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Having been heavily involved with HCI and UI design while working on my PhDs, I'd recommend Task-Centered User Interface Design: A Practical Introduction by Clayton Lewis and John Rieman ($5.00 (US) shareware from http://www.hcibib.org/tcuid/) and Tog on Interface by Bruce Tognazzini. Clayton and John's book will lead you through the process of understanding your users' needs (remember that interface designers are rarely the intended users of a product) and Bruce's book documents all of the early Macintosh UI guidelines and how and why they came about. Bruce also has a wonderful website (http://www.asktog.com/) where he's been a harsh critic of many of Apple's more recent UI decisions...

No, but nice try. Look up universities offering advanced HCI degrees for a clue. Here's a list to get you started. You might recognized a few little schools like CMU, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and so on.

Or here you can read some guidelines that are actually insightful (or 'really for nerds', depending on how you look at it):
hcibib

When will interface designers learn that it's faster if you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard every three seconds?

Actually, there are a large number of studies that say the opposite is generally true, even for expert users who know the keystroke commands from memory (indeed, one could argue that the letter and symbol keys on a keyboard are all examples of this). The time 'saved' by keeping your hands on the home row is more than wasted by the time that it takes to recall a key-combination. It doesn't seem that way because you are actively thinking about the command, so your time sense is focused on the activity, whereas the time spent mousing around is more or less 'blank time', since the hand-eye coordination needed to match the pointer to the pointed item is more or less 'handled in hardware' once the decision of which command to use is made.

Naturally, there are several cases where keyboard commands are faster than menus, however. One is when there is a very common operation which has a permanently assigned action key, with no key-combos. Another is in the case of an expert user entering a complex, multi-operation command line, versus having to gesture the same actions; however, a case such as that is generally complex enough that the real optimal solution is to create a script of the command, even for a single use instance (some systems, such as Oberon, facilitate this by allowing you to invoke any arbitrary selected text as a script - indeed, in Oberon a menu item is nothing more than a section of text that is pinned to a given location and 'pre-selected' so that it activates on a single click). Third, multi-level menus require the user to select and target successive items, which is the same cause of slow-down in keystroke commands. Fourth, there are many cases of poorly considered 'graphical' tools that require multiple passes to home in on the target (Raskin's example of a 'visual thermometer' that requires you to adjust the height of the 'mercury' column versus simply entering the degrees into a textbox, comes to mind). Finally, 'adaptive' menus are invariably worse than keystrokes, because the changes disrupt the pattern of actions. In each of these last three cases, the reason the mouse is slower is because the layout of the UI stymies the ability of the user to habituate to them, making it a matter of design rather than a flaw with pointing devices themselves.

Ironically enough, given all the 'quick bars' around in certain systems, the worst response time in most cases is for using icons. The problem is that you have to associate the icon with not only the image it represents, but also the action it causes, and the connection between them is not always as obvious to a user as it was to the developers. The difficulty increases rapidly with the number if icons on the screen, especially if there are two or more similar icon images that need to be differentiated. Many design theorists today argue that icons should only be used sparingly, and only to represent specific physical devices (i.e., a disk drive).

What we really need are more designers who understand usability analysis, and actually use it to determine how much effort a given design takes to use.


Usability in Website and Software Design
AskTog Interaction Design Section
The Raskin Center for User Interface Design
Human-Computer Interface Institute at CMU
Human-Computer Interaction Resources on the Net
Bibliography of Human-Computer Interface Studies
Usability Tips and Tricks
Overiview of GOMS Analysis
Us

Google is your friend...
HCI Bibliography with many papers and the relevant HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) prepared by GUI system designers and API builders...

http://www.hcibib.org/

people with preferences to GUIs clearly need more practice with computing ;)

If you still need useful data like that you have missed something that already existed (though naturally in a different outfit) when uucp was en vogue.

CC.

Thank you everyone who commented, especially those with CS minors (or those fingering them). This is exactly the kind of reality check I needed. I'm still going to forge ahead with the minor, but not out of the hope that it will land me a job (though it was heartening to hear that it may have made the difference in getting a couple of people jobs).

The HCI tangent really interests me, and I googled upon the HCI Bibliography:

http://www.hcibib.org/

That's enough to keep me busy for a while. Maybe in a couple of years I'll be asking the same question about the CS Master's.

If you're looking for cutting edge HCI research, go to where the researchers are: the universities. Here's a pretty exhaustive directory of HCI educational links, university departments, etc.

I'm currently taking some HCI grad school courses at Tufts, and the department head is doing a lot of work in the field of Tangible User Interfaces .

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text and ps
pdf

I might seem a little pedantic but it was and still is HCI indeed.

Evidence here

CC.

I can't believe I no one has commented about user testing yet. It's so simple to do...

http://www.hcibib.org/tcuid/

Some companies provide loaner equipment to universities. It would be interesting to find something that is of interest/use on your campus and then get some hardware to play with. Videoconferencing equipment (end point stations and MCUs) might be a good start.

SIP and VOIP. This is something that is cool, fun and fairly accessible to folks with a decent network connection. And, if you have the energy, the administration on your campus might be interested to hear that it could save them money.

Games. Games are an interesting and fun topic. With a bit of thought, a talk could be constructed that mixed fun with learning (grin).

Internet2 Days. Advanced Networking. If you are at a school that is involved in Internet2, there are resources that are available.

Microsoft Resrach Group. Evil blah blah yes, whatever. Say what you will, but they are still smart people. Your login indicates that you might be interested in HCI, so Dumais's site might be a good start. Other companies are also listed in various places.

GRID. buzz buzz buzz. You say that no marketing hype is allowed. Well, for all the buzz about GRIDs, the folks that can give you the skinny are prob to be found here. Depending on your location, asking one of them might just get a visit.

As you are at a university (and I am assuming you are in the U.S.), you might find that someone from the NSF would be able to give you some interesting insights into what they consider to be important, interesting and fundable. Again, not sure how successful you would be at getting anyone to visit, but it is a a starter for ideas.

Lastly, many of the folks that you might want to have present will be busy. It might be worth considering an interactive presentation over video. Sounds cheezy, but many folks are used to this type of presentation.

Just a quicky,

If you're interested in exploring the field of human computer interaction further try the HCI Bibliography. If you're particularly interested in user experience, user interaction, and the "stuff below the iceberg" then take a look at the book "Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction" (ISBN 0-471-49278-7) which has a website. Also the IBM Ease of use site is pretty good.

Something to whet your appetite!

--
iDler seemed like a good name when I used to be bone idle (ie: a student)...

Just a quicky,

If you're interested in exploring the field of human computer interaction further try the HCI Bibliography. If you're particularly interested in user experience, user interaction, and the "stuff below the iceberg" then take a look at the book "Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction" (ISBN 0-471-49278-7) which has a website. Also the IBM Ease of use site is pretty good.

Something to whet your appetite!

--
iDler seemed like a good name when I used to be bone idle (ie: a student)...

I'd check out material from Google, Amazon, The HCI Bibliography, NASA, the W3C, and Joel for starters.

While some may scoff, the ACM has an article on the Windows 95 interface, a little bit aged by now. Though many in this forum dislike Microsoft for its other faults (the constant crashes, draconian business practices, etc.), a big part of their current success comes from the fact that their user interface is simply easy to use. They do their homework when it comes to that.

My mom couldn't spell WWW when I set up my parent's computer for them a couple years ago. She complained that IE wouldn't go to the website after she typed in the address. It took me a while to realize that she wasn't pressing Enter when she finished typing the address in. That's why they have that little "Go" button next to the address box that I always get rid of right away.. Duh!

This is a noble quest, young hero. God speed.

This is the sort of thing one would expect to see in SIGCHI conference proceedings. Although there were no experimental controls or peer review of the results, it is telling of Slashdot's influence that such results are published on Slashdot first. As is, the quality would be top notch for a commercial rag such as Dr. Dobbs, and with just a bit of polishing would be published in an academic journal, serve as a Master's thesis, or even -- with quite a bit of "pushing" (expanding) of the ideas -- serve as a PhD at some schools.

You're right brennan - sans-serif fonts are easier to read on a monitor.
see
Bruce Tognazzini's explanation (Tog being an original Macintosh UI guy among other things - he's up there with Jakob in the UI / Usability field).
If you're really interested and want academic literature, start at the Human Computer Interaction Bibliography at www.hcibib.org, search for serif for a couple references.

Not a great example -- GUIs and CLUIs aren't equivalent except for aesthetics. They are really totally different forms of interaction, with different tradeoffs.

But the general point is basically true. There is evidence that people's perception of the usability of a computer system is biased by its aesthetic appeal (relative to their actual productivity).