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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?"
Interesting definition of when the dawn of time took place.. :)
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?
"MS has perhaps the best research team (at least nowadays) when it comes to HCI stuff. Think about it -- who invented that top-notch joystick? Natural shape keyboards? Wheeled mouse? MS on all three."
Joystick - Thrustmaster. Copied by MS.
Wheel mouse - Logitech. Copied by MS.
Natural keyboard - Not sure, but I had previously seen ergonomic models by IBM and Logitech long before MS got into the peripheral scene.
I suggest MS is being cited for its GUI UI design and consistency across product lines more than anything else.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
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!
Though somehwat offtopic of the original HCI article, Microsoft also has the best research team in the world on 3D graphics, natural language processing, and a few other fields. Billions of dollars can rent an awful lot of talent.
CMU's Human Computer Interaction Institute (http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/ )is worth a look - B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees are offered.
Their list of accomplishments [xerox.com] reads like high-tech-marketing-mumbo-jumbo, and makes some pretty far-reaching claims (object-oriented programming)?
Yes, OO and GUI were developed at PARC, but Xerox had no idea what they had in their hands, and let it slip away. Steve Jobs visited them on a corporate junket, and that's where the Macintosh came from (true story). A bit later, Jobs came out with NeXTStep. This illustrates that engineers need marketing and vice versa.
This would be embarassing if not for the fact that IBM did exactly the same thing with RDBMS and indeed the PC, but it's got to rate alongside the greatest corporate blunders of all time.
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
Joystick? How about Boeing or Lockheed? Weren't most topnotch computer joysticks based on fighter aircraft joysticks?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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
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).
Relevant quote:
An easier road to market acceptance probably lies in the evolution of the mouse itself. Mouse Systems (Fremont, CA) first released a commercial mouse with an embedded roller for scrolling. The ProAgio included a rolling "barrel" for scrolling. However, wide market acceptance did not occur until Microsoft (Redmond, WA) introduced the IntelliMouse in 1996. In 1996, researchers at the IBM Almaden Research Center (San Jose, CA) explored various implementations of scrolling and pointing. In particular, they prototyped a mouse with an isometric, miniature joystick for 2D scrolling, located between the two mouse buttons, dubbed the JoyMouse (or JSMouse, for the combination of the joystick and mouse).
The article is a pretty good read - especially since one of the researchers taught at the university I go to until recently.
So it looks like Microsoft did copy the idea but deserves some credit in making it popular. Maybe they just put their name on Mouse Systems design, maybe they made it better. All I know is my Logitech Optical Wireless wheel hadn't existed 6 years and I can't wait to see what we're using in 2010.
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
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.
The early popular analog joysticks from Thrustmaster were largely based off commercial designs (e.g. - F16, F15, etc). They used it as a selling point, being identical in feel to the "real thing".
They also cost >$100 when basic joysticks were running $10. The throttle was another $100 or two.
Nowadays some of the better joysticks aren't based off real fighter jock ones, but they're also way cheaper ($79 for the X45, about $30-40 for a combo joystick/throttle with numerous buttons and hats). Thrustmaster has also come down in price, because the market has expanded, plus competition has forced lower prices.
Who first invented the force feedback style controllers? I think Nintendo was the first to popularize them, but as this thread shows popularize != invented.
Also, Xerox had every idea of what they had in their hands and tried hard to market it.
My understanding was that Xerox PARC knew what they had, but Xerox corporate was clueless.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
No, Norman is right. (Disclaimer, I saw Norman's keynote at UIST '94).
I'm a geek. And I thanked heaven the day I realized that my new VCR would set its own clock. I have an ancient '80s vintage VCR that I still can't remember how to program without the manual. And I hate DST time change, because I have no clue how to set/change the time on my daughters' digital watches (four unlabeled buttons, -- too small to really press properly, none of which has the obvious function of time set).
If we are to enter the era of what Norman calls "ubiquitous computing", then we've got to make it so you don't need to THINK at all to use the damn puppies.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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?"
Two great places to get info & book links are
http://www.useit.com
http://www.asktog.com
the 2 people from those sites are considered to be the among best in the field
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then again, you don't necessarily need a degree in HCI, CS, or psych at all. For example, if you're coming from the programming side (as I suspect many here on /. are :) ), you could get a job building user interfaces, which is mostly programming with some HCI component. Then you could migrate pretty smoothly to doing higher-level, design type work, which would be more HCIish and less CSish.
As far as books, here are a few I like:
- The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman.
- Programming As If People Mattered, by Nathaniel Borenstein.
Dan Olsen and Ben Shneiderman have written good HCI/UI (user interface) books, too.If you want to see what the cutting edge of HCI is, check out proceedings and journals, such as the ACM conference on HCI (Human Factors in Computing Systems, a.k.a. SIGCHI) or the ACM Symposium on User Interfaces Software and Technology (UIST).
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.
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....
No, that's wrong. Networks and especially the internet have fundamentally changed the way we use our computer. It's not really a new technology, but it allows new ways of interacting. And many users don't understand the consequences of this, which is why spyware and email worms work so amazingly well despite the fact that if you understand how your computer works, it is really easy to not be affected.
I believe that this is an interface problem, computers do no longer communicate the consequences of an action the user is about to take in an appropriate way. (Actually they never had appropriate interfaces, but that wasn't a problem because until recently people didn't communicate with untrusted computers over untrusted networks all the time.)
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
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
If you can't deal with it, why did you buy that watch? Or if your daughter bought it, why do you set it for her? It's here problem.
Can you say "grandparents"? I knew you could.
Other people may want the features that are accessed through those buttons.>
The point is, it's not obvious what all these buttons do, they're hard to press, and *SETTING* a watch should be a fairly obvious function, and simple to do.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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
They tell contractors how to build houses instead of building it properly themselves.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
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.
"and makes some pretty far-reaching claims (object-oriented programming)? "
The first true object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk, was developed at Xerox PARC. It's not really a far-reaching claim.
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
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."
Four buttons may be a whole lot easier to some people, if they bother to read the instructions.
And who keeps the instructions after initially setting the watch? Of if you keep them, who can find them?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.