british inter aces - british computer society · the dave clarke syndicate my phd: culture in hci...
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Inter acesNo. 51 Summer 2002
British
Groupwww.bcs-hci.org.uk
1Published by the British HCI Group • ISSN 1351-119XHuman–Computer Interaction
also running this issue …The Gresham Gathering
HCI Educators go wild in PortsmouthThe Dave Clarke Syndicate
My PhD: Culture in HCITeenage chat and email by gender
Cassandra gets XPeriencedAK & The Joy of X
X marks Nielsen's card
Wot! N
o P
rid
e?
Culwin's fluid interaction stylepotable yet invincible
2 Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
contents2 View from the Chair
3 Editorial
4 UK HCI Community MeetingAlistair Kilgour
6 A Pilot Study into E-mail UseKamaljit Nagpal & Xristine Faulkner
8 Effective Teaching and Training in HCIJo Hyde
10 My PhDJosé L. Abdelnour-Nocera
11 Syndicating Your Content on the Web: Part 2Dave Clarke
15 Book ReviewXristine Faulkner
16 A Study of the Language Used in InternetChat Rooms
Samantha Sai & Jan Noyes
18 Vet’s ColumnAlistair Kilgour
20 ‘I am not alone in seeing the world throughwicked windows’
Cassandra Hall
22 CHI2002 contrasted with HCI2002Fintan Culwin
24 HCI Executive Contact list
View from the Chair
People and Computers are different. HCI 2002at South Bank University in London(www.hci2002.org , September 2–6 2002) has theslogan ‘memorable yet invisible’. This is a finegoal for technology, but we want our 16thannual BCS HCI conference to be memorableand visible. We’d especially like BHCIGmembers to be visible at the conference.
HCI 2002 is the main annual meeting placefor the British HCI community, where we willbe joined by many colleagues from Europe. For2002, the European Usability ProfessionalsAssociation will be incorporated into HCI 2002.This continues the move away from a singleindustry ‘day’ in previous years. EUPA 2002will add practitioner presentations and panelsto the main HCI programme. In addition,following on from IHM-HCI2001, there will alsobe a programme of workshops.
The AGM of the British HCI Group will beheld on Thursday September 4th at HCI 2002, at17.30. All BHCIG members are welcome toattend. Again, while the technology can beinvisible, we’d like you to be as visible aspossible. We are currently restructuring theexecutive committee and volunteer structure ofthe British HCI Group to make us better able torespond to suggestions from members for newactivities and initiatives. Once the new structureis in place, we will need more active volunteersfrom our members to improve the contributionof BHCIG to the cause of usability and user-centred design in the UK and beyond. Our neworganisational structure will allow volunteers tocontribute to more tightly scoped activities, andthus make effective use of the precious sparetime that they offer to BHCIG.
Our first calls for volunteers have resulted inseveral welcome offers of help, which we arenow putting to good use (thank you to all whovolunteered). However, to increase the profileof HCI in the UK we really need to make themost of our membership, and on the facingpage we list some examples of what you coulddo. If you are interested in helping, don’t waituntil the AGM. Please get in touch with me, or arelevant member of the Executive Committee(see the back cover of Interfaces).
I hope to welcome as many members aspossible to HCI 2002. There is an excellentprogramme of plenary speakers, tutorials,research and practitioner papers and the usualrange of activities that make the BCS HCIannual conference the main focus for the UKHCI community.
Find out more now at www.hci2002.org .
Visible and Remembered
Gilbert [email protected]
3Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
RIGHT TO REPLY
Make Interfaces interactive! We invite you tohave your say in response to issues raised inInterfaces or to comment on any aspect of HCIthat interests you. Submissions should be shortand concise (500 words or less) and, whereappropriate, should clearly indicate the articlebeing responded to. Please send all contributionsto the Editor.
Deadline for issue 52 is 15 July 2002. Deadline for issue 53 is 15 October 2002. Electronic versions are preferred:RTF, plain text or MS Word, via electronic mail or FTP (mail [email protected] for FTP address) or on Mac, PC disks; butcopy will be accepted on paper or fax.
Send to: Interfaces, c/o Tom McEwan, School of Computing, Napier University, 10 Colinton Road, EdinburghEH10 5DTTel: +44 (0)131 455 2793; Email: [email protected]
and copy email submissions to Fiona Dix, Interfaces production editor; email: [email protected]
Interfaces welcomes submissions on any HCI-related topic, including articles, opinion pieces,book reviews and conference reports. The nextdeadline is 15 July, but don’t wait till then – welook forward to hearing from you.
NEXT ISSUE
with thanks to commissioning editors:
Vet's Column: Alistair Kilgour, [email protected] Reviews: Xristine Faulkner, [email protected] PhD: Martha Hause, [email protected]
To receive your own copy of Interfaces, join the BritishHCI Group by filling in the form on page 23 and sending itto the address given.
It’s good to be back, believe me. One needs brain surgery likeone needs a hole in the head. So I got both, but, touch wood,that’s it for the next forty years. Many thanks to Alex Dixonboth for putting issue 49 to bed, (while the NHS did the sameto me) and for whipping up issue 50 into the remarkableconcoction I had hoped it might be.
Many thanks too, to the other members of the British HCIGroup exec who rallied round and contributed to this and theprevious issue. Long may this continue. First amongst equals isDave Clarke’s second instalment on news feeds, which deservesto be standard teaching material. It’s easy to do too, and the livefeed from UsabilityNews.com stands out like a beacon ofexemplary content in the foggy mire of my own website.
Alistair Kilgour maintains his formidable output with ahot news item from Harold Thimbleby’s recent Greshamgathering of the tribes, as well as his ever-reliable Vet’scolumn. His account of Gresham speaks for itself, but his ‘Joyof X’ deserves further reflection.
Ever since my first fumblings with computers in the mid-80s, ‘next year’ has been the year of Unix. Can MacOS Xsucceed where Ultrix, Sunos, Xenix et al did not? Some of myown students face using Macs for videocapture next year. Itwill be interesting to see how a generation raised on Wintel,and educated in UCD, react to them. Recent usability reviewsof Quicktime have not been kind. But as Alistair points out,we can always run Windows under X!
Of our other regulars, Cassandra Hall presents a moreeXPeriential view of Windows, Martha Hause has sourcedanother fine My PhD column (from José Abdelnour-Nocera –whose work in cultural factors, as well as activity theory andcontext, sounds promising). Cover-model Fintan does histhing on CHI and HCI with Pride. Xristine reviews Nielsen &Tahir, as well as supplying (with Kamaljit Nagpal) a pilot
Editorial
study into email use and gender, for our ‘Learning andDoing’ column.
Worth reading alongside the latter is a study into teenage useof chat rooms, by Samantha Sai and Jan Noyes. Just as previousgenerations derided dozy old usability buffers who couldn’tmake VCRs record, or use mobile phones, so too might ageneration reared on instant communication and virtualmanners challenge the current priorities of the HCI community.
As Gilbert suggests, these and other debates will takeplace at HCI2002, the advance programme for which issupplied with this issue. One late decision omitted from theAP is that, following losses due to much reduced numbers atCHI, the committee have decided to limit to around 300 thenumber of available places at the conference – leading to thepossibility that the full-up signs will appear in mid-August.So don’t hang around – it’s cheaper before 10th July anyway!
In the next issue, due to be with you in late August, youwill find a new service – short descriptions of every paper tobe presented at HCI2002 (as well as an interview with JaredSpool, a review of a certain triumvirate’s Interaction Design(Beyond HCI) and other regulars).
Tom McEwanEditor
Volunteers are needed by the British HCI Group to:
• Write for Interfaces and UsabilityNews• Market and promote BHCIG in the media• Review for Conferences and Interacting with Computers• Collect information for www.bcs-hci.org.uk• Organise, support and promote HCI meetings for educators,
practitioners, students and researchers.• Plan for the future growth and influence of usability and
user-centred design in the UK and beyond
4 Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
Around forty participants gathered in the historic GreshamCollege (www.gresham.ac.uk ), discreetly tucked awaydown an alley off Holborn, to reflect on the nature of HCI,and formulate a community response to the ‘InternationalReview of UK Research on Computer Science’ commis-sioned by EPSRC and published last year. (A PDF versionis available at www.iee.org/Policy/CSreport/ ). The date ofthe meeting was the week before CHI, and for academics atuniversities on the semester system – nearly all now I guess– the Easter vacation was already a fading memory, so itwas not surprising that representation from the usualsuspects was patchy. There were quite a few newcomers toHCI recently migrated from other related areas, but thiswas all to the good, not least in injecting a degree ofrealism into our discussions of how HCI is perceived inother disciplines and other areas of the academic andresearch world.
On the first day the focus was on defining HCI, andpossibly formulating what Harold Thimbleby described as‘grand challenges’ for HCI research – to perform a functionand provide a focus for HCIakin to the human genomeproject in biology or the huntfor the Higgs boson in physics.It was a day for dichotomiesand spectral analysis,flavoured with a soupçon ofphilosophy.
I was reminded at one pointof the discussion of ‘quality’ in Robert Pirsig’s once trendybest-seller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (theSophie’s World of the seventies, for the benefit of youngerreaders), where it is suggested that maybe quality can’t bedefined, but we can all sure as hell recognise it when wesee it.
The same view of HCI was beginning to emerge in oneof the groups I took part in – we couldn’t exactly define itsboundaries, but we were sure there would be unanimousagreement, when we saw a research paper or thesis, as towhether it was really about HCI.
On the other hand, the eclectic (not to say kleptomaniac)nature of HCI was also acknowledged, whereby we might‘grab’ papers or topics submitted by accident, and claimthem for our own, even though the areas they covered hadnot previously been thought of as HCI. (Readers of Yeatsmay recall the sad little poem about a mermaid who founda swimming lad, and ‘claimed him for her own’. Theconsequences were not happy – she ‘Forgot in cruelhappiness, That even lovers drown’.) And this absorptiveproperty also reminds me of a school chemistry experimentdemonstrating deliquescence – the end result of which wasa mushy mess.
Dichotomies, bifurcation for the use of: theory v.practice, ‘pure’ v. ‘applied’, computer science v. psychol-ogy – but when does a dichotomy become a spectrum? Westarted off thinking of the range from ‘craft skills’ to‘engineering design’ as a spectrum, but maybe that would
better be considered a dichotomy. In any case, the suggestionthat we needed to place HCI somewhere on this spectrumwas felt to be too restrictive – why do we need to excludeanything? Philosophy’s contribution: HCI research is under-pinned by a shared set of values – about making technologyuseful and usable, for the benefit of society as a whole. Itshould not just (or at all, some would say) be technology-driven. We had to admit, though, that up to now it largelyhad been – much HCI research has consisted of analysingtoday’s failures, rather than envisaging and facilitatingtomorrow’s successes.
Alan Dix asserted animatedly that we had in fact beentremendously successful, and we should be proud of theachievements of HCI. However, many felt uncomfortableabout claiming any credit on behalf of HCI research for someof the obvious UK successes we could think of – for example,in computer games, virtual reality systems, or mobile tech-nology. One of the paradoxes is that successful design (in theusability sense) often depends on detailed domain know-ledge, and on incorporating this knowledge into the interface,
rather than on the use ofinnovative or particularlypowerful interaction tech-niques or devices. The place ofthe design process itself withinthe research agenda was alsoseen to be problematic,because it is much harder todemonstrate improvement
here than in many other computer science research areas – tocompare quantitatively one design methodology, notation, orphilosophy with another is very difficult.
The funding councils all pay lip service to the advantagesof interdisciplinary research, and this is to the benefit of HCI,but we still come up against practical problems, such as rigiddepartmental boundaries within universities, when biddingfor and running interdisciplinary projects. It’s still very hardto get a psychologist appointed to an academic post incomputer science, and then, if you do, it’s hard to get theinvolvement of your local psychologist accepted as sufficientto meet the funding council’s requirements for interdiscipli-nary research. ‘Real’ psychologists, in their view, can onlylive and work in psychology departments. And although theHCI community is seen as friendly by others (and generallyexperienced as such by its members), nevertheless there hasbeen a rather destructive tendency for some parts of thecommunity to dismiss the work of other parts as lessimportant, or even trivial, thus reinforcing the externalperception that it’s all just a matter of ‘common sense’.
Usability is certainly part of HCI. How big a part, though,and how our ideas about usability need to be updated, wasthe subject of lively debate. Peter Thomas, in his Wednesdaymorning presentation, reviewed responses he had received toa request to define the ‘new usability’, sent to a range ofresearchers and designers. (Details are in Thomas &Macredie, ‘The New Usability’, ACM Transactions on CHI,2001, copies of which were distributed at the workshop.)
UK HCI Community MeetingGresham College, 17–18 April 2002
5Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
When the technology is peripheral, or ambient, or ‘lean-back’,and the goal is entertainment, diversion, or social interaction,traditional task-based, work-directed measures are no longerappropriate. Peter suggested ‘creative lurking’, in pubs, clubsand other public places, as one way of gathering data for thiskind of usability, but doubted if any research council wouldfund this.
The new dawnOn the second day of the workshop we looked specifically atthe EPSRC International Review of UK Computer ScienceResearch, with a view to distilling the first draft of a possibleresponse from the UK HCI community. The meeting gener-ally welcomed the report, and felt it represented a very fairassessment of the state of research in UK computer science.Particularly welcome was its strong recommendation forimproved support for research in computer science andinformation technology, and for more emphasis on longerterm basic research, not industrially linked. The specific viewof the report on HCI was also felt to be sympathetic andpositive, particularly the highlighting, as key features of theUK research scene, of:
• strong collaboration between psychology andcomputer science, and
• the theory-driven (as opposed to gadget-driven)nature of much of the research.
The range of disciplines mentioned in the HCI section ofthe report includes CSCW, NL, HF, IR, UID, and ‘graphicsand visualisation’, although the last also merits a separatesection on its own later in the report, following the HCIsection. Several participants regretted the omission ofreference in the report to other inter-disciplinary collabora-tions, e.g. between computer science and social science.
By the time you read this a more complete set ofrecommendations distilled from the workshop will have beendistributed, but it might be worth listing here some of thecandidate recommendations coming out of one of the groupsI was involved with:
• a return by EPSRC to the ‘panel’ system inassessing interdisciplinary research proposals
A personal impression by Alistair Kilgour
Alistair [email protected]
• the establishment of a ‘son of PACCIT’ long-terminterdisciplinary research programme, focused onbasic HCI research, with no mandatory industrialinvolvement
• the establishment of several new directly HCI-related interdisciplinary research centres.
This has been a very personal and selective account of arich, diverse and sometimes rambling meeting. A follow-upworkshop (or maybe panel session) at HCI2002 was mooted,and there was wide support for this, even if, as seems likely,the deadline for feedback to the EPSRC may be past by then.Harold Thimbleby is to be warmly congratulated for hisinitiative and energy in setting up this meeting, and forsetting in motion so effectively the process of formulating apowerful and effective HCI community response to theEPSRC. Even if you were unable to attend the meeting, therewill be ample opportunity to contribute electronically to thedebate, and to the refinement of the distilled recommenda-tions, over the next few weeks.
http://www.uclic.ucl.ac.uk/projects/GreshamHCImeeting/
Forthcoming Events
IV026th International Conference on Information Visualisation10–12 July 2002London, Englandhttp://www.graphicslink.demon.co.uk/IV02/
TAMODIA 20021st International Workshop on TAsk MOdels andDIAgrams for user interface design18–19 July, 2002Bucharest, Romaniahttp://www.ici.ro/chi-romania/tamodia/Tamodia.html
SAICSIT 2002Enablement through TechnologyAnnual Conference of theSouth African Institute of Computer Scientists &Information Technologists16–18 September 2002The Boardwalk, Port Elizabeth, South Africahttp://www.petech.ac.za/saicsit2002/
CSCW 2002ACM 2002 Conference on Computer SupportedCooperative Work16–20 November, 2002New Orleans, Louisiana, USAhttp://www.acm.org/cscw2002/
6 Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
This article describes a pilot survey on e-mail carried outrecently at South Bank University. The aim was to under-stand the frequency of e-mail use and user attitudes to theirservice providers. 50 questionnaires were returned.
The use of e-mail has increased recently. It is nowreplacing traditional paper-based communication, the faxmachine and even the telephone. It is the darling of currentcommunication methods [4]. Despite its popularity it hasmany problems and many organisations are struggling todevelop controlling policies in response to sometimesdisturbing events. For example, in 1995, four female employ-ees claimed they had been subjected to sexual harassmentthrough explicit e-mail messages. Their employers paid outmore than $2 million in compensation to settle the claim [3].
More and more people are now on-line; one of their majoruses is e-mail. In the UK 40% of those on-line are women; thisis expected to rise to 60% by 2005. Predictions say that 68% ofthose who come on-line in 2002 will be women [2]. Accordingto David Silver at the University of Washington, there is adifference between male and female e-mail messages. Malemessages tend to be basic, supply answers or give responsesthat close dialogue. Women tend to keep conversations goingand ask more questions and are more willing to say they arewrong!
In March 2001 the Guardian stated 360,000 e-mails weresent per second in the UK and that this figure was increasingevery month by 20,000 e-mails per second [1]. It is evidentthat e-mail use is increasing rapidly, and with that the needfor an e-mail policy becomes vital. Although many compa-nies and e-mail providers have policies, these are sometimesdifficult to impose except where a technical fix is available.
Figure 1 illustrates the sending of messages classified bygender. Women are more active than men at the lower level.At the higher level, men send more e-mails. These resultsagree with a recent Guardian article which states that one inthree men spend about forty minutes a day on personal
A Pilot Study into E-mail Use
e-mails compared with women who spend 25 minutes a dayon personal e-mails [5]. This may explain why men are moreactive at the higher levels of sending e-mail messages.Perhaps women dedicate less time for sending personale-mail messages, whereas men spend extra time for personalmessages, thus sending more e-mails. However, withoutfurther analysis into mail length, numbers of mails sent, etc.,it isn’t possible to draw conclusions. Perhaps men writelonger messages, take longer, are slower typists or thinklonger, for example!
Figure 2 shows that women send more text messages thanmen. But men send more e-mail messages. The reasons fortext messaging being so popular with women are againunclear. It could be that the mobile phones are more difficultfor large fingers to operate and this would tend to reducemale text messaging activity .
Table 1 shows number of e-mails sent weekly grouped byage. The 19–21 age group are the most active.
Table 2 shows number of text messages sent daily groupedby age. The 19–21 age group are the most active and activitydeclines with age. Therefore, comparing with number ofe-mails sent, it can be seen that activity declines with age inboth text messaging and e-mail use. Younger age groups
Age 0–10 11–25 26–40
19–21 22 3 2n=27 55.0% 42.9% 66.7%
22–23 6 2 0n=8 15.0% 28.6% 0.0%
24–25 2 1 1n=4 5.0% 14.3% 33.3%
26–29 2 0 0n=2 5.0% 0.0% 0.0%
30+ 8 1 0n=9 20.0% 14.3% 0.0%
Table 1. Number of e-mails sent weekly by age
Learning
Figure 1. Number of e-mails sent every week by gender
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
0-10 11-25 26-40
No. of e-mails sent weekly
Female
Male
Figure 2. Number of text messages sent daily by gender
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
0-5 6-10 11-15 16+
No. of text messages sent daily
Female
Male
7Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
Kamaljit Nagpal and Xristine Faulkner
appear to communicate more. But there could be any numberof reasons for this level of activity. Until further research iscarried out in these areas it is impossible to say. These resultsconcur with those of a recent UK report where people in the15–25 age range were said to be deserting e-mail in favour oftext messaging [6].
Subjects were asked to rate their e-mail provider for junkmail filters. Figure 3 shows 55.6% of men rated them as ‘OK’and this was the highest rating given by men! Women ratedjunk mail filters higher with a total of 67.5% scoring them‘Very Good’, ‘Good’ and ‘OK’. Only 32.5% of women ratedjunk mail filters as ‘Poor’ or ‘Very Poor’. Overall, womenrated junk mail filters more highly than men did. Again, wehave no reason to explain these differences. Perhaps furtherresearch will explain whether men receive more junk mail,are more irritated by it, or are more critical.
Figure 4 shows that females rate their e-mail providerhighly at ‘7’ or ‘8’. 66% of females rated their e-mail providerin this way. Males rated their e-mail provider mainly at ‘6’ or‘7’; 66% of males rated their e-mail provider thus.
As this was a pilot study, the amount of data was small,with 50 questionnaires returned. It has to be noted that thissurvey was carried out with students so the findings maywell be typical of undergraduates but not the population at
Kamaljit Nagpal is a finalyear student on a BScCombined Honourscourse at South BankUniversity.e-mail [email protected] Faulkner is asenior lecturer in HCI atSCISM, South BankUniversity.e-mail [email protected]
Age 0–5 6–10 11–15 16+
19–21 13 9 3 2n=27 41.9% 75.0% 100.0% 50.0%
22–23 5 2 0 1n=8 16.1% 16.7% 0.0% 25.0%
24–25 2 1 0 1n=4 6.5% 8.3% 0.0% 25.0%
26–29 2 0 0 0n=2 6.5% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
30+ 9 0 0 0n=9 29.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
Table 2. Number of text messages sent daily by age
and Doing
Figure 4. Overall Rating given to the e-mail provider by genderNB: No rating was given below 5.
Rating
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
5 6 7 8 9 10
Female
Male
large. As students are automatically provided with theire-mail accounts at university this requires very little effort ontheir part. They may well be more technologically aware,have more time to spend playing with e-mail communica-tions, without criticism from a boss, and they aren’t payingfor the cost of being on-line.
The questionnaire was designed as a pilot study, thereforethere were bound to be flaws. We hope to extend this work inthe coming months.
References1. Snoddy, Julia. 360,000 emails a second in UK, available
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,451357,00.html2. Walsh, N.P. Is that a hemail or a shemail in your inbox? available
http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,493356,00.html3. Barb Cole-Gomolski, ComputerWorld, September 8, 19974. Edesigns. E-mail is #1 for marketing communications, available
http://www.edesigns.co.uk/5. Left, Sarah. Men beat women in work email stakes, available
http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,537930,00.html6. Barclays Quarter Internet Report i->iew edition 2 March 2001, available at
http://www.barclays.co.uk/economicreports/pdfs/iview_issue2.pdf
55.6%33.3%
11.1% 7.5%
32.5%
27.5%
17.5%
15.0%
Male Female
Very Good
Good
OK
Poor
Very Poor
Rating of Junk Mail Filters by Gender
Figure 3. Rating given to Junk Mail Filters by Gender
8 Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
Effective teaching and training in HCI is essential if we are tomake headway in our ongoing battle against poor interfacedesign, and this workshop provides an annual opportunity todiscuss current issues and thrash out possible solutions. Ihave attended the past four of these workshops, and make apoint of coming each year. I find that larger conferences aremore formal and structured, whereas these workshops arealways friendly, sociable, informativeand discursive. They are also attendedby academics who might not have thefinancial resources for attending alarger event.
Over the past years, I have seenseveral themes repeated: the problemsof gaining acceptance for HCI in theacademic curriculum, the difficulties ofdistance learning, how best to manageassessments for increasingly over-worked staff. However, this repetitionof themes is not depressing, becauseeach year there seems to be a new perspective and progress ismade, either in our understanding of the issues, or inmanaging to convince our respective faceless bureaucraciesto implement them.
This year’s workshop, ably organised by Jonathan Crellinand John Rosbottom (University of Portsmouth), withadministrative LTSN support from Una O’Reilly (Universityof Ulster), covered four main areas:distance education, participation,subject issues, and resources. Therewere attendees from a number ofestablishments such as the OpenUniversity, the University of EastLondon, the University of Bath, and theNorth East Wales Institute of HigherEducation, bringing together acorresponding variety of perspectivesand problems associated with theworkshop’s core subject. All thepresentations were interesting andinformative, based very much on practitioner experience,although the range of issues covered was diverse. Only asmall selection is mentioned below, in order to give a flavourof the workshop.
Alistair Kilgour (Open University) gave a cogent talk onthe difficulties of instilling a user-centred approach incomputer scientists, and how the best approach seems to beto let them actually see users struggling. We agreed thatgetting our students to see the point of HCI is often difficult,but it seems HCI is now accepted as part of the curriculum,and industry is aware of the need, although this still seems tobe as a second or third year module, in some cases optional,rather than integrated into the development of the computerscientists’ degree programmes. Whatever the limitations, Ifind the fact of the subject’s acceptance encouraging, giventhat this has only taken place recently. Now all we have to dois educate the students, with the associated challenges of
doing this in an integrated manner with students withdifferent expectations, often geographically dispersed andlearning at a distance. Easy!
There was a feeling that computer software designers suchas Microsoft have taken the usability message on board, butthat the web is still a problem area, due to graphic designersbeing more interested in the aesthetics than the functionality.
Someone (who shall remain anonymous)suggested that graphic designers get todesign websites because if computer scien-tists were given the job it would look horribleand still wouldn’t work. A not entirelyserious remark, but one which struck achord.
The issues of effective distance educationhave been topical for some years, both withthe widespread adoption of the web as ateaching resource and medium, and thestrain on universities to maximise incomethrough reaching a larger student group with
the most cost-effective methods. Several papers addressedthis theme, looking at issues such as the use of deadlines(some felt that this gave a pace to the studying, othersthought that this detracted from the idea of distance educa-tion being something that could be done at one’s own pace),and how best to support it effectively, through the use ofchat-rooms and message boards. Technology is now at a level
which can effectively support web-basedteaching, which in the past it has not, andthere were several derisory remarks aboutthe current usability of such interfaces. Itseems ironic that the very tools we use toteach are often so badly designed themselves.
This led into a wider consideration ofways of teaching, and the issues faced.Students have difficulty in accepting that inHCI there may be no ‘right’ answer, and theyoften find it hard to start and apply theirknowledge effectively. There is a current lackof suitable methods for the application of
these methods, and they wish for a step-by-step process tofollow to ensure the usable quality of their product. StuartMacFarlane (University of Lancaster) put forward anapproach for teaching user needs analysis, which has beenused both in his HCI classes and also in other domains bystudents who have found it useful. It has had the addedbenefit that members of his department have had to find outabout it in order to mark projects in other subject areas thathave included aspects of it. Possibly more importantly,feedback from students who have gone on to use it in indus-try has also been positive.
Julie Horton (University of Northumbria) gave an interest-ing presentation on the use of rich pictures as a means ofexploring problem situations and communicating issues. Theinformality of the technique seemed to be one of the factors inits success with students. Rich Picking (North East WalesInstitute of Higher Education) gave a presentation based
Report on the Effective Teaching and Training in HCI WorkshopThis two-day BCS HCI Group workshop, the fifth in the series, was held at the University of Portsmouthon March 25–26 2002, and was supported by the LTSN.
9Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
around the use of post-it notes to createaffinity diagrams, which again stressedinformality as strong success factor.Generally, the use of post-it notes andwhiteboards were winners on the technol-ogy front by general acclaim, whichhighlights some of the problems withmodern technology.
Kate Dingley (University ofPortsmouth) gave an interesting talk aboutvarious HCI textbooks and websites,making the relevant point that textbooks inthis field have an obligation to be usable,and that HCI principles should apply intheir design. Following this, WileyPublishing gave a presentation regardingthe website for the new HCI book byPreece, Rogers and Sharp, making thepoint that although textbooks serve aparticular need, web resources are ofincreasing importance as a teaching andstudent resource.
There was much discussion on the bestway of teaching HCI, which focusedaround two issues: that of distance; andthat of style. Problem-based learning wasjust one of the approaches considered in aseries of presentations and exchange ofviews. People were happy to contribute,discuss, and disagree, leading to a moreinformed and participatory discussion,which was noted for its amicability andrespect.
My personal bugbear with theseworkshops is that we don’t consult ourusers: our student population. We tend toassume and take for granted. I did take amoment to talk to the student volunteerspresent. They found the workshop to bevery interesting from their perspective.They like the lecturers to be transparent inwhat they want to achieve, because itmakes it easier for the students to knowwhat is going on and what is expected.They found it intriguing to see how academics can argueamongst themselves so much, and they also observed thatstudents were not mentioned a great deal, which personally Ifound worrying.
Overall, I felt that this workshop had a friendly andencouraging atmosphere. The social programme was asimportant a part of the workshop as the more officialproceedings, giving us a chance to catch up with what isgoing on at other institutions across the UK, as well as theopportunity to exchange horror stories relating to QAA andRAEs. The building we were based in gave an object lesson inhow poor design is still a major part of our life.
The building, opened in 1996, is beautiful and light, with
some interesting architectural features,including some spectacular bridges acrossthe atrium. As well as staircases thatdidn’t lead you where you wanted to go,and which stopped in obscure places, andtoilets cunningly hidden, to be found onlyby a process of elimination (I’ve looked inall the obvious places, I know/hope theyexist, so now think laterally…). Oh, and itfloods. However, I have a personal theorythat the HCI community is made up ofpeople who can’t cope anyway, proved byhow the group I was with took threeattempts to break into the restaurant.We’ve just come up with a better justifica-tion for it than most ;-).
The tour of HMS Warrior was sobering,since this was a ship so totally designedfor warfare. There was no way of avoidingthe fact that this vessel was a killingmachine, with each part of it engineered tothe highest standard and attention todetail in order to accomplish its task.
By contrast, the ten pin bowling whichfollowed the supremely excellent meal (Istill have fond memories of theprofiteroles) was hysterical. We wereespecially amused to see a qwerty key-board on the touch screen scoring system,given that the benefits of such a layoutwere completely hamstrung by thepositioning. I foresee a rush of studentprojects based around designing aninterface for a bowling alley scoringsystem… I found the fact that the compu-ter graphics insulted us when we bowledpoorly rather disconcerting. I don’t mindmissing, I do mind the computer takingthe mick about it! Just for the record, GaryWills (University of Southampton) tookthe prize for best male bowler, scooping abottle of champagne, with Una O’Reillytaking a box of Thorntons chocolates asbest female bowler. Eva Turner (Univer-
sity of East London) won a special prize as person with mostpotential for improvement.
This has been a highly selective and possibly distortedaccount of a fun and informative two days. I believe thatthese workshops serve a very useful and worthwhilepurpose. However, the best way to know what theseworkshops are like is to attend the next one, to be held nextEaster, venue to be decided. See you there!
Jo Hyde
Dr Jo HydeUniversity of [email protected]
10 Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
One day while browsing through mye-mail list an invitation came fromMartha Hause to write some words forthis column. I felt very flattered to begiven the opportunity to express mycurrent PhD research, or should I sayjigsaw? I say jigsaw since it took meone year to make sense of most of theliterature and theoretical strands thattry to address the issue of context andculture in systems and interfacedesign. As I write this, I’m beginningmy second year of research and have aclearer picture of the differentperspectives ranging fromhermeneutics to traditionalinternationalisation approaches.
I ‘define’ myself as a culturalpsychologist who has spent the lastfour years researching the social andcultural implications of informationtechnology use. My first researchinterests were concerned with howvirtual communities build their owncultures in virtual environments. Bydoing this, I discovered the stronginfluence that the system and itsinterfaces have in shaping the group’sculture by enabling certain interactionsand modes of expression, andinhibiting others. This was the sourceof my interest in the field of HumanComputer Interaction and its relationto issues of social context and culture.Consequently, I was offered a PhDplacement at the Open University,supervised by Prof. Pat Hall(Computing), Dr. Hugh Mackay(Sociology), and an interface expertfrom Thames Valley University,Prof. Lynne Dunckley.
The main objective of my researchis to document what and how culturalframeworks shape the process ofencoding and decoding (productionand consumption) of computersystems and interfaces. This is basedon the metaphor of technology as aninterpretative flexible text. At the sametime, this text is also constrained bythe preferred readings embedded intechnology by its producers and by thecultural resources of its readers (users).Equally important is the social processthrough which users shape technology.As a result we have a two-way flow of
socioculturally determinedconfigurations for interfaces and theirsystems.
Working from this perspective hastwo main implications. Firstly, therelationship between computers andusers is no longer a symmetrical one:the traditional vision, inherited fromcognitive sciences, is that of conceivingcomputers and users as equivalentabstract information processingentities. This vision is replaced byrelocating computers as tools forhuman action and users as personswithin specific cultural configurations.Secondly, culture is no longer seen as avague national affiliation but as a webof symbols, values, beliefs andpractices that is produced, reproducedand transformed in any socialaggregate regardless of size andlocation.
My literature and empirical reviewcovers four main approaches. First isHofstede’s approach. I believe this islargely outdated, since it uses ready-made fixed national culture modelsthat are usually not adjusted to thespecific requirements of mosttechnologies.
Secondly, Lucy Suchmann andTerry Winograd have explored theimportant role of the contextcontingencies and cultural resourcesand traditions that shape systems use.This gives an important place to theprocess of conception of technology as‘an interface to human action’. In theearly nineties Jonathan Grudin tookthis further. He presented the conceptof interface as a double layeredconcept. He gives an illustration inwhich the ‘handle of a cane’ is pre-sented as a user interface and the ‘caneitself’ is the system working as afunctional interface between thevisually impaired person and her worldof activities.
Similarly, the third approachapplies Activity Theory to computer-mediated activity. This recognises howsocial factors shape human actionsranging from individual operations tosocially defined activities. Here,technical tools are seen as culturalevolutionary and reactive artefacts.
My PhDMy PhDMy PhDMy PhDMy PhD The problem of Culture in Human Computer Interaction
Finally, the semiotic approach triesto solve culturally determinedusability problems, by looking atdifferences between intended andreceived meanings, by studying theuser interface, its producers and users.
One of my main insights afterreviewing all these perspectives andempirical experiences is that culture isnot a simple phenomenon. To studyhow culture affects systems use is tobreak it down in as many culturalspaces as are relevant to eachtechnology. These are some of thespaces I propose: workplace culture,tool-related culture (or study oftechnological genres and tastes) andthe personal background of users. Inthis latter case we can include variousvalues, beliefs and practices acquiredfrom multiple frameworks such asfamily, national identity, sub-culturalaffiliations, etc.
After a pilot study with foreign PhDstudents at the Open University, I haverealised how difficult it is to obtaincultural evidence. Therefore, at thisstage of my research I’m looking for asuitable case study, namely anintercultural setting in which softwareproduced in one culture is used inother highly contrasted cultures. Thismeans I’m spending much of my timenow in public relations andnetworking rather than in academictasks. Something I never expected todo in My PhD!!
José L. [email protected]
José L. Abdelnour-Nocera
11Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
In the last issue (Interfaces 50) I discussed the idea of sharingyour content with other websites, via simple feeds. That is,the idea of syndication – information being supplied forre-use and integration with other content. We looked at themany advantages of doing this, and went through a simpleexample news feed, using JavaScript in the browser as amechanism for achieving it.
In this second and final part of the article, I will build onthe practical example introduced in Part 1, by producing asimple dynamic feed using ASP (Active Server Pages). We’llthen look at a real live example, and show how to use theUsability News feed on your own site.
Finally, no article on syndication would be completewithout mention of some of the relevant metadata standardsthat are influential in this area. This is a vast topic and I onlybriefly touch on it here. Nevertheless, this will act as a usefulstarting point for further reading.
Updating your news feedIn Part 1, I illustrated how to achieve a simple news feed. Ofcourse, the approach we discussed was based on having astatic news.js file on your web site, which was then‘requested and integrated’ with the remote page via thebrowser. This works fine, but what about when we wish toupdate the news feed? The method outlined would requireus to upload a new .js file every time we needed to updatethe feed content, which is not ideal.
Syndicating Your Content on the Web: Part 2
A nicer approach would be to dynamically generate thescript itself (i.e. generate the .js text file on your web server atset intervals) using some server-side scripting such as PHP,ASP or Java Servlets, or better still stream the JavaScriptsource back directly. We could then retrieve the necessarylive headlines from a relevant information source, andgenerate the JavaScript source accordingly. This is efficient, inthat only the necessary script is sent back the user’s browserand also has the advantage that we can pass parameters tocustomise the results.
Let’s try it!We’ll now extend the original news.js file-based example andmake it ‘dynamic’ using a bit of server-side ASP script. Torecap, Figure 1 shows the news.js code we used on your site.
We now need to think about how to create this content‘on-the-fly’ when requested and stream it back to the client.As an example, let’s create a feed that simply sends back adifferent headline each day, where the headline ‘strings’ aresupplied in an ASP include file, which you can upload toyour web site each week. The news.inc include file is shownin Figure 2. Here we’ve used arrays to store the text for eachday, but this could be extended to read these from a text fileor a database, and maybe cache them too with a little morework.
document.write('<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/newsitem1.html">First headline here</
a><br>');
document.write('A summary would be here...<P>');
document.write('<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/newsitem2.html">Second headline here</
a><br>');
document.writeln('Dave\'s second news summary would be here...<P>');
Figure 1: news.js code
<%
' This news.inc file contains a week's worth of
' news headlines, one for each day, indexed 0 to 6
dim arrNews(6)
arrNews(0) = "<a href='http://www.samplesite.com/news.html'>Sunday's Headline
here</a><br>Sunday's news summary here<P>"
arrNews(1) = "<a href='http://www.samplesite2.com/news.html'>Monday's Headline
here</a><br>Monday's news summary here<P>"
arrNews(2) = "<a href='http://www.bbc.co.uk/sample.html'>Tuesday's Headline
here</a><br>Tuesday's news summary here<P>"
arrNews(3) = "<a href='http://www.test.com/another.html'>Wednesday's Headline
here</a><br>Wednesday's news summary here<P>"
arrNews(4) = "<a href='http://www.yoursite.com/news.html'>Thursday's Headline
here</a><br>Thursday's news summary here<P>"
arrNews(5) = "<a href='http://www.anothersite.com/news.html'>Friday's Headline
here</a><br>Friday's news summary here<P>"
arrNews(6) = "<a href='http://www.andfinally.com/news.html'>Saturday's Headline
here</a><br>Saturday's news summary here<P>"
%>
Figure 2: news.inc include file
Dave Clarke
12 Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
<% option explicit %>
<!—#INCLUDE FILE="news.inc"—>
<%
dim iDayNo
iDayNo = datePart("w", date())-1 ' get present day number in week between 1 and 7 (Sunday
is 1)
' Now stream back headline(s) for this day
' Don't forget MIME type
Response.ContentType = "application/x-javascript"
response.write "document.writeln('" & parseJS(arrNews(iDayNo)) & "');" & vbCRLF
function parseJS(sText)
dim s
s = sText
s = replace(s,"'","\'") ' escape any apostrophes
parseJS = s
end function
%>
Figure 3: ASP script that uses news.inc
Figure 3 shows the main ASP script that uses this file (andhence would be called from the remote site). This scriptsimply picks up the current day number in the week (1Sunday to 7 Saturday) and picks out the appropriate elementfrom the array and streams this back to the browser. Note theMIME type application/x-javascript in the header – essentialfor fussy browsers, for example – and also notice theparseJS() function to nicely encapsulate the code to parse outany troublesome characters from our news text. Any otherspecial characters you wish to handle could also be placedinside here.
All that’s left to do now is supply the script for the remotepage to use, which is much the same as we used before:
There you have it – a simple dynamic feed! Of course, thisis a little simplistic in that it only copes with a week’s worthof content and requires an upload of the news.inc file eachweek. But from this, it is easy to see how this could beextended to use a backend database, and use parametersmaybe, to provide a truly integrated and automated solution.
This general approach is in fact exactly how ourUsabilityNews.com site news feed works, which you can tryout for yourself in the next section.
<script language="JavaScript"
src="http://www.yoursite.com/news.asp">
</script>
<noscript>
Sorry, you need a JavaScript capable
browser to get news headlines on this
page</noscript>
The UsabilityNews.com feed...Do you find the idea of a live news feed on your site,
showing up-to-date usability headlines, attractive? We nowhave such a facility ready to use via our UsabilityNews.comsite, which can be utilised very easily by simply embeddingjust a few lines of code in your web page:
Embed this in your page source (e.g. inside an HTMLtable cell somewhere to create a ‘news column’) and you will‘instantly’ have the latest headlines appear. I’ve also wrappedthe script in a <div> block in the above, to illustrate how youcan control the look and feel. You could also have applied astyle sheet class on the <div> just as easily.
The key part of the code is the URL reference to theUsabilityNews.com site along with some parameters. Theseparameters, shown in Table 1 (page 13), which can bechanged to suit your own needs, allow customisation of theresults that are returned. All parameters are optional, andsuitable defaults will be used as indicated, if not supplied.
<div><font size='2' face='arial'>
<script language="JavaScript"
src="http://www.usabilitynews.com/
newsfeed.asp?cat=1&sh=y&nw=n&total=5">
</script>
<noscript>
Sorry, you need a JavaScript capable
browser to get news headlines on this
page</noscript>
</font></div>
Syndicating Your Content on the Web: Part 2
13Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
Parameter Description Values
CAT Category of news to return 1 general news (default)2 jobs3 events4 paper calls
BRK Put a line break before summary Y (default) or N
SH Show article sub-header Y (default) or N
NW Link opens a new window Y or N (default)
TOTAL Number of headlines to return Range of 1 to 10 (10 is default)
Table 1: UsabilityNews.com news feed parameters
No emails please on my chosen defaultoption for NW (new window)! The jury is stillout on when and when not to use newbrowser windows for links. Rather thanforce one or the other, I thought I’d leavethis as an option for the user interfacespecialist! My feeling is that links shouldstay within the same window (for internal orexternal links) and that if I want a newbrowser window, I’ll request one via mybrowser with an explicit action (e.g. right-click the link).
Controlled and appropriately sized pop-upwindows certainly have their uses though –when the dialogue can afford, and mayneed the assistance of, another relatedthread for example (such as on-line help ora glossary definition).
Dave Clarke
14 Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
For further information and instructions on how to use thenews feed facility visit: http://www.usabilitynews.com/help/newsfeed/. I also use the feed myself on my own homepageat http://www.visualize.uk.com .
And finally… what about standards?As we’ve already discussed throughout this two-part series,the web is an ideal medium for providing syndicationservices, with data exchange happening electronically andstandardised metadata continuing to play an important role.XML has been by far the most influential, with variousXML-based standards and protocols appearing and beingproposed.
RDF (Resource Description Framework), for example,which started out initially as a lightweight metadataspecification to support information exchange on the Web,has now progressed and is now largely superseded by theSemantic Web:
The Semantic Web is an extension of the currentweb in which information is given well-definedmeaning, better enabling computers and peopleto work in cooperation. Tim Berners-Lee
RDF achieves this through the use of triples, similar tosubject, verb and object of a basic sentence. All of this bringstrue value to the Web and that of information exchange. Forexample, no longer will ‘agents’ on the Web be restricted tosimple keywords but now have access to what the content‘means’. See Tim Berners-Lee’s paper for a fascinatingcommentary on the subject.
RDF has also been the inspiration for many specificstandards related to News Feeds, for example, such as RSS(RDF|Rich Site Summary), which is a popular metadataformat for online news content and used by a number of well
known web sites for syndicating headlines – examplesinclude ZDNet, Wired and Reuters Health.
ICE (information and content exchange) is also worthchecking out. This complements in many ways contentformats like NITF (news industry text format) and also othermetadata formats such as PRISM (Publishing Requirementsfor Industry Standard Metadata) and NewsML.
Further information on the Webhttp://www.xmlnews.org and http://www.newsml.org are
excellent starting points for NewsML, PRISM, ICE, NITF,along with http://www.xml.com and http://www.w3.org forgeneral information on relevant standards.
http://www.w3.org/RDF/ contains full details on the RDFspecification
http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/
0501berners-lee.html for his comments on the SemanticWeb
http://www.moreover.com , http://www.yellowbrix.comand http://www.mastersyndicator.com are all worth a lookfor syndication.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/soap/ is the definitive guideon SOAP for data exchange
http://www.visualize.uk.com/resources/ for links to ASP,PHP and .Net resources.
http://www.visualize.uk.com/downloads/
interfaces51.zip to download the dynamic news feed sourcecode used in this article. Simply unzip and place on an ASP-enabled web site.
Dave ClarkeVisualize Software LtdEmail: [email protected]
1) Browser requestsand downloadsexternal site’s web
page
xxxxxxxxx
<script>…….
xxxxxx
2) Browser requestsremote news feedscript, with parameters
3) newsfeed.asp picks
up parameters andobtains relevantheadline details from
“news cache”
newsfeed.asp
SQL Server 2000
database
Memory cacheof latest articles
(refreshedregularly)
4) Relevant
headlines are“streamed” back to
client
UsabilityNews.com
UsabilityNews: how the news feed works
Syndicating Your Content on the Web: Part 2
15Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
I’ve been looking forward to this book ever since I reviewedNielsen’s excellent Designing Web Usability. At first glance itlooks like something from the ’70s and those first booksabout home decoration. The cover is extraordinarily retro andvery DIY looking. It turns out that it’s made up of thumbnailsof the fifty sites, colour washed with the colours used for thepie charts, which I’ll explain later. The insides too are differ-ent. For some reason I couldn’t fathom some of the pages areconventional white with black print and others are reversed.
There’s a bold red stripe down the outside edge of eachpage. It is very eye catching especially against the black. Butit doesn’t make for easy reading. And I suspect that it isn’t abook that anyone intended me to read from cover to cover.It’s more like a cook book or maybe a de-cook book sincewhat it does is unravel the recipes rather than construct them.I think you’re meant to dip and choose the de-recipes youlike best or hate the most.
The book is in two parts, the first offers a set of honest,down-to-earth guidelines that would certainly make the weba better place to be if everyone designed by them. Theauthors have plenty of stats here to back up their persuasivearguments. It’s a book designed to attract developers and Ithink the stats will convince all but the most pigheaded –presumably the ones who according to the sound bites at theback ‘jeered’ at the last book.
However, there are some bits that amused me though Isuspect they weren’t supposed to. For example, Nielsen andTahir tell us that other ‘color schemes are less readable thanblack on white’ and promptly go on to illustrate that in thebook by switching between black on white and white onblack. I’m convinced! No one should do that on a website norindeed in a book. Glossy black pages with white text are notgood for reading on trains. Take it from me. I do up to andsometimes beyond four hours of travel a day and glossyblack pages suffer from glare and give you a headache. Evenin the ergonomically controlled environment of my studio,the pages still gave me problems and created the sense ofghost images below each line.
The deconstructions though are really interesting. They’vedone a thorough job. Each homepage is shown on one pageand then shown again colour zoned according to how thepage is used. There is then a nice, coloured pie chart illustrat-ing how much that page devotes to self promotion, advertis-ing, navigation, content and so on. Even I could understandthose charts so the rest of you will undoubtedly find them abreeze.
The authors then go through the page in detail,commenting on the strengths and weaknesses and suggestingimprovements. I tell you, it’s fascinating and worth the cost
of the book just to see what they have to say about the sites.As I say, the guidelines are sensible but not profound andalthough there are plenty of stats to back them up there islittle by way of explanation. But maybe Nielsen has done hishomework and perhaps most developers want something towork and are not so bothered about why.
To be honest, I didn’t like it as much as Designing WebUsability, which I still admire very much. But I was muchamused by the defensive looking poses of Nielsen and Tahiron the back cover. They reminded me of an upmarketAddams family portrait. But maybe the people whose sitesthey’d criticised were standing behind the cameras.
Yes, buy it. It’s oddly priced at £30-99 but order a couplefor the library and get one for yourself. I promise you hoursof fun, reading through the website deconstructions andtrying to improve them. Students should be pointed in thedirection of the book but it isn’t one for them to buy unlessthey have money to spare.
Yet again, there are no references! And contrary to theauthors’ advice in this book, exclamation marks do have theirplace and here is an example. Nothing gets across to myreaders my exasperation like an exclamation mark.Exclamation marks do belong in professional writing as longas they are used when they are needed. The same is true ofreferences.
I know Nielsen is the leading light in web design but I dowish there were references to other writers. I know this isn’taimed at the academic market but developers read things aswell and they are surely as curious as I am about what theoriginal sources were or who else to read. I can’t believe forone minute that Nielsen is expecting his readers to readnothing but him. It could also do with a glossary, and it isironic that the authors warn against using jargon and thenuse lots of webspeak. A glossary would fix that and Nielsendoes have a very nice way of explaining things without thedreadful condescending tone that some authors seem to haveto adopt.
Incidentally, the last few pages of the book are adverts. Ifound them interesting. In fact, I found the concept andpresentation of this book interesting. It’s almost anexperiment in doing to a book what books have done to theweb. And as another aside, one of the papers at HCI 2002looks at how people use thumbnails in recognition: ‘HowPeople Recognize Previously Seen Web Pages from Titles,URLs and Thumbnails’ by Greenberg et al. This book usesthumbnails from the fifty sites at the back. I’d be interested toknow what the authors of the paper have to say about that.Any way, as for Homepage Usability, you won’t bedisappointed. Suck it and see.
Book Review Xristine Faulkner
Xristine [email protected]
Homepage Usability: 50 Websites DeconstructedJakob Nielsen and Marie TahirNew Riders 2002£30-99ISBN 0-7357-1102-Xpp 316
16 Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
The Internet continues to expand on an almost daily basisand its increasing use is exemplified in the growingnumber of chat rooms. One of the concerns associated withchat room interactions is that often younger children orteenagers are able to communicate with others in anunsupervised manner, and indeed, there have beenisolated cases of adults masquerading as minors in orderto set up physical meetings with them. The study reportedhere was a final-year project that was carried out last year.It aimed to find out exactly what type of language is beingused in chat rooms in terms of its form, intent andappropriateness, and how this differed across the three agegroups of children, teenagers and adults.
One of the features of chat room interactions is useranonymity. Although some chat rooms provide users withthe option of completing a user profile with personaldetails (and even a photograph) that can be viewed byothers, it is always possible to retain an anonymous orfalse identity. This may explain the attractiveness of thismode of interaction. If undesired feelings are elicited or‘enemies’ are made, the chat room facilities allow the userssimply to log off. Hence, anxiety will be low during thesetypes of interactions as individuals feel uninhibited andlose their fear for social consequences (Bremer & Rauch,1998). Users may not see a need to be polite to others(Holmes, 1999), and shyness may be overcome to the pointwhere self-esteem is improved (Stiles, Walz, Schroeder,Williams & Ickes, 1996). However, concerns have beenexpressed that chat rooms may attract individuals who arelacking in the social skills needed for interpersonalinteractions, and computer play may become an avoidancestrategy that perpetuates isolation and social inactivity(Shiami, Yamanda, Masuda & Tada, 1993).
Design & ParticipantsA between-subjects design was employed with threeconditions each representing the age category of the chatroom: namely, ‘kids’, ‘teens’ and adults. The dependentvariable was a sample of the language used that wasanalysed according to a general code for analysing verbalresponses based on Stiles (1978) (which has been shown torelate to politeness; see Brown & Levinson, 1978) and aspecifically developed code for inappropriate languageuse, e.g. sexual and abusive utterances, and swearing.
Participants were people engaged in chat roomcommunications and were unknown to the experimenter.No record of the time or place of the conversations orpersonal details relating to the participants was recorded.The only criterion that had to be met was that there weremore than ten users in the room at the time to ensure thata sufficient amount of language would be provided.
ProcedureInitially, a small questionnaire survey of local schoolchildren was carried out in order to locate the mostpopular chat rooms used by children and teenagers.Internet searches were carried out to find the adult chatrooms. The three most popular were used in this study:
namely, Yahoo, Excite and Chat-Avenue. Three continuousten-minute samples were collected for each of the threegroups.
ResultsA total of 1087 clauses were coded for form (i.e. literalmeaning) and intent (i.e. pragmatic meaning); 145 inappro-priate clauses were found. These included: 3.61% of theclauses in kids’ chat rooms, 18.94% in the teens’ chat rooms,and 8.25% in the adult chat rooms.
Verbal Response Modes
Figure 1: A comparison of verbal response modes (form) by agegroup
Figure 2: A comparison of verbal response modes (intent) by agegroup
A Study of the Language Used in Internet Chat Rooms
17Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
No significant differences were found for the verbal responsemodes between the three age groups.
Inappropriate Language
Figure 3: A comparison of inappropriate language by age group
DiscussionInterestingly, no significant differences were found for theform and intent of the language being used in the three typesof chat rooms. This was in contrast to inappropriate languagewhich was found to be more prevalent in the teen chat rooms.In the teen chat rooms, sexual words and cursing weresignificantly higher than in the other two types of chat room.Sexual referred to clauses containing words and phrasesrelating to sexual experiences, organs, etc. Curses weredefined as clauses that aimed to insult the recipient(s).However, it was found that the most frequently usedcategory of clauses in the adult chat rooms was flirtatious, i.e.clauses that do not explicitly use ‘bad language’, but containimplications of a sexual attraction.
So, what can be concluded from the finding that teenagerswere found to swear more than the other age groups?Perhaps, younger children are aware of the swear words, butare not fully familiar with how to use them (see Axia &Baroni, 1985). At the other extreme, teenagers are aware ofhow to use swear words, but do not fully understand theimplications or consequences of such language, e.g. that theyare impolite and may be unacceptable in certain situations(Holmes, 1999). Adults, on the other hand, are whollyconscious of both the use and implications of swear words,and therefore, avoid them.
An alternative explanation may involve social influenceand social conformity. Perhaps there is some sort of socialtrend, where teenagers perceive swearing as a form of socialacceptance, and peers will be impressed by abusive or sexuallanguage. By adulthood, the inappropriateness of swearingbegins to become apparent, and so adults reduce its use. In
Samantha Sai and Jan Noyes
Samantha Sai and Jan NoyesUniversity of BristolDepartment of Experimental Psychology
addition, adults may have developed a wider range ofvocabulary compared to teenagers and so can generate moreeffective communication and expression.
A final point concerns the virtual nature of chat rooms.The extent to which the teens’ chat rooms provide arepresentative sample of language used in everyday life isnot known. Chat rooms could possibly be a holding place forinappropriate impulses of a violent and sexual nature – aplace to let off steam in anonymity. Hence, they provide aharmless environment that allows teenagers to channel theirimpulses. Alternatively, chat rooms may lie at the other,more negative, end of the spectrum, where they feed suchimpulses, and encourage teenagers to act in an inappropriatemanner. This distinction is an interesting one to consider infuture chat room research.
ReferencesAxia, G., & Baroni, M.R. (1985). Linguistic politeness at different age levels.
Child Development, 56(4), 918–927.Bremer, J., & Rauch, P.K. (1998). Children and computers: Risks and benefits.
Journal of the Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 37(5), 559–560.Brown, P., & Levinson, S.C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage.
Cambridge: University Press.Holmes, J. (1999). Women, men and politeness. London: Longman.Shiami, S., Yamanda, F., Masuda, K., & Tada, M. (1993). TV game play and
obesity in Japanese school children. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 7(3), 1121–1122.
Stiles, W.B. (1978). Manual for taxonomy of verbal response modes. North Carolina:Chapel Hill.
Stiles, W.B., Walz, N.C., Schroeder, M.A.B., Williams, L.L., & Ickes, W. (1996).Attractiveness and disclosure in initial encounters of mixed-sex dyads.Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 13(2), 303–312.
Wanted …Pics for Usability NewsUsability News is hoping to expand its range of copyright-free picsof users, usability and gadgets. If you have any digital pics youwould like to see getting some action, please mail them to AnnLight: [email protected], and know that you have livenedup the British HCI Group’s stylish but rarely illustrated newswebsite, www.usabilitynews.com.
Student Volunteers for HCI 2002HCI 2002 is recruiting student volunteers, whose roleincludes setting up and taking down the conference, staffingregistration, tutorial, plenary and technical paper sessions, andhelping wherever needed. SVs will receive many benefits,including free conference registration, travel to and from Londonwithin the UK, accommodation and some meals.
If you are a postgraduate student interested in becoming a studentvolunteer for HCI 2002, go to http://www.hci2002.org/student-vol.html for more information and an application form.
18 Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
The 50th edition of Interfaces was awonderful opportunity to indulge insome purposeful, goal-directednostalgia, and it was great to readDan’s thoughtful and entertainingretrospective on the early history anddevelopment of task analysis. BothDan and Andrew Monk (in his overviewof usability elsewhere in the 50thedition) talk about the challenge ofhelping users to achieve work (as Dandescribes it), or goals in the oldterminology (which Dan would have useschew). As Andrew points out, theprocedures needed to achieve usabil-ity (at least in the domain of softwaretools) are not rocket science, andthere is wide agreement about how toapply them. So is it just that we needto spread the message to the newdomains (where the driving force indesign does not come from HCI-enabled software engineers)? Or is itthat there is much more to HCI than isdreamt of by usability practitioners?
These and other issues about thenature and future of HCI in UK sciencewere debated, sometimes hotly, inthe HCI Community Forum organisedby Harold Thimbleby, on 17th and18th April (see report on page 4 ofthis issue). When listening to JaredSpool’s Michaelson lecture in Edin-burgh on 7th April I was struck againby the stark contrast between thesimplicity of the message, and thereluctance to put it into practice. Youcould not really believe that some ofthe web site examples Jared showedhad been ‘designed’ in any sense atall — especially one case with whitetext on a white background. (I guessthe perpetrators would class this asan HTML coding bug.)
The most impressive, and redolent,finding Jared reported was hisrediscovery (in the web context) thatspeed doesn’t matter — usersconsistently rate the most usable sitesas the fastest, irrespective of theactual measured speed — and makinga bad site faster doesn’t help at all.But apart from the detailed andpainstaking research behind thisfinding (which like all such resultsbecomes less surprising the more youthink about it, so that you finish up
convincing yourself that it’s obviousthat it must be so), Jared’s coreadvice to web designers was — watchsome users trying to use your site forthe purpose for which it is intended.Even one user is better than none.
Why does this seem so hard? I guessit’s the old ego thing — everyoneclings to the belief that they knowhow to do it, and are sure they canget it right first time. Graphic design-ers are just as prone to this asprogrammers — maybe even more so.And in any case, even if designerswould like to do some user testing,they are forced to move on — oncethe site is up and running, the projectis deemed to be complete.
Since we are in the mood fornostalgia, I want to share with yousome memories which on the face ofit have nothing whatever to do withHCI — though I will try to make theleap later. On a sunny afternoon inspring 1976 I drove to Prestwickairport, south of Glasgow, to releasefrom customs three boxes shippedfrom Bell Telephone Company — forwhich my department (CS at Glasgow)had paid the princely sum of $300.Inside were three RK05 single-platterdisk cartridges (5 Mb each capacity if Iremember rightly) and some printedmanuals. This was Unix version 6.Within a few days my highly giftedcolleagues Bill Findlay and EmrysJones had installed the system on ourPDP-11 (that actually took only halfan hour, as opposed to half a day forthe RSX-11D system — the D was fordinosaur — we had been using up tothen), rewritten the terminal driver,and written a driver for our third-party external disk drive, and wewere supporting up to 10 simultan-eous users, with 48K bytes of memory,and a processor which I guess (thoughI never thought in those terms inthose days) had a clock speed of lessthan a tenth of a Megahertz.
It is no exaggeration to say thatthe effect, not just on our depart-ment, but also on CS throughout theUK, was revolutionary. By the end ofthe seventies, every university CSdepartment in the UK, except one,was using Unix. (The one exception
was Edinburgh. The head of depart-ment there was Sidney Michaelson —in whose honour the Michaelsonlecture series was instigated — whotook against Unix for reasons that Iwas never clear about. It is ironic thatit was as a result of attending aseminar given by Jeff Tansley, then alecturer at Edinburgh, that I initiatedmoves to obtain Unix at Glasgow. Youcould argue I guess that thesubsequent rise to pre-eminence ofthe CS department at Edinburgh underSidney’s leadership was in no smallpart due to his refusal to have any-thing at all to do with Unix — butthat’s another story!
It is common among HCI people tomock Unix for its command lineinterface and cryptic, hard toremember, command names (like ‘ls’,‘pwd’, ‘cat’, etc.) But Unix wasdesigned for programmers — and forprogrammers it was (and is) a dream.And even if you are not aprogrammer, you can see beauty in itsdesign — that’s I believe the real keyto its appeal.
As with Java twenty years later,there was nothing really new in Unix.But the bringing together of a fewsimple but very powerful ideas, in away where each complemented andreinforced the others, was quitebreathtaking. To mention just a few:a hierarchical file system, implement-ing the abstraction of a file as a(potentially arbitrarily large andexpansible) sequence of bytes; regularexpressions; the operating system as avirtual machine whose instructionscould be invoked by any program;and, last but not least, the idea of‘information appliances’ thirty yearsbefore Don Norman invented the term— small programs that did just onething, and which could be strungtogether in a sequence (a pipeline infact) to perform more complexoperations.
I hesitate to suggest that what wasmade manifest in the design of Unixwas the power of patterns — suffice itto say that I witnessed again andagain, with colleagues and studentsalike, that moment of epiphany whenyou have to say: that’s just so right!
Vet’s ColumnThe Joy of X (In which Alistair Kilgour finally gets a Macintosh to be as user-friendly as Unix. Ed.)
a regular feature to help you rediscover the lessons of yesteryear
19Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
We never thought, mind you, in thoseheady days, that in 2002 there wouldstill be nothing better around.
And that’s my flimsy justificationfor mentioning the history — Irecently installed OS X on my iMacand started up a terminal window,and immediately I was transportedback in time to the occasion 26 yearsago when I first sat down at a VDUand logged in to Unix. The old com-mands work just as they used to —‘man’, ‘cd’, ‘pwd’ and all the rest —even ‘ed’, which invokes the original,world’s most cryptic editor — they areall in there. It was like finding theskeleton of a long-lost friend beneaththe glamorous facade of a newacquaintance. Two relatively newcommands which I was delighted tofind as well were ‘javac’ and ‘java’ —the Java compiler and run-timesystem are built in, even if you don’tinstall the developer’s toolkit whichcomes bundled with OS X.
Then there’s the new ‘aqua’ lookand feel of the OS X interface. At firstit seems a bit chunky, and the anima-tion gimmicks become irritating afterthe first ten minutes or so (and canmostly be easily switched off), but itdoes grow on you, and after a fewdays you become sure that this ismost comprehensive and convincingexample of an interaction ‘style’ thatApple or anyone else have producedfor a long time. (Mind you I have toadmit I have not used or even seenWindows XP, so maybe I am missingsomething even better there.) It’s notjust look and feel — it’s thecombination of extremely meticulousattention to detail in the graphicdesign, with the complete consistencyof behaviour across all — well most —of the functionality. (The new AddressBook tool is an example to show thatnobody’s perfect — the most puzzlingand frustrating utility for many amoon — definitely a candidate for thehall of shame.)
My second spooky experience whenplaying around with (read empiricallyevaluating) OS X was, after I haddiscovered the presence of the Javacompiler, importing and running somesample Java programs from the M301
OU module I am tutoring — simpleanimations and a ‘pin-ball’ gametaken from Budd’s book (Understand-
ing Object-Oriented Programming
with Java). Lo and behold, thedefault look and feel you get whenyou compile and run a Java programunder OS X is aqua! So anyone candevelop ‘native’ applications for OS Xjust by writing them in Java. Andbecause ‘look and feel’ is dynamicallychangeable in Java, you could ofcourse change it to Motif, or Metal,or, if Microsoft would licence it, toWindows look and feel, at the click ofa mouse button. Conversely, if Applewould licence it you could equallyexperience the aqua look and feel ona Windows machine — but I guess theywill never do that.
In his article last issue AndrewMonk stressed the importance of styleguides in helping uniformity, andreminded us that these are notarbitrary, but represent thedistillation of much research andempirical evaluation. With ‘pluggablelook and feel’ Java now offers theuser a choice, potentially at least,between a range of alternativeinteractive style components. I saycomponents, because style is I thinkwider than ‘look and feel’. There are(at least) two major ways, forexample, in which Windows and MacOS differ (or differed), which gobeyond just ‘look and feel’. The firstis that traditionally the Mac has useda one-button mouse, whereasWindows has always assumed a two-button mouse. However, thatdifference has pretty welldisappeared in practice. Although newMacs are still supplied with a one-button mouse, it is common for usersto replace this pretty smartly with atwo-button (or scrolling) alternative,which is well supported by thesoftware. I have been using a scrolling(two button and wheel) mouse on theMac for several years, and use theright button for all the things I woulduse the right button for on Windows,without even thinking about it. This isan area where Apple have learned alesson from Microsoft, although theyare still a bit coy about advertisingthe fact.
The second difference, which ismore subtle in a way, is the positionof menus on a window. On the Macthe menu bar for the active window isstill at the top of the screen, not atthe top of the window — and only onemenu bar is ever visible. Although OSX has relaxed this a little bit byintroducing window-specific,configurable tool bars, the ‘one andonly one menu bar’ convention is stillthe major potential stumbling blockfor a user transferring from oneenvironment to the other. Personally Imuch prefer the Mac’s uncluttered,unadorned window style, but I havenever owned or used a Mac with alarge screen, and I have observedother users experience quite seriousdifficulties on the Mac because theywere unaware from the subtlechanges in the menu bar, whichapplication owned the currentlyactive window.
My third spooky experience of thepost-Christmas period was runningWindows on a Mac. That is seriouslyweird. Although I have at least avague understanding of how it isdone, it still seems to me like themost powerful kind of black magic.
Connectix, who produce Virtual PC(and there’s even a version forWindows now, so could can run oneflavour of Windows on a virtual PCunder the control of another flavour)have done a wonderful job ofintegrating the two environmentswhile ensuring complete compatibilitywith ‘real’ Windows behaviour. Forexample from Windows on a virtual PCyou can use your installed Macinternet access settings, and your Macprinter and other peripheral drivers.You can have as many virtual harddrives as you like, which expanddynamically as needed so never getfull, and you can increase the amountof RAM allocated to the virtual PC atany time — and you can, if you’re areal masochist, run several versions ofWindows at the same time (Connectixclaim to have got up to 30 on G4).
For the simple tasks I have tried(web browsing, email and wordprocessing) Windows 98 on my 400MHziMac (with, it has to be said, lots of
Alistair Kilgour
20 Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
RAM) seems as fast as Windows 98 onmy real 466MHz (non-Pentium) PC,with the same amount (128Mb) of realmemory as allocated to the VirtualPC.
It’s hard to pin down why beingable to run Windows (at acceptablespeed) on a Mac appears so wonderful— I guess in a way it’s the ultimate in‘pluggable look and feel’. But it’smore than that — there’s somethingquite liberating about using a virtualmachine rather than a real one. Inthis respect, I had to think a bitbefore deciding to install virusprotection software on the virtualversion of Windows. Only when Ireflected that the data I stored on thevirtual PC would be real even if themachine was not, did I decide that onbalance it would be a good idea.
While the design of the OS Xsoftware might be regarded in somequarters as merely an exercise inputting limpid and languorous flesh ona strong and elegant bone structure,there is no doubt that in the physicaldesign of the new iMacs Apple hasonce again showed its flair forproducing design classics, which
would be objects of extreme desireeven if they only ran boring oldWindows. In the combination of thisphysical design with a seductive newlook and feel for the user interface,and an industry-strength Unix kernel,Apple are sure of success — both innew (to them) Unix workstationmarkets, as well as their traditionalcreative application domains,although as so often in the past, theyseem to be in danger of shootingthemselves in the foot by beingunable to come near to produce themachines fast enough to meet thepredictably burgeoning demand.
I guess the HCI conclusion is notjust that design is paramount — we allknow that — but that outstandingdesign is about the integration ofaesthetic appeal, fitness for purpose,reliability and functionality — all thecomponents in fact which constitutethe multiple facets of style. It’stwenty years since the first Macarrived on the scene, and for manyyears afterwards the Mac interfacewas a primary baseline to which laterinnovations were compared, and fromwhich examples were principally
taken, by interface designers,researchers and educators.
Twenty years on we might haveexpected something a bit moreradically different — what we havegot is basically still a 2D interface(with its main features not dramati-cally different from the original), andnow, an underlying operating systemwhose origins go back at least as faras the Xerox roots of the interface.(At least there is now an alternativeto the CRT — whose death has beenpredicted many times in the lasttwenty years — for the display.) Inspite (or maybe because) of the longand distinguished history of its majorconstituents, OS X still marks asignificant step forward (if not quitein the direction we might haveexpected), and in years to come willonce again provide a baseline forcomparison, and a rich source ofexamples, for interactive systemdesigners and educators.
Alistair [email protected]
November produced ‘Echoes’ – PinkFloyd’s Greatest Hits – and Microsoft’snew Windows XP. The silent,presumed defunct, group released itsalbum just before Christmas as astocking filler for anyone who hasn’tjust started university. Polls taken atthe same time state that Travis is thestudent’s new Pink Floyd. And not amoment too soon. The far fromdefunct and never silent Microsoft letWindows XP go just in time to put thedosh in the tills. Nothing speeds upschedules like Father Christmasrevving up his reindeer to the tune of acrotchety computer industry doing aChristmas Future to MS’s XmasPresent.
Oh I remember Floyd. The bandwho produced the hauntingly beauti-ful ‘See Emily Play’ but who couldn’tmanage it quite so nicely when put onstage. The latter day Floyd, torn apartby disagreements found that recordingworked best if they didn’t all turn upat once. The very artificial music –
forerunner of today’s electronicwizardry which takes away even thenecessity to be able to sing – wasproduced in the studio, in splendidisolation. Now, doesn’t that remindyou of computer systems where theuser is separated out from the rest of itjust in case an argument breaks outbetween the software engineers, theHCI people and the productionmanager?
And what a surprise, put it togetherand try to do it in the real world andthe punters boo and the hall getscleared in no time. Computer applica-tions are falling over themselves to doa Gilmour and Walters. They get builtpiecemeal, divorced from reality, eachsection working on its own so thatplaying its own harmony doesn’tinterfere with someone else’s render-ing of theirs. The result is a system thatrequires the memory of an elephant,the constitution of an ox, the hide of arhino and the patience of a slug if theuser is to get anything out of it. Fintan
Culwin might think that you don’tnotice the real nature of an elephantunless it steps on your tootsie but thereal nature of the operating systemquite often hits you a bit higher,though in XP’s case it’s in the pocket aswell.
Although technology is seductivelyenticing, working with it is far fromeasy and it still promises much morethan it delivers and even then at aprice that doesn’t cause nice to springto mind. But until we get real humanehuman computer systems, it is difficultto see how this gap between the realworld and what can be done in the labwill ever be fixed. The people in thelab are technical experts, softwareengineers with complete and breath-taking expertise and control oversoftware but with a vague understand-ing of what real people are like. Theyseem to have a vaguer notion of howoften people can afford to change theircomputer systems nor do they seem to
‘I am not alone in seeing the world through wicked windowsCassandra Hall
21Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
realise what sort of computer systemsmost will be trying to operate.
Real people have real lives and inLondon that seems to translate intobeer to buy, judging from the last twoissues of Interfaces. Although Nielsenmight lament the sort of stuff theychatter on about in the chat rooms, infact, that is the stuff of everydaydiscourse. Very few of even myintelligent and witty friends want torelax by discussing Richard Dawkins’latest theories. They want to talk aboutstuff closer to their hearts: how goodthe beer is, who won at footie andwhat their latest times are when theystagger round the block. The chatrooms echo that reality. They illustratereal people doing real things, even if itis very dull.
As much as I love it, technology, orat least what technologists expect fromtheir users, worries me. The assump-tions we make about what peoplecould and should have stored in theirheads is scary to say the least. But forme, this is part of a greater picture. Thefact that developers act as if people canfill their heads up with meaninglessjunk is reflected elsewhere. We’re asociety fascinated by technicalrecitations of isolated and disparatefacts that make the diaspora lookpositively home-loving.
It’s as if society has turned into amass of Gradgrind wannabes, eachtrying to outdo someone else with afew more useless facts. I’ve long agoabandoned those kind of examinationsthat expect students to learn stuff offby heart. But this doesn’t exactly stopthem from learning a potpourri ofisolated facts – including any typos inthe books that the editorial processhasn’t managed to eradicate. Havingbattled their way through the vagariesof so many computer systems, theyknow the only way forward is to traintheir memories to hold ridiculousoperational detail for the next 40 years.
No wonder no one takes makingsystems invisible seriously. Wemeasure ability, expertise, prowess,intelligence even – by how muchpeople can recall of a computingsystem without resorting to themanual. A guy now tries to impressme with Unix commands whereasbefore he’d have quoted Marvell. Tobe honest, I still favour the ‘tear outpleasures with rough strife’ approachrather than cat yourfile >> myfile pipe
myplace. In any case, I vaguely remem-ber a Draper paper that argued thatthe nature of expertise wasn’t quitelike most of us in HCI insist onarguing that it is. Marvell, on the otherhand, is Marvell even with a Frenchaccent. Hmmm, casting my mind backto IHMHCI, make that, especially witha French accent…
Remembering isolated facts is notsomething we are good at. We arepattern recognisers. We generalise,note idiosyncrasies only when they areso quirky that they make somedemands on our attention, but societyand technology seems to act as if wewant our heads stuffed full ofnonsense. And there’s no need. Thesystem can take care of all that provid-ing we can make the thing bend to ourwill. Finally, the idiotic rote learning offact is trivial, unchallenging, it’ssimply forcing the engine to run as fastas it can without giving it somethingconstructive to do.
At a party, a database expert said:‘You don’t know how easy you have it,in non-technical subjects,’ and wellbrought up that I am, I refrained fromchucking my champagne over him. Aschat-up lines go, it would be a failure. Iadmire the mathematicians using theirformulae and the critics who take Learapart and reassemble it in a way Ididn’t think it would ever go. But thetechnicians reciting facts? Never! Myhistory teacher trying to wean us offlearning isolated facts said that theonly important thing about a date wasto turn up on time. It’s a maxim I’velived my life by.
Invisible, transparent systems: ohyes please. My heart breaks every timeI listen to typical users tell me theirstruggles with a system. And I meantypical users. My friends mightinclude technically astute academicsand software engineers but they’re farfrom typical. I’m talking plumbers,builders, bus drivers, shop assistants,farm workers. I’m talking people whoare too old to have used computers atschool but want to be part of thetechnological revolution. I’m talkingpeople who have better things to dothan waste time struggling withmiscreant technologies.
I’m sick of those clever, cleverstudies we all do that don’t ask realpeople to do real tasks, and don’treflect real world states. Followsomeone home, watch them try to
understand the vagaries of theirmobile phone, their modem, and theirvideo recorder despite the gallons ofink that have been used on it. Andactually folks, surprise, surprise, it’s along way off being usable let alonetransparent and invisible. It’s still therefor its own convenience not ours. Let’snot kid ourselves. When we produceour theoretical underpinnings, we’reunderpinning a tiny minority of thetechnically astute. There are doubtlessa mass of households with operatingsystems that don’t, applications thatcan’t and browsers that won’t.
All the time we carry out oursurvey work within the confines of theuniversity we get a distorted view ofreality. Those of us in the hallowedivory halls of real universities are evenmore out of touch. We think usershave ‘world enough and time’ that realpeople don’t have.
The committee for HCI 2002 saythat only just now can we address theproblems of transparency andinvisibility. But it’s not a moment toosoon. And make that real transparencyand real invisibility – not on-line helpand minimalist manuals. Make itsystems that work for users and notthe other way round. Make ittransparent, invisible, seamless andeffort free. The guys and gals out therehave places to go, monsters to kill andit’s time that we stopped acting like amodern-day Marie Antoinette andtelling them to rtfm. They boughttechnology to save time, not to gobbleup more of it. And at the risk ofsounding like one of those endlessSocialist Worker chants of the ’80s:‘What do we want? Invisibility. Whendo we want it? Now!’
So what’s that to do with WindowsXP? Well, nothing much exceptaccording to Microsoft, Windows XP isa ‘new version of Windows that bringsyour PC to life!’ I knew there was somesort of problem with the operatingsystem I was using but I didn’t realiseit was dead. And that explains XP. Soit’s not Xpensive as some unkindcommentators have suggested butXpired.
22 Interfaces 51 • Summer 2002
1 Minneapolis has the largest shopping mall in the USA; theElephant has the naffest shopping centre in the UK.
2 CHI 2002 in Minneapolis had about 2000 attendees; HCI 2002at the Elephant will have about 300.
3 The London Pride in Minneapolis was served at about 40ºF;the Pride at the Elephant will be served at about 9OºC
4 The Minneapolis mascot is a goose; the Elephant’s mascot isan elephant!
5 The Mississippi river runs through Minneapolis and is 2350miles long; the Thames runs near the Elephant and is 340kilometres long.
6 Stelarc demonstrated body art at CHI 2002; most of the localpopulation at the Elephant disport body art.
7 The CHI 2002 committee had about 55 members; the HCI2002 committee has about 25.
8 The London marathon has about 32,000 runners; the twincities marathon only has 8,500.
9 The HCI chair ran the London Marathon in 4 hours 16 min;neither of the CHI co-chairs entered the twin citiesmarathon.
10 The HCI social events include opera and Shakespeare; the CHIsocial events included a visit to an upmarket shopping mall.
11 The CHI proceedings come in two volumes weighing 4pounds; the HCI proceedings come in three volumes weighing1.5 kilos.
12 The CHI conference bag contained about 25 items including apenlight keyring; the HCI conference bag will contain about10 things including a triangular three-colour highlighter.
13 The CHI logo was a splodge of yellow dots; the HCI logo is anelephant and castle, with an elephant’s bum as analternative.
14 Tutorials at CHI cost up to $1,100 per day; tutorials at HCIcost £160 per day.
15 Workshops at CHI cost $90 per day; workshops at HCI cost£50 per day.
16 CHI had about 500 presentations in about 12 categories; HCIwill have about 100 presentations in about 5 categories.
17 Minneapolis is about 12 hours travelling time from the UK;the Elephant is in the UK.
18 At CHI you had to buy your own lunch; lunch is included atHCI.
19 The CHI conference hotels cost about $200 per night,excluding breakfast; the HCI student residences cost £35 pernight and include a full english.
20 Minneapolis and Mississippi are difficult to spell on yourexpense claims; ‘Lahndan’ and the ‘elepharnt’ are easy tospell.
21 The Minneapolis Vikings football team throw and carry theball more than they kick it; Milwall football team kick theball most of the time.
22 The Minnesota Twins baseball team play a version of roundersat the Minneapolis Stadium; Surrey county cricket club playthe game of the kings at the Oval.
23 There were over 50 student volunteers at CHI; there will beabout 12 at HCI.
24 The HCI chair’s plait is about 25cm long; the CHI co-chairsplaits together were only 0 inches long.
25 A pint of Pride in the George costs £1.90; a pint of Pride inthe Minneapolis Brit Bar costs $5.
CHI2002 contrasted with HCI2002Fintan Culwin (runs amok)
25 things you never knew about Minneapolis and the Elephant (or … is bigger really better?)
Fintan CulwinSouth Bank University and HCI2002 [email protected]
23Interfaces 40 • Spring 1999
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2P
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HCI Executive contact listInteracting with Computers editorDianne MurrayTel: +44(0) 208 943 3784Fax: +44(0) 208 943 3377Mobile: +44(0) 7960 426581Email: [email protected]
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