“Just Roll Your Mouse Over Me”: Designing Virtual Women for Customer Service on the Web

Abstract

This paper explores the growing popularity of animated software agents as a rapidly evolving technology for supporting website users and particularly the tendency among designers to figure them as young women. While designers claim that animated/personified interfaces are more intuitive and natural than the traditional point-and-click interfaces that users encounter, this paper aims to show how virtual humans can enact familiar scripts about women's work, circumscribe the range of possible roles and personalities for women, invoke service to others as the primary context for women's work, and objectify women through a not-so-subtle process of linking technology-as-tool to the idea that women are tools, fetishized instruments to be used in the service of accomplishing users' goals. In conclusion, this study develops our field's tools for critiquing technical communication texts and interfaces by focusing attention on the implications of how technologies for interacting with website users are designed.

Notes

¹For a classic study of the persona effect involving virtual characters that “vary in terms of humanity” (no face, dog, smiley face, realistic human face, cartoon human face), see Koda and Maes (1996). For some good examples of personified interfaces designed for a variety of independent (non-Web) platforms, see Justine Cassell's research on Embodied Conversational Agents (Bickmore & Cassell, 1999; Cassell, 1998; Cassell, 2000). For an analysis of text-only (no face) interfaces designed to engage users in conversationally competent behavior, see Zdenek, 2001.

²This list of 27 is actually a list of “non-AIML chat robots.” AIML, or Artificial Intelligence Markup Language, is an easy-to-learn programming language for ALICE, an open source chat system. Users start with the basic ALICE engine and, using AIML, customize it. Since the “Bot Industry Survey” is authored by the Alice Foundation, it is divided between ALICE-inspired (or AIML) bots and non-Alice bots (i.e., everything else). The list of 27 bots contains everything else.

³On the Web at: http://conversive.com, http://www.verity.com/, and http://botizen.com In December 2005, Verity was acquired by Autonomy: http://www.autonomy.com As of February 2007, the Botizen website has closed and the Botizen technology is being offered by Hantropos: http://www.hantropos.com/bo_index.htm