Jakob Nielsen - Advances in Human-computer Interaction

Editorial Board

John M. Carroll, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Kate Ehrlich, Lotus Development Corporation

Steven Feiner, Columbia University

James D. Foley, Georgia Institute of Technology

Jim Hollan. University of New Mexico

Wendy A. Kellogg, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Robert E. Kraut, Carnegie Mellon University

Gitte Lindgaard. Telecom Australia Research Laboratories

Allan MacLean. Rank Xerox Research Centre, Cambridge, England

Thomas W. Malone, MIT Sloan School of Management

Marilyn Mantei. University of Toronto

Tim Oren. CompuServe

Janice Anne Rohn, SunSoft

Gitta Salomon, IDEO Product Design

Chris Schmandt, MIT Media Lab

Gurminder Singh, National University of Singapore

Gillian Crampton Smith, Royal College of Art, England

Akikazu Takeuchi, Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Japan

Tandy Trower, Microsoft

Hirotada Ueda, Hitachi Central Research Laboratory, Japan

Patricia Wright, MRC Applied Psychology Unit, England

Juergen Ziegler, Fraunhofer Institute IAO, Germany

Chapters 1-4 fall into the category of surveys of important subfields of HCI. First, Kellogg and Richards survey the human factors of information on the Internet. The Internet has received so much press coverage in the last two years that I am sure everybody knows what it is. Interestingly, most newspaper articles about the Internet include some statement lamenting the "cryptic commands and codes" necessary to use it. A first, naive, analysis might lead one to believe that graphical user interfaces would solve this problem by hiding the command names from the user. But as most HCI specialists know, GUIs can have usability problems too, especially when they are retrofitted onto a system with problematic semantics. Thus, would-be developers of the "information superhighway" would be well advised to read (and heed) chapter 1.

Chapters 2 and 3 survey current hot user interface technologies. Bederson and Druin discuss computer-augmented environments, which are a somewhat different take on enhanced interactions than virtual reality with its cumbersome helmets. In chapter 3, Isbister and Layton survey the use of agents as another way of enriching the user's experience compared with the tedious sequence of commands needed in traditional systems. I particularly want to highlight the subtitle of Bederson and Drum's chapter, "New Places to Learn, Work, and Play." All three applications of computers are important for HCI and all can benefit from increased attention to usability. Indeed, because the majority of computer sales now go into the home, home computing, entertainment interfaces, and children's interfaces will probably dominate in the future. Most HCI work (including, admittedly, much of this book) still focuses on use of computers in the workplace, but designing good interfaces for shooting aliens in videogames will soon become a bigger business than designing good interfaces for shooting Soviets for the Defense Department. Even people who prefer nonviolent games probably agree that this is a positive development.

The most classic trap in user interface design is to assume that the user is like yourself. Because most developers (at least so far) have tended to be young, mathematically inclined hotshots, there are definite dangers to this assumption. To increase the sales of computers to a broader audience than other hackers, we have to design with the customers' characteristics in mind. One important market consists of disabled users and Bergman and Johnson discuss ways of making computers more accessible to these customers in chapter 4.

Chapters 5-7 belong to the second category of project reports. In chapter 5, Hunter describes a project at Hewlett Packard to design a pen-based interface to a groupware system, thus combining two important subfields of HCI. The fact that interesting systems like the one described by Hunter invariably draws from multiple fields is an important lesson that should cause some reflection in this age of specialization. Multidisciplinarity is a traditional concern of human factors people, and both Graham and Dye and Turner, Lee, and Atwood comment on the collaboration between usability specialists and developers in their chapters. Graham and Dye describe ways of using information about user needs in the design of Microsoft applications that typically reach a very large market of diverse users and Turner, Lee, and Atwood describe usability work on a much more narrow (but economically important) system for NYNEX telephone company operators. It is instructive to compare these two chapters and their lessons with respect to usability needs for the two main types of software development: sale on the open market and in-house use. A general observation across all three project report chapters is that results, methods, and concepts from HCI research influenced the development of real systems. One often hears HCI researchers complain that system development disregards the research in the field. Of course, it is true that no HCI practitioner can read even a small fraction of the 2043 papers and books published in a year, and it is also true that lack of infrastructure and other practical constraints keep many new technologies from being used in current products. However, the better and more relevant parts of HCI research definitely do not go to waste.