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Top Research Labs in Human-Computer Interaction?
legLess writes: "Jakob Nielsen's latest Useit column lists his opinion of the best HCI research labs, from 'The Dawn of Time' (1945) 'til now. Xerox PARC made the list each decade, naturally. He says that future HCI research is in jeopardy, partly due to Universities backing away from 'real-world' research, and partly because 'HCI has rarely been the first priority of new research organizations, so by the time research managers recognize the need for it and build up a world-class HCI team, it's often too late.' Is he right about the best labs? Is he right about his other conclusions?"
Let's face it, computers are just a passing fad. In only a few more years we'll all have genetically-engineered austistic monkey slaves.
Microsfot made it to the top in 2000-2010? I wonder what they were doing?
Return the bells of Balangiga.
Interesting definition of when the dawn of time took place.. :)
However, it got disbanded or is being disbanded now, or atleast it has very less emphasis now because the ir graduating students were just not getting jobs and the faculty were not getting funding.
This was also due to the fact that most of the graduate students were from social sciences etc. Many of them could not even do anything beyond using Word, let alone do programming.
Anyway, no body is sad to see that group crumble - we all felt they were a bunch of fluffballs who belonged in the social science department - I don't think HCI should be part of computer science.
I'd like to get into HCI professionally but I have no credentials. Can anyone point out a good place to start? Even if it's just a few books? What kind of degree do you need, and what are the best schools?
-dbc
Nielsen's piece is more important to read because of its (rightful) insistence on HCI as something which is rarely considered when it should be.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
This might be dumb/silly but isn't it more that Universities usually give out research funds via department? and the deparements rarely ever share? and because this sort of research requires both CS/CE knowledge *and* psychology?
Boston College, though it lacks a graduate program in CS, is still doing some really interesting work in HCI. The CameraMouse and EagleEyes use computer vision and muscle eletric potential, respectively to control the mouse cursor. While this is mainly a user-assistive technology, they're continuing to develop the technology and at some point one of these could move into the mainstream of HCI.
You're not allowed to rent here anymore!
CMU's Human Computer Interaction Institute (a href="http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/">http://www.hcii . mu.edu/ is worth a look - B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees are offered.
Well, if anybody cares, the University of Jyväskylä (in Finland) has Agora - human technology center
Ken Perlin was one a guest lecturer at my HCI class at Stanford. This guy has so many good ideas, check out his web page:
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/
Alot of his work is Java/Web based and so its really easy to look at and get a feel for how it would work
And that is my major point about M$, that they steal everything they do. This is why they are so afraid of the idea of making their code public. If you were to look at their code, you would see clearly that it violates hundreds of software patents, which short-term-thinking corporate types incorrectly think is the holy grail of profit. And this is why, a few years ago, when it was found that part of Win95 had been stolen by hackers inside the company and circulated in Russia, they went ballistic.
M$ is a company of Nazi-inspired thieves.
I vote that Amazon should be included here since the net is more commericalized now, and they patented the "one-click" way of e-commercerce.
I suggest he should put up a survey and include "Cowboy Neal" among the choices.
Return the bells of Balangiga.
I'd imagine most of the people here OWN one:)
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
Human-Computer Interfaces aren't much of an item any more. I think he is looking in the wrong direction. He is looking at how people interact with their home PC. If you look at the last few years the way we interact with our PC's hasn't changed much. But PC's haven't changed much as well. Yes, there is more disk space, faste CPU's etc. but how they work and what we do with it hasn't changed much. That means there isn't much need for a better interface.
Only a new technology need a new interface, the way we currently interact with PC's is around for some time now and everybody is fine with it. If you want to see intresting thing I think you should be looking at newer devices like mobile phone, PDA's etc.
I'm running with Internet Explorer 6.0 rig
It's worth noting that Don Norman, the former VP of Apple's Advanced Technology Group and the author of The Design of Everyday Things (among others) is currently a professor at Northwestern University. He's teaching a class this quarter, the future design of everyday things (sorry--login required for the class page), and it's fascinating!
Josh
news:alt.hypertext
he never posted there either
Or, in different words, if musical instruments were designed like software, instead of violins and pianos, we'd probably only be getting those electronic children's books that play a melody when you touch different parts on the page. Kind of intuitive and easy, but not exactly very powerful or interesting.
UC Irvine's HCI group is called CORPS:
Computers, ORganizations, Policy and Society
its at:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~corps/
As the name suggests, it is more of social sciences group, than a computer science group (as stated by the author above).
HCI has rarely been the first priority of new research organizations
Thats true but the real failing has been its use in industry, HCI is rarely the first priority there either, being often seen as expensive, time consuming and something separate to the traditional design process.
How many projects actually fail because the developers designed the system that the client wanted, not what the users would realistically use on a day to day basis.
The most practical aspects of HCI focus on understanding the user, and most modern software design methodologies take account of this...actual use of HCI in RL is really lacking.
Its one one the main reasons projects fail in the long term, ok poor project management and vague requirements do the most damage but its still pretty important
Most people pop DVDs into their player and play them. Some people play around with the menus, many people don't. It's a leisure activity. It doesn't have to be efficient. It doesn't have to be simple. And if some people don't get it, it doesn't matter. If it's quirky, that's part of the charm. If customers don't like it, the manufacturer's focus groups will let them know.
Tog had a similarly irrelevant column tearing apart the MacOSX dock. Come on, what's the problem? It looks nice, people like it, and anybody with an IQ greater than 80 can use it. Optimizing it doesn't save anybody any real amount of time.
Guys: spend some time thinking about some real stuff, stuff that matters. Saying semi-obvious things about trivial little features really isn't interesting.
While the interface to Windows is generally pretty good, I think it's a bit unfair to give credit to MS for the research behind it, as so many of the good ideas have been borrowed from elsewhere. Microsoft are good at taking an idea and enhancing it, but I don't think it's reasonable to put them up with Xerox PARC and the like.
OTOH, Microsoft do run a number of research laboratories now. The one just down the road from me in Cambridge, UK is looking at things way beyond current Windows UI. I suspect this sort of facility is the reason for Jakob's prophecy that MS research will be a big contender in the coming years.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Some of the best HCI work has been done in areas like Aircraft control.
I don't think anyone would disagree that the Euro fighter development team hasn't put a lot of research into HCI.
Car manufacturers are also doing a lot of good HCI work.
Nokia managed to develop a efficient interface with a low learning curve, this is a fairly major achievement.
I think things like touchtone phones, and remote control devices should have made the list.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Check out their GVU pages (some profs hold appointments in both psych and CS)
GaTechGVU
First thing I thought was, "hmmm... haven't we understood hydrochloric acid for a long time now?"
if you want to see what research Microsoft is up to, go to http://research.microsoft.com/
They are working on some intresting stuff.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I *strongly* disagree with him on this. In fact, the opposite is true. It is only in the past few years that universities and industry have realized that there is a HUGE demand for human factors or HCI specialists.
Engineering deparments are also realizing that undergrads can benefit greatly by taking a human factors course in product/system design.
If any one is interested in bringing human factors into their engineering education I suggest you look at Kim Vicente who is trying to make human factors a part of every engineers education.
"The scientist describes what is; The engineer creates what never was." - Theodore von Karman
That's the problem. Today's computer user is not a highly technically literate professional the way they were a decade or two ago. The average Joe now has a PC, Mac or whatever sitting on his desk. By your own admission, interfaces have not developed to support this new class of user in performing his tasks.
Added to which, I think the state of interfaces at present is pretty sucky even for the expert user. For a long time, the productivity in most offices was known to drop significantly when "old fashioned" tools went out in favour of modern computers. Has anyone ever seen anything to suggest that this is not still the case?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
... idiots who don't know what a half-life is will learn to post in the right thread.
This is a bit offtopic, so sue me.....but if I recall correctly, Princeton has a human-machine interaction lab. They don't study ergonomics or anything of that sort--it is more of a parapsychological type undertaking.
They do studies as to whether people miles away from a turing-type machine can make it spit out a 1 instead of a zero, or something like this. A bit strange for an institution of this sort to be promoting something that one would normally see on Sally Jesse!
Their webpage!"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
It was like 10 words long and said "I like PARC". This lame, trolling post of mine has more content.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
My dissertation research involves developing a software system that will allow a computer to acquire a lexicon grounded in visual experiences. Thus words to a computer start to have some "meaning" rather than just being based on other words.
I'm working through the Robotics Research Lab at LSU.
How rigorous. Usability pundit picks pet criteria and decides that these are the top HCI labs. Those interested in the real state of the field instead of opinion might take a look at the more rigorous listings available:
Top Research Labs by Topic, 1978 and 1997
Where Researchers Want to Work
BusinessWeek's Top 20 US Research Labs
Google Cache of 1999 US News ranking of User Interaction Grad Schools
MIT Technology Review Corporate R&D Scorecard (Requires subscription)
HCI Academic Article Imapct Rankings
I think that few of the people on avant garde of HCI research take Jacob Neilsen very seriously. He is a usability specialist, not a interface researcher.
http://research.microsoft.com/downloads/
Got anothor of thos Invalid FormKeys again.
The University of Maryland's Flagship branch in College Park has a Human-Computer Interaction Lab that focuses in part on making NEW technologies for kids. This includes computer software, and cool interactive toys (think Teddy from A.I.). They have a team of children who help with the design process, and are overall doing all kinds of really neat things. I think they should have at least received an honorable mention, if only for including kids in the research process, and making _new_ technologies.
The kid-oriented website is here:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/kiddesign/
The HCIL exists under the umbrella of the UM Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, their grown-up page is here:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/
Like several other responses, I thought the list was entirely too random, and didn't include nearly enough explanation of who got picked and why.
Does anyone else besides me think that Jakob Nielsen is an idiot? I've read several things by this guy, and have yet to agree with him on anything substantial, and I'm a UI fanatic.
HCI Labs are expensive items, it ain't cheap to get either multi-disciplinary personnel or more single disciplinary people.
:-)
The best in the business at the moment are HCIL Maryland, M$ Redmond even if they never implement their research!, Xerox PARC and Nokia's Research Lab in Finland (who ain't got a Nokia?).
Others that I know more about personally are Prof. Stephen Brewster group at Glasglow Interactive Systems Group http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/gist/ and my own group the Interaction Design Centre http://www.ul.ie/~idc (Gotta mention it !
HCI is one area which still needs both more available research and more universal courses on the topic.
Research is definitely needed in new technology. As it requires investigating both current and possible HCI methods and techniques. As with technology, neither are social or personal interactions static these need to be further examined such as in CSCW ( Computer Support Collaborative Work) an offspring of HCI.
The requirement for more univeral courses is obvious in that I've seen friends and students design UI's and winced at the end result. Until every programmer or software engineer is taught simple HCI principles interfaces will still pain the user.
One easy book to read on this subject is Jeff Raskin's "The Humane Interface".
The best place to see what the top research labs in HCI are is in the current research literature such as the ACM http://www.acm.org in the CHI section, this really is the best place to find academic research on the topic. To find the best place for corporate research just find a successful product that uses an interface and there you go!
When I read the short article a week or so ago, I remember wishing it contained more information. He has a bit about his criteria for the list, but I would have liked to see at least a short blurb about why each lab deserved their ranking. I know the Alertbox posts are not meant to be long involved discussions, but Nielsen's columns usually contain more analysis than this one.
I am a software engineer who spends 90% of my work time trying to find out what a couple of thousand people want to see in one system. I didn't have any formal training in school and now I am paying for that. From a Professor's point of view they think that computational problems are the more interesting and complex ones. This is because CS nowadays is taught from a userLESS aspect. Most projects/assignments are never going to be used by anyone in a real world environment therefore why bother designing usable chi for it. I agree with the author of the article. I am somewhat disappointed that CHI is not a big factor in the educational arena meanwhile anyone who designs big systems knows that without a good chi there is no product.
The IEEE just released a new publication called "IEEE Pervasive Computing; Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems". You can track down a dead-tree edition (got mine in the mail a couple of days ago) or read it online if you have a digital subscription.
The first (paper) issue even includes a reprint of Mark Weiser's "The Computer for the 21st Century", Scientific American, 1991 article. A very interesting read, seeing how far things have and have not gone in ten years.
--The more you know, the less you know.
Isn't he the web usability "guru" who has the unusable web site?
well, other people have already noted that he's too focused on human-workstation/server interaction (rather than broader human-computer interaction which includes the range of computers people don't think about as computers, like microwaves and air traffic control systems). but lets look at it within that frame.
easy stuff first: today. i think it's laughable that he'd include Microsoft rather than Apple, particularly given the criteria he states. Microsoft is very much doing evolutionary progressions on there Win95 UI on the desktop, and very unimpressive stuff in the WebTV realm. Apple, on the other hand, took a much more dramatic jump in the Aqua development. further, Apple does a much more thurough and complete job of UI definitions, work that MS has largely just ignored, leaving up to the app designer.
it's also quite interesting that Bell Labs didn't make it in the '80s. it was 1981 when rob pike wrote the first bitmap window system for Unix, and that decade when Bell Labs created the jerq, blit, and DMD (or MDM?) series of multi-tasking graphical terminals. pioneering work that led directly to much of what came after, particularly much of the Xerox PARC and Bellcore work following it.
his "fall of the good" observation is distressing, and i agree with it, but not his reasoning. Xerox and Bell Labs certainly hadn't "peaked" in any real sense by their respective apearances in the list (okay, Xerox maybe by its third).
the article is less useful without notes on why a give place made the list. i certainly hope X wasn't a positive contributing factor for MIT, for example! to my knowledge, MIT did more interesting things in the '90s. and i confess total ignorance as to what PARC's done since 2000. i'd really like to, but he doesn't say.
i think the author's assertions about HCI research in universities are bogus. while research universities may have avoided "real-world" research in the past, today that's nearly reversed. many universities are indistinguishable from corporate R&D arms. in particular, given CS departments' increasing trend towards vo-tech training over broad educational foundations, this becomes more and more true. but this just changes the cause, not the problem. now universities arn't likely to be involved in pineering HCI research because they're doing much smaller, more incremental improvement sort of stuff.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Even though that post was 100% on topic (dicussing sunken cities) and 0% flamebait it got moded into oblivion because people didn't want to read it.
/. is beginning to really suck ass.
One of the primary difficulties faced by HCI within industry is that the field is still ill defined and misunderstood by those who are practitioners of software development. A very common view is that HCI is the study of how to make software that is easy to use for the first time, naïve user. For instance, once comment posted about this story states "...if musical instruments were designed like software, instead of violins and pianos, we'd probably only be getting those electronic children's books that play a melody when you touch different parts on the page. Kind of intuitive and easy, but not exactly very powerful or interesting."
This same misperception that HCI is only about software for naïve users may also explain why it is so well embraced by the major players in enterprise web development and not is other areas such as application software. In the world of web development it is widely accepted that all users are naïve users. (This is partly why HCI practitioners such as Jokob Nielson are able to be so prolific in the area of web software.) However, in application development, the common view is the software is being developed for "expert users" and that catering to the needs of the naïve user through HCI will only dilute the program's capabilities needed by the "experts" .
This same attitude is also leads software development teams to think that they can create user interface for naïve users simply by creating a lot of dialog boxes and wizards. (Yuck!)
The fact is that the field of HCI is much broader than this common and simplistic understanding. While HCI does have something important to say about the way applications are designed for the naïve user, this aspect of usability is only one component of HCI. HCI also has a lot to add to the design of software systems to be used by "expert" users.
People such as the ethnographer (Who works to understand how the end user gets their work done.) and the information architect (Who designs user interfaces for information-rich software systems.) are also working within the field of HCI. Their contributions are probably most useful when developing software systems that are not geared towards the naïve user such as Photoshop or even an enterprise application. In these applications it is even more important that the software accommodate the user and fit within the user's normal workflow.
I have put together a short paper giving information about the different roles that are exist in the domain of user interface software and how these roles fit together fit together to form a loose user interface software development process. It is available at http://www.bobowen.org. I also recommend that software development practicioners get and read About Face by Alan Cooper for a better understanding of how user interfaces can be designed without resorting to all these dialog boxes.
UCSB has a major interdisiplinary push called the cognitive science board. Major departments are CS, Psychology, Linguistics, Geography and many others. One of the major pushes is HCI, and we have may of the top experts in the field. It's one of the top five research institutions in the country.
I really wish people wouldn't worship the ground Nielson walks on. He SO does not deserve it. Just because he was one of the first to make some common sense suggestions to help web sites download faster, does not mean he is an expert in HCI. It just means that he was too cheap to get a modem faster than 9.6 kbps.
I have been developing web pages commercially for 5 years. Frames do have a use, as do embedded images. W3C is smarter than Nielson. They have forsight and understanding of how people like to present their content.
Take a look at the source code of http://www.useit.com/. Uppercase HTML tags, unquoted attributes within tags, single HTML tags such as img, br and hr without closing forward slashes at the end. He doesn't know what he is talking about. And worst of all, he uses Verdana, an ugly, unreadable font that is not as suitable as Arial, Helvetica and sans-serif for viewing text on computer screens.
One reason new technologies are created is to enhance the education and entertainment that can be provided by online content systems. If content provided is dry and boring (eg: www.useit.com), viewers are going to learn less and be less satisfied with their experience.
Nielson should take a reality check and leave the publication of usability papers to people who are experts, not just claim to be.
Hmm, is this a bit like a baseball 'World Series'? Surely not every 'Top Research Lab in Human-Computer Interaction' in the last 50 years is from the US....
Seriously, though - I know that Nielsen is trying to stimulate discussion about the role of HCI labs and generate interest in the history of HCI. But ranking HCI labs over "history" just seems a bit silly to me.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
i should think that human computer interaction research by definition applies to real-world applications. by making real live humans central, obviously any research must be geared towards things humans will use, thus being applicable to the "real world". while a lot it may not all be useful today and now (e.g., his reference to "unworkable, esoteric 3-d browsers") it still has applications (military, etc) and most will probably eventually filter down to the mainstream, not to mention the ton of more "real world" hci research going on, especially in corporations whose focus is on the usability of their products (e.g. nokia hardware/software, microsoft, etc).
in terms of the best labs, i'm biased coming from cmu, but i can say we have quite a repertoire of "real world" research projects like computer based tutoring, safer cars (with gm), the use of the internet in american homes, and making programming accessible to all in addition to the more far off stuff like command post of the future, visual copresence, and everybody's favorite, wearable computing
No "ask slashdot" FOR A WEEK, and this is the shit we get?
FUCK U
(* Only a new technology need a new interface, the way we currently interact with PC's is around for some time now and everybody is fine with it. *)
I am not fine with it. I am getting tired of menus. If you have say 25 different options, menus are fine. However, if you have 200+, then menus and hierarcies really stink IMO. It is a "path bath".
I would rather see the options treated more like a web search. You type in key words, and a list of matches come up. Good interface designers would put in a lot of synonyms so that people are more likely to find what they are looking for. For example, "delete, rid, remove, disappear".
Further, users should be able to put their own rankings or "markers" and/or their own key words into their favoriate matches. I used to do this kind of stuff with old dos dBASE sofware, so it is not rocket science. (Well, maybe in C++ it is.)
I don't know why interface designers so much love hierarchical menus and options lists. Time to move on. Trees have outlived their usefulness. (In file systems, too, but this is another anti-tree rant covered in another topic.)
Table-ized A.I.
He couldn't design his way out of a wet paper bag. He caught peoples attention back in '97 with 'Frames are bad' and has been hustling his B$ to the masses ever since. He makes his bank on telling people how they should design interfaces instead of going out there and doing it.
------------------- a man with a good car needs no justification '93 90S 150K
Xerox corporate had no idea of what they had and for 1 million dollars gave apple rights. Apple had only seen the Alto not the Star and before the visit had planned bit mapped graphics and some type of GUI for the LISA, although it was quite different from what was released because they developed based on what they saw from Xerox. Actually the Lisa was quite advanced GUI wise if you have ever seen an Alto or Star the Lisa was way ahead of it in GUI, but the Star and Alto had another interesting feature which was the OO programming system it had. True modern OO and OO concepts were developed at PARC, Simula was a precursor to true OO, which was created at Xerox and was named there. Steve Jobs eventually out did PARC with NeXT and it's release in 1987, 5 years after Star which was quite crude in comparison. Xerox was actually right not to deal with the computer technologies because they would have gone the road of NeXT or the LISA because those products were simply too expensive and advanced to succeed. Xerox PARC also created ethernet and experimented with many great technologies as did Bell Labs now Lucent Labs and the great work still being done by IBM, But today Parc and Bell Labs are a poor shell of what they were because the companies controlling them are poorly managed and dying. For the record I am sick of people claiming the Modern GUI was stolen from Xerox. Truth is the idea was around since the 1950's, Xerox and Apple employed most of the pioneers, apple borrowed some ideas from Xerox but began with Lisa in 1978 before visiting Xerox and completed it in 1981, released in 1982, so apparently they were working on these interfaces before visiting Xerox and got some direction from research at PARC. Anyhow apple paid Xerox for the privilege of using their research, Xerox really deserves a big check from MS who ripped them off big time because early incarnations of windows were more like the Alto than the Mac and Xerox never got a dime from MS. Also with the resources that MS has they have been unable to contribute like Xerox and fail to make open standards. It is a shame that the virtuous corporations who do great things shrivel up and die at the hands of competitors using their ideas.
Don Bitzer is the true unsung hero of computer science - his work as head of the University Of Illinois' PLATO project touched virtually everything people love today about computers and the Internet!
Check out his 1965! patent - bitmapped graphics, audio and photographic quality images back in the sixties!
Other (pre-1975!) PLATO innovations included instant messaging, near zero latency multiplayer network gaming, distance learning, groupware, newsgroups, online newspapers, animated email, network delivery of music, client/server computing, touch screen interfaces, flat-panel displays (the basis for the ones you're just now seeing at Circuit City!), and multimedia that were delivered across a worldwide educational network with satellite and cable communications.
In his ACM article on the early days of Smalltalk, Alan Kay states that he had no idea how to implement his Dynabook concept before seeing a demo of Bitzer's patented plasma display.
Search some of the early WWW documents, and you'll be surprised to see PLATO's influence. Here's e-mail inventor Ray Tomlinson and Ethernet papa Robert Metcalfe attending a 1971 conference that included a demo of Bitzer's PLATO system before their breakthrough work. And there's communication from none less than Tim Berners-Lee encouraging early Internet pioneers to try to meet Professor Daniel Sleator's challenge to try to provide the Web with easy-to-use PLATO features from two decades earlier.
Prominent users of Bitzer's PLATO system at the University of Illinois included Groove's Ray Ozzie (who credits PLATO with giving him the idea for Lotus Notes) and Brand Fortner, a founder of Spyglass, which produced the original Internet Explorer for Microsoft.
At the risk of overestimating PLATO's profound influence, it certainly is an odd coincidence that "ground zero" of PLATO just happened to be across the street from Netscape founder Mark Andreesen's NSCA gig (where Fortner also worked at one time).
For more info on PLATO, check out David Woolley's excellent PLATO: The Emergence of Online Community.
After reading it, you'll see that Bitzer's PLATO of the early '70s had far more in common with today's popular Internet that Berners-Lee's Web of the early '90s.
Don Bitzer's been the Rodney Dangerfield of the Internet for far too long - it's time to give the guy the proper respect he deserves!
Jakob is just pissed because unlike Ken, he never won an Oscar
Go NYU - Ang Lee, Joel Coen, Martin Scorcese, Spike Lee, and Ken Perlin (!).
<snide>among others, of course</snide>
HCI spans many categories, which makes it hard to fit into one pigeonhole. Which suggests that reductionist categorization is the wrong approach to education, not that the HCI people belong segregated with the humanities people.
It's the hard computer science people who need to get out of the department more often.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Microsoft spends billions on Human-Computer research. I worked in speech recognition research there for a couple of years. They routinely do a survey of what the universities are doing, and share code from CMU and MIT. Microsoft has usually has several projects researching the Next Big Thing, be it speech, natural language, vision, AI or just new mouse designs. They do make some progress, but it is very slow.
:)
They are not getting their money's worth. Oddly, they don't expect to. Its pure research, some people say its the only pure research in industry today; possibly there is a good reason for the demise of the other pure research labs.
For those of you who want to do research on some pie in the sky concept after your PHd, Microsoft is a great place to be, as it pays well and gives a fairly long leash.
MIT and CMU are both leaders in HCI. MIT is for bright team players, and functions pretty similar to Microsoft..transitioning from MIT to Microsoft is pretty smooth. CMU is apparently for Mad Scientist loners. This is where the really radical stuff gets done. Of course, you need a big brain for either
...a point of order:
l
I think Don Norman could get hired by any department he wanted to join; if only for all his work on attention, modelling, knowledge representation, information processing and memory. Hes quite a big figure in the cognitive psychology world. Most psychology people would probably recognise him from that work (Norman&Bobrow, 1975 on the distinction between data limited and resource limited performance is a citation classic for example, just about every psych undergrad will encounter it at some point).
To get more on-thread, I think its fair comment to say its certainly true that he's more famous for his mainstream cognition work than his HCI stuff IMHO, so as a test case it kinda supports the source article.
Signed... Anonymous Psych Coward
ref:http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~norman/CV.htm
Interestingly, I work in this field. I won't supply too many specifics (I probably shouldn't), but we are investigating ways of improving HCI in high-load menu-driven systems where errors - which can be common - can literally cost in the millions of dollars per.
Voice looks promising. And it's more robust - especially in a bounded environment like a menu-driven system - than you might think.
Of course, there are other issues with HCI outside of providing input to the system. Such as monitoring critical systems, and monitoring the environment a teleoperated machine works in. With potenially long input delays (seconds). We are studying the effects of tactile warnings, three-dimensional audio, and computer-augmented reality to provide more efficient operator-machine interaction. Very cool stuff.
Cheers,
Brian
Tog is not quite as irritating and repetitive as Norman, but he's just a cheerleader, not a designer or a creator. He doesn't have much to say that's useful, that you can't get better and deeper by reading somewhere else more comprehensive and less slanted toward his corporate masters.
After he left Apple, Tog sold out to Sun: a company that absolutely doesn't give a shit about UI design, and just wanted to hire a figurehead to pontificate about it.
And pontificate he did: Tog promised that he was going to turn the ship around and redesign Open Look so Unix was easy to use, and look where that went.
Instead, he spent piles of money producing Sun's "gee whiz" Starfire Corporate Wank-Off Video, in response to Apple's "Knowledge Navigator" HCI Porno Video (aka "GUIs Gone Wild"). That's the kind of bullshit that gives HCI a bad name.
On the other hand, Jakob Nielson is a conscientious researcher who has produce interesting and useful results, and written about them clearly so many people can understand.
Nielson also used to work for Sun, but he didn't make such a fool of himself as Tog did with that silly "Fartfire" video.
to me, ``best'' really depends on the sub-issues you are interested in. once you have identified those issues, you can drill down to the relevant labs and people.
Doug Engelbart invented the mouse at SRI, and developed a graphical user interface to NLS, which was his early hypertext system (and no, he didn't get the idea from Ted Nelson). Ivan Sutherland's work on Sketchpad at MIT was extremely influential.
And Smalltalk wasn't the only GUI that PARC developed. There was the Alto, Interlisp-D, Mesa/Cedar, XDE (Xerox Development Environment) , Star/Viewpoint, and others.
When you're comparing computer user interfaces to musical instruments, remember that it's extremely difficult and takes a lifetime of training and practice to learn to use a musical instrument.
They tell contractors how to build houses instead of building it properly themselves.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Dr. Bunsen Honeydew here! Today we will test human-computer interactions by connecting my assistant Beaker into this mainframe...
http://hci.ucsd.edu/lab
The University of California, San Diego has an HCI lab. Good stuff by Jim Hollan and Ed Hutchins including Pad++ and aviation stuff.
That's a different person. It's not an uncommon name. The Jakob Neilsen we're talking about publishes his web site at: http://www.useit.com
"Quality"?
Create a folder on your desktop called "Desktop" and try cut n paste other folders and files into or out of there. Interesting things happen. Real quality stuff.
Ever tried reading the list of security hotfixes that Windows XP automatically downloads? The majority of them are bugs of the "lets anyone on the internet run anything on your computer and access any files on your hard disk" variety.
While an application is busy loading, and you hold in Alt+TAB to switch to other Windows, you'll often see TWO icons for the program. This also happens on other occasions when the system gets busy. Real good UI design there.
The "Start" menu gets RIPPED away from the user if a window pops up. This is EXTREMELY bad UI design.
When Outlook starts it seems to insist that it needs your attention by flashing blue in the task bar. However, when you click on it, it DOESNT need your attention, not at all. That is BAD ui design, you don't put an annoying flashing button on the screen, asking to be pressed by the user, unless there is a REASON it should be pressed by the user.
More ALT+TAB issues: when a program has a modeless child dialog which has the focus, the application simply disappears COMPLETELY from the ALT+TAB icon list. Really stupid UI design - the user will think his program has closed.
More ALT+TAB issues: under certain circumstances when an application is busy (e.g. SourceSafe is one app that does this), the application also simply disappears COMPLETELY from the ALT+TAB icon list.
When you try select an application by clicking on its taskbar button, and the program is busy, and you click again because you don't see the application appear, it MINIMIZES the application. This is such STUPID, meaningless behaviour I can't even begin to fathom what idiot thought it was a good idea. And I'm sorry, I don't care how good the technical explanation is for why the app can't redraw itself: the end-user simply *should not have to know* that "the thread is busy thus the application can't process the WM_PAINT message on the application message loop, because the window management in a Win32 application is done by the application thread itself". Moreover, if you click on an app on the taskbar, it means *select the application*. Simple. Regardless of whether or not its already been selected.
Create a new folder in Windows Explorer and often it will not appear in the treeview until you manually refresh. BAD user interface behaviour.
Watch your desktop icons when you start up a system on a slowish maching or on a machine with not too much RAM - you can actually *see* them redraw with plain icons, then redraw OVER those icons with the actual program icons, then suddenly THEY ALL JUST MAGICALLY DISAPPEAR, and then lo and behold, they redraw themselves back again. On a slowish machine (like my Pentium III 550 128 MB RAM TNT2, which is NOT actually a slow machine), you can actually watch as icons repaint themselves again and again in Windows Explorer, sometimes going into some sort of loop where they keep on doing it every few seconds. That is NOT good quality UI.
I think this ones fixed in XP but is definitely there on Win2K: When you double click on an unknown file type in Windows Explorer, THE "OPEN WITH" DIALOG OFTEN APPEARS *UNDERNEATH* ALL OPEN WINDOWS. This is so stupid I can't even begin to wrap my mind around it.
In the DirectX SDK installation program, when selecting the desired installation folder, if you open another app (e.g. Windows Explorer) and then close it again, the dialog for selecting the desired installation folder magically begins to JUST LOSE FOCUS once a second. This is also some sort of parallel universe thing that I can't get mind around. So to type in the desired folder, you actually have to click with the mouse and then very quickly type in the next letter, click with the mouse, very quickly type in the next letter, etc.
An MFC application, if you've done MFC programming, you'll see has many annoying "lose focus" problems.
Why the HELL can't you resize a dialog? This is really dumb.
In older versions of Windows Explorer, there was no way to alt+tab to the properties dialogs for file properties that you opened once you selected another window over them --- you literally had to minimize ALL windows to get to them and close them - and if you don't KNOW about it, as non-technical users cannot possibly know, then they just pile up, the user doesn't know they're there at all. I've seen people who had dozens of these things open and didnt know it.
Try delete a folder in Windows Explorer, and watch the array of stupid ridiculous errors you get, in any version of Windows Explorer except Windows95's.
In Windows 2000's "right click / search" from in Windows Explorer, if you type your search term "too quickly", you get a stupid error "A valid folder name must be entered".
In Windows Explorer, try create a file (e.g. right click / new text file) and give it a name beginning with a ".". Note that this is a perfectly valid filename, filenames CAN begin with a ".", and you can create them with a DOS box or any other program.
Anyone else seen, on Win98, when you open Windows Explorer, that only your C: drive is there and none of your other drives, until you manually do a refresh? Of course, most of us have probably seen it. Imagine a non-technically-savvy user trying to find his CD ROM drive.
The UI for Windows XP's search is so badly thought out its difficult to know where to begin. First of all, and EVERYONE I know's machines, the search feature simply often doesn't work. It'll work one day, be broken the next, work the next day, broken the next etc. Secondly, why can't I disable searching into .zip files? Thirdly, anyone ever tried to delete a longish (i.e. > 20) list of files found using "search"? The files will mostly remain in the list after being deleted! Then when you get confused and try delete them again, it gives you a confusing (to non-technical-savvy users) error message.
Right-click on the start menu: everywhere else in the whole Microsoft universe, "properties" is at the bottom of the menu, which is a very nice idea because you instinctively know where to find it - except, on the start menu, IT ISNT. And there is no reason at all for it not to be.
Man, believe me, I could go on for a loooong time. And every single one of the above problems can be easily confirmed by others here if they want to. I honestly don't know how ANYONE can use the words "quality" and "Microsoft" in the same sentence and keep a straight face. Unless they're on the MS payroll.
I'm sorry, but Microsoft is really CRAP at user interface design. And this is a company that, I'll remind you, spends $5,000,000,000 a year on research.
I am a researcher in a HCI lab at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. The lab is brand new - we have not even been officially opened. The lab is small now, but we have been endowed with quite a bit of research money. currently we are working on attentive interfaces, and I will be demo'ing a prototype attentive communicator at this year's CHI (HCI) conference in Minneapolis.
Check out our site:
http://hml.queensu.ca
Back in the mid '80s, inspired by Neilsen Norman Group partner Bruce Tognazzini to explore the syntheiss of graphical user interface and online information services, my then trade press hat was enough to get me in to have a chat about user interface research with Professor Peter Poole, the then relatively new head of the Computer Science department at my alma mater, the University of Melbourne.
At that interview Poole was dismissive of HCI as something best left to commercial interests but before the end of the '80s, through his role as chairman of an IFIP Technical Committee, he and I finished up in the Napa Valley at an IFIP working conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction.
During those years, I had opportunities to follow a few of the interconnected strands of inspiration variously categorised under Hypertext, Computer-supported Cooperative Work and the broader Computer Graphics communities and share in the early work and inspiration coming from institutions in the form of Brown's Intermedia and MIT's Notes (pre-Lotus), and from indepenents like Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart.
Meanwhile Prof Poole was making the University of Melbourne Australia's gateway to the Internet and creating a supportive campus-wide IT infrastructure that would allow a few early innitiatives to be explored, especially educational multimedia. But as is so often the way of academia, the benefit became spread much wider than Melbourne through the natural progression of individual careers.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Well I am not an expert so I welcome the additional wisdom here... But in recent years, for example, how about Nokia or one of the Japanese companies that have done so much with mobile phone interfaces? Probably a lot of good work being done by people like Sony on more pure 'computer' interfaces as well. How about the guys who put Minitel together? ok so it's dated now but way back there in the 70s and 80s a *huge* percentage of the French public were buying services and getting information over computer networks way before the internet as we know it now had moved into the public domain.
Interested to know your thoughts.
I'm surprised UIUC hasn't been mentioned for our present endeavors in HCI. There's a lot of money and work flying around here.
...and then there's my favorite baby project on campus, Active Spaces. Active Spaces is just a part of the CS department, separate from Beckman, and is researching ways to gadgetize the new CS building, aka the Siebel center (currently-under-construction).
The huge building known as the Beckman institute houses AI and HCI research with primary intermingling occurring among the CS and Psychology departments. Human-Computer Intelligence Interaction
THIS IS A TEST COMMENT.
.NET ©®(TM).
I'm trying to diagnose an MTU path discovery error with my ISP, so disregard this comment.
1. Local Account Passwords are simple or Weak. Please change them to something overtly convoluted and difficult to remember. It wont matter anyway because the Active Directory Server©®(TM) you authenticate against is probably not patched.
2. IIS©®(TM) Installed. Please update to Apache 1.3.24 or 2.0.35
3. JRE 1.4 is installed. Wow. That's even more bloated than the first revision of
4. Auto-login is enabled. This is inherently dangerous because this OS has no inkling as to what multi-user means, for whatever reason, everyone is a su-doer.
5. Passwords are too short. This is weak because the domain controller isn't patched. If you are running Samba 2.2, please disregard this. We can't tell the difference.
6. File systems. They all appear to be running NTFS. Good (you should have two UPS for this. If its get corrupted, snicker.........)
7. Your Cell Phone, Palm Device, monitor, printer, hub, DSL router, joystick, speakers, KVM, other PCs, scanner and filing cabinet do not have Client Access Licenses.
8. Sent all info to Microsoft.
Creating products and features is not the same thing as researching HCI. Nokia and Sony have created a lot of good products, but have contributed little to the field of HCI. Do you see any major OSes adopting interface elements developed by Nokia or Sony?
As for Minitel, you're kidding, right? Are you seriously nominating a clunky government monopoly teletext system as a peer of Xerox PARC or Bell Labs or Apple's Advanced Technology Group in usability research?
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
I just found this quote floating around:
'The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
-Bruce Ediger'
I bet it would pass the patent office. Take old stuff and e-tize it, and you gitta patent.
Table-ized A.I.