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This is my inaugural Standards column as newly appointed SIGCHI Vice Chair for Standards. Under Pat Billingsley's care, this column had generated much interest and favorable comments, and, as a result, I will want to continue providing the same information as in the past. Thus, each quarter, you can expect news from standards activities which may affect you as user interface designers, programmers, and/or users of interactive computer software. But, in addition, I want to extend the scope and content of this column to include
I thank Pat for introducing me in her last column. Perhaps what I can add is a taste of why I became involved in standards. Like so many of my colleagues, I started out with a dim view of standards---a view that I now feel is too simplistic. I feared, correctly, that standards, if thoughtlessly applied or slavishly adhered to, can negatively affect the usability of a piece of software.
But at the same time, I was concerned about the manner in which I saw user interface designers going about their profession. With tight schedules and less and less time to do user testing of any type, designers are relying more and more on past experience and generalization from existing data. Yet I saw many people working in relative isolation. Knowledge, data, and experience is not well organized or systematized, and communication of design information to the community, I felt, was weak. Standards and guidelines are one (of several) means of helping to solve problems with the systemization and dissemination of user interface knowledge.
As I became more involved, I began to better appreciate the additional importance of standards in themselves as a tool for increasing usability. Don Norman (1988) expressed this function succinctly in referring to the standardization of clocks to run clockwise: if we did not have this standard, reading clocks would be much harder to do. By agreeing on one alternative for a user interface element or procedure, that rule or procedure need only be learned once by users. Yes, there's a lot more to say about these issues, but I will save a deeper discussion of the advantages and dangers of user interface standards for another column.
I think the best way to start this column is to go back to basics, to make sure everyone knows who the players are in this game. For this first time, I will simply introduce the names of the parent organizations and their committees, and leave detailed descriptions of on-going projects for my future columns.
My space is too limited to do anything but briefly mention the major organizations in standards. For readers desiring more detailed background information, there are two excellent books to consult. Cargill (1989), although now becoming dated, gives a detailed survey of standards agencies as well as the historical and conceptual background to information technology standards. Smith (1996) not only is recent but is specifically devoted to ergonomic and user interface standards.
In the universe of user interface standards, organizations can be sorted into three categories: (a) worldwide agencies, (b) national and regional agencies, and (c) independent "unofficial" industry consortia. I will concentrate here on the worldwide international organizations.
ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, is a cross-disciplinary industrial standards organization. Membership in ISO is voluntary and it is not related to the UN or other governmental organizations. Members of ISO are organizations which are most representative of standards development in a country. For some countries these organizations are government bodies, but some are not, such as ANSI in the US and BSI in the UK. ISO standards are completely voluntary, but these standards gain power through common use and through adoption by regional standards bodies (such as the European Community standards body, CEN) and by individual governments.
In ISO, each major topic for standardization is covered by a technical committee (TC), which can be further composed of subcommittees (SCs), representing further breakdown of a topic. TCs and SCs may also have working groups (WGs) devoted to a particular subtopic.
TC159 is the ISO technical committee on ergonomics and SC4 is the subcommittee devoted to the "Ergonomics of Human-System Interaction." Much of the work in SC4 is devoted to video display terminals (VDTs). Two working groups in SC4, WG2 and WG3, are devoted to ergonomic standards for office environments and hardware aspects of VDTs. This committee is in the process of completing ISO 9241, a standard on the ergonomics of visual display terminals---the most significant document relevant to human computer interaction design to be completed in the near term.
Working Group 5 of SC4 is the group devoted to software ergonomics. It covers screen and dialog design for computer software, both character and graphical user interfaces. This committee is completing the human computer interaction sections of ISO 9241 and is initiating a new standard on multimedia user interfaces. The topic of Working Group 6 is human-centered design for interactive systems. Currently, the group is working on a standard to promote user-centered design processes.
Although ISO is an interdisciplinary organization, it does not cover standards for electrical and electronic engineering, which is the domain of the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission). However, work on information technology standards was being duplicated between ISO and IEC, so the two standards organizations joined forces and consolidated their information technology technical committees into JTC1: the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology. JTC1 has its own bylaws and committee structure resembling ISO.
Subcommittee 18 of JTC1 deals with "Document Processing and Related Communications," and Working Group 9 of SC18 is titled "User System Interfaces and Symbols." JTC1 SC18/WG9 has worked, or is working on, standards for icons, objects and actions, keyboards and keypads, cursor control, and, recently finished, a standard for voice mail user interfaces.
This telecommunications standards body was formerly called CCITT (Comité Consultatif International Télégraphique et Téléphonique -- International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee). It is a committee of the ITU (International Telecommunications Union), with connections to the UN. Unlike ISO, ITU-T is a treaty-based standards body. Standards produced may be Requirements, which have the force of international treaty agreements, or Recommendations, which are not treaty-enforced. In practice, ITU-T Recommendations tend to have the force of law, through adoption by local telephone companies and governments. ITU-T is divided into Study Groups (SGs) which are further divided into Working Parties (WPs). Some of the work in ITU-T will be of little interest to professionals working in human-computer interaction. However, ITU-T has developed user interface standards for computer systems which monitor and manage telecommunications networks (in Study Group 10, Working Party 1). Furthermore, Study Group 1's Working Party 2, which covers human factors issues regarding new service definitions, has included projects which concern interactive voice response systems (i.e. dial-up services where users interact with computer systems using telephone sets).
CEN (Comité Européen de Normalisation -- European Standards Committee) is an inter-disciplinary standards agency that is more or less the European equivalent of ISO---except that CEN has a quasi-legal status: member states agree to follow CEN standards in preference to local standards where applicable. CEN has technical committees devoted to ergonomics, similar to ISO's structure. CEN TC122 is devoted to hardware based ergonomics standards, and covers software ergonomics as well.
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute is roughly similar to ITU-T, except that it covers the region of Europe. ETSI has worked on user interface standards for use of video communications and telephony services.
Some national standards organizations which have relevance to user interface standards are
ANSI is a non-government and non-profit organization which manages (but does not develop) voluntary, consensus standards. ANSI standards are developed by professional societies, technical groups, and trade associations. Among them are X3 (information technology standards), T1 (telecommunications standards), IEEE, and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Significant committees include X3V1, on "Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface," which covers the same area as (and works with) ISO/IEC JTC1 SC18 WG9.
A voluntary standards organization, separate from the government, which coordinates standards in Britain. BSI (unlike ANSI) has connections with testing and quality assurance. In the user interface domain, BSI manages British involvement in ISO and other international standards, and has issued a standard, BSI 7179 which is similar to ISO 9241.
A private organization with intimate governmental links (including AFNOR management of a government standards council).
DIN is a consensus standards organization with cooperative links to government. Similar to BSI, DIN also performs test and certification functions as well as standards development. DIN 66234 is a national standard which is a landmark in ergonomics and human computer interaction, including a specific set of requirements on principles of human-computer dialog.
Many other national agencies which I haven't been able to mention here are significant players in user interface standards at the national and international levels (e.g. Japan and the JISC, Japanese Industrial Standards Committee, and Sweden, which has been a leader in hardware ergonomic standards).
In addition, professional societies have also been involved in user interface standards. IEEE was involved in the past, but not at the present time. This leaves the major society involved as the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. The Society's ANSI 200 committee is developing standards for user computer interaction for screen-based software and, lately, for voice interfaces (formerly, and still, referred to as the "HFES Human Computer Interaction Standards Committee," HFES/HCI). HFES/HCI has also worked with ISO TC159 SC4 WG5, contributing content to ISO 9241.
Although there aren't hard and fast definitions of an "official" standards agency versus an "industry consortium," some distinctions can be made. I am likely to refer to an organization as a standards agency if it has been established for years with an on-going history and continuous series of projects (rather than organized on a one topic basis). Typically, standards organizations have well defined and agreed upon procedures for development and approval of standards, dispute resolution, and fair representation for affected parties. In contrast, industry consortia often appear for specific purposes on a temporary basis, perhaps set in motion by one or more companies with common interest, or by a consulting firm. Occasionally, such groups may not have well honed procedures or may not insure participation from all entities with a material interest.
Currently, there is little user interface standards development outside of traditional standards agencies. Exceptions to this include the Open Software Foundation (OSF) and the COSE/Motif\xaa group, industry sponsored groups involved in the definition of the Motif\xaa window manager for UNIX computer systems.
To contribute information, corrections, and thoughts to this column, or just to argue with me, you may send Internet email to heb@acm.org, call my office at +1 908 949-9745, or fax +1 908 949-8569.
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