HCI 2007: Jared Spool on Usability - It works in Practice, but does it work in Theory?

Jared M Spool, CEO and Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering, was Keynote Speaker at the recent HCI 2007 conference in Lancaster. He spoke to UsabilityNews about HCI research and practice; professional identity; and the 10,000 new jobs we’ll be trying to fill over the next few years.


UN: Jared, is academia making a valuable contribution to the development of practical and commercial tools, or is it all a bit blue sky?

JS: There’s nothing wrong with blue sky! Academia is focused on the HCI problem space rather than specific commercial questions and that’s how it should be. We can’t always see the relevance of what academics are doing in the lab for three, five, fifteen years or even longer. Ten years ago we were listening to papers on the sociology of strange things called avatars and the usability of mobile interfaces for gadgets that didn’t exist. Now Second Life and Blackberrys are an important reality, where that knowledge makes a vital contribution.

Sure, there is a gap between academic research and applied work, and practitioners understandably get impatient with a lack of good tools and techniques. What we need to address this is more applied labs funded by commercial organisations. The work of Bell Labs, Xerox and Microsoft is still the bedrock of lots of what we do. Commercial labs don’t have to do major, ground-breaking stuff, they just need to focus on providing good answers to the immediate questions the tech industries are asking. In the UK the BBC is doing some of the best work in this area but they don’t talk much about it.


UN: I’ll see what I can do about that. Jared, ‘usability’ is becoming a big issue in a much wider range of applications and industries. Is that a good thing or does it dilute our professional identity?

JS: Look at it like this: Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, recently stated that user experience has become the number one priority within her organisation. eBay is a big organisation. Other big organisations are making similar statements – and it’s not just the marketing people, it’s the CEOs and CIOs. This is a good thing. But if we translate that kind of statement into specific intentions, if we work out the costs and the recruitment figures, the reality is that we can expect to see an additional ten thousand user experience and usability vacancies globally over the next two to three years. As a profession we’re simply not prepared for that.

So where will these people come from? The reality is that they’ll come from somewhere – probably other, similar disciplines where a lot of people think that usability is easy or that they already know it. This could be good if we gain a lot of new usability professionals, but it’s not such a good thing if more defined professions simply absorb our knowledge and call it their own. If you look at Rolf Molich’s research, it seems like we’re not even sure whether usability is a craft or a science. What is clear is that we need to compare notes more often, tighten up what constitutes a technique, develop reference points that we can all agree on.

On the other hand you can do great HCI work by dispensing with long lists of heuristics and just follow mine instead: 1. don’t do anything stupid; 2. don’t do anything clever.


UN: So, what are the core skills that a good HCI practitioner needs today? Who, or what, should we be?

JS: My son wants to be a magician. Actually he’s pretty good. He comes home and tries out, let’s say, the ‘Anderson tear-and-restore’ trick. What struck me was, he knows the names. He knows the history. That is a problem we have in HCI – too many practitioners don’t know the history of the methods they use, they don’t know what’s gone before or why that particular technique has been adopted in preference to any other technique. Too little of what we do has been effectively documented – and that means we don’t know about what doesn’t work any better than we know what does. The result is an awful lot of repetition, with smart people trying things they think are new, only to discover they were tried and discarded years before. And when something does work, we don’t know why because we can’t find the documentation and we end up in this situation where we’re asking, ‘it works in practice, but does it work in theory?’

Reinventing the wheel slows us down and it happens because we’re very multi-disciplinary so we don’t have a clear sense of our own history. Our pioneers are mostly cognitive psychologists and even ergonomists, and although what they did seems ancient to us today, the fact is people haven’t changed that much. The core skills we need today are the same as they were then – some psychology, some technology, some business. Pretty vague. What’s more important is some history, so we can consolidate what we are and what we know, and move forward.


UN: Jared, you travel widely – do you see any differences in attitudes towards usability research and practice in different countries?

JS: No, not really. There may have been in past years but the internet has globalised our knowledge and many of our approaches. I see similar levels of enthusiasm, awareness and difficulty across most of the places I visit. In the UK I do notice that people are generally far more sensitive to accessibility issues, which is a good thing, but it also leads to a lot of frustration for designers and users who have to take so many demands into account. But it’s an area where we have a lot to contribute.


UN: I could have called you at your desk in Boston from my desk in London, but somehow we’re getting more done face to face. Can usability work really change that? Can technologically-mediated communication ever be as good as the real thing?

JS: I don’t see one as trying to replace the other. For example, the conferences I attend usually have a turnout somewhere between 300 and 600 people. When UIE runs virtual seminars, we get something like 25,000 people across the world. Chances are that some people attend both – look at the growth in size and number of UPA chapters across the US with their own local conference: they’re clearly fulfilling a need. Face to face communication, whether in an office or at a conference, provides something you can’t get any other way. Virtual seminars, research journals, small meetings and big conferences all have a place. Fact is, humans like multimodal experiences. Usability work can definitely improve the quality of our technology-based interactions but we will always find a way to meet and connect in other ways, and that’s ok. It’s what we do.

UN: Thank you, Jared.

Associated Link: User Interface Engineering

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