When Bad Feels Good: Assistance Failures and Interface Preferences

User interfaces often attempt to assist users by automating elements of interaction, but these attempts will periodically fail -- impeding user performance. To understand the design implications of correct and incorrect assistance, we conducted an experiment in which subjects selected their preferred of two interfaces (neutral and snapping) for a series of 10 drag-and-drop tasks. With neutral the dragged object moved pixel-by-pixel, and with snapping the object snapped to a grid. Snapping trials were engineered to provide controlled levels of objective performance gains and losses with respect to neutral: gains were achieved when the target was aligned with the grid, and losses were achieved through misalignment -- which required subjects to drop the object, hold a key, and complete the task using a finer movement resolution. Results showed a significant preference for the snapping interface, even when losses impaired performance.

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