designer with important gauges of utility. Over and over again, you
as designer must reflect on the state of the user’s mind and what information
processing is going on inside that brain that pays your salary. How can you keep
that brain going at full speed? What information will stimulate it to its highest
levels of desirable activity?

The Interactive Loop

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Human-Human Interaction versus Human-Computer Interaction

Some people think that the human-to-human interaction of a conversation is
somehow fundamentally different from the human-to- machine interaction in
software. There are differences, but they are confined to the particulars of each
step. Humans think holistically whereas computers think sequentially. Humans
speak in natural language, whereas computers speak with audio and video.
Humans listen with their ears, whereas computers listen with the mouse and the
keyboard. These are profound differences, to be sure, and much of the hard
work of interactivity design lies in surmounting the obstacles imposed by these
differences. The process as a whole, however, remains the same in both cases.
Human-human interactivity is at root the same thing as human- machine interac-
tivity; the basic cycle of listen-think-speak remains unchanged. The asymmetry of
listening and speaking styles makes your job difficult; the asymmetry of thinking
processes provides you with the point and purpose of your work in the first
place. If the computer thought just like a human being, who’d want to talk to it
rather than the real thing?

Interactivity establishes a loop through which information flows. More information

flow usually means better interactivity. However, the value of the information flowing
is crucial to the quality of the interactivity.
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