Between a Rock and an Interface

By Bill Thompson


One of the most wonderful things about spending a lot of my day online is that there is always something interesting to read when work gets boring or I'm waiting for the coffee to brew. And I don't even have to go looking for things to read, as the Bloglines news aggregator brings the latest postings from the ninety-two websites I'm most interested in to one place, checking their RSS feeds and managing them for me.

The serendipitous nature of the web took me to BoingBoing, a group blog that calls itself a "directory of wonderful things" which is, although sometimes deeply annoying, always interesting. And that in turn led to a paper on the Scientific Commons website, a two-year old doctoral thesis by a researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands in which he reports on his experiments comparing different forms of computer interface in problem-solving. It is one of the most interesting examinations of current computer use and the potential downsides of our increasing reliance on screen-based interaction with information systems that I've seen, although of course I would never have come across it without those same information systems.

Psychologist Christof van Nimwegen is interested in effective user interfaces for computer systems, and distinguishes between systems that require users to internalise the knowledge needed to carry out a task and those that externalise it in the form of wizards, prompts, menus and the other elements we associate with modern computers. Van Nimwegen's work is important on many levels, and anyone designing user interfaces should read it as it provides experimental evidence to support hunches we have all had for many years about the depth of learning that different interfaces encourage.

It is also the sort of basic psychological research that we desperately need in the Web 2.0 world where major sites like Facebook are constantly being redesigned on the basis of little real understanding of how people engage with their computers.

Vast amounts of work have been done in our attempt to understand human psychology, and the investigation of how we can use computer systems for co-operative work has been going on for decades. Yet few of today's user interface designers seem to make use of the things we already know. The research carried out by psychologists is important because it involves proper experiments, with control groups, null hypotheses and statistical analysis - all the things that focus groups and usability labs don't have.

Making use of the results in the real world is not easy, but it is very worthwhile, despite the temptations to skip the hard stuff and just get on and build the website or launch the computer.

Associated Link: Between a rock and an interface

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