HFI Surveys the Information Gap between Research and Practice

Where on the Web do you look to find the usability articles you need? Apart from the obvious answer - and you wouldn't be here if you couldn't work that one out - there seem to be many places to look, mostly off the Web, to find current research thinking, because there is no single place to publish research articles that everyone agrees is the most desirable.

This is the finding of Human Factors International who have been doing some work into it over the last couple of months, surveying researchers about where to 'publish so that practitioners would be sure to read their study'.

'Almost all responses included the proceedings of the three major usability conferences in the United States (CHI, HFES and UPA), and four major journals including Human Factors, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Technical Communication, and the Communications of the ACM.

HFI points out that most of these articles are not readily available to practitioners on the Web.

'Practitioners who responded provided additional interesting information. Over half indicated that the first thing they do is an Internet search, usually with Google.'

Further findings included:
* about a third of the respondents accessed the archived newsletters at humanfactors.com, useit.com and uie.com.
* about 20% use the ACM Digital Library.
* other sources frequently mentioned were the the four major US organisations (UPA, SIGCHI, HFES and STC), and the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction.

'Based on this limited exercise, it is fairly clear that usability information is being published in a variety of different locations. Most of it is still paper-based, and most current, full articles are not readily available on the Internet. This makes it very difficult for many (most) practitioners to use this information in a timely way.

'From a practitioner's perspective, I suspect that those articles that can be found using a Google search will have much more impact on their design decisions than those that are much more difficult to find and retrieve,' concludes Bob Bailey, chief scientist for HFI.

I note that they do not go into further related problems, such as the style of academic articles which are more often designed to prove rigour, than to ensure the easy assimilation of results. Or the length of time it takes from research completion to publication, by which time some research is only interesting historically. There are many reasons why the academic world does not always transfer into the practical one.

* As editor of Usability News, I urge people to send in summaries of their research findings to UN. We feature high on Google searches and will eventually gain the kind of profile in the States (where HFI focused their investigation, despite their name) that we are enjoying here in Europe. There clearly is a need for a better way of bridging the gap and UN is committed to attempting it.

Associated Link: HFI: Making Research-Based Decisions—Results of Research Poll

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