Human-Computer Interaction
The good people over at Adaptive Path have spent some time imagining a near-future web browser called Aurora. The core concepts—structured data replacing monolithic pages, algorithmic grouping of related items, minimized chrome, screen-sharing, etc—are all fairly familiar (to people working on this stuff), but it’s always good to have someone pull the elements together into a coherent vision. I’m looking forward to the rest of the videos.
One aesthetic complaint, however: compared to its inspiration (Starfire), the Aurora video is conspicuously (and unrealistically) pleasant. The people in Starfire are dealing with problems. Granted, they are overcoming them via technology, but at least the situations are tense to begin with. Here, the people seem not to have any problems (not even the weather!). I guess I prefer a bit more angst in my fake future.
File under there-should-be-a-standard, Steps for finding a human on various phone systems. Some of them are pretty amazing, such as Delta, where you say ‘agent’ four times until it finally gives you an agent. This is firmly in that part of the Venn diagram where business needs fail to intersect with user needs.
Apple has introduced a new mouse which, to me, epitomizes the problems with Apple’s design culture: It looks really nice cut out on that clean white background, but the emphasis is all in the wrong place. They’ve put all their design energy into making the buttons disappear (so it will look nice cut out on that clean white background), but I can’t figure out what the advantage is to not having buttons. The site says:
“Who has time for intuitive, elegant design when there is so much clicking to do? Thanks to a smooth top shell with touch-sensitive technology beneath, Mighty Mouse allows you to right click without a right button.”So, they’re basically saying that clicking by pressing a non-button is more intuitive than clicking by pressing a visible, tangible button. Um, am I missing something? If only they’d improve the size and shape of the damn thing we might have something. Oh, and give up on that silly “press the whole thing to click” idea. It so very much doesn’t work. Anyhow, I gotta run; I’m off to the Apple store to buy one of those cool new mice they have.
Sadly, Jef Raskin passed away a couple of days ago. More on Raskin and his recent work.
It’s about time we got speech-to-speech translators; they had ‘em on Star Trek like 40 years ago! Plus there’s a great opportunity for hackers to mess with people’s conversations from the inside.
Another gem from Scott at uiweb is his compilation of the Best of CHI-WEB and SIGIA-L, two lists that goodness knows need filtering.
I just had an interesting online experience. I wanted to sell my old digital camera. First I listed it on craigslist, which is essentially a glorified newspaper classified. Multiple people expressed interest and arranged to come see the camera but then never showed up, thereby wasting a fair amount of my time. Finally I listed it on ebay. The up-front effort of wading through the (none-too-spectacular) ebay interface was a bit onerous, but then a magical thing happened: someone won the auction (for more than I had expected) and the exchange went smoothly, camera sold.
What I find noteworthy here is that, while interaction designers often talk about software enabling human interaction, in this case, the main benefit was that the software reduced the amount of human-human interaction. In many cases, I’d rather deal with a machine than a person, no matter what Clifford Nass says.
Marc Rettig’s Interaction Design History in a Teeny Little Nutshell (3.2 Mb PDF) is a lovely snapshot of the present (by way of the past and future) state of human-computer interaction design.
India: Hole-in-the-Wall is a worthwhile quick read. Among other things, it deeply reinforces the (should-be obvious) idea that usefulness (or, related, desirability) is key to getting people to use a product. The most easy to use interface will fail if there’s no reason to use it. Likewise, even the early craptacular ebay interfaces proved “usable.” (via eh)
Computer Human Values is a nice rant about Cliff Nass’ research (amazing stuff which demonstrates that people interact with computers astonishingly similarly to how they interact with other people—like saying nicer things about an application if they are in the same room as the computer on which they saw the application!)
Best of CHI-WEB (via cam)
I haven’t finished this Clay Shirky interview up on Slashdot, but so far it’s excellent. (via taylor, via eatonweb, via…)
I like the Adbusters phrase “mental environment” a lot. It pushes you to think of your mind as a place you spend a whole lotta time, your thought patterns as features of a permanent personal landscape. And it begs the traditional environmentalist questions: is this environment being cared for? Is it being polluted? Is it a place I want to spend my time? Is it overcrowded? How do all the pieces fit together? It also forces you to question common symptomatic treatments for mental unease such as eating when you’re bored or shopping when you’re depressed.
And it makes me wonder what my own mental environment looks like when I spend many hours each day “inside” an abstracted realm of symbols and ideas, with my attention somewhere completely “outside” my immediate surroundings.
taylor has some very smart things to say about the ways animation and comic and video game storytelling techniques are coming together online. One of the keys here is that so much of the engrossing-ness of comics comes from their very incompleteness. By forcing (allowing?) the reader to complete them—whether filling in the action between panels or imaginatively “fleshing out” cartoony drawings—comics become to some extent the reader’s creation. Comics are not just low-frame-rate animation, nor are they a debased form of books.. There is something specific and undeniably powerful in comics’ use of visual communication, something different than either text-only or video communication (I haven’t seen it, but I wonder how the gutter is used in Time Code).
This reminds me (tangentially) of how almost no Windows users name their hard drives while absolutely all Mac users do, and what this suggests about the relationships people are forging with their computers. As taylor implies, we need to be thinking about how closure works in human-computer interaction. What makes one interface design more identifiable-with than another? What goes on in the fuzzy borderland between tools and agents and locations?
Alertbox: Eyetracking Study of Web Readers reports on research that shows that people “interlace” multiple web sites; that is, they have multiple browser windows open and switch back and forth, reading several sites at once. This is one of those things that I do all the time, but it never occurred to me to take it into consideration at design time. I certainly will from now on. ps—I really wish Jakob would stop trying to get people to use the default link colors; that horse is dead and rotting.
Apparently there is room for humor in human-computer interaction (gzipped postscript of all things.. if that sounds like a pain, here’s another bit on humor in HCI). I was really thinking more of formal definitions of the comedic form than just of humor when I wondered if there was room for comedy (or tragedy) in interface design. I guess what I’m really wondering is where a narrative arc would fit into an interface, especially a task-oriented interface. I can see the value of a beginning and end, but what about the part in the middle where you’re not really sure the hero will succeed? That is a key component of narrative pleasure, but I’m not so sure you want that feeling when you’re trying to finish a paper you’re writing or tallying up your taxes on April 14th. (Thanks to Vincent O’ Keeffe who pointed me to that first link.. I was tempted to keep his excellent interface-related weblog all to myself ;)
On a related note, I really need to read some more of Cliff Nass’ research on how people interact with computers just like they interact with other people.
I had a nice birthday yesterday, thanks for asking! I didn’t touch a computer, but I did think a bit about Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theater. I’ve been finding it incredibly valuable to read stuff that approaches interface outside of a straight-up HCI context. Whether it’s architecture, gaming, comics, or theater, it forces me to step back from the mundane design decisions that I’m making (should the “Cancel” button go on the left or right of the “Continue” button) and think in a different and larger way about what I’m doing.
Anyhoo, I was reading the book, thinking about human-computer interaction in terms of narrative pleasure and I started seeing the interaction differently, with different sub-tasks as little scenes, with beginnings, middles, and ends, and with a need for the interface to move the action from scene to scene: “Congratulations, you’re now registered. Now you can do the following…” Cool.
So, now I’m wondering: is there a place for comedy in human-computer interaction? What about tragedy?
While I share a lot of the fears of this suck column on skins, I think a lot of good can come of them. First of all, it’s been noted that we are stuck in an imperfect UI paradigm, and I think it will be very hard for HCI professionals to break free without some pushing. Christina Aguillera skins notwithstanding, putting control of the entie UI in the hands of anyone with a text editor will certainly do some pushing on our notions of what is acceptable human-computer interaction. Second, by putting full control of the chrome in the hands of developers, XUL effectively does away with the browser as browser. Mozilla is a web-based application platform, and that is very interesting to me. Anything that gets me away from building every damn function on a site as a wizard-like loop is welcome at this point. The trouble is that (as usual) it’s not cross-platform.
Essential Use Cases (Constantine and Lockwood) are a geeky HCI way of formally defining the types of people who will use a system and how they’ll do so. The key is keeping things abstract to distance yourself from specific technologies or implementations. I find these sorts of formal exercises really, really frustrating while I’m doing them, but they can be a very powerful way to break free from the implementation-lock that sets in so quickly on a project.
OK, so maybe perceived speed isn’t so different from actual speed, but I still think there’s a lot of important work to be done dealing with the role of perception in usability. If people’s feelings about their interactions are as important as the measurable efficiency of their interactions, then maybe treating people like machines is the wrong approach.
To what extent, on the other hand, should we think of machines as people? Hmm..
Email overload: How people interact with all that g**damned email. Also mentioned by peter in this context: History-Enriched Digital Objects.
Studio Archtype/Sapient study on elements of “trust” in e-commerce sites.