The State of HCI A personal view

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The State of HCI (A personal view)

• Alistair D N Edwards
• University of York, UK
• http//www.cs.york.ac.uk/alistair

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Background

• Ideas that have been kicking around in my head
  for a while
• Been trying to write a paper on it
• Chi 2003
• Fun, but uninspiring
• A version of this seminar I gave at York
• Other inspirations that will become apparent

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The failure of HCI

• Darn these hooves! I hit the wrong switch again!
  Who designs these instrument panels, racoons?

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Not such a joke?
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HCI has failed us

• Systems are still released with diabolical
  interfaces.
• True innovation is only taking place within
  industrial settings.

6
HCI has failed

• A large proportion of the bloopers refer to
  software that is the most used in the world
• that produced by Microsoft

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Making money out of failure

• Edwards, A. D. N. (1997). How hard can it be to
  design a hole in the wall? Interfaces(36) 3
• a list of faults in ATM designs
• Thimbleby, H., A. Blandford, P. Cairns, P. Curzon
  and M. Jones (2002). User interface design as
  systems design. Proceedings of HCI 2002, London,
  Springer
• analysis of the faults in a ticket machine

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Making money out of failure?

• Gordon Baxter suggests that analysing failures is
  a healthy engineering approach
• Perhaps the Glasgow Accident Group would say the
  same?
• But surely we should be learning from those
  failures?

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Errors on websites

• Error alert that I had not specified number of
  nights. I had specified date of arrival and
  departure and there was no space to enter number
  of nights.
• On clicking button to make purchase I was taken
  to a page on which I could buy a completely
  different product.
• Customer form allowed the selection of non-US
  country, but insisted on the insertion of a
  state.
• etc.

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HCI has failed

• Russell Beale, I bought my parents a computer for
  Christmas Interfaces, 58, Spring 2004
• I therefore think that we have failed my
  father. Sure, Microsoft has failed him too, but
  we are people championing usability.

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Why do we have diabolical interfaces?

• Because nobody cares

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Nobody cares

• Managers
• Too many other considerations?
• Programmers
• Dont care or dont know?
• Users

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Users dont care

• Why do they (we) put up with poor interfaces?

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Who ever bought a product for its interface?

• Mac
• Insanely great
• Steve Jobs, Apple
• Windows
• Good enough
• Ken Dye, Microsoft

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Who are the most loyal Mac users?

• HCI enthusiasts

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HCI does not deliver

• Analysis by William Newman of Chi papers
• A tiny proportion lead to any commercial product
• HCI people like to build gadgets
• Write it up for Chi and move on
• Most projects try to do too much

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My fears

• The focus of what we call HCI is too narrow
• The HCI research we do in universities is academic

in the worst senses of the word
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HCI has failed

• True innovation is taking place only in industry

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If only theyd listen to us we know how to make
their interfaces properly!
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Andrew Monk, HCI 2002
http//cise.sbu.ac.uk/hci2002/Andrew_Monk.ppt
People learn GUIs by exploration
Reversibility
Undo
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Undo

• The cycle for undo starts at PARC
• Bravo, 1974
• Earliest paper I have found on the topic
• Archer, J. E., Conway, R. Schneider, F. B.
  (1984) User recovery and reversal in interactive
  systems, ACM Transactions on Programming
  Languages and Systems, 6(1) 1-19.

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HCI has failed

• Innovations that passed us by

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Who predicted SMS?

• 160-character messages
• Awkward input through a 12-key keypad
• No way!
• 50,000,000 texts per day in UK

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Phone personalization

• Customized covers
• Personal logos
• both serendipitous according to Christian
  Lindholm of Nokia (HCI 2002)

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What do we know about keyboard input?

• all there is to know
• And what do we know about gamepad interaction?
• Yet how many people use gamepads compared to
  keyboards?

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Counter-arguments

• Its the same in other branches of engineering
• We would not have multi-level undo without the
  work of Alan Dix (Andrew Monk) mea culpa?
• We learn from failures (Gordon Baxter)
• Accident analyses

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Its easy to knock

• What to do about it?

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What to do about it?

• Education

Education
Education ?
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Look at the bigger picture

• McCarthy, J. and Wright, P. (2004) Technology as
  Experience MIT Press.  Summer 2004
• Others?

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The York MEng curriculum
Most computer programs have an interface to a user
Yet it is very hard for an MEng student to take
an HCI module

• Very few computer programs must run in real time

And Real-Time Systems is a compulsory module
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and who writes the programs?

• The ATMs
• ticket machines
• web pages

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Wheres the Computer Science?

• HCI is Computer Science
• It must be taught to all Computer Science
  students
• HCI comprises a lot of other disciplines
  (psychology, sociology,)
• So it might be taught by people from other
  disciplines

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Integrate into mainstream

• Do Chi and HCI etc have a role?

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What do you think?

• Name any significant HCI innovation which has
  come from a non-industrial lab
• What is the greatest HCI innovation in the past 5
  years?

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Acknowledgements

• Apart from the people cited, the following have
  provided helpful and insightful comments
• Gordon Baxter,
• Michael Harrison,
• Andrew Monk,
• Julia Brant,
• Bastiaan Schupp,
• Darren Reed.

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What is HCI?

• It is not science
• A discipline?
• An academic discipline?

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True innovation occurs in industry

• Name any significant HCI innovation which has
  come from a non-industrial lab

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Good enough?

• HCI takes a utilitarian approach
• Not maximization of the good
• but minimization of the bad
• (errors, time etc)

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Where have we failed?

• CHI, HCI etc is preaching to the converted.
• HCI education is not getting to the people who
  need it.

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The academic Chi/HCI message

• We know the answers to usability, if only
  industry would listen to us.