Ben Shneiderman on the fifth edition of "Designing the User Interface"

By Ann Light


We are sitting at a well-known chain of restaurants in Boston and Ben Shneiderman, founder of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, is running his credit card through a portable terminal. The process of paying with the device takes several sequences to complete: Ben alternates between scrutinising the screen and the array of buttons. This being the United States of America, the terminal offers you the option to add 15%, 18% or 20% service or choose an amount of your own. I am struck by several things, not least the way that technology is made to fit into the local culture (or economy) by little touches such as this one. But mostly I am struck by the fact that when Ben first hit the stands with his HCI bible, Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction, devices such as this were no more than a dream. Indeed, even the fourth edition of the book - which reached the reader in early 2004 - could only hint at the impact of wifi. But the fifth edition is launched and wireless technology and design for ecommerce are staple features.

It may seem unwarranted to talk about the fifth edition of a book. But the new version, as the blurb puts it, has: ‘a balanced emphasis on mobile devices, Web and desktop platforms’ and exists in a very different world from the one in which Ben began work as a computer scientist. As his negotiations with his publisher have resulted in an update approximately every five years since the launch of the original back in 1987, a review of the book is a history of interaction design for modern times. As Ben puts it: “In that early book we were talking about the users being programmers, medical specialists, air traffic controllers, sophisticated professionals and the glimmer of personal computers and word processing was already filtering in, of course, but here we are, more than 20 years later, and the progress from a few million users to a few billion users is a staggering and dramatic historical transformation.”

For instance: “We’ve worked very hard to tell the history of user-generated content and the amazing story of YouTube, which - in three years - has become number three on the Web after Yahoo and Google and the fact that high school kids can edit and post videos and have millions of viewers. When I was describing that in one of my classes, a student put his hand up and said: ‘oh yeah, we did that, we have two and a half million’. We showed the class his video that had become very popular: a parody of a Macintosh commercial.”

And it is a sign of the times that we do not even pause to consider that he can show a Web-based video to the class, or that computers have become so culturally embedded that a parody of an advert for one can attract a major following.
We talk a little about the form of the book. Although a Ben himself is a happy user of the Kindle electronic bookreader, Ben’s fifth edition is still a book. What does that say about access, usability and our progress in media over the years?

“A book is an intellectual idea that is in part shaped by the technology of paper and page turning, but the fifth edition will also be an electronic book; it will have components on the Web; two chapters are already available free on the Web; there’s a web-based companion site that helps instructors and students with exercises, questions and slide-decks. So I still have a great affection for paper books and they are an effective technology actually (they’re compact, portable, easy-to-read, low power consumption, etc, etc...) but they are not searchable and there are a lot of ways that electronic books have advantages. We are learning about all of those issues.”

So, it has become a hybrid of the kind that we might expect from an HCI specialist – with many ways to approach it and an exploitation of the different benefits.

The professor hasn’t ceased evolving either. Starting out with a thesis on databases, he changed his focus to human-computer interaction in the early 80s. A 1983 key work introduces the now-ubiquitous idea of ‘direct manipulation’ as a means of giving users enough but not too much control over their interfaces with technology. Since then he has appealed repeatedly for user control in a simple visible form and done much to make it a reality as tools changed. His name is synonymous with some striking information visualisation techniques.

Now in his 60s, Ben is still advocating with the same passion and mission but in a slightly different arena. For the last couple of years he has been sitting on the National Academies Committee on Technical and Privacy Dimensions of Information for Terrorism Prevention and Other National Goals, and he is also a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Networking and Information Technology Technical Advisory Group. In April, Ben was addressing a select meeting in Washington as part of his new campaign to see a US National Initiative on Social Participation. This has come out of his work with terrorism prevention and he sees a big role in other capacities for generating social capital using software: “Combining the ideas of the successful social networking sites with important national agendas like fighting terrorism, like community safety, healthcare delivery, energy sustainability, environmental protection seemed to be the natural next step for me.”

He tells me about WatchJeffersonCounty.net which over four years has been collecting stories of behaviour of the kind that the police have no time to deal with and yet is considered undesirable in the county. It is a kind of Neighbourhood Watch online and he can see potential for rolling this out to the other 3139 US counties. Added to the opportunity that social software offers, he feels a new sense of possibility with the new President, especially given Obama’s command of social networking and interest in information. (It has escaped few of us what a major contribution blogging, tweeting and online fund-raising made to Obama’s campaign.)

“This is a new direction. We have to take our technical organising skills and shift them to the policy domain and engage with people who can make these things happen. For me, that’s a great intellectual challenge and a remarkable time to be in Washington DC.”

We return to the book. How does he respond to the idea of social participation as an author? He is thoughtful but not wholly converted: “We play with the idea of how we might have our readers contribute to the book. And I regularly get mail and people making suggestions and fixes. We could do more to make it a social process.”

But then I have to wonder what kind of world the next edition will be launched in. If we are to expect it sometime next decade, we ought not even speculate. At one point Ben says that a book should be a living document and, even without mass reader participation, the Shneiderman book - in its many iterations - has become an example.


The fifth edition of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (this time written with Catherine Plaisant, Maxine Cohen and Steven Jacobs) is out now.

Associated Link: Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction, 5th edition

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