Bill Buxton: the CHI community’s Renaissance Scientist

The big name at this year’s CHI was arguably Bill Buxton: long-time human-centred design guru; plenary keynote speaker; Principal Researcher at Microsoft and this year’s CHI Lifetime Achievement Award winner. Despite having a book to promote, it’s perhaps characteristic of Buxton that both his talks at CHI 08 were entirely original and introduced new material to an audience with high expectations.

Buxton’s unifying theme across both his talks and press briefings was the meaning of good design and ways to achieve it. He describes technological gadget development as being permanently stuck in a ‘gold rush’ mentality, whereby the demand for new devices and the excitement generated by novelty is so high that thoughtful design and a civilised pace of development are neither necessary nor desirable – for the manufacturers, at least. It’s only now, he suggests, that settlements are appearing at the frontiers of technology and the impact of good design – Apple’s products, Nintendo gaming gadgets – is making a visible beneficial difference to sales and sustainability.

The way we perceive gadgets and designs is critical too. The radio, he suggests, is a browser every bit as much as Internet Explorer is. Essentially passive, it allows you to browse different frequencies and bookmark your favourites. The multifunction mobile phone /PC is much like the Swiss army knife: up to a point it’s fantastically useful; add one too many features and it becomes too big, too fiddly and just too hard to use. Getting design right, he says, requires the input of multiple experts, and crucially, each one is essential, but not one of them can do it alone. Buxton confirms that Microsoft is reviewing and rebuilding its approach to design, making cultural changes through value changes, which include a greater focus on openness and an emphasis on integrating all corporate and professional roles within a design-aware ethos.

Buxton’s first talk, in partnership with Saul Greenberg, introduced the notion that usability evaluation can be harmful if naively done ‘by rule’ rather than ‘by thought’. Too early in the cycle and it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. Applied to too radical an innovation, and the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision. If done to validate an academic prototype, it may incorrectly suggest a design’s scientific worthiness rather than offer a meaningful critique of how it would be adopted and used in everyday practice. If done without regard to how cultures adopt technology over time, then today's reluctant reactions by users will forestall tomorrow's eager acceptance. The choice of evaluation methodology – if any – must arise from and be appropriate for the actual problem or research question under consideration.

The closing plenary was different again – and so original that it was just a few hours finished by the time Buxton began. An inspiring discussion of humanity in a technological age, the future of technology and the huge contribution which the HCI community can make, it’s worth reading this excellent account
here, including commentary from Bill Buxton himself (with thanks to Kevin Arthur for bringing it to my attention).

Passwords that are Simple - and Safe
Source: MIT Technology Review, 29 July 2010
 
Researchers at Microsoft have come up with a way to create easy-to-remember passwords without making a system more vulnerable to hackers.

Coercing people into a Brave New digital World
Source: Spiked, 27 July 2010
 
Does a government-backed campaign to get the entire UK adult population online threaten to make cyber slaves of us all?

iPhone 4 one month on – A user experience and functionality success, despite antenna issues
Source: Webcredible, 26 July 2010
 
Webcredible Senior Consultant, Abid Warsi suggests that the impressive functionality and user experience of the iPhone 4 is enough to overcome the widely reported technical issues, thus proclaiming the device a big success.

Darwin City Council Website - Australia’s Most Usable!
Source: Loop11, 24 July 2010
 
Darwin City Council came out on top in a recent website usability study of Australia's capital city councils. The aim was to discover which of the six council websites was the most user friendly and usable.

Digital Design Jobs first to experience Growth
Source: UN, 23 July 2010
 
The marketing and design industry in the UK is seeing strong signs of renewed confidence, according to the new European Market Eye report from the industry’s specialist recruitment consultancy, Aquent.

Usability at a Glance
Source: usability-ed, 22 July 2010
 
Something interesting and useful to print out and stick on your wall.

Google may know your Desires before You do
Source: New Scientist, 21 July 2010
 
In future, your Google account may know your birthday and anniversaries, consumer gadget preferences, preferred hobbies and pastimes, even favourite foods. It will also know where you are.

Closing the Usability Gap between Enterprise Applications and Consumer Web Applications
Source: Integrated Solutions for Retailers, 20 July 2010
 
New White Paper on Workforce Management and the increasingly ancient software which controls it.

Collect Words, not just Numbers with Feedback Analytics
Source: CMS Wire, 19 July 2010
 
Tracking visitors’ behaviors online can help us understand how customers use a site - but what if you could actually ask each individual a question? That’s what Kampyle aims to do with its feedback analytics tools.

Back to the Future...
Source: ZDNet, 17 July 2010
 
Always a popular sport, comparing the PC with the motor industry is as relevant as ever.