HumansinInterfaces

"As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains. Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper. These days, nearly every infant is quick to identify a human face, and to respond with a goony grin."

— Carl Sagan from "The Demon-Haunted World"

The Choice of Weapons

The impact triggered by viewing a face is one of the strongest ever. Faces are similar to the smell of something burning: it simply overshadows everything. Once a face is recognized, there is no way to ignore it. It was probably an evolutionary advantage to recognize the face of a tiger as early as possible. The phenomenon of apophenia – where people see faces in random data – is responsible for many cultural effects such as nature religions and beliefs, which in turn led to superstition and mysticism. As soon as we see a face, we start to read it and interpret its meaning on a sociocultural and contextual level. Or in other words: we compare it to ourselves.

Imprinted in Perception

There are many things in our environment that we generally do not pay much attention to. Other patterns, however, are so important that our brain has developed special mechanisms to process them as quickly and efficiently as possible. Social information – like facial expressions – belongs to the latter category. Our brain seems to be preprogrammed to recognize the shape of human faces – and anything that resembles them.

A face immediately triggers emotions that can best be described as familiarity. Like a language we speak effortlessly. It is also interesting that a smiling face evokes a smile on one's own face. The reason for this is the so-called mirror neurons, which react to other individuals and reproduce emotions, tactile impressions, or even movement patterns as internal feedback of one's own impression.

The processing of these patterns appears to be holistic, as the stimulus is triggered even at a resolution of 12 x 14 pixels. This is about the overall visual impression; no individual components of the face are perceived in isolation. From this impression, certain information is then added by the viewer, which could be described as "second-hand" emotion. This holistic perception is deeply rooted in human development and has the primary purpose of quickly distinguishing the human face from other impressions and dangers.

"As we have evolved, the brain has become capable of making complex social judgments on some very basic visual cues. […] All the social information is in the centre of the face, if the brain is distracted by imperfections, it processes less and so has a weaker social assessment of the person it is looking at."

– Dr. Arnaud Aubert, Experimental Psychologist, University Francois-Rabelais, France

"We want our new website to evoke emotions!"

... is a sentence we often hear. What the client usually means by this are page-filling images – mainly of people – to meet the explicit desire to show "more personality." A result that can be traced back to extensive research and empirical work on the value of human faces - and an idea we are very happy to embrace.

However, in everyday agency life, there are some obstacles to fulfilling this:

- No sufficiently good image material available. Image material must be shot or stock images must be used.
- The results of shootings look "stocky" and miss the concept.
- There is a desire to show real people, such as for contact pages. However, there is a lack of real contacts -> Stock images are used.
- If stock images are chosen, it is difficult to find a comprehensive set.
- A set of images is created for the launch but not updated throughout the cycle.

Possibly, and this is just an assumption, there is a tendency among agencies to take the safe route. With images of landscapes or objects, because it seems to be the more controllable and sustainable way.

Clients need the guidance of the agency here to understand and embrace these unique challenges that result from the simple desire to make things "more emotional." In the initial discussions at the start of a project, on topics like content strategy and governance structures, these discussion approaches are helpful:

Images of people in a digital product should never be understood as decoration

They should always support and "co-narrate" the story. The image of a person will immediately trigger a deep, direct connection with the user, and they will place more meaning on this image than on other content. These content-related images should be used to the advantage of communication, and it is worth having this discussion from the beginning throughout the entire project.

This path results in increased responsibility for the organization

Using images of real people as the digital face of the product means that additional care is necessary. The images must be treated almost like the people they depict. Employees come and go, positions change, and corporate communication changes. All of this should be reflected in the product. We use the human face precisely because it has high value in communication. This high value, of course, also applies to the person who bears it.

With great power comes great responsibility

…towards the content. Images of people have enormous power - they communicate directly and strongly. We must ensure that it is indeed the story we want to tell. If these images are used carelessly, they can potentially influence the surrounding content and even devalue something more important. When we see a person, we follow their gaze, we mirror their expression, we identify or do not identify, we believe or question. This has a great influence that we must be aware of.

We have found that an early, intensive discussion of these points greatly contributes to establishing a good mutual understanding among the parties involved and can clarify the intentions for the joint project course.

The Situation with Stock Images

Over the past year, the stock image landscape has once again changed significantly with the emergence of free stock image sites. Many new collections have popped up, almost consistently with the same model: the exchange of publicity for the photographer for free images. These sites have now become a truly valuable resource, not least because these sites usually choose a more naturalistic approach to stock photography. These images generally appear more genuine and usable than the offerings of more traditional providers like Getty or iStockPhoto. The still strongly growing supply apparently reflects a clear demand in the industry.

However, these offerings also have something in common with the established ones. Emotions and storytelling mechanisms are difficult to classify and precisely, universally describe and find. Most of the free sites offer no search or any way to find images for a specific application purpose. This is certainly understandable due to the free model. The established players are much further along and offer good entry points, but even here there is a lack of a clearly defined syntax across offerings that could make it possible to finely adjust emotions and meaning. It is consistently difficult to find images that consistently speak the language that would be appropriate for the respective communication.

A good overview of the free stock image sites can be found at The Stocks, an offering by Panda.

Is Size Important?

As described above, even a very small image of a person can trigger a significant emotional reaction in the viewer. Even though the images are usually larger than a few pixels, laptops, tablets, and phones show people in reduced size. Here, distance is built through abstraction, the interface is unnatural. With the advent of larger interaction surfaces, such as public touchscreens - and walls, this ratio could shift. Now the interface can have human dimensions. What happens when an image or the virtual representation of a person meets the user eye to eye and thus truly becomes a human interface? Will this further strengthen the emotional relationship or even create something completely new? This is definitely a new, very interesting field that we would like to explore further. As part of one of our latest projects, CASETURE, we have already started to investigate this relationship. The approach is presented in the case "Approacher".