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Vol.30 No.4, October 1998
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Vol.30 No.4, October 1998 |
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This is the first article in a new column about the World Wide Web. The column stems from a "Special Interest Area" about the Web that I started within SIGCHI. Our WWW SIA is affiliated with the HFES Internet Technical Group. Finally, in keeping with the CHI 98 theme of this issue, I provide some small notes from CHI 98 about the Web.
After organizing a successful workshop with Steven Pemberton at CHI 96 on "HCI and the Web", I started "WebHCI", a mailing list and small SIGCHI web site focused on the human factors aspects of the Web.
Both grew over the years. The mailing list was renamed "CHI-WEB" to fit in with other SIGCHI-sponsored discussion lists. I used the WebHCI pages as the basis for my expanded site on the topic, Usable Web (http://usableweb.com/). I created a new section of the SIGCHI site to act as a gateway to CHI-WEB, Usable Web, and past CHI conference activities related to the Web.
At some point, I started looking for a semi-formal mechanism within SIGCHI to "latch onto" for all of these Web-focused activities. The best I could find was the "Visual Interaction Design Special Interest Area of SIGCHI" and used that as a model.
Thus, we have the "Web Special Interest Area" now. (You can get to the site from the Special Interest Area of the SIGCHI home page.)
SIGCHI has no formal definition of an SIA, what membership means, or anything like that. So, you can "join" by just acting like a member: subscribe to CHI-WEB, check out the web site on a regular basis, organize Web-related sessions at CHI, etc.
If it sounds muddled and complicated so far, hold on. WWW SIA is also loosely affiliated with HFES's new Internet Technical Group (ITG).
HFES has a formal method for establishing sub-groups, with rules for membership and so on. ITG has initially adopted some key rules, however: no membership fees and no HFES membership required.
So, anyone can also join ITG, although they do have a form you should fill out so they know you want to be a member. See http://www.sandia.gov/itg/ for more information.
When I say SIGCHI WWW ISA is "loosely affiliated" with ITG, I mean that the plan, once SIGCHI upgrades to society status and sets up its own guidelines for sub-groups, is to have joint membership in ITG and WWW SIA.
That is, in the spirit of cooperation rather than competition, I hope to help create a single "community" for those of us interested in the human factors, usability and HCI aspects of the Web. I have not found any records of HFES and ACM or SIGCHI working so closely together, so this type of cooperation will break some new ground.
Exactly when and how this will happen is completely up in the air. But I am staying in close contact with the "ITG people" to make sure we continue to work together toward common goals. For example, Usable Web serves as both groups' "library". We have already set up one project, the Web Design Survey, as a joint effort. (See the 1998 May/June interactions for the first published results and the WWW SIA site for the survey instrument.)
So, for now, I encourage you to join ITG, subscribe to CHI-WEB, etc., to stay in touch with this informal community. Right now the ITG side is leading the way, with a regular newsletter and other projects. Someday the SIGCHI side will catch up and we will have a more formal community.
(And to further confuse you, I must also mention BayCHI's own Web-specific sub-group/Birds-of-a-Feather, BayCHI-Web: yet-another informal SIGCHI/Web-related group. See http://www.baychi.org/bof/web/.)
OK, enough background information. The rest of this article fits in with the issue theme: CHI 98. Below are some nearly-random thoughts about the World Wide Web from CHI 98. I collected these from the CHI-WEB mailing list and a little bit if surfing.
I have purposely selected some material from non-CHI-regulars who came to CHI 98 specifically with an interest in the Web. It may not all be flattering, but I hope it makes you think.
I offered a tutorial on distance learning at CHI 98. Of the approximately 50 participants, split fairly evenly between people from academia and industry, none had taken or taught a distance learning class but most would be either teaching or helping to set up distance learning programs in the near future. The Web was the primary delivery vehicle for planned classes due to availability, convenience, and cost.
I was disappointed by the Czerwinski breadth vs. depth study because their artificial screens were unstructured, probably underestimating the number of items that can be put onto a structured screen.
I was very impressed by the scaffolding work at Michigan (http://hi-ce.eecs.umich.edu/ and see the papers by Jackson et al and by Wallace et al) and in general, with the increased concern with integrating information seeking into the broader context of information use, for example the work by O'Hara et al and Adler et al at Xerox. To me, this is the future.
The Culture and International SIG organized by Julie Khaslavsky got me motivated to gather resources on intercultural issues, which led to the creation of http://www.acm.org/sigchi/intercultural (79 links in 12 categories) and the addition of Internet links to the HCI Bibliography, which begat link indexes for other special interest areas. See the SIGCHI site.
Most interesting was meeting more people.
Disappointment? Most of the web stuff was very repetitive and had a sort of "preaching to the converted" mentality. How many of us need to hear that sites need more ease of use and usability? That's what all of us do (for the most part). The web design panel on the last day was a good indication of this -- I didn't really get anything out of it -- other than putting some names to faces and finding out that some people have really big egos.
I learned that a lot more research needs to be done, but that you can rely on a lot of what's been done already in CHI and Human Factors research.
Since I work with Internet I went to the two panels that were web related. The guru, Jakob Nielsen, was there, as were Jared Spool and other important people. But I found the panels disappointing. Nothing new came up, and the panel didn't feel too engaged in the web. One of them even said she rarely used the web.
I did attend one panel containing my colleague Jared Spool, Jakob Nielsen, and a couple others. It was mostly content-free and good only for the entertainment value.
Based on a recommendation from David Siegel, I recently attended the ACM SIGCHI conference -- which included a mixed attendance of 2500 academics, practitioners and companies focused on "front end" visual and interface issues across technologies.
Much of the most innovative web work being done by ad agencies and interactive shops was not represented -- making me wonder if the SIGCHI community was perhaps a little out of touch with current experiments. Also, not a lot of talk about information architecture or how to choose the best medium for the message, which I think are two important issues.
The whole event had a more theoretical tone than most software industry events that I've been to (which has its good and bad points) -- there were no vendor presentations or big commercial exhibit hall. There were some small exhibits from Microsoft, and others but no strong sales overtone.
I did however learn and think a lot (a scary thought) -- and enjoyed the conference, which was also priced much lower than most I have attended ($500) -- given the emphasis on the academic community.
First, some background: I came to web work as a technical writer and a long-time net enthusiast. I wrote my first web page in May, 1993, when there were around 100 web sites in the world, and have been doing it as my job since some time in 1994. CHI 98 was my first CHI.
Much of the information I heard at CHI 98 was conflicting. Some of it was new; much of it confirmed or supported long-held suspicions of mine. All of it was interesting. The Big Message I got from the conference is that web architecture is in its infancy, and we still don't know what makes for good design. Plenty of speakers were able to point out things to avoid that made web sites bad. Few had pointers or suggestions for ways to make web sites good. In some ways, this disappointed me, as I was hoping for more insight to help me in my work; on the other hand, it also made me feel that I wasn't alone in struggling to understand how to make good use of the web.
There were a lot of littler messages as well. Everyone stressed the importance of usability testing on web pages. This was a little like preaching to the converted, given that the audience was largely human factors professionals. Iterative design, the idea that you take what you learn from testing, alter your site accordingly, then test again, was also stressed and somewhat assumed to be basic. As someone relatively new to the HCI approach, I found this very useful.
Tog completely electrified the audience with his presentation (part of the Current Issues in Web Design tutorial) on iterative design of a health care benefits enrollment web site that all users must complete with no errors before being allowed to select their corporate benefits. But saying it that way is so dry, and totally misses the essence of the Tog Experience. Tog doesn't merely speak; he is a whirlwind. He is Phil Donahue, charging up and down the aisles with his microphone. He wants to know each and every person in the audience. He's hysterically funny. Seeing Tog speak for 45 minutes was without question the highlight of the entire conference. I was even familiar with the material he presented, having read the web page he used for the session two weeks earlier, but while the page is good, it's not the same as seeing him speak in person.
Rather than the usual CHI panel format of a number of presentations followed by whatever questions the panelists could fit in, Good Web Design: Essential Ingredient! was given over to audience questions. The panel started with a question to the audience about what they wanted their web sites to do. A sacrificial lamb leapt to the microphone to say that the ideal web site was one that enabled users to find the information they were looking for as quickly and simply as possible, whereupon the panelists jumped all over me, and they were off to the races. (One of the panelists apologized to me the next day....)
The panel agreed that metaphor on web sites is overrated. Jared Spool said that using metaphor for web sites conflicts with the web browser's use of the concept of the page as a metaphor. Jakob Nielsen claimed that metaphor often serves as a crutch to cover up bad architecture, and as a distraction. In addition, metaphors tend to break when they're too obvious.
Following this, ironically, was discussion about what metaphor best applied to the process of web site creation. Architecture was suggested as a good one. Nick Ragouzis suggested Industrial Engineering as an apt metaphor and source for inspiration. Ultimately, the panelists agreed that a new model is needed. The work of marketing professionals in "one-to-one marketing" was also suggested as a source of inspiration.
This session covered a lot of ground, was very opinionated (any panel with Jared Spool on it could hardly fail to be), and was fascinating and exhausting. I don't think I got as much concrete knowledge from this as from some of the other sessions, but I sure enjoyed it, and it was good for seeing what was still hotly debated rather than blithely accepted, which is sometimes better than concrete knowledge.
The most interesting thing about the conference was that I discovered an entire community of people asking the same questions about the web that I've been asking, rather than just discussing the latest fads and all the wizzy things they can make their browsers do.
All in all, I found the conference to be intensely stimulating and positive. It didn't give many easy answers, but it gave me a lot to think about. It turned my head around on one or two things. It increased the vocabulary available to discuss site architecture. It pointed out some new directions for exploration of inspiration.
At best, the HCI folks asked to talk about the Web stated the obvious. At worst, they exhibited a rampant cluelessness. Not one person I heard said anything remotely interesting or new. My belief is that HCI folks were so obsessed that The Next Big Thing in home computing was to be document-centered object-oriented applications (based on technologies like OLE and OpenDoc) that they were blind-sided by what has proven to be the single most popular technology in the history of the PC.
And, as it is human nature to Fear That Which You Don't Understand, much breath was spent deploring the state of Web design. I listened to a distinguished panel (including Jared Spool and Jakob Nielsen, among others) gripe for over an hour, and then asked them the question, "If the state of Web design is so bad, why is it the most popular application of the PC?" To which Jared Spool replied that essentially, popularity is not a worthwhile metric ("Laverne and Shirley was the most popular show in America for four years" he witticismed). To which I responded, "Well, Jared, than what use are you?" because if success doesn't count for something, I don't know what does.
One man on the panel, Nick Ragouzis, did bring some clear-headed reason to the talk, making the bold suggestion that in the same way a successful artist must be master of his materials, a successful web designer must understand the engineering and technology. He also deplored the types of usability tests that Jared conducts, which define the success of Web design as how well it fills some Aristotelian perfect goal of information retrieval. Nick encouraged extreme experimentation in Web design, because it's only in those outlying areas will we find the models that will lead us to progress. It's far too early in this field to build a box defining `successful' Web design, which is what's happening as people attempt to adhere to Jared and Jakob's usability principles.
I am not planning on writing a lot of "Web" articles for subsequent Bulletins: I want you to write them. Submit your contributions dealing with HCI, human factors and the Web to the Bulletin and they will appear here.
Keith Instone is an active SIGCHI volunteer and Web Usability Consultant. His most significant client has been SIGCHI itself. Now he is back to just volunteer work, including finding reviewers for CHI 99 and maintaining pieces of the SIGCHI web site. His remaining free time is spent building Usable Web (usableweb.com).
Keith Instone
PO Box 7411
Bowling Green, OH 43402
USA
Email: instone@usableweb.com
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