October 3, 2004
HCI Comments I
I will post short responses to my reading assignments in HCI here from time to time. Most will not summarize the articles but rather take them as a starting point for various tangential thoughts.
As We May Think, Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945
Bush, with striking insight, predicts that issues of knowledge management, meta-knowledges so to speak, will become the most important tasks to solve in the future. Key functions that science should enable are efficient extension, storage and consultation of the record of human knowledge. While enabling technologies are envisioned, the archival properties of these technologies are not addressed. Will his microfilm still be legible after spending 100 years on shelf? This problem is also underrated today - see the recent discovery that many CD-Rs will de-laminate and disintegrate after a few years.
Most of Bush's contraptions are directly bound to mechanical machines or chemical processes. The abstraction of the function of a particular device (think software) from the underlying architecture (think general purpose computer) has not taken place yet.
The Xerox Star: A Retrospective, Jeff Johnson, Teresa L. Roberts, William Verplank, David C. Smith, Charles Irby, Marian Beard, Kevin Mackey, IEEE Computer, September 1989, pp. 11-27
Through careful planning, a strong task-based focus, and meticulous attention to detail, the STAR team anticipated and introduced many lasting design features of office software systems. Part of the success was due to the developer's choice to not just rely on their own judgments but to leverage external expertise - graphic designers were hired and user studies were conducted. The article itself situates the STAR system very well in the general context of user interface research at the time, showing its lineage, but also concurrent competing technologies. As for criticism, it was uncanny how many of my immediate concerns about the system while reading the paper were acknowledged and addressed by the authors just a few pages later. There is the danger of pushing the desktop metaphor too far - the life of data is not like the life physical objects. Only allowing the user to act upon data in ways that have correspondences in the real world is limiting. There is also a problem of custom-tailoring a product too rigidly to an a priori model - what happens if the user's requirement profile changes - maybe as a function of becoming more computer proficient and reliant?
User Technology: From Pointing to Pondering, Stuart K. Card and Thomas P. Moran, ACM Conference on The history of personal workstations, 1986, pp. 183-98
Card and Moran outline a detailed "applied science of the user" - user behavior and processing capacity is rigorously studied. An interesting question at the level of their "conceptual interface": how can we as system designers/developers ensure that the user will have a reasonably accurate mental model of the system? The authors also point out the difficulty of aggregating scattered individual research studies from, e.g., psychology, into a unified computational model of human user behavior. An assumption is made that the user acts rationally to fulfill the given tasks. Is this always the case? When does irrationality come into play? Can we model it? Problematic on a technical level: repetitive use of terms that are overloaded with multiple, imprecise meanings in popular usage ("task") makes it hard to follow the flow of the argument at times.
Posted by Bjoern Hartmann at October 3, 2004 6:57 AM