Designing for Reminiscence- UX Perspective

Photo by Soragrit Wongsa on Unsplash

I am a teaching assistant (TA) in a course called Intelligent User Interfaces at Cornell University (INFO 4940). There are 30 undergraduate and masters student in our class. Most of them have an HCI or UX research/design background and all are Cornell students. This blog post is a summary of students’ discussion around designing technology to help people remember memories. With permission from Prof. Dan Cosely and the students, I am sharing this online.

If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend this paper by Dan Cosley et. al (2009) which we asked students to read before the class.

Cosley, D., Akey, K., Alson, B., Baxter, J., Broomfield, M., Lee, S., & Sarabu, C. (2009). Using technologies to support reminiscence. People and Computers XXIII Celebrating People and Technology, 480–484.

Students’ ideas and perspective

Assume we want to design a system that helps users remember good memories from the past. The goal is to provide the user with a trigger (e.g., a photo) to remind the user of a good memory and to delight him/her.

Students pointed out several design considerations in designing such a system.

The system…

• Should avoid triggering negative memories. We don’t want to make the users feel sad by showing them a social media post they shared about a funeral.
• Should not distract users from their ongoing and potentially more important activities. Therefore, the frequency and timing of triggers and notifications are very important.
• Should choose meaningful memories. Not all memories are equal in their value for reminiscence. For example, on social media, some posts have a higher value due to the relationship the user have with the people in memory (e.g., close friends)
• Should be inclusive. Some users might not be able to see visual triggers such as photos. The system should be able to provide reminiscence triggers in various forms (audio, visual, etc) to accommodate users' needs and preferences.

To address the concerns mentioned above we can think of these points:

• Sentiment analysis. Before triggering user the system can conduct sentiment analysis to calculate the potential negativity of the trigger and associated memory.
• Customizing. Allowing users to set the frequency and type of notifications could eliminate the distraction problem. Beyond notifications, it will improve the system if the system ask and store type of triggers that should be avoided.
• Feedback and learning. A great way to estimate appropriate times for sending triggers and the type of content each user prefers is through feedback. By asking a simple question such as “did you like this?” over time the system can “learn” what type of triggers and memories are preferred by the user.
• Beyond temporality. Reminiscence tools such as TimeHop or Facebook Memories feature rely only on time of events and the triggers are about time (e.g., “on this day…”). Locations and places people go to often could be another way of triggering good memories which worth considering.

Discussing a Case: Facebook Memories

I was curious to learn more about the Facebook Memories feature. So I did a quick analysis which I share here with pictures!

First, it was relatively easy for users to find where to find the Memories page under Explore.

By clicking on Memories, users can see a memory of that day. This page only shows posts from the exact same day in the past. For example, I was tagged in a post 2 years ago on January 30th.

Let’s see what the Preferences allow me to do.

I can select people or dates that I don’t want to be reminded of. This is a good and as a user I appreciate this. But, this could be better. Let’s see the next steps. Assuming I want to exclude some dates and people, these are the windows I’ll see by clicking on Edit.

I have to type in the name of each person if I want them to be excluded. Let’s assume I have more than 500 friends and I only want memories about close friends and memories. There is not an option for me to select a small subset of friends to include in the Memories and exclude all the rest.

I’m also wondering whether people I’ve unfollowed are automatically excluded from Memories.

For dates, it allows me to choose time windows to exclude:

This is good and again I appreciate that it’s there. But, as a user, I might not remember the date of a potentially negative post or photo. So, I think this put the burden on the user to set exclude dates instead of evaluating and avoiding potentially negative memories.

Finally, I clicked on the notification option.

and these are the options:

I can choose to see all the memories, or none of the memories or memories from “top” friends. It’s not clear to me as a user who counts as “Top friend”.

Overall, I’m glad that I have some control over the Memory feature but I think this feature could be improved to address some of the questions I mentioned above.