| Editor's Column | | BIB | 1-2 | |
| Bill Hefley | |||
| Chairs' Column | | BIB | 3-4 | |
| Austin Henderson; Peter Polson | |||
| Report on the CHI'92 Workshop on Lessons Learned from Teaching HCI: Challenges, Innovations, and Visions | | BIBA | 5-7 | |
| Jean B. Gasen; Peter Aiken | |||
| As the field of HCI grows, the need for related courses, curricula and
training also expands. Keeping abreast of new developments is only one part of
the teaching challenge. Determining the best methods for translating this
knowledge into a meaningful learning experience is, perhaps, the greater
challenge.
The CHI'92 Workshop grew out of the efforts of the Curriculum Development Group's ACM/SIGCHI Curriculum for Human-Computer Interaction. (You know, the report with the lime green cover!) The CDG's report represented the combined viewpoints of many seasoned experts, but we wanted to learn more about what other HCI teachers and trainers are currently doing nationally and internationally. We were interested in finding the "state of the practice" -- what experienced teachers have already learned, what challenges remain and how educators' innovations and visions are shaping the future of HCI education. This article summarizes the activities of the SIGCHI Workshop "Lessons Learned from Teaching HCI: Challenges, Innovations and Visions." We think the ideas expressed here could be a catalyst for the design of future workshops, articles and debates in the field of HCI education. | |||
| Defining Roles in International Communication within HCI | | BIB | 8-9 | |
| John Karat | |||
| Mutual Harmony and Temporal Continuity: A Perspective from the Japanese Garden | | BIB | 10-13 | |
| Yosuke Kinoe; Hirohiko Mori | |||
| 1990 EC Directive May Become Driving Force | | BIB | 14-18 | |
| Pat Billingsley | |||
| HCI and the Inadequacies of Direct Manipulation Systems | | BIBA | 21-22 | |
| Bill Buxton | |||
| The Direct Manipulation (DM) style of user interface made popular by the Macintosh is becoming a de facto standard. Rather than being taken as a point of departure, it appears to be taken more as a standard to achieve. Using the specification of scope as an example, DM interfaces are shown to be deficient in supporting a transaction fundamental to word processing, information retrieval and CAD. This essay is a plea for designers to break out of the complacency that surrounds the DM approach. It also calls into question the methodologies of HCI for the very limited degree to which they have challenged the DM approach and their paucity of ideas for generating strong new alternatives. | |||
| Towards a Guide to Social Action for Computer Professionals | | BIB | 23-27 | |
| Jeff Johnson; Evelyn Pine | |||
| Usability Inspection Methods: Report on a Workshop Held at CHI'92, Monterey, CA, May 3-4, 1992 | | BIBAK | 28-33 | |
| Robert Mack; Jakob Nielsen | |||
| Usability inspection methods, based on informed intuitions about interface
design quality, hold promise of providing faster, more cost-effective ways to
generate usability evaluations, compared to empirical user evaluation methods.
Examples of inspection methods include heuristic evaluation (Nielsen & Molich,
1990), usability walkthroughs (Bias, 1991; Karat & Bennett, 1991a, 1991b),
cognitive walkthroughs (Lewis, Polson, Wharton & Reiman, 1990), and
applications of guidelines in walkthroughs (Jeffries, Miller, Wharton, & Uyeda,
1991). These methods have been used in development for some time in one form
or another (perhaps by other names), often because there is simply no
alternative like user testing. Usability inspection methods have been an
object of research in the last two years or so. Progress has been made in
refining methods, and understanding their role in usability engineering.
We organized this workshop because the time seemed right for a group of practitioners and researchers involved with these methods to review the state of the practice. Thirteen people participated in the two-day workshop. On the first day each participant led the group through a half hour demonstration and discussion of a specific method or methodological issue. Participants were asked to read position papers prepared before the workshop, in order to provide a common background. On the second day, the group engaged in a wide-ranging discussion of issues raised on the previous day. Procedurally, this discussion began with the development of a issue space consisting of key issues written on index cards, pinned up on a wall and grouped into larger topics. This SIGCHI report is our initial summary of what we discussed and in some cases, what we concluded. We also plan to produce an edited collection of papers based on the workshop. Keywords: Non-empirical usability evaluation, Usability inspection, Usability
walkthroughs, Cognitive walkthroughs, Heuristic evaluation, User interface
design guidelines | |||
| Exploratory Sequential Data Analysis: Traditions, Techniques and Tools | | BIB | 34-40 | |
| Carolanne Fisher; Penelope Sanderson | |||
| Report of the Fifth IFIP WG2.7 Working Conference: Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction | | BIB | 41-42 | |
| James A. Larson | |||
| INTERCHI'93: A Manager's View | | BIB | 43-44 | |
| Peter Stevens | |||
| Visual Interaction Design Special Interest Area: An Introduction | | BIBA | 52-53 | |
| Maria G. Wadlow | |||
| Visual Interaction Design is the first Special Interest Area within SIGCHI. A Special Interest Area (SIA) is a group with specialized interests in an area which falls within the boundaries of the larger CHI domain. SIAs have been discussed as a possibility within SIGCHI for some time but the Visual Interaction Design SIA is the first real application of this concept. | |||
| Editor's Column | | BIB | 1 | |
| Bill Hefley | |||
| Chairs' Column | | BIBA | 2-4 | |
| Austin Henderson; Peter Polson | |||
| In this column we want to discuss five matters: the new SIGCHI bylaws, the new dues structure, holding CHI '95 in Colorado, the visioning process undertaken at the December SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC) meeting, and the directions for SIGCHI within ACM. | |||
| On Lessons Learned from A. A. Milne With Contributions from Winnie the Pooh | | BIB | 5-6 | |
| Jean B. Gasen | |||
| Understanding the International Community and Their Concerns | | BIB | 7 | |
| John Karat; Clare-Marie Karat | |||
| FRIEND21 Project | | BIB | 8-9 | |
| Hirotada Ueda | |||
| The Emergence of ISO 9241 and Some of its Parts | | BIBA | 10-13 | |
| Pat Billingsley | |||
| It now appears that the first three parts of the 17-part ISO 9241 standard, Visual display terminals used for office tasks -- Ergonomics Requirements, have successfully completed the entire ISO standards-development and approval process. | |||
| Interactions: A New ACM User Interface Magazine | | BIB | 15-19 | |
| Bill Hefley; John Rheinfrank; Brad A. Myers | |||
| Report on the CHI'91 Workshop on Languages for Developing User Interfaces | | BIB | 20-23 | |
| Brad A. Myers | |||
| Report on the CHI'91 Workshop: HCI and Users with Special Needs | | BIB | 24 | |
| Alistair Edwards | |||
| Neural Networks and Pattern Recognition in Human-Computer Interaction | | BIB | 25-35 | |
| Janet Finlay; Russell Beale | |||
| Report on the 1992 East-West International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (St. Petersburg, Russia, August 4-8) | | BIBA | 36-39 | |
| Jonathan Grudin; Allan MacLean; Scott Overmyer | |||
| The East-West International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction was
held August 4-8, 1992 in St. Petersburg, Russia. The second conference in an
annual series, it brought together researchers from the former USSR, Europe,
the United States, Japan, and Australia. At the time of the 1991 conference,
the USSR was still intact (by about two weeks). By 1992 it had become the
Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltic Republics (henceforth
CIS/Baltic). The conference committee settled on the more stable (if not
entirely accurate) designation "East-West" to characterize the communities that
came together.
Before summarizing the technical element of the conference, we will give a brief description of who was involved and how the conference was structured. This may be of particular interest to anyone considering attending in 1993. | |||
| Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction: A Report on the CHI'92 Workshop | | BIBA | 40-45 | |
| Wendy A. Kellogg; John C. Thomas | |||
| The field of Human-Computer Interaction, and the CHI conference specifically are characterized by diversity. The field includes many professions and people from many cultures. Because of the intrinsic complexity of human-computer interaction as well as the wide variety of systems, tasks, users, and contexts that are addressed, this diversity of backgrounds and approaches is both inevitable and necessary. Nevertheless, this diversity also poses a serious dilemma. How can the science and practice of HCI cumulate effectively when the professionals deal with such different problems, and come from such a variety of professional and cultural backgrounds? The purpose of the workshop was to explore this issue. Readers will no doubt appreciate the analogy between this challenge of CHI and many international social issues facing people of the world today that require valuing and encouraging diversity while communicating and working together effectively to solve common problems. | |||
| End-User Programming Language: The CHI'92 Workshop Report | | BIBA | 46-50 | |
| Wayne D. Gray; James C. Spohrer; Thomas R. G. Green | |||
| The call for participation for the Workshop on End User Programming began
with the following statement:
"In the beginning, every user was a programmer. While that appeared to change forever in the 80's, the 90's are shaping up as the decade of macro-languages, scripting languages, authoring languages, dbase query languages, inter-application communication languages, and event languages. Programming in some form or another will become inescapable and again, every user will be a programmer. The 90's will be the decade of end-user programming." While many of our colleagues are working hard to build systems which automatically and intelligently adapt themselves to the needs of the user or which "program by example", a growing group of researchers and developers have become convinced that a large part of the 90's will be spent on a very different vision of computing. This is not to imply that we view these other efforts as either competitive or futile, on the contrary, we see them as trying to solve different problems and, sometimes, as complementary solutions to the same problem (see Kuhme, 1993 for an interesting proposal for a user-programmable adaptive interface). | |||
| "Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design," by Deborah J. Mayhew | | BIBA | 51-53 | |
| Dennis Wixon | |||
| The birth of the field of human computer interface design is often traced to
the Gaithersburg conference 10 years ago. In the inevitable assessments of the
impact of HCI after 10 years, questions have arisen about the applicability of
research to product design. Deborah Mayhew's outstanding new book, Principles
and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design, should dispel any doubts
about the applicability of research to interface design. Mayhew distills a set
of practical guidelines for designing better interfaces from a comprehensive,
well-organized, and insightful review of the research literature....
In summary Mayhew has produced the best book on user interface guidelines to date. Already, my copy is filled with notes and stained with coffee. | |||
| Tog on Interface | | BIBA | 54-55 | |
| Jakob Nielsen | |||
| This is an enjoyable although somewhat whimsical book to be read for its firm foundation in graphical user interfaces for personal computers and insights into consistency and the evolutionary nature of interfaces. It is not a general textbook on user interface design. | |||
| Visual Interaction Design Special Interest Area: Getting Started | | BIB | 65-66 | |
| Maria G. Wadlow | |||
| Getting Started in Visual Interaction Design: A Bibliography | | BIB | 67-69 | |
| Andy Cargile | |||
| The Making of the SIGCHI Identity Design | | BIB | 70 | |
| Suzanne Watzman | |||
| Editor's Column | | BIB | 1-2 | |
| Bill Hefley | |||
| Chairs' Column | | BIB | 3-6 | |
| Austin Henderson; Peter Polson | |||
| HCI Education Survey Now Available | | BIBA | Web Page | 7-8 | |
| Jean B. Gasen; Gary Perlman | |||
| The HCI Survey of Educational Programs is now available to colleges, faculty, and students. The survey, developed jointly by Gary Perlman and Jean Gasen, contains information about degree and non-degree programs, faculty, and courses on Human-Computer Interaction. The primary goal of the Survey is to provide prospective students (particularly graduate students) information about educational opportunities, and secondarily to provide HCI educators information about other HCI educators. Unlike some of the other surveys, we wanted the HCI Education Survey to be easily updated and accessed primarily in electronic form. The cost of printing and mailing the survey and the widespread availability of electronic mail and personal computers made the collection and dissemination of an electronic report preferred over print media. | |||
| IFIP's Technical Committee on Information Systems | | BIB | 9-10 | |
| John Karat | |||
| A Closer Look at ISO 9241 | | BIBAK | 11-13 | |
| Pat Billingsley | |||
| This issue's column examines the ISO 9241 standard, Ergonomic requirements
for office work with visual display terminals. Keywords: Standards, ISO, ISO 9241 | |||
| Skills Needed by User-Centered Design Practitioners in Real Software Development Environments: Report on the CHI'92 Workshop | | BIBA | 16-31 | |
| Tom Dayton; Bob Barr; Pamela A. Burke; Andrew M. Cohill; Mary Carol Day; Susan Dray; Kate Ehrlich; Lynne Axel Fitzsimmons; Richard L. Henneman; Susan B. Hornstein; John Karat; Jill Kliger; Jonas Lowgren; Jeff Rensch; Mike Sellers; Mary R. Smith | |||
| User-centered design (UCD) of human-computer interfaces-including task flow and documentation-is gaining acceptance in software development organizations. But managers who want their organizations to start using UCD often do not know what characteristics to look for, in candidates for hiring or retraining to fill UCD roles; this article can help. It has the recommendations from participants in a CHI '92 conference workshop on this topic. The 16 workshop participants were UCD practitioners and managers from companies and a few universities across the United States, Canada, and Sweden. This article first describes some typical roles of UCD practitioners in software development organizations. There follows a list of attributes that UCD practitioners should have. Some attributes should be had by all practitioners, regardless of their subspecialties. The most important of those universal attributes are of three types: knowledge that can be acquired formally (e.g., of the human-computer interaction literature, cognitive processes, experimental design, rapid prototyping), skill that can be gotten from experience (e.g., estimating resources needed to do a job, commitment to users, understanding of the software development process, negotiating ability, enjoyment of working on teams, ability to really listen), and attributes that are harder to acquire (e.g., tenacity, flexibility). Every practitioner needs other characteristics as well, but their importances differ by the practitioners' subspecialties (e.g., a design team leader needs team management skills). | |||
| A Headsup on GUI Styleguides: Report on the CHI'92 Styleguide SIG | | BIBA | 32-35 | |
| Robert W. Root; Kathy M. Uyeda | |||
| This article reports on a Special Interest Group meeting at CHI'92 to discuss issues associated with the development, deployment and use of design guidelines for Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). We discovered that styleguide practitioners (those who are responsible for developing commercial or in-house guidelines) are desperately in need of moral support, advice on how to construct styleguides, and access to a sound, scientific base of HCI information that can be used to help make design decisions in the real world. The immediate challenges facing the Human Factors community are the need for solid and timely research to support guidelines, better transfer of research results to the real world, and the evolution of styleguide development into a systematic methodology that produces good guidelines and, therefore, good user interfaces. | |||
| The HCI Bibliography Project | | BIB | Web Page | 36-37 | |
| Gary Perlman | |||
| Virtual Business | | BIB | 38-39 | |
| Julian C. Bleecker | |||
| Analog Input Device Physical Characteristics | | BIBA | 40-45 | |
| James S. Lipscomb; Michael E. Pique | |||
| When selecting a device, a designer should compare alternative devices point-by-point. When making a tentative decision, one needs to know what other possibilities have been locked out. A classification graph does this. New here is this classification graph. Also new are several terms: free, sticky, unbounded, bounded, homogeneous and volatile. We developed this classification of existing devices while building the GRIP-75 interactive molecular computer graphics system [2, 11] and refined the classification during discussions with other system builders where we used this classification to map out alternatives. This paper is founded on practice and experience, not on classification theory. | |||
| A Baby Babble-Blanket | | BIBA | 46-48 | |
| Linda J. Ferrier; Harriet J. Fell; Charles Silverman; David Horowitz; George Silvestri; Michael Harm | |||
| We have developed a multiple-switch-activated device with speech output for use by infants with severe speech and physical impairments. It is hoped that using this device for early intervention will provide these infants with a means of environmental control and communication with parents. | |||
| Is Speech Recognition Usable? An Exploration of the Usability of a Speech-Based Voice Mail Interface | | BIBA | 49-51 | |
| Marita Franzke; Adam N. Marx; Teresa L. Roberts; George E. Engelbeck | |||
| U S WEST Advanced Technologies conducted an experiment using the "Wizard-of-Oz" paradigm. We compared a simulated speech recognition interface ("wizard") for a basic voice mail application to functionally similar touch-tone and operator assisted versions. This poster abstract highlights the results of this experiment, focussing on performance times and errors, the perceived ease of use, and a description of the linguistic characteristics of users' utterances. The results are interpreted to be in favor of applying speech recognition technology to user interfaces. | |||
| Menu Stacking-Help or Hindrance? | | BIB | 52-57 | |
| John S. Gray | |||
| A Tool for the Rapid Evaluation of Input Devices Using Fitts' Law Models | | BIBA | mb.Hqx and README via anonymous ftp from snowhite.cis.uoguelph.ca in pub/fitts-law | 58-63 | |
| I. Scott MacKenzie; William Buxton | |||
| A tool for building Fitts' law models is described. MODEL BUILDER runs on the Apple Macintosh using any device which connects to the Apple Desktop Bus. After 16 blocks of trials taking about 4-5 minutes, the program provides an immediate (albeit tentative) statistical analysis, showing the coefficients in the prediction equation, the coefficient of correlation, and a regression line with scatter points. MODEL BUILDER can be retrieved anonymously by researchers, educators, developers, or anyone with access to INTERNET through file-transfer-protocol (FTP). | |||
| A Componential Model of Human Interaction with Graphical Displays | | BIBA | 64-66 | |
| Douglas J. Gillan | |||
| A componential model of graphical interaction was developed based on analyses of humans interacting with graphical displays. The model, known as the Mixed Arithmetic-Perceptual (MA-P) model, proposes that five component processes underlie graphical interactions: Searching, Encoding, Arithmetic operations, Spatial comparison, and Responding. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the number of components for a given question-graph combination predicted the time to answer that question using that graph. Experiment 2 provided empirical support for two predictions from the model concerning the spatial relations among the elements of the graph. A metric for determining the ease of processing of a graph is outlined and guidelines for design of graphs are presented. | |||
| Visual Interaction Design Special Interest Area: Interdisciplinary Design | | BIB | 71-74 | |
| Maria G. Wadlow | |||
| Editor's Column | | BIB | 1-3 | |
| Bill Hefley | |||
| Chairs' Column | | BIBA | 4-5 | |
| Austin Henderson; Peter Polson; Jim Miller; Mike Atwood | |||
| We will use this column to make some announcements and to transition to the new Executive Committee. | |||
| Validating the ACM SIGCHI Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction | | BIB | 7 | |
| Jean B. Gasen | |||
| Customizing the SIGCHI Curriculum for Use in Sweden | | BIBA | 8-11 | |
| Jonas Lowgren; Lena Holmberg | |||
| This note describes the work undertaken by the Swedish interdisciplinary interest group for HCI (STIMDI) in order to develop a HCI curriculum for Sweden. Our efforts have been inspired by the ACM SIGCHI curriculum proposal presented recently; we discuss why we felt certain customizations were necessary and present our modified curriculum. We also describe our plans for creating a HCI teaching resource in the form of a commonly accessible database. | |||
| A Human Interface Society Abroad | | BIB | 12 | |
| John Karat; Clare-Marie Karat | |||
| The Technical Committee for Human Interface (SICE-Japan) -- An Introduction | | BIBA | 13-14 | |
| Masaaki Kurosu | |||
| In Japan, several of the academic associations are supporting research
activity on the human interface from various approaches (e.g., information
processing, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, etc.).
Among them, the Technical Committee (TC) for Human Interface of the Society of
Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE) is a representative one in the size of
its membership and the variety of the activities.
Based on technical success of sponsoring a symposium on Man-Machine Interface from 1982 to 1984, SICE decided to establish an independent committee on this subject in 1984. After discussions on the direction of the activity, the Technical Committee reached a decision to name it the Human Interface TC rather than the Man-Machine Interface TC to reflect an interest in a broad range of subjects. In 1986, the committee began to operate as an independent TC within SICE. | |||
| Canvass Committee Members Sought for ANSI/HFS 100 Revision | | BIBA | 15-18 | |
| Pat Billingsley | |||
| The first version of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society's American National Standard for Human Factors Engineering of Visual Display Terminal Workstations (ANSI/HFS 100-1988) is expected to be available for public review and comment in fall 1993. | |||
| SIGCHI Annual Report, 1992-1993 | | BIB | 23-24 | |
| Austin Henderson | |||
| Some Closing Thoughts About SIGCHI | | BIB | 25-28 | |
| Austin Henderson | |||
| Celebrating a Decade of Joyful Innovation: HCIL's 10th Annual Symposium and Open House | | BIB | 29-31 | |
| Sylvia B. Sheppard; Elizabeth D. Murphy | |||
| CBMS'93 -- Computer-Based Medical Systems | | BIB | 32 | |
| John Kruse | |||
| Reports from CSCW'92 | | BIB | 33 | |
| Sara Bly | |||
| Privacy Considerations in CSCW: Report on the CSCW'92 Workshop | | BIB | 34-39 | |
| Andrew Clement | |||
| Controversies About Privacy and Open Information in CSCW: A Panel Report from CSCW'92 | | BIB | 40-41 | |
| Jonathan P. Allen | |||
| The Productivity Paradox: Why Hasn't Information Technology Fulfilled Its Promise? A Panel Report from CSCW'92 | | BIB | 42-44 | |
| David Constant | |||
| Commercial Products for CSCW: A Panel Report from CSCW'92 | | BIB | 45-47 | |
| Kristina A. Lindholm | |||
| Report of the Workshop on Interdisciplinary Theory for CSCW Design | | BIBA | 48-50 | |
| William Hunt | |||
| This report describes the Workshop on Interdisciplinary Theory for CSCW Design which took place on 31 October 1992 during the first day of the ACM 1992 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. | |||
| CSCW'92 Workshop Report: Understanding and Supporting Successful Group Work in Software Design | | BIBA | 51-56 | |
| John Karat; John Bennett | |||
| Fifteen people participated in the one day workshop held at CSCW'92 in Toronto on October 31, 1992. The workshop announcement invited experienced practitioners and reflective researchers to submit short position papers as background for discussion. The focus was on how people doing software design activities in groups can be effectively supported. Our overall objective was to create a dialog within which we could characterize a microcosm of group work that takes place during the complex activity of design. If we could develop some understanding of design aspects, we could then identify different types of support and interventions that might be helpful. In this way each of us as individuals in our subsequent work might increase the probability of outcomes considered successful in terms of both design team results and design team processes. | |||
| Technology and Pedagogy for Collaborative Problem Solving as a Context for Learning: Report on a CSCW '92 Workshop | | BIB | 57-60 | |
| Timothy Koschmann; Denis Newman; Earl Woodruff; Roy Pea; Peter Rowley | |||
| Visual Interaction Design Special Interest Area: Notes from INTERCHI | | BIB | 67 | |
| Maria G. Wadlow | |||
| One Visual Designer's Perspective on INTERCHI '93 | | BIB | 68-71 | |
| Andy Cargile | |||
| Agreeing to Begin: Status of the SIGCHI Identity Project | | BIB | 72 | |
| Suzanne Watzman | |||