Abstract

The seventh of Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design states that designers should strive to create interfaces that “support an internal locus of control”. This is based on the observation that users “strongly desire the sense that they are in charge of the system and that the system responds to their actions”. The presence of this rule in Shneiderman’s list reflects the importance of the sense of control in human computer interactions. In recent years the experience of control – or “Experience of Agency” – has become the focus for a significant body of research in cognitive neuroscience. Within this literature the experience of agency is defined as a person’s innate sense of being in control of their actions and through this control of being responsible for, or having ownership of, the consequences of those actions. In this talk I will discuss how implicit techniques, borrowed from cognitive neuroscience, can be brought to bear in investigating users’ sense of personal agency when interacting with technology.