Caroline's Corner: What have the Romans done for us?

This month saw the highlight of the British HCI Group's year, and an important event for everyone involved in usability in the UK: the BHCIG annual conference. Regular readers of Usabilitynews.com will know that this year's conference was held at Bath University and was the usual successful mingling of academics, practitioners, students and others with a professional or personal interest in usability, user-centred design and HCI.

And over in my corner... well, unfortunately I wasn't able to make it to the conference properly as I had various client commitments. So the event for me was a little 'mini-conference': the afternoon of Industry Day, and the conference dinner.

Let's do the technical bit first. I was lucky enough to be part of the session on 'e-commerce'. Shailey Minocha and Liisa Dawson presented "Social and Cultural Obstacles to the (B2C) E-Commerce Experience" - a dry title for a thrilling moment for me: the first time that I'd heard a presentation of full-strength academic work in HCI that was paying as much attention to the overall user experience as to the details of the human-computer interaction. It was so enthralling to hear of co-operation between academics specialising in the management aspects of a problem and academics specialising in the interaction aspects. They have ideas that will appeal to both the techies and the managers. If this sounds a little less cynical than the usual 'Corner' - well, I really don't hear about much work like this. If you do then please let me know.

Angela Sasse presented on behalf of Jens Rieglesberger who had been lured to Microsoft in Redmond for the summer. The paper "Trust at First Sight? A Test of Users’ Ability to Identify Trustworthy e-Commerce Sites" (Authors: Jens Riegelsberger, Angela Sasse & John D. McCarthy) was a follow-up to a study presented at CHI this year. Their first paper investigated whether including more or less trustworthy photos, with appropriate captions, adds to or detracts from the overall trustworthiness of a website. This follow-up looked at whether users could identify 'good' or 'bad' vendors (as judged by well-known rating services such as epinions) based on their exploration of the vendors' sites and whether inclusion of a photo affected this. And their conclusions? I'm going to tantalise you and say 'read the papers'. All right, I admit that the papers haven't made it off my guilt pile yet and I hesitate to summarise something I haven't actually read. But for anyone working in e-commerce, these are definitely 'must read'.

After these two interesting and highly academically respectable presentations, I did my bit on forms. Fortunately the audience enjoyed my jokes - not wonderful jokes, but hey, forms aren't that funny. (For anyone who missed it, please email me if you'd like a copy of my slides). I was honoured that Professor Pat Wright, the hero of forms research, was in the audience.

We adjourned for a well-earned cup of tea in the exhibition tent, followed by a keynote presentation by Gordon Smillie of Microsoft. A long client call meant that I missed the majority of the keynote so I found the advertisement at the end completely bemusing. Serves me right for not being there.

And now to the Romans. The conference reception and dinner were held at the Pump Rooms in Bath. First we descended to the Roman level, where the ancient baths have been beautifully floodlit. Despite my confident manner I too find it somewhat daunting at those conference moments when we have to circulate and 'network'. Thank heavens for the Romans. At points where the conversation lulled, or joining a new group seemed a little difficult, there were the baths to look at and the description boards to read. Was that why the conversation seemed extra lively, or the wine?

For the dinner itself, we ascended to the recently refurbished Georgian Pump Room. There was the usual unseemly rush as people tried to make congenial groups at the unreserved tables. I wish conferences could organise this better. Couldn't we sign up in advance so that we knew who we were dining with? Also, with round tables of 8 and the noise created by a big room filled with people talking, I found it impossible to hear those on the other side of the table from me. Maybe we should be encouraged to swap seats after each course? Despite these whinges, I found my dining companions fascinating and had trouble tearing myself away from the coffee and chocs when the time came to depart.

And finally: a word of praise for the speeches. A few years ago I went to a conference dinner where the speeches could best be described as 'agonising'. They went on for ages and were packed with name-dropping of people I'd never heard of, most of whom seemed to have retired. The speeches at this year's dinner were exactly the opposite: to the point, and very, very short. Excellent.

See you next year in Leeds.

As usual, Caroline welcomes any comments or suggestions about this article.

Caroline Jarrett
Independent usability consultant specialising in forms, questionnaires and data capture.

Effortmark Ltd
w. www.effortmark.co.uk
e. caroline.jarrett@effortmark.co.uk
p. +44 (0)1525 370379

Associated Link: Effortmark

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