CHI 2003: Opening Plenary Compares On and Off-line Media

The 2003 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Fort Lauderdale opened this month with an explanation of the three special themes being addressed: Emotion, e-Learning and Mass Communication and HCI. 'Be shocked, learn and then tell all your friends,' quipped co-chair Gilbert Cockton of the University of Sunderland.

He then introduced Neil Budde, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and now media consultant, who addressed the last of the three special themes. He likened the intersection of old and new publishing to steering a sailboat – with two very different media, the air and the water, to contend with. Traditional media provides the ballast and the stability, but lacks sensitivity to its audiences, he said.

The idea ten years ago that an HCI specialist would be needed at the WSJ would have been ridiculous, but 'it is time to develop a human-centred focus to all our media', he told delegates.

A key issue he identified in working with products that offered the same or similar content across different media was the recognisability of content in different contexts. Initially, he said, no one could see the importance of using the same headlines in the paper and on the online version. Research showed that people would read the paper and then go online to save, print or send on a copy of the story. They would enter keywords but either would not get or would not recognise the story they were looking for if it was named differently. Subtleties like these went beyond interface design to an understanding of how the two products interacted in users’ lives.

Two further points he made were illuminating. First, he said that the site would have been designed quite differently if the service were free – the WSJ is one of the few newspapers that has found a model for selling its wares on the Web. This made the point that design was more than ease-of-use, it was about targeting for function.

And he also briefly touched upon the consequent design of the 'free tour' that markets the online service at the site itself. Use of this feature was shallow, he said, but he would like to know more about how to organise it best as a promotional tool.

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