After I wrote this post yesterday, I had to go out among humans, so didn't have time to put in a few thoughts that occurred to me only later. Then Matt Daniels left a comment there, and I thought it's a good opportunity to respond to him and add the stuff that I figured out later.
The fact that humans often behave like certified psychos when interacting with websites only means that we should not try to make websites human-like, but quite the opposite: we need to design them in such a way to prevent obnoxious human behavior. That is, we need to design against all those opportunities that make people pissed off. Pretty simple.
And that's a purely experience design matter. It really goes against the ton of conversation going on right now around how to "humanize", "personalize", and "socialize" a brand website. And how brands online need to behave like persons, need to be nice, and conversational, and pleasant, and sociable, and resourceful, and whatever else crosses your mind if you are a [bad] digital strategist. I am just not sure that it really helps. Like, who cares if you imagined that your brand should be a "real nice person" if there's a damn stupid mistake in navigation, or the page takes forever to load, or if there's really nothing much to do on the site, or if the experience design sucks. Maybe we don't want our websites to be like humans in the first place - maybe we just want them to be what they are - interfaces - and to work damn well, in that.
So here's the answer to Matt's two observations: a) our behavior will not necessarily turn more impersonal and socially awkward as long as we don't imagine that we are interacting with humans and that it replaces human interaction; and b) I think that we need exactly the opposite of Turing's test for our websites, we need a "machine test". Is this machine working well? Can you design it flexibly for a range of uses, and also predict dead-ends and kind of drive people away from them? At the end of the day, we don't want our websites to be "personalities", we want to have an uninterrupted interaction that lets complete some task, communicate, connect with others, or just plain hang out online without being frustrated while trying to do so. Real simple.
And the less "is it a human, or is it a machine?" confusion, the better.
