Noam Tractinsky

Ella Bar-Or, Tom Regev, Paz Shaviv et al.

Politeness plays an important role in regulating communication and enhancing social interactions.Research suggests that people treat interactive systems as social agents and may expect those systems to exhibit polite behavior. We augment early research in this area by proposing a framework that is grounded in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. The framework focuses on two complementary concepts - clarity and politeness. We suggest that these concepts are pertinent to various domains of interactive technologies and provide examples for the applicability of clarity and politeness rules to human-computer interaction (HCI). We conducted a laboratory experiment, in which politeness and clarity served as independent factors in the context of a cooperative computer game, based on the Peekaboom game. The manipulation of clarity failed, yet politeness was manipulated successfully based on the framework's rules of politeness. The results provide empirical support for the basic propositions of the framework and may facilitate more systematic research on politeness in various domains of social computing and other areas related to HCI.

Shikhar Kumar, Eliran Itzhak, Samuel Olatunji et al.

Aiming to explore the impact of politeness on Human robot interaction, this study tested varying levels of politeness in a human robot collaborative table setting task. Polite behaviour was designed based on the politeness rules of Lakoff. A graphical user interface was developed for the interaction with the robot offering three levels of politeness, and an experiment was conducted with 20 older adults and 30 engineering students. Results indicated that the quality of interaction was influenced by politeness as participants significantly preferred the polite mode of the robot. However, the older adults were less able to distinguish between the three politeness levels. Future studies should thus include pre experiment training to increase the familiarity of the older adults with robotic technology. These studies should also include other permutations of the politeness rules of Lakoff.

Yulia Goldenberg, Noam Tractinsky

Hundreds of millions of speakers of bidirectional (BiDi) languages rely on writing systems that mix the native right-to-left script with left-to-right strings. The global reach of interactive digital technologies requires special attention to these people, whose perception of interfaces is affected by this script mixture. However, empirical research on this topic is scarce. Although leading software vendors provide guidelines for BiDi design, bidirectional interfaces demonstrate inconsistent and incorrect directionality of UI elements, which may cause user confusion and errors. Through a websites' review, we identified problematic UI items and considered reasons for their existence. In an online survey with 234 BiDi speakers, we observed that in many cases, users' direction preferences were inconsistent with the guidelines. The findings provide potential insights for design rules and empirical evidence for the problem's complexity, suggesting the need for further empirical research and greater attention by the HCI community to the BiDi design problem.