Russell Reflects: The Usability of CHI

In the world of HCI and interaction design, you always have a major disadvantage when going public. Ask any website design company, for example: everything you do has to be perfect, and so any small problems are highlighed. Your home site has to be fantastic; fast, interesting, just the right mixture of graphical zing and snappy, readable content, and so on. Good is not good enough.

It's the same with HCI conferences: or should I say, CHI conferences. It may be that some of the issues that came up were only noticed by the sensitive CHI types - though some may have been wider problems. You can decide...

One of the biggest changes that CHI 2004 made was not to provide paper copies of the proceedings to the participants, instead handing out CDs with the papers on. Since most people had brought lightweight laptops, without CD drives, these were not really readable, and anyway there is still no mechanism for 'flicking' though proceedings when they're on the screen. This caused huge problems, in two ways. Firstly, the duration of the conference is one of the only times that people have the time to read the papers: in a less than fascinating talk, you can skim through a number of more relevant research findings and get right up to date with the field. Removing this option has meant that many people, myself included, haven't really seen much more of the current state of the art than the sessions we attended.

And this is the second problem - you need information in order to choose which of the many parallel sessions to attend, which you get from a flick though the papers. Without being able to do that, we had to choose from a few line abstract, and as a result made, shall we say, some sub-optimal choices. I don't believe the work at CHI was of substantially lower quality than in previous years - but I went to many sessions than were much worse than I expected. This is, I think, down to my poor choice rather than the intrinsic quality of a session, but for that I blame the lack of information on which to make that choice.

The venue itself was interesting: a central area with lecture rooms off it in all directions, up and down levels as well. With signage that was almost invisible, no logic to the labelling of rooms, and student volunteers who were as lost as the delegates, it made running between talks in different parts of the building an interesting experience - more the chance to meet with new people than an opportunity to get from place to place effectively.

Finally, it doesn't take much to keep conference goers happy: some interesting talks, a place to chat, and coffee. Food is good too. The place to chat was provided, but coffee was in short supply, tea harder to get, and food provisioning was dire. A couple of small sandwich bars, nothing much else nearby, and all shut on the Sunday when many people were attending workshops gave people a very poor impression.

Still worth attending though: lots of chat, a few good sessions attended, a decent workshop, the sights of Vienna.....

Russell Beale University of Birmingham

Associated Link: Russell's blog

All change at the top for System Concepts
Source: System Concepts Ltd, 3 July 2009
 
Leslie Fountain has been promoted to joint Managing Director of leading usability consultancy System Concepts.

Life in UCD immortalised in fiction: you couldn't make it up
Source: UN, 2 July 2009
 
Sarah Herman's fictitious book on life in a user-centred design company has hit the shelves and The Guardian's book pages...

Interfaces Magazine - Issue 79: The Education Issue
Source: Interaction Group, 1 July 2009
 
The latest issue of Interfaces is now available as a free download from the Interaction Website.

Two new Behavioural research Tools from Noldus
Source: UN, 30 June 2009
 
Tool updates make on-site behavioural data collection easier.

Cell Phones that Listen and Learn
Source: MIT Technology Review, 29 June 2009
 
New software tracks a user's behavior by monitoring everyday sounds.

Top Six Don’ts for Usability Testing
Source: FutureNow Inc., 27 June 2009
 
Six tips for creating quality usability tests to ensure useful feedback from testers.

Usability: ‘Lovely software. But I can’t work it’
Source: FT.com, 26 June 2009
 
In a recent survey by Global Graphics, 77 per cent of office workers estimate they lose up to one hour a week because business software is difficult to use.

And what do you do?
Source: Dexo Design, 25 June 2009
 
How do you describe your job role? Here are the results of a recent 'Preferred UX/UI Title' Poll.

Most Doctors cite Usability as critical to Electronic Health Record Adoption
Source: TMCNet, 24 June 2009
 
It's all about 'meaningful use'.

Glossy monitors look good but can hurt
Source: QUT, 23 June 2009
 
A new advisory cites research which suggests high gloss monitors make users sit awkwardly.