A Day at HCI2002/EUPA: a Practitioner's View

This year I was limited in the amount of time I could spend at HCI 2002. There was some work that had to be completed on Thursday, so I was only able to stay for two days.

On Tuesday I was giving a tutorial. Was I the one who caused all the moving around when I asked for a better room for group exercises? Anyway, after a slightly confused start it all went well.

The organising committee saw the Tuesday evening as the excuse for another chance to socialise – but that corridor wasn't the best place to put a buffet in my opinion. And after that the inevitable departure to a nearby pub to have some further food and refreshment. Overnight, the choice in MacLaren House accommodation seemed to be either heat or noise. I chose the latter. And so to the conference proper...

As a practitioner I am always looking for things that will help with our approach to our work. Anything that means we can get better results for less money gets my attention. So after Wendy's keynote address (see HCI2002/EUPA: Mackay puts Conference in Context) I headed for the CSCW papers. The first paper was about research on graphical dialogues (not graphical dialogs for those who spot the subtle difference). Did you know that 50% of drawings are part of social interactions? I didn't, but that's not what I came to learn.

What could I find about CSCW? The first talk [Pat Healey and James King - Queen Mary University of London, Nik Swoboda - Indiana University: "A tool for Performing and Analysing Experiments on Graphical Communication"] centred on an investigation of dialogues between users who were given the task of identifying pieces of music. To be more precise, the task was for a pair of users to decide if they were listening to the same music. The catch was that they were only able to use a CSCW whiteboard tool to communicate. Although the tool on which the tests were done was of marginal interest to me (a free copy can be obtained, last week at Queen Mary's Magic) - I didn't find anything new in the description. I did however learn something about the users doing the tasks. For example, I found out which sorts of communication they tended to draw (abstract rather than figurative). In particular I found the description of the development of shared, abstract languages quite interesting. So read the paper for the sociology and anthropology value.

The next talk [Devina Ramduny and Alan Dix - Lancaster University: Impedance Matching: "When you need to know What"] was about Impedance Matching in CSCW. This was much more technical – but again not in a way I wanted. It started quite promisingly by talking of the problems for users when there was no matching: too slow and the users unaware of each others' actions; too fast and users are distracted by irrelevant changes. But the rest of the talk described server technology for performing the matching, not an assessment of the affect on the user. And, as the talk did not inspire me to read the full paper, I don't know if any information has been obtained on this.

The final paper in the session [Ann Blandford and Iain Connell – ULC, B. L. William Wong - University of Otago, Thomas Green - University of Leeds: "Multiple Viewpoints On Computer Supported Team Work: A Case Study On Ambulance Dispatch"] sounded more promising. It started with the need for a technique to balance between scientific methods such as GOMS and ethnographic studies. The proposal was OSM - Ontological Sketch Modelling – which we were told 'focuses on user's conceptualisation of the device'. As I had just spent several weeks on RAF bases trying to find out about the user's conceptualisation of air traffic control, I paid attention. So what you do is document the user's conceptual model in terms of objects and attributes. Then you look at an equivalent description of the device (computer system). And by looking for matches and mismatches in these descriptions you can find problems. There was a good description of a study of ambulance dispatching in London with plenty of anecdotes to reinforce the utility of the technique. For me the disappointment was that there was no description of the notation and no new techniques for speeding up the production of the object/attribute diagrams.

After lunch I went to the UPA plenary session [Christian Lindholm, Nokia Mobile, Phones: "Designing User Delight - Nokia User Interface Strategy for 2.5G and 3G"]. For me the most interesting part was to see how the strategy had changed. As the phones emerged from the car-phone, the driver was size. And while size was tackled, the cost came down too. But now they have a strategy that's driven by usage. There are four classes of device: a feature driven two hand phone you might describe as a PDA integrated with a phone, a feature driven one hand device, a size driven device where features are less important, and a cost driven device where screens can be monochrome.

In moving on to the usability work he does, Christian was refreshingly modest about his achievements. One thing he pointed out was that he is always wary of the quality of data obtained from surveys - people exaggerate. He explained the concept of the 'Usability Knee', the point at which the functions desired place too much demand on the interface available. This is a particular concern as he is working on devices with such limited mechanisms.

After another break I headed for the session on evaluations. There were a pair of papers from the same group. [Maia Dimitrova and Stephanie Wilson - City University, Helen Sharp - The Open University: "Categorising and reporting usability problems of Educational Multimedia Interfaces" and "Educational Multimedia Cognitive Walkthrough: Supporting Experts to Predict Valid User Problems"] Both papers were about trying to improve the use of cognitive walkthrough of educational multi-media. These evaluations are trying to measure two things: usability (can it be used?) and comprehension (do they learn?). The formats presented for collecting this data looked quite interesting. I shall read the papers and see if we can use some of this in our own evaluations.

Alan Woolrych presented some work I had already seen about the effectiveness of heuristic evaluation. [Alan Woolrych and Gilbert Cockton - University of Sunderland: "Testing a Conjecture based on the DR-AR Model of UIM Effectiveness"] Firstly, they believe that analysts find problems and then associate them with heuristics and not the other way round. Secondly, if you have more analysts they find more problems but they also find more non-problems. So beware of the false positives and have a way to eliminate them from your findings.

The last talk in the group was of significant interest to me as we got lost trying to find a car park near to the University. [Paul Curzon, Richard Butterworth and Ravinder Bhogal - Middlesex University, Ann Blandford - University College London: "Interaction Design Issues for Car Navigation Systems"] Paul imposed an evaluation of a navigation system on his family during one of their holidays. He found that many problems stem from the poor usability of the route selection procedure. The second set of problems relate to how the user's internal model of the road system matches with the one held by the system. For example, some junctions were pointed out to the user even though they did not need to change the road they were on.

My second day at the conference ended with another buffet in the corridor. At least this time they had learned from users' previous experience and placed the drinks in a different place to the food. We spread out much more and the socialisation was much improved.

Next year I am looking forward to giving an insider's view as I will be the chair for "Laboratory and Organisational Overviews". See you next year.

Dave Roberts
DaveRoberts@uk.ibm.com

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